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I t took the first squad car six minutes to arrive.

But soon after they surveyed the scene, the ghost town of Stellar Heights was alive with red-and-blue flashing lights, scores of headlights, ambulances, and fire trucks.

After an hour, detectives arrived with stadium lights that brought the abandoned subdivision to life as if it were high noon.

News helicopters hovered overhead as word spread.

Elizabeth Jennings was placed in an ambulance and brought to Emerson Bay Memorial.

Terry McDonald was airlifted to Raleigh to be treated by the Duke burn unit.

Megan was taken, under the supervision of Dr. Mattingly, to a private treatment facility undisclosed to the press.

Livia, after being treated by paramedics who flushed her eyes with saline, stuck around Stellar Heights, refusing the suggestion of scans and observation.

They searched all six houses. Three appeared unused.

The others showed signs of life, at one point in time.

Each had similar characteristics of boarded-up basement windows with filthy living conditions in the cellars.

The furnishings were consistent between all the spaces, and shared a common floor plan of a bed, a dresser, and a small table where it was determined meals had been placed.

Each basement wall was graffitied with dual X ’s.

Livia relayed to the police and the detectives Elizabeth Jennings’s claim that she had been in contact through the ventilation system with a girl named Nicole.

She was sure it was her sister, missing for nearly a year and a half.

Livia showed the detectives the second-story bedroom where similar living conditions were found—bed, dresser, and shackle.

Yellow tape went across the doorway and detectives waited for the crime scene unit to pick through the room.

The search for Nicole Cutty continued.

* * *

It was a week before Terry McDonald was able to answer detectives’ questions.

He was mummified in heavy white bandages, so that only his mouth and eyes were visible during questioning.

It took three days at the hospital for detectives to put together the last three years.

They found that Megan McDonald’s father wanted to talk.

Was eager, in fact, to rid his soul of sin.

He confirmed all the facts Livia had brought to the detective’s attention about Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato.

Elizabeth Jennings was pieced into the puzzle and tied with what Megan was beginning to divulge.

The only missing link, which they got to at the end of the third day, was the whereabouts of Nicole Cutty.

Under tremendous pressure, he told them, with the coming destruction of Stellar Heights, he worked feverishly to find a new “home” for the girls who remained—Elizabeth and Nicole.

But as pressure mounted and his ailing daughter began her nightmares, he was certain her memory would betray him.

So instead of moving the remaining two “Loves,” he disposed of them.

Nicole first, Elizabeth Jennings meant to be next.

Two weeks of excavation, however, by the Montgomery County police force, who used donated Bobcats to dig up the forest where Terry McDonald had buried Nicole, produced no body.

Pressed hard for details and location, he told detectives through tears that he was certain of the locale.

He had, he confessed, in his haste buried Nicole without the protection of a body bag.

Perhaps, it was suspected, animals had taken her remains.

When this news reached Livia, she listened with a stoic expression as detectives and social workers explained their theory.

Livia tuned out after a moment. All she could concentrate on was that Nicole’s body was no longer waiting to be discovered.

There was no longer the chance that her sister’s remains would come to her morgue and beg Livia to uncover the answers they held.

Livia slept that night under the red fan of her childhood bedroom, finding in her slumber both peace and angst that this opportunity was gone.