Missing Persons

45

What if this is why she died?… What if somebody killed Hannah because she met with Mallory that one time?

As my head hit the pillow and I tried to find the sanctuary of sleep, Diane’s original conspiracy theory about Hannah Grant’s death-a hypothesis I recalled I’d dismissed out of hand at the time-bounced back and forth inside my skull like the digitized ball in a game of Pong.

What if this is why she died?… What if somebody killed Hannah because she met with Mallory that one time?

It didn’t take long for my sleep-depriving musing to move on to cover fresh ground: If Diane had been right, and Hannah had been murdered because of something she’d learned from Mallory, could Diane and Bob somehow have suffered the same fate, too?

I shuddered at the thought.

The links were there. Diane had consulted with Hannah about Mallory; Bob had talked to Mallory across the backyard fence.

It was a far-fetched stretch, but could everything-Hannah’s death, Mallory’s disappearance, Diane’s disappearance, and Bob’s disappearance-really be related? Could some immense ball have started rolling the December afternoon that Mallory decided she just had to see Hannah Grant?

But why?

And how?

I gave up on sleeping and stumbled back out to the living room in search of a common denominator.

If Diane’s theory was true, there had to be a secret in the Miller household. Something that Mallory had revealed during her single session with Hannah. Or at least something that someone thought she’d revealed.

What was it?

During that week after Christmas, the week after Mallory disappeared, Diane had said, “She said her father was ‘up to something,’ remember?”

So what had Bill Miller been up to?

Had he been up to something at home? At work? Planning a career change? Planning a major change in his parenting?

And why, I wondered, was Bill Miller so curious as to why I had been at Doyle’s house?

Yeah, why?

During the psychotherapy session I’d had with Bill Miller earlier that day, I’d been so busy feeling guilty about being caught snooping around at Doyle’s house that I’d missed the obvious: Why had Bill Miller been so damn curious about the fact that I’d been looking at the house that was for sale next door?