“We should go,” Jon said under his breath, his voice stretched tight with effort.
“Wait,” Margaret whispered.
She looked at the 3 young women and asked the question she would later replay in her mind a hundred times.
“Do any of you ever have dreams about a different place? A different family?”
The 3 sisters exchanged glances. Something moved across their faces, faint and fast. Confusion. Caution. Recognition trying not to be recognized.
“That’s an odd question,” Sophie said carefully.
“Sometimes,” Stella admitted softly. “Sometimes I dream about a woman with dark hair who used to sing to us. But they’re just dreams.”
Margaret’s hand flew to her mouth.
She had sung to them every night. Lullabies, folk songs, whatever came to her while she sat on the edge of their beds in the warm half-dark, 3 identical faces looking up at her, 3 little bodies settling at the sound of her voice. That memory had never left her. And now one of them, standing full-grown in a farmers market, was reaching toward it from inside whatever false life had been built around her.
“Margaret,” Jon said sharply. “We need to go.”
This time she let him lead her.
They walked back through the market in silence, past stalls and customers and noise that now seemed unreal. She could hear the sisters talking behind them in voices too low to make out, and even from that distance she felt tension enter the air around their stand.
When they reached the car, Margaret turned to Jon with both hands shaking.
“Did you see them?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand.
“I saw.”
“The way they moved. Their faces. The names.”
He started the engine with hands not entirely steady.
“But Margaret,” he said carefully, “we cannot jump to conclusions. Fifteen years is a long time. We could be seeing what we want to see.”
“Robert Greenfield,” she said, staring through the windshield. “Jon, I know that name. Detective Carson mentioned him.”
Jon was quiet.
“I remember a lot of names from those days,” he said at last. “Most of them led nowhere.”
“He was their science teacher,” Margaret said. “He knew them. He knew us. And now he has 3 daughters who look exactly like our girls and have the same names.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
Jon gripped the steering wheel and looked at the crowded market through the glass as if the answer might be waiting somewhere in ordinary motion.
“How many times have we thought we saw them?” he asked. “How many photographs, how many phone calls, how many girls in grocery stores or county fairs or gas stations turned into other people’s daughters once we got close enough?”
He was not wrong. That was what made this so cruel. Hope, after enough years, becomes a dangerous thing. It teaches grief new ways to wound.
But Margaret shook her head.
“This is different.”
That evening she sat at the kitchen table with the local phone book spread open, looking for Greenfield in the residential listings, then the business section, then the agricultural pages. Jon stood in the doorway with a coffee mug in his hand, watching the old urgency return to her in a way he had not seen for years.
“There’s no Robert Greenfield in the residentials,” she said. “But there’s a Greenfield Organic Farms with a P.O. box.”
“Of course there is,” Jon muttered. “If someone wanted to hide 3 kidnapped children, they wouldn’t exactly put a street address in the paper.”
Margaret looked up sharply.
“So you do think it’s possible?”
He exhaled, long and tired.
“I think we have learned not to trust first instincts. But I also think we can’t ignore what we saw.”
She put both hands flat on the table.
“I want to find that farm,” she said. “I want to see where they live. I want to know who Robert Greenfield really is.”
“And then what?”
That question slowed her only for a second.
“If it really is them,” Jon said, “if they are alive and think he’s their father, then what? Do we tear their lives apart with the truth?”
Margaret looked down at her hands.
“They deserve to know who they are,” she said finally. “And we deserve to know what happened to our daughters.”
The next morning she was waiting outside the Watsonville Public Library when it opened.
The librarian helped her load old newspaper archives on microfilm. Margaret framed her request as research into local farming operations, which was not a lie so much as an incomplete truth. She scrolled for 2 hours through grainy local pages until she found the article.
