The Return of Ellie Black

Detective Chelsey Calhoun and her husband, Noah, wake up to Chelsey’s phone ringing. On the phone, Sergeant Abbott, Chelsey’s boss, tells her that Ellie Black has reappeared after being missing for two years. Abbott tells her that his son Doug, who is also a detective, has already gone to investigate the hiking trail where the hikers found Ellie. Chelsey (whose father was a police chief) thinks back to a precinct picnic when she was a child and her sister Lydia was still alive. She remembers Doug making a racist joke toward her because Chelsey, who is Japanese American, was adopted by a white family.

Abbott tells Chelsey that he wants her to go to the hospital and verify that the woman is Ellie Black. As Chelsey gets dressed, Chelsey thinks back to meeting Noah at a bar two years earlier. Noah insisted on coming home with Chelsey to visit her father even after she told him that her father had cancer. As Chelsey leaves, she hopes that she does not lose Noah.

Chelsey remembers when Ellie went missing. The Blacks reported that their 17-year-old daughter had not come home from a friend’s house the night before. Chelsey interviewed Ellie’s father, Jimmy, and her mother, Kat, who told her that Ellie was supposed to be at her friend India’s house. When Kat called India, however, India said that the last place she saw Ellie was at a motel where they were having a party. Kat insisted that Ellie was a good girl even if she got into trouble at times. For the next two years, Jimmy would come by the precinct occasionally to ask about the case. Chelsey understood this behavior because she experienced it with her parents after Lydia went missing. Now Chelsey calls Jimmy to tell him and Kat that there is a new development in the case.

In a flashback, Ellie remembers India picking her up for school on the day of her abduction. Ellie’s sister, Sam, accuses her of stealing her ID, and they get in a fight because Ellie will not admit to it. At school, Ellie asks her boyfriend, Danny, if he is coming to the party at the motel. Danny tells her that he cannot go to the party, because he has to work. By 11 o’clock at night, the motel room is filled with high schoolers. Ellie needs to use the restroom, but the motel restroom is full. She decides to go across the street to use the restroom at the gas station.

When Chelsey gets to the hospital, she meets with Denise, a social worker. As they enter the hospital room, Chelsey recognizes Ellie even though she is dirty and emaciated. Denise tells Ellie that she has been missing for two years and that a sexual assault examiner will come in soon. Chelsey steps out as Denise prepares Ellie for the examination. Chelsey calls Doug and says that Ellie shows signs of abuse and likely escaped from somewhere.

Chelsey guides Kat and Jimmy to the hospital room and explains that Ellie does not like to be touched and has an aversion to light. When they see Ellie, Kat bursts into tears. Ellie asks to go home, and the nurse clears Ellie for release provided she sees a therapist named Dr. Fischer.

At the Blacks’ house, Kat shows Ellie a picture of Sam with her wife, Valerie, and their daughter, Mia. Kat tells Ellie that Sam and her family will come see her the next day. In the middle of the night, Kat goes to check on Ellie, but she is not in bed. Instead, Kat finds Ellie tucked in the crawlspace in Sam’s old room. Kat realizes that she does not know her daughter anymore.

Chelsey goes to her parents’ old house to think. She calls Noah to tell him where she is. He asks her about boxing up the house, and she lies and tells him that she is almost done. Chelsey has not told Noah that the house remains untouched because she cannot bear to pack up Lydia’s items. After she gets off the phone, Chelsey sits at her father’s desk, which is covered in Chelsey’s case files. Chelsey prefers working at her father’s desk because of the underlying misogyny in the precinct office.

Chelsey goes through the evidence found on Ellie’s body. The examiner discovered old blood on the sweatshirt that Ellie was wearing when they brought her to the hospital. Chelsey sends the report to Abbott and then calls Dr. Cerise Fischer. Chelsey asks Cerise about how disoriented Ellie seemed at the hospital. Cerise explains that after a traumatic event, the mind becomes like a maze that a person must work through until they find the answers to what happened to them.

In another flashback, Ellie crosses the street but decides not to go to the gas station. Instead, she walks into an abandoned parking lot and urinates in the bushes. Afterward, someone grabs her from behind. Ellie struggles, but the person stabs something into her arm, and she blacks out. Ellie wakes up surrounded by darkness. She realizes that she is in a school bus, and she sees a glimmer of light from the emergency hatch above her. She tries to open the hatch, but it is locked. Ellie opens one of the windows of the bus, but dirt pours in, and she realizes that she is buried in the bus. Ellie screams for help, but no one comes.

Sam, Valerie, and Mia arrive at the Blacks’ house the next morning. Ellie abruptly goes outside when they talk to her. Jimmy finds Ellie and asks her if she wants to come out on his boat with him, and Ellie brightens at the idea. However, as Jimmy prepares the boat, he cannot find Ellie. He panics but then sees that she is at the car, pulling a piece of paper from the windshield. Jimmy sees that it is a postcard with a picture of trees and the number three printed on the other side, which Jimmy finds odd. Chelsey pulls up in her car and greets them.

Chelsey asks to speak with Ellie back at the Blacks’ house. There, she asks Ellie about the night she went missing. Ellie explains how she left the motel to use the bathroom across the street. Someone grabbed her from behind and drugged her. Ellie woke up buried underground in a school bus. After a few days, a man came to get her, but she did not see his face because it was covered with a red bandana. Ellie then tells Chelsey that she does not want to talk about it anymore to anyone.

Chelsey remembers catching Lydia leaving the house to go to a party with a senior named Oscar. Lydia made Chelsey promise that she would not tell their parents where she was going. After Lydia went missing, Chelsey kept silent for two days, even as the police were searching for Lydia, because she wanted to keep her promise to her sister. After two days, the police found Oscar’s body and evidence that he had murdered Lydia.

In a flashback, Ellie waits for days inside the bus before a man opens the hatch above her. He asks her name, and she tells him. Before she can react, he drops food and a water bottle into the bus and then closes the hatch again. Every few days, the man returns, asks her name, and drops food to her. Once, Ellie refuses to answer him, and as punishment, he denies her food for five days. Ellie eats worms, desperate to survive. When the man returns, he asks her name again, but Ellie realizes that she has forgotten it. He repeats the question, and she finally tells him that she does not know. The man reaches down and helps Ellie out of the bus.

Chelsey looks at the clothes that Ellie was wearing when the hikers found her, including a University of Washington sweatshirt. She realizes that it is not Ellie’s clothing. The sweatshirt is a volleyball custom design, and she leaves a message with the school to see if she can find out who purchased it.

Chelsey dreams of when the police found Oscar’s body. Her parents told her to stay by the car, but Chelsey followed them to the beach cliffside. She saw the gruesome scene and listened as the police told them that Oscar killed Lydia and then died by suicide. Oscar’s fist was filled with Lydia’s hair, a piece of scalp attached to it.

Chelsey wakes up to the college apparel store returning her call. Based on the description of the sweatshirt, the worker tells Chelsey that it matches an order from a customer named Althea Barlowe. Chelsey looks up the name in her database and finds that Althea is the grandmother of Gabrielle Barlowe, a then-16-year-old girl who went missing five years earlier wearing a University of Washington sweatshirt. Chelsey reads that Gabrielle’s body was found two and a half years after her disappearance, strangled to death. Chelsey realizes that the timeline of Gabrielle’s disappearance and murder overlaps with Ellie’s abduction. She wonders if Gabrielle was kept at the same location as Ellie.