Lying on top of the money was an old photograph.
It showed a little girl standing in front of a brick house.
She looked about six.
She had Down syndrome.
And she was wearing a red dress almost identical to the one Caleb had bought for our neighbor’s daughter the day before.
On the back of the photograph, someone had written:
ELLIE — 1984
Below that were six more words.
I should have been a better father.
Caleb stared at me.
“Mom… should we call the police?”
I looked at the money again.
At the photograph.
At the dozens of lunchboxes surrounding us.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I think we should.”
What I didn’t know was that none of this had really started with the lunchboxes.
It had started one month earlier…
with a red dress in a department-store window.
PART 2 — THE LITTLE GIRL NEXT DOOR
My name is Megan Parker.
