Even the business articles she had found, which had seemed credible at first, now felt uncertain.
How much of David’s story was true, and how much was fabrication? Panicked, Clara called Emmy.
There was no answer.
She called David.
Again, nothing.
Fighting to remain clear-headed, she dialed Detective Gary Holden.
When he answered, she said immediately that she believed Emmy was in danger.
Clara ran to her car, heart pounding, and drove toward Emmy’s apartment while speaking to Gary on speakerphone.
She told him everything: that she had seen David emerge from inside the Kesler farmhouse when he should not have been there; that she was certain she had seen him at Miller’s Tavern with 2 men the night before; that she had now learned he had been lying about his life in Colorado and no longer had any wife there.
Gary instructed her to stay where she was and not approach them alone.
He would send officers to the apartment at once.
Clara answered that she could not simply wait, that Emmy was her daughter.
Gary’s tone softened, but he warned that if David was involved with the traffickers he could be dangerous.
She could meet the police at the apartment, he said, but she was not to go up alone.
Clara reached the building and hurried inside.
She buzzed Emmy’s apartment repeatedly through the intercom, but no one responded.
Then she rushed to the front desk and explained urgently that she needed to check on her daughter in apartment 403, reminding the receptionist that they had all been there earlier with Detective Gary Holden.
The receptionist looked sympathetic but refused to grant access without the resident’s permission.
Clara protested that Emmy had only been living there for a few hours, but the receptionist held firm and offered only to call upstairs.
Before the call could be made, Clara’s phone rang again.
It was Gary.
He asked where she was, and when she told him she was at the building, he said that might be for the best.
Then he told her that the Willow Reach police had just contacted him.
Someone had tipped them off about documents in the Kesler farmhouse—transaction records containing an address that might lead to the traffickers’ main headquarters.
Clara’s blood ran cold.
Those documents were in the same farmhouse where David had gone when Gary was distracted.
Gary agreed.
Now that David could no longer be trusted, the documents might be a false lead or even a trap, and he had already warned Willow Reach to proceed cautiously.
He had also alerted border patrol and transportation hubs to watch for David.
Clara pressed a hand to her forehead and forced herself to think.
Then she remembered that Emmy had mentioned going grocery shopping.
There was only 1 major supermarket near the apartment.
Gary told her he would meet her there, and repeated that she was not to approach if she saw them before backup arrived.
The drive to the supermarket lasted only minutes, though to Clara it seemed endless.
She searched the parking lot frantically, then the aisles inside, drawing curious looks from other shoppers as she moved from section to section.
There was no sign of Emmy or David.
Back outside, she saw Gary arriving with several officers.
He listened, nodded grimly, and said they needed to review the security footage.
In the security office, after Gary showed his badge and explained the urgency, the staff brought up the recordings.
On the monitors they saw David and Emmy enter the store roughly 1 hour earlier.
They barely shopped at all before David received a phone call, after which they exited without buying anything.
Gary requested the parking-lot footage.
There they watched David and Emmy meet 2 men beside a black SUV.
All 4 entered the vehicle and drove away.
Clara leaned toward the grainy screen and said with hollow dread that those were the same 2 men she had seen with David at Miller’s Tavern.
Gary wrote down the license plate and time of departure, calculating that the SUV had left about 1 hour and 50 minutes earlier.
If it had been moving fast, it might already have left Asheville.
Within minutes he had contacted surrounding departments, and everyone in the room waited under palpable tension until finally his radio crackled with news: the target vehicle had been seen entering Mon County and officers were attempting to track it through street cameras.
Clara told Gary she was coming with him.
After a brief hesitation, he agreed, telling her to leave her car where it was and ride with him instead.
They sped down the highway in the police cruiser, lights flashing but sirens silent, while Gary coordinated over the radio with agencies across the region.
Clara sat rigid beside him, listening to each update.
At one point Gary reported grimly that the address found in the farmhouse documents had indeed been a trap.
Officers arriving there had encountered gunfire.
One officer had been injured, though the police had managed to capture 3 men.
Those men were talking only enough to say they had been hired as muscle to take down whoever came through the door and had not known they would be facing police.
One of them had let slip that his boss was preparing to disappear.
No one knew where.
Clara clenched her fists and said that David must have been working with them all along.
He had planted the documents to distract the police while he took Emmy away.
Gary said that increasingly it looked that way.
David’s eagerness to see the farm that morning suddenly made sense, as did the fake Laya Dalton email that had drawn Clara away from Asheville for a few hours.
They drove deeper into Mon County, moving from small towns into increasingly rural country, until at a place where a narrow road met the highway Clara suddenly pointed ahead.
Something was happening there.
A crowd had formed at the roadside and emergency lights flashed in the distance.
Gary pulled over and told her to remain in the car, but she was already opening the door.
When they reached the crowd, Clara’s heart nearly stopped.
At the center of the scene was Emmy, torn, dirty, scratched, and clearly in shock as paramedics attended to her.
Clara cried out her name and rushed forward.
Emmy’s eyes were vacant, her body trembling, but she recognized Clara and leaned into her embrace.
Gary demanded an explanation from the local officers.
Witnesses, he was told, had seen a black SUV pass by when a female passenger suddenly jumped from the moving vehicle.
A male passenger, identified as David Marin, had gone after her on foot, but the 2 other men in the SUV had opened fire, shooting at both David and Emmy.
Clara looked up and asked whether David had been shot as well.
The officer said yes and pointed to another ambulance where he was receiving treatment.
He added that a military veteran driving to a shooting range had happened upon the scene.
The man had a licensed shotgun in his trunk and had used it to subdue the 2 shooters before they could escape or do further harm.
They were now in custody.
Clara asked the paramedic whether Emmy would be all right.
The paramedic answered that her physical injuries appeared superficial—cuts, bruises, and possibly a dislocated right arm—but that she was experiencing acute psychological trauma and needed immediate transport to a hospital for a full evaluation.
Clara said she was coming too.
In the ambulance, as sirens wailed and the vehicle sped away, Clara held Emmy’s hand tightly.
Through the rear windows she caught a glimpse of another ambulance, where David was being treated under police guard.
She still could not see the entire shape of what had happened, but 1 fact was undeniable: David, the man she had once married, was tied to the trafficking organization that had sold their daughter to the Keslers.
And now, 18 years later, he had reappeared and tried to take Emmy back for reasons she could not yet understand.
At the hospital Emmy was rushed through the emergency-room doors while Clara followed beside the stretcher as closely as she was allowed.
Staff fired questions she could answer only imperfectly.
She explained that the patient was Emmy Wells, though legally her birth name was Ella Marin, that she was 20 years old, and that Clara did not know her full medical history because they had been reunited only 1 week earlier after an abduction that had taken place in early childhood.
The doctors exchanged brief glances at the extraordinary explanation but stayed focused on their work.
Emmy was in shock, a nurse observed.
Her blood pressure was low but stable.
There were multiple contusions and a possible dislocation of the right shoulder.
They needed X-rays.
Clara was told she would have to wait.
She sank into a plastic chair in the waiting area, suddenly crushed by exhaustion and dread, while minutes stretched into more than an hour.
Police officers came and went with updates.
David had been taken to surgery so a bullet could be removed from his leg.
The 2 gunmen were in custody and were being questioned.
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