Take Your Breath Away

One

It felt surreal.

Which was kind of crazy. It was the most commonplace of activities, shopping in a grocery store. Pushing her cart up and down the aisles. Pausing to look at all the fresh produce. Checking out a head of cauliflower. Looking for bananas that were still green. Glancing at the dozens of different boxed cereals. Sugary and delicious and bad for you, or full of fiber and yucky and good for you. About a hundred different kinds of coffee. Had she ever noticed before today how many brands there were? Maybe this was why an activity so mundane suddenly felt strange and unfamiliar. It was as though she were doing it for the first time.

Or at least the first time in ages.

She had grocery-shopped a thousand times — and that was in no way an exaggeration. A thousand, easily. Say you went out for provisions twice a week. That was more than a hundred times a year. And given that she was in her mid-thirties, and had been doing her own shopping since moving out of her parents’ home at age twenty, well, there you go. Do the math.

That’s a lot of trips to the local Stop & Shop or Whole Foods or Walmart.

But today was different because she really didn’t know what to buy. Did it even matter what she tossed into the cart? She’d entered the store without a list. The basics seemed like a safe way to go. Milk, eggs, fruit. A six-pack of beer. She wondered if a list would have been a good idea. It would have helped her pick up things Andrew liked.

Maybe what made this trip feel so strange was that she didn’t want to be spotted. Didn’t want to run into anyone who knew her. Not at this point. So she kept her head down as she went up and down the aisles. Tried to withdraw into herself. She was thinking that the next time she went out for groceries, she’d pick a place she didn’t usually frequent.

At one point, she thought maybe she’d been spotted, recognized, despite the steps she had taken. As she was passing by the meat counter, a man, shopping alone, attempted to engage her in conversation. He was probably fifty, gray hair, tweed sport jacket, white shirt with a button-down collar. Handsome and, she was betting, divorced or widowed, because he was clearly hitting on her.

They were almost shoulder to shoulder when he picked up a roast wrapped in cellophane and said, “How long would you cook something like this?”

Trying to strike up a conversation.

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “I don’t eat meat.”

Not the best comeback, considering she had already dropped a small package of ground beef into her cart. The man noticed, and said, “Well, you might want to put that back, then.”

She ignored him and quickly pushed the cart farther up the aisle, pretty sure she heard him mutter, “Bitch,” under his breath.

As she went down the aisle stocked with multiple varieties of potato chips and other snacks, she thought one woman had given her a second look, but then convinced herself that she was being paranoid. It wasn’t like anyone had stopped her and said, “Hey, is that you?”

She was starting to wonder whether this shopping excursion had been such a good idea, but she’d really believed it necessary. Anyway, by this point she thought she had enough in the cart, and headed for the row of checkouts. She’d bought half a dozen too many items to qualify for the express line, and wondered whether to put a few things back. But in the time it would take to return them, she might as well go to one of the regular checkouts.

“You need bags?” the hefty woman at the register asked.

She nodded.

“You got one of our points cards?”

“I’m sorry?”

“A points card.”

“No, no, I don’t have one of those.”

When the groceries were bagged and in her cart, the cashier said the total was fifty-five dollars and twenty-nine cents.

“How you paying?”

The woman reached into her purse and brought out three twenties. “Cash,” she said.

“Okey dokey,” the cashier said.

The woman had her hands on the cart and was turning it around to point it toward the exit when the cashier said, “Lady, your change?”

She’d been so distracted, she hadn’t thought to wait for it. She held out her hand, took the money, and dumped it into her purse.

She wheeled the cart out into the parking lot and opened the tailgate on a black, mid-2000s Volvo station wagon. She put the bags in, closed the tailgate. Affixed to it was a license plate with letter and numbers smeared with enough dirt and grime as to be illegible.

She got behind the wheel and waited the better part of a minute for other cars to pass before she backed out. Given that it was a Saturday morning, when a lot of people did their week’s shopping, the parking lot was busy.

“Don’t have a fender bender,” she said to herself. That was the last thing she needed.

Once she was out of the lot, she headed across town into one of Milford’s west end neighborhoods.

She put on her blinker when she saw the Mulberry Street sign and turned down it. There was a lot of activity in the neighborhood today. Being the second of April — one day too late for April fool’s, she thought grimly — many homeowners were engaged in yard cleanup. Raking leftover debris from the fall before, jamming it into paper recycling bags. Men wielding leaf blowers that made as much racket as a low-flying jet. A woman ran alongside a girl, no more than five years old, as she learned to ride a bicycle. Two other women stood at the end of a driveway, one of them still in pajamas and a housecoat, each holding a mug and chatting.

What a nice neighborhood, the woman in the Volvo thought. Like something out of one of those 1950s TV shows. Not that she was old enough to have seen them when they first ran, but hey, was that June Cleaver over there, bringing a tall glass of lemonade out to Ward? Was that young Opie running past with a slingshot sticking out of his back pocket?

To think that something so horrible could happen on a street such as this.

Oh, there it was. Her destination was just up ahead.

She put her blinker on again, waited for a kid on one of those motorized skateboards to whiz past, then steered the Volvo into a driveway. She noticed that at the house next door, a man was sweeping the steps of his front porch. She put the car into park, got out, and went around back to raise the tailgate. She grabbed two bags, came around the side of the car, leaving the tailgate open, and it was at this point that she actually gazed upon the house.

It was, clearly, a new build, judging by the architectural style. Sharp angles, huge panes of glass. Solar panels built into the roof. A modern, contemporary design.

The woman stopped, as though she’d bumped into an invisible wall.

“What...”

The man sweeping his porch glanced over in her direction.

The woman turned her head to look at the house to the left, then the house to the right, as though confirming to herself that she was in the right place. Finally she focused on the number affixed to the door of the house she stood before.

Thirty-six.

“Where...”

She dropped her groceries to the ground. A carton of eggs toppled from one, the lid popping open and a single egg shattering onto the driveway.

“Where is my house?” she said aloud. “Where the hell is my house?”

The front door opened and a teenage girl with pink highlights in her hair and wearing workout sweats poked her head out. “Can I help you?” she said.

“Where’s my house?” she cried, a frightened edge in her voice. “An old house. Red brick. A porch, a railing. Where the hell is it?”

The man next door took several steps in her direction.

The girl said, “Uh, I think maybe you’ve got the wrong place?”

“Thirty-six,” the woman said.

“Yeah, that’s right. But maybe you’ve got the wrong street?”

“Thirty-six Mulberry,” the woman said. “This is thirty-six Mulberry.”

“Yeah,” the girl said slowly.

“This is all wrong. This house doesn’t belong here. There’s supposed to be an old house here. With... with red brick and a porch, that kind of sagged. My house. It was right here. Right here! How does a house just disappear?”

“Yeah, well, that house you’re talking about? They tore that down like three years ago and my parents built this one. Did you say your house?”

“This is not right,” the woman said.

The girl shrugged and went back inside, leaving the woman standing there, staring open-mouthed at the three-year-old home.

“This is not happening,” she said.

The man with the broom was standing at the property line now. He studied the woman, narrowing his eyes as if trying to improve his focus, like maybe he didn’t believe what he was seeing and needed to be sure.

“Brie?” he asked.

The woman glanced in his direction, her face blank.

“Jesus, Brie, is it you?” he said.

Suddenly the woman got back into her car, keyed the ignition, and backed out of the drive, crushing the remaining eggs with the front wheels as she turned, the tailgate still in the raised position. The car’s transmission whirred noisily as the car bounced into the street, narrowly missing the kid on the motorized skateboard making a return trip.

The Volvo’s brakes squealed as the car came to an abrupt halt. It sat there for half a second while the woman put it into drive, then took off down the street, the man with the broom watching it speed away.

Two

Andrew

I rolled over onto my side, opened my eyes, and looked at the clock on the bedside table. Nearly eight. Jesus. I almost never slept that late. There was some momentary panic as I thought about being late to an appointment with a potential client, then realized that not only was it Saturday, but that my appointment was on Friday and had already happened.

I turned back over again to see whether Jayne was awake and found her staring at me with one eye, half her head buried into the pillow, her brown hair splayed across it. She flashed half a smile at me.

“Morning, Andrew,” she said with mock formality.

“It’s almost eight,” I said. “How long you been awake?”

“Five minutes, maybe,” she said. “I was watching you. Woke you up with my mind.”

I grinned and slipped one arm around her under the covers and pulled her closer to me. “You have great powers.”

“Indeed,” she said, and gave me a kiss so light it was as if she’d brushed a feather across my lips. “I can read minds, too.”

“Okay,” I said. “What am I thinking?”

I guess she rolled both her eyes, but I only saw one. “Too easy. Give me something hard.”

I smiled. “Amazing. Got it on the first guess.”

It took her a second, and then she grinned. “I was actually going to guess French toast. Your usual Saturday morning demand.”

“Okay, maybe that, too. In a bit.”

Jayne shifted in closer to me, pressing her body up against mine. I caught a glimpse of the open bedroom door.

“Might want to close that,” I said.

She whirled around, saw the door, threw back the covers, and got out of bed. Her oversized T hung down almost to her knees. As she padded toward the door, she stopped halfway, turned, and said, “Did you hear him come in last night?”

I tried to recollect. “No,” I said. The truth was, I didn’t really listen for Tyler Keeling the way she did. He was her brother, after all, not mine, and while that didn’t mean I didn’t care about his welfare, he was biologically more her worry.

“I don’t think I did, either,” Jayne said.

Tyler had texted around ten-thirty, promising his sister he’d be home before eleven, or soon after, that he was just about to leave his friend’s place. Jayne had offered to go pick him up, wherever he was, but he’d said no problem, one of his other buddies, who was old enough to drive and had his mom’s Hyundai, would drop him off. He’d left his bike at home, not wanting to take it out at night in case someone swiped it when he left it outside his friend’s house. Locks weren’t much of a deterrent when the thief was determined enough.

Jayne had texted, OK, and felt she could go to bed, confident that he’d be home soon after she was asleep.

But now, as she stood between the bed and the door, I could see doubt cross her face.

“I’m just gonna check,” she said, and slipped out of the room and down the hall. I sat up in bed and waited. She was back in under ten seconds.

“His bed hasn’t been slept in,” she said.

“Maybe he’s already up.” But even as I said it, I knew how unlikely that was. It was Saturday morning. Tyler would not be up early, and even if he were an early riser, he wasn’t one to make his bed without being reminded.

“I don’t think so,” Jayne said.

“Shit,” I said, and threw back the covers. I was in a pair of boxers, decent enough to mount a search of the house.

I slipped past Jayne in the hallway and shot a look into Tyler’s room myself. The bed was made.

“You don’t believe me?” Jayne said.

I went down the stairs and into the kitchen. No sign of him there, either. No bowl in the sink, no half-eaten banana left on the table. Jayne had her phone in her hand and was getting ready to text him or maybe phone him, when I happened to look out the kitchen’s sliding glass doors that opened on the backyard deck.

“Jayne,” I said.

She was already tapping. “What?”

“Outside.”

She came up alongside me and took in the view. Tyler was sprawled out on one of the recliners, arms circled around himself to keep warm, the blue hoodie not quite up to the job. I noticed what appeared to be a smudge of vomit on his sleeve, an observation that was confirmed by the puddle of puke on the deck about four feet away.

“Jesus,” Jayne said, unlocking the door and sliding it back on its track. She stepped out onto the deck, and I was one step behind her, the planking cold under my feet and damp with dew the morning sun had yet to burn off. I let Jayne take the lead here.

“Tyler,” she said, standing over him. Then, more sharply, “Tyler!”

He stirred slightly and opened one eye. “Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

“When did you come home?” his sister asked.

“Um, not exactly sure,” he said, struggling to sit up.

“Go in and clean yourself up,” she said, waiting as he managed to get to his feet.

As he passed me, I could smell the booze, and the vomit, on him. I held him back gently by the arm and pointed to the mess he’d left on the deck. “Hose is over there, pal.”

“I’m not your pal,” he muttered without looking me in the eye.

To his credit, he did clean up his mess before coming into the house, but rather than coil the hose back up again and hang it by the tap, he left it in a mess on the grass. He trudged past us as we stood in the kitchen, but not before Jayne reminded him that his shift at Whistler’s Market, one of west end Milford’s independent grocery stores, started at noon.

Jayne and I went back upstairs, took turns in the shower, and met back in the kitchen about half an hour later, neither of us saying anything. I knew Jayne was embarrassed by her brother’s behavior, and maybe waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t want to wade into it, at least not yet.

I got the coffee going, and Jayne still made French toast, but didn’t bother setting a place for Tyler, who we knew wouldn’t surface until the last possible moment. He didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but he could ride that ten-speed like nobody’s business, so the chances of him getting to work late were remote. One thing about Tyler: he didn’t seem to give a shit about a lot, but he got to work on time. He liked his money, and it about killed him to pass over twenty bucks a week to his sister in a token gesture of contributing to the household. It wasn’t me who asked for the money. It was all Jayne.

When we sat down opposite each other, Jayne picked at her toast, then finally said, “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. I was seventeen once, and—”

“Sixteen,” she reminded me. “He’ll be seventeen in another month.”

“Okay, sixteen. Lots of kids get drunk earlier than that. Doesn’t make him an alcoholic. He’ll feel like shit today. Maybe it’ll teach him a lesson.”

“I don’t know.”

“When I was his age, I’d done far worse,” I said. “It’s a rough period, and he’s been through a lot. He’ll be a handful for a while.”

“He shouldn’t have to be your handful, Andy,” she said.

We’d been over this before. No matter how many times I told her I did not mind having her brother live with us, she could not be persuaded.

Tyler had been here nearly two months. He had been living with his dad, Bertrand Keeling, at the family home in Providence. Jayne and Tyler’s mom, Alice, had died about five years earlier. Jayne, now twenty-nine, hadn’t lived at home since Tyler was ten. He’d been one of those “surprise babies.” Jayne’s parents figured they were done with kids — Bertrand had always said Jayne was enough of a handful all on her own — but then Alice found herself pregnant when she was forty. The thirteen-year age difference might as well have been a century. Hard to be a “big sister,” and all that that entails, when you’re already in high school and your brother’s in diapers.

Bert dropped dead of a heart attack back in January, shoveling the driveway after a heavy snowfall. Bad enough for Tyler that he’d lost his dad. He was also carrying a lot of guilt. It was his job to clear the driveway, but he’d slept in and his dad had decided not to wake him. If Tyler had gotten his ass out of bed, his father might still be alive.

He went to live with his never-married aunt — his mom’s sister — in town, but she soon found that looking after a teenager was something she was not up to. That was when Jayne started wondering what she should do. She felt she’d never really been there for Tyler, and maybe now was the time.

She was going to end our living arrangement and move back to Providence. She and Tyler would live in the family home, which had not yet been sold. She drove up there to explore the idea, see if she could get the house off the market.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said to me on the phone one night. “I love you, but... he’s my brother.”

After we had finished talking, I spent an hour or two thinking about her situation, then finally picked up my phone and sent her a text:

The phone rang in my hand almost immediately. Jayne said, “No, I would never ask that of you.”

“It’s okay. Honestly. He can move in. There’s an extra room. We have the space.”

“It’s not my house,” Jayne protested. “I don’t have the right to ask that of you.”

“It is your house. It’s our home. And you’re not asking. I’m offering. You forget what I went through.” I reminded her how my own parents had both died within a year of each other. When my father died of lung cancer, I had just turned twelve. Ten months later, as though God himself wanted to show he had a cosmically dark sense of humor, my mother was killed when a drunk driver ran a red light in Stamford and T-boned her Toyota. With no extended family to take me in, I bounced around from foster home to foster home until the age of eighteen, when I struck out on my own.

“I know what it’s like to have nowhere to go,” I’d said. “I can only imagine how great it would have been to have extended family step up and take me in.”

So it was done. But Tyler was less thrilled about it than I thought I might have been in similar circumstances. He had to leave behind his school, his social circle. Leaving Providence and coming to Stratford meant starting all over again. And he wasn’t crazy about his sister taking on a pseudo-parental role. The kid was adrift, and Jayne and I believed we were doing the best we could to provide a stable environment for him.

Some days, we felt we were failing.

Later that morning, I was in the garage, trying to make some sense of the mess in there. The Keeling home had finally sold, and while much of the furniture had gone into storage or been donated, there were several dozen boxes in the garage of family keepsakes and mementos that Jayne wanted to go through. “Photos” and “tax records” and “Tyler stuff” were scribbled in marker on the boxes. I thought I could at least sort them into neater stacks along the garage walls so that we could get both Jayne’s small car and my aging Ford Explorer in here.

Seconds after I powered open the double-wide door, I heard the door that enters into the house squeak on its hinges. Jayne had a beer in each hand, and held out the bottle of Sam Adams in her left.

“A little early for this?” I said, taking the beer anyway.

“What the fuck,” she said, pushing out her lower lip and blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. “It’s Saturday.” We clinked bottles. She was drinking something different, the label on her bottle mostly obscured by her hand.

She watched me take a swig, and frowned. “Maybe we’re not setting a good example. Drinking before noon.”

I smiled. “At least we don’t puke on the deck.”

Jayne shrugged. “Got stuff to do,” she said, and went back into the house.

I was about to take another sip when the cell phone tucked into my back pocket rang. I dug it out, saw MAX on the screen. I was surprised to see the name of my former next-door neighbor. It had been a long time since we’d spoken.

“Hello,” I said.

“Andy?”

“Hey, Max. Long time.”

“Yeah, well. It was lucky I still had your number in my phone. Not sure I would have found you otherwise, because, well, I’d heard you changed your last name and I didn’t know what it was. You’re still in Milford?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t comfortable talking about changing my name, and didn’t volunteer my new one. “In Stratford now. You cross the Housatonic, it feels like you’re in another state.”

“So, this is going to sound crazy, and I didn’t know whether I should call or not, but I figured this is something you’d want to know about.”

“What is it, Max?’

“So I was out front, this morning, and this car pulls in to your place. Well, your old driveway. Not your old house, since they rebuilt on the lot, but—”

“I’m aware, Max.”

“Anyway, this car pulls in, and this woman gets out, and she looks at the house and she goes kind of crazy, asking what happened to her house, where did it go?”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up.

“You there?” Max asked.

“I’m here.”

“The girl next door, the one who lives in the house where yours used to be, she came out, told this lady it was a new house, the old one was torn down, and this woman looks kind of freaked out, gets back in the car, takes off. Didn’t even close the tailgate. Like she’d seen a ghost. Or, I don’t know. As if maybe she was the ghost.”

Max paused, as though steeling himself.

“The thing is, Andy, I mean, I know Brie’s been missing six years now, and everyone figures something bad happened, and I don’t want to get your hopes up and all, but...”

Another pause, and then:

“But I think it was her.”

I needed to be sure I understood what Max was telling me. “Say again?” I said.

“Brie,” he said. “I think it was Brie.”

Three

Detective Hardy: Mr. Underwood, what is the name of the company you work for?

Charles: Triple-A Pest Control. We’re in the book under AAA Pest Control, so we’re the first ones you’re going to find if you’ve got a problem.

Detective Hardy: And you received a call from Brie Mason when?

Charles: Saturday morning. She said she thought she’d heard something in the walls the night before and she was kind of freaked out and she left a message on the voice mail since we don’t usually take calls on the weekend. But I checked the message and she sounded pretty upset, so I said I could come over that afternoon.

Detective Hardy: And when did you arrive at her residence, at, let me just check... thirty-six Mulberry?

Charles: I guess it was around two, two-thirty. Yeah.

Detective Hardy: She met you at the door?

Charles: That’s right.

Detective Hardy: There was no one else at home?

Charles: Just her. She said her husband was out of town, but coming back any minute.

Detective Hardy: Did he come back?

Charles: Not while I was there, no. I had the feeling... sometimes, when you’re in a house with a woman who’s on her own, they get a little nervous. So she might have been saying he was going to be back soon even if he wasn’t so I wouldn’t try anything.

Detective Hardy: Try anything?

Charles: You know. Make a pass or something.

Detective Hardy: Is that something you sometimes do? Make a pass at customers?

Charles: Shit, no. Sometimes, well, sometimes it’s the customers that end up coming on to you.

Detective Hardy: Really.

Charles: Been known to happen. I’ve had calls, over the years, a woman didn’t have so much as a spider in her house, but she calls me to check the place out. Some people are lonely, you know. I’m no prize, I get that, but some ladies, they can be on the desperate side, if you know what I mean.

Detective Hardy: How long were you there?

Charles: ’Bout an hour. Didn’t see much evidence of any kind of infestation, although an old house like that, you wouldn’t be surprised to find something. If not mice, termites. Who knows? Lots of ways for the little rodents to find their way inside with an old place. You know mice can actually climb walls? Had them come into one house through the outside vent for the fan over the stove. Mice would have had to climb up an eight-foot brick wall to get to the vent. They’re a very interesting species. Did you know—

Detective Hardy: And when did you return to the house?

Charles: The next morning.

Detective Hardy: What time?

Charles: Just before eleven, guess it was.

Detective Hardy: She had asked you to come back? She called you?

Charles: No, but I think I’d said something about coming back the next day to see if she’d caught anything. I gave her a couple of traps. The kind that don’t kill the mouse, just catch him, so you can take him outside and set him free.

Detective Hardy: Is that the kind you recommend?

Charles: We’re all God’s creatures. I don’t always feel good about what I do, to be honest. Trapping and poisoning things. But we’ve all got to pay the bills, am I right?

Detective Hardy: How did Ms. Mason seem to you?

Charles: You mean on the Sunday? Because she wasn’t there on the Sunday. Neither was her husband.

Detective Hardy: I mean on the Saturday. How was her mood? Anxious? Apprehensive?

Charles: She seemed a little antsy, to be honest with you. But like I said, having a man in the house, that might have made her a titch uneasy. Although I don’t think I come across as threatening. Do you think I do?

Detective Hardy: You seem perfectly charming, Mr. Underwood. Did she talk about her husband? Other than that he was coming home soon?

Charles: That was about it.

Detective Hardy: So, back to the Sunday, the following day. What happened when you returned?

Charles: I knocked on the door, but I got no answer. I figured she was home because the car was in the driveway.

Detective Hardy: Just the one. The one that was there the afternoon before?

Charles: Yeah. A little Volkswagen. A Golf.

Detective Hardy: And the husband, he wasn’t around, you said.

Charles: Yeah. Whether he was there between the time I left the day before and when I came back the next morning, that I couldn’t tell you.

Detective Hardy: Okay, go on.

Charles: I thought maybe she was in the bathroom or went for a walk or was out back. So I knocked again, and waited, then walked down the side of the house and into the backyard, but she wasn’t there, either.

Detective Hardy: And that’s when you left?

Charles: No, no. I went up to the door there. You go in that way and you’re in the kitchen, which is at the back. I called in, instead of knocking. Said, “Hey, Ms. Mason, you there?” And I didn’t hear nothin’ back. That’s when I noticed the door wasn’t quite latched.

Detective Hardy: The door was open?

Charles: Not open, just like when you let a door swing shut on its own, and it needs that little push to lock it into place. It hadn’t had that push. Am I going to get in trouble here?

Detective Hardy: Why would you be in trouble?

Charles: Well, did I, like, break-and-enter or something?

Detective Hardy: Don’t worry about that. Go on.

Charles: The thing was, I wanted to check what happened with the flour.

Detective Hardy: Flower? You saying you brought Brie Mason some flowers the day before? Or were these flowers from her husband?

Charles: Not a flower, flower. But flour, like you bake with.

Detective Hardy: I’m not following.

Charles: Okay, so, if you want to know if you’ve got mice scurrying around in the night, you sprinkle some flour on the floor so you can see their footprints.

Detective Hardy: You did that?

Charles: No, but I told her she should do that before she went to bed. Sounded to me like she was going to do it. I wanted to take a peek and see if there were any tracks. If there were, then we could get a little more aggressive, dealing with the infestation.

Detective Hardy: Where was she to sprinkle the flour?

Charles: On the floor in front of the sink. I thought I’d seen some turds — you know, mouse droppings—

Detective Hardy: I get it.

Charles: —under the sink area. So I thought, if they were running around, that was a good place to spread some flour.

Detective Hardy: And you had the impression she was definitely going to do that? Sprinkle the flour?

Charles: Pretty much.

Detective Hardy: We didn’t notice any flour on the floor when we went through the house.

Charles: Huh. Well, maybe she didn’t do it, or...

Detective Hardy: Or what?

Charles: Or she saw the tracks in the morning, and then vacuumed it up.

Detective Hardy: Her, or somebody else.

Four

Andrew

I told Jayne I was making a run to Home Depot for some bags of weed and feed. The scraggly front lawn was clearly in need of some springtime TLC.

Once I was behind the wheel of the Explorer I drove out of my Stratford neighborhood, across the bridge that spanned the Housatonic and headed for the east end of Milford, where I used to live, with my wife, Brie. I avoided not just this part of Milford, but all of it, as much as I could. Not so much because familiar sights triggered unpleasant memories. I didn’t need familiar sights for that.

I just didn’t want to run into people I knew.

There was still a risk of that, of course, living in nearby Stratford. But at least the risk was reduced, going to different stores, frequenting different restaurants. Had I never moved, still been a fixture on Mulberry, I’d have had to deal with the inevitable questions and comments, even six years after Brie disappeared.

“Have you heard anything, anything at all?”

“The not-knowing must be the worst of it, right?”

“I can only imagine how much you must need some sense of closure.”

You could guess the questions on the minds of those who chose to say nothing.

“Did you do it?”

“You feel pretty smug, thinking you got away with it?”

Or just:

“Why?”

I’d stayed in the Mulberry house for the better part of a year after it happened, and would have moved away sooner had I been able to sell the house more quickly. But the place was tainted. Prospective buyers, one way or another, had heard the stories about the current owners, or, more accurately, owner. There was no actual evidence anything grisly had actually happened on the property. It wasn’t as if someone had been buried in the basement or tucked a body away in the attic. But that didn’t do much to tamp down some potential purchasers’ anxieties. At least I was allowed to sell it. I’d registered the house in the name of my company. If it had been jointly owned with Brie, and I’d needed her signature to complete any sales deal, the house would still be there, and in all likelihood I’d still be living in it.

The plan had always been to do major renovations on the place, knock out some walls, blow out the attic to make a more usable third floor, redo the kitchen. Maybe live there, maybe sell it. Buying an older house, renovating it while we lived in it, and then selling it, was something we’d done three times before, and Brie was more than fed up with living that way. It was a major source of tension that nearly ruined our marriage. That, and a couple of other things. This house on Mulberry was one we were debating whether to settle in permanently.

The basic structure of the house — the bones, I called it — had been good. There was something to work with there, but everything about the place was out-of-date. It needed to be rewired, the plumbing was a catastrophe waiting to happen. I’d ripped away the drywall on some of the exterior walls and found insulation black with mold. The previous owner had been there for nearly fifty years, since the late seventies, and hadn’t done much beyond replacing the roof shingles. Those avocado appliances in the kitchen were but one item on a very long list of things that had to go. And that pink toilet in the upstairs bathroom?

“Don’t get me started,” Brie used to say.

But once everything went to shit, and my life became a public spectacle, fodder for true crime shows and social media speculation, I needed a fresh start. The house finally sold for about ten percent under what I was asking, and I felt lucky to get that. I found my current residence across the river in Stratford, but I hadn’t actually bought the place. I found it difficult to make decisions that involved permanence, so I was leasing with an option to buy.

I was, for a very long time, a mess. Having your wife disappear, and hearing the whispers behind your back that you’re responsible, will do that to you.

I lost my friends, except for one, and for a long stretch lost work. Nobody was keen to hire the guy who might have killed his wife and gotten rid of her body. I drank. A lot. I found alcohol helpful because when I was sober, I couldn’t sleep. At least drinking would put me out for a while.

If I had any real goal in the first three years or so after Brie vanished, it was to achieve a total state of numbness. I wanted to feel nothing. Happiness and contentment were off the table, but I didn’t want the flip side, either. The booze helped block the depression and the guilt and the grieving.

At least, up to a point.

One day, waking up fully clothed in an empty bathtub with no memory of how I got there, I decided that it was time to make a choice. Kill yourself, or get your shit together. I chose the latter. That one good friend helped me get through it.

And I got better, but I never fully pulled out of that dark place. Not until I met Jayne Keeling one day when her car stalled in the drive-through line at McDonald’s, blocking half a dozen vehicles behind her, including mine. I came to her rescue, got her car moving, and something just clicked between us.

That was when I forced the door shut on all that had happened to me in the preceding six years. I didn’t want Jayne to have even a peek into that room. I was afraid if she knew what I had been through, what some suspected me of having done, she’d walk away. Brie was gone and the world would have to carry on without ever knowing what had happened to her.

And then came the call from Max.

I did not know what to make of it.

“I think it was Brie.”

My wife, missing for six years and presumed, by many, to be dead, had shown up at my old address?

Impossible.

I figured, if I went over there in person, I might be able to extract more detail from him. He’d also said a girl living in the house that had been built on the site of my former home had seen this woman. Maybe I could talk to her, too.

I had the sense that my universe, such as it was, was on the verge of some kind of... unraveling.

There was so much I had not told Jayne.

Max had been expecting me, and was sitting on his porch when I pulled up in front of his house, parking the Explorer at the curb. He came down to greet me, extended a hand.

“Andy,” he said. “Nice... to see you.”

Nice and awkward was more like it. Max and I had been good neighbors to each other, chatting on trash pickup day when we would find ourselves bringing garbage and recycling to the street at the same time. If he needed a special drill attachment, he could borrow one from me. If I ran short of ice on a Saturday night, Max could provide. Brie and I occasionally socialized with him and his wife, Ruth. A backyard barbecue once or twice a year. But we weren’t what you would call close.

Max told me basically the same story he’d related over the phone. The black Volvo pulling into the driveway, the woman getting out and looking at the house, distressed that it was not the one she expected to find. His description of the woman was imprecise. She kind of looked like Brie, but he couldn’t swear to it. The closest he got to her was probably forty feet.

“But who else would be shocked to find the house gone?” he asked. “I heard that the McGuires, who you bought the original house from, have all passed, so, who else would come back here expecting to find a house that got torn down a long time ago?”

I had no idea how to respond to that.

As we stood in his driveway, I looked at the home that now stood where mine had been. It was a dramatic-looking building. Angular, modern, lots of glass. It didn’t fit in with the other, older houses on the street, but the neighborhood was slowly evolving, and in another ten years, as more homes came down and new ones went up, no one would give this place a second look.

I noticed, mounted discreetly under the eaves, a small glass bubble. A security camera with a wide-angle view.

I left Max standing there as I crossed the property line, went up to the front door, and rang the bell. It was one of those camera doorbells you see advertised all the time on television. It had the ability to capture a decent image of someone on the front step, but that camera below the eaves would have a broader field of vision.

The door was opened by a tall, portly man in his forties. I wracked my brain, trying to remember the name of the buyer on the property transaction from several years ago, but it wouldn’t come.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “My name’s Andrew. I used to live here. Well, not in this house. But the house that was torn down to build this one.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Andrew Mason?”

I didn’t see the point in correcting him. That was my name at the time, and was the name on all the real estate documents. The fact that my name was now Andrew Carville didn’t seem important right now.

“Yes,” I said. “I know I should know your name but I can’t pull it up.”

“Brian,” he said. “Brian Feehan.”

“Right,” I said, now remembering that there were two names on the documents. “And your wife is Sonia.”

“Yes.”

“Your neighbor, Max? He gave me a call a short while ago to tell me about something he witnessed. Here.” I waved my hand toward the driveway. “Something that your, I’m guessing, daughter, something she saw as well?”

Brian slowly nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It was very strange. A woman. She caused quite a scene. There were groceries spilled all over the place. Is that what you’ve come for? Because we did save them. We gathered them up in a bag. It’s in the kitchen.”

“Very kind of you, but no, that’s not what I was wondering about.” I pointed a finger skyward. “You’ve got a security system.”

“Yes.”

“I’m hoping you’d let me have a look at the incident. I’m guessing your system records video, saves it for a period of time. And this would be just a short while ago.”

Brian eyed me warily. “Why’s this a concern of yours?”

“Mr. Feehan, I’m sure you knew what I’d been going through when I sold this property to you. The personal tragedy I was dealing with.”

He nodded. “I... was aware.”

“Of course you were. It’s one of the reasons you were able to get the property for ten percent under what I was asking. It had a history.” I didn’t know, when I sold, that my house would be torn down and replaced with another. I wondered if the house’s notorious past was a factor for the Feehans, or if they’d planned to rip down the house regardless. Had Brie not disappeared, we might very well have taken the same path, and replaced it with something as nice as what the Feehans had built.

I continued: “Without getting into the specifics, Max believes what he saw might have some bearing on my situation. That’s why I’d be grateful if you’d let me see what he saw.”

The look I saw in Brian Feehan’s eyes was one I’d seen before many times in the last six years. What’s your game? he was wondering. What are you hiding? Why should I help someone like you?

“Please,” I said. “It’s probably nothing, but then again, it might be important.”

He studied me for another second, then said, “Wait here.”

He went back into the house and closed the door. He returned a minute later with a touch-screen tablet. He’d already opened an app that accessed his household security system. On the screen were four video boxes, like we were about to have a Zoom chat with a few friends who’d not yet stepped into the frames. In each box was a different view of the property. One showed the backyard, two others offered views down the side of the house, and one was fixed on the driveway and the street beyond.

“I’m scrolling back to early this morning,” he said. “It’s motion-activated, so when something moves into any camera’s field of vision, it begins to record.”

I knew all that.

He had tapped on the tablet to enlarge the feed that scanned the front yard. He dragged his index finger across the bottom of the image, fast-forwarding through the morning. I’d moved to stand next to him so I could watch.

“There,” I said.

The Volvo wagon slowed, turned into the driveway. The car came to a stop, and after a few seconds, the driver’s door opened and a woman got out. Immediately she turned her back to the camera as she went to the rear of the car, and by the time she turned to face the house, she was obscured by the open tailgate.

But then she came out from behind the car and took a few steps toward the house.

And stopped. And dropped her grocery bags.

While there was no audio, she could be seen mouthing some words. At this point, she was looking directly at the camera.

The image, however, was not crisp.

“Can you pause that?” I asked.

Brian did so.

I reached out a hand. “You mind?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he handed the tablet to me. I stared at the screen for a few seconds, then placed my thumb and index finger on the screen to expand the image and enlarge the woman’s face.

It was still a soft image, just bigger. And yet...

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

Five

Detective Hardy: Mr. Mason, thank you for coming in again. How are you managing?

Andrew: How do you think I’m managing? How would you be managing if your spouse had been missing for two days? Not well.

Detective Hardy: I understand. What you’re going through, it’s, uh... it’s a nightmare.

Andrew: No kidding. Tell me you’ve found Brie, or some lead as to where she might be.

Detective Hardy: Rest assured this is a number-one priority for us and we are doing everything we can to find your wife, Mr. Mason.

Andrew: (mumbles)

Detective Hardy: And just to make sure I have all my notes correct, Brie’s maiden name is McBain?

Andrew: That’s correct.

Detective Hardy: But she took your name when you married.

Andrew: Yes.

Detective Hardy: A bit of a traditionalist, is she? Most women these days, seems they keep their own name when they get married.

Andrew: Is this somehow relevant?

Detective Hardy: Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible your wife, wherever she might be, is not using her married name. It’s just good to know.

Andrew: Why would she be out there using another name?

Detective Hardy: I don’t know that she is, Mr. Mason. I only want to know as much as I can about her, and that includes her name before she married you. I think we should move on. Now, I have some questions, and I know some of them are going to seem repetitive, like it’s ground we’ve already covered, but maybe, going through this again, you’ll recall something you hadn’t thought of before.

Andrew: You’re spinning your wheels here.

Detective Hardy: I know you may feel that way. And as I said, I understand, but there are things I’d like to go over with you.

Andrew: Fine.

Detective Hardy: Let’s go back to Friday night. You left around six? To head up to Sorrow Bay? Where you have a cabin?

Andrew: That’s right. Cabin makes it sound pretty rustic, but it’s nicer than that. It’s got all the so-called modern conveniences. A new kitchen, Wi-Fi. But yeah, it’s on the water and it’s our getaway place.

Detective Hardy: And why didn’t Brie accompany you on this trip?

Andrew: It was a guys’ weekend.

Detective Hardy: Just one other guy, yes? Gregoire Raymus?

Andrew: That’s right.

Detective Hardy: He’s your friend and business partner.

Andrew: Yes. He goes by Greg.

Detective Hardy: And what is this business again?

Andrew: We build stuff. Small plazas, businesses, low-rises, that kind of thing.

Detective Hardy: And you’ve known Mr. Raymus for how long?

Andrew: Fifteen years, I guess? We met in college. Engineering. Been good friends since, formed a partnership.

Detective Hardy: And you went up together?

Andrew: No, I told you this. We took separate cars because he couldn’t get away as early. His cabin is about a hundred feet down from mine.

Detective Hardy: How long a drive is it?

Andrew: Couple of hours. Sometimes a little longer, if there’s traffic getting out of the Milford area. Can do it in under two if there’s nobody else on the road.

Detective Hardy: Hmm.

Andrew: What?

Detective Hardy: Nothing. So you didn’t actually share quarters.

Andrew: Not for sleeping. We had a late dinner at my place Friday night, dinner over at his on Saturday.

Detective Hardy: What time did you leave his cabin Saturday night?

Andrew: Before nine. We’re not exactly night owls anymore. There was a time, we might have sat up drinking till midnight. His leg was sore and I think he took a couple of painkillers.

Detective Hardy: What’s wrong with his leg?

Andrew: He was at a job site, up on a wall that was under construction, and he thought he could make the jump down instead of using the ladder. Broke his left leg below the knee. But it’s pretty much mended.

Detective Hardy: And Sunday morning? What happened then?

Andrew: I made my own breakfast but went over to his place for coffee around nine, I think it was.

Detective Hardy: So you didn’t see Mr. Raymus between nine o’clock the night before and when you went over for coffee in the morning.

Andrew: That’s right. We did some more fishing and then in the afternoon we both headed back.

Detective Hardy: Catch anything?

Andrew: No.

Detective Hardy: When did you get home?

Andrew: Just after three.

Detective Hardy: And Brie, she wasn’t home.

Andrew: (sighing) No. How many times have we been over—

Detective Hardy: But the car was there? And the house was unlocked?

Andrew: That’s right. When I couldn’t find her I thought maybe she’d gone for a walk.

Detective Hardy: So what did you do then?

Andrew: I called her cell. And heard it ringing in the house. Upstairs. It was plugged in to the charger, next to her bed. That didn’t make any sense. That was when I started to get worried. I searched the entire house. Wondered if she might have fallen down the stairs to the basement.

Detective Hardy: Why would you think that? Did she have a habit of tripping or something?

Andrew: No. But things can happen. I was looking everywhere.

Detective Hardy: When had you last spoken to her?

Andrew: The night before. She called me. We did a FaceTime thing so we could see each other. She told me about having some weird pest control guy there because she thought we might have mice.

Detective Hardy: She said he was weird?

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, nothing really crazy. That he was an exterminator who didn’t like to exterminate things. That struck her as kind of odd. Me, too. Have you talked to him?

Detective Hardy: Yes.

Andrew: You need to take a close look at him. He was the last person to see her alive.

Detective Hardy: Well, not technically. You saw her during your FaceTime chat.

Andrew: Okay, yeah, but he was the last person to actually be with her.

Detective Hardy: You said he’d have been the last one to see her alive. You think she’s dead?

Andrew: I didn’t mean it like that. I have no idea. I’m praying to God she’s okay, that there’s got to be some kind of explanation for this.

Detective Hardy: And what about the flour?

Andrew: The what?

Detective Hardy: Did you notice any flour, baking flour, on the floor in the kitchen?

Andrew: She told me she’d done that, to see if there were mouse tracks in the morning.

Detective Hardy: Did you see the flour on the floor when you got home?

Andrew: No.

Detective Hardy: You didn’t vacuum it up?

Andrew: No.

Detective Hardy: And you had no further chats with your wife after that Saturday night call?

Andrew: No. That... that was the last time... I talked to Brie.

Detective Hardy: Do you need a minute, Mr. Mason?

Andrew: (unintelligible)

Detective Hardy: Mr. Mason?

Andrew: I’m okay.

Detective Hardy: Do you want a glass of water?

Andrew: No. Yes. Thank you.

Detective Hardy: So, you called her cell, searched the house. What did you do after that?

Andrew: I drove around the neighborhood, hoping I might spot her. I called one of her friends, Rosie Holcomb. Didn’t want to panic her, just asked if Brie was there, and she said no. Not long after that I called you. Well, the police. I called the police, I think, around five.

Detective Hardy: That’s right. The call came in at five-oh-three. You look very tired, Mr. Mason.

Andrew: I haven’t slept for two days.

Detective Hardy: Do you think it’s possible your wife might have decided to just up and leave?

Andrew: No. That makes no sense.

Detective Hardy: Even though you’d been having some troubles in your marriage?

Andrew: I’m sorry, what?

Detective Hardy: Some troubles. Thinking about a separation? A possible divorce?

Andrew: Where the hell are you getting that from?

Detective Hardy: So you’re saying no problems on that front.

Andrew: We’d been through a rough patch, but we’d moved on from that. Did somebody tell you something?

Detective Hardy: A rough patch?

Andrew: Look, Brie had this very brief... I don’t know what you’d call it. It wasn’t an affair or anything.

Detective Hardy: What’s that person’s name?

Andrew: I don’t think there’s any point in making his life any more miserable than it already is. And anyway, I’d been kind of an idiot myself in that area.

Detective Hardy: Would that be with Natalie Simmons?

Andrew: Jesus.

Detective Hardy: She’s the woman you had an affair with, correct?

Andrew: (unintelligible)

Detective Hardy: I’m sorry, what was that?

Six

Albert McBain pushed tentatively on the hospital room door and stepped in quietly. He didn’t want to wake his mother if she was sleeping. He would settle into the vinyl-covered chair across from her bed and play some Reversi on his phone, or take the spiral notebook from his pocket and make some notes for the play he had written and was currently directing, and wait until Elizabeth McBain woke up on her own.

He needn’t have worried. As he approached the bed, he saw her eyes were fixed on the television that hung on a swing arm from the ceiling. The headset tucked into her ears was barely visible under her stringy gray hair. Her jaw was moving back and forth, suggesting to Albert that she was grinding her teeth, something she did when she was angry.

Before Elizabeth realized her son was in the room, she said, “Idiots!” under her breath. “Morons,” she added.

But then she caught sight of her son standing there. Her grim expression morphed into a smile and, awkwardly with her spindly arms, pulled off the headset.

“Albert,” she said, trying to shift herself into more of a sitting position.

“Let me help you,” he said.

He got an arm around her back and helped her up, taking a second to glance at the television to see what had gotten her thin blood boiling. It was one of the cable news networks, a panel of talking heads debating the latest scandal out of Washington.

“Hey, Mom,” he said. “How we doing today?”

Elizabeth pointed a bony finger at the screen. “You wouldn’t believe what that pinhead just said. They just spread lies, without any regard whatsoever for the facts. They know they’re lying, but it gets their base riled up and they make money off it. Assholes, the lot of them.”

“I know, I know,” he said, trying to calm her.

“What happened to facts? What happened to evidence?” Her speech became breathy.

“Take it easy,” Albert said. “You get a little winded when you’re upset.”

She sighed and closed her eyes briefly, composing herself. “I’m fine.” She raised a finger again. “It’s just that these lying—”

“Mom, let’s talk about something else. How was your night? You get a good sleep?”

Another sigh. “They never let you rest around here. Waking you at the crack of dawn.”

Albert nodded sympathetically. “They kind of get going around six a.m. in the morning here.”

His mother shot him a look. He knew instantly he’d stepped into it, wished he could claw back his words.

“Albert, you can say it’s six in the morning, or you can say it’s six a.m., but there’s no need to say six a.m. in the morning. It’s redundant. It’s like saying it’s six o’clock in the morning in the morning.”

He cracked a smile. “Maybe I was just testing you.”

His mother rolled her eyes. Elizabeth had never been able to resist correcting him, or his sisters, when they misspoke. She might have retired nearly two decades ago, but she hadn’t forgotten what she’d learned from a career in newspapers. She’d bounced around several Connecticut dailies, starting in Hartford, then back and forth between New Haven and Bridgeport, almost all of that time on copy desks, turning reporters’ error-riddled accounts into something that was not only readable, but unlikely to necessitate a correction in the next day’s edition. Elizabeth McBain had waged a lifelong war against vagueness, woolly thinking, accusations without evidence. It was a battle she fought on the home front as well. If Elizabeth asked one of her kids how school had gone that day, and heard, “Okay,” in return, she wanted specifics. What made it just okay, instead of great? What was the source of disappointment? Was it a friends issue? A bad mark on a test? A forgotten assignment?

Albert fussed with his mother’s pillow until she waved him off. He looked hurt, briefly, but he was used to his mother’s brusqueness. If anything, her hard-edged nature was one of the things he loved about her most. And he was strangely grateful that, if these were to be his mother’s final days, at least they were happening now, and not when that virus was raging. Back then, he probably wouldn’t have been allowed in to visit her at all.

“Is your sister here?” Elizabeth asked.

“No. I think Izzy’s going to visit later this afternoon.”

His mother nodded wearily. “She came last night with Norman.” Elizabeth sighed. “What a production.”

“What are you talking about?” Albert asked, although he had a pretty good idea.

“She got up here first while Norman parked the car, and when he arrived she quizzed him about where he parked it. In the lot, he says. They charge too much for parking, she tells him. He should have found a free spot on a nearby street, she says. I looked, he says, and couldn’t find one. You must not have looked very hard, she says. I can always find a spot. It went on forever.”

“I guess you can get a replay if she comes in this afternoon.”

Another sigh. “How’s the new play coming?” she asked.

Albert’s face fell. “We’re so far behind. Opening night’s less than two weeks away and no one’s got their lines nailed down and the set construction is behind and the ticket sales are slow.”

“You’ll be okay,” she said, reaching out a withered hand and patting his. “Things always come together at the last minute. That’s community theater for you. They’re not professionals. Everyone’s got regular jobs, their own lives, just like you do at the bank, you know? They’re all volunteers. The important thing is everyone loves what they’re doing. And ticket buyers, lots of them wait till the last minute. There’ll be lots of walk-ins, you just wait.”

“I hope you’re right, Mother,” Albert said, sounding more like a little boy than a grown man. He almost always called her Mother instead of Mom. Sounded more respectful, more formal. More devotional. “I don’t even know anymore if the play’s any good.”

“It is, it is,” she assured him. “I read it and liked it very much. It’s very funny in places.”

“It’s supposed to be funny all the way through.”

“Oh, it is. You know what the word for it is? Madcap. It’s very madcap.”

Albert smiled gratefully, letting his mother’s opinion rule. “Thank you.”

“How... are Dierdre and the children?”

“Okay,” he said, somewhat glumly. “Dierdre and I are talking now about a trial separation.”

Sorrow overtook Elizabeth’s face. “It’s a terrible thing to go out of this world knowing there’s this to be sad about, too.”

“Maybe... maybe we can work it out,” he said.

“Oh please. I may be on my last legs but I’m still pretty hard to fool.”

“Yeah,” Albert said. “I know.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “She’s a good woman, Dierdre. She’s a wonderful mom to the kids. But there’s just... the spark is gone. And she... she doesn’t understand that I have dreams, you know? She resents all the theater stuff. It’s not my fault she doesn’t have something of her own that gives her joy. I’ve tried to get her involved. With costumes, or handling ticket sales. Anyway. But I’m there for Randy. I take him to practice. Same with Lyla, anything she needs. She’s on the soccer team now.” He paused, looked away. “Is it wrong that I have a dream?”

Elizabeth could think of nothing helpful to say.

“One day, some theater person, some producer from New York, will see my work and I’ll be on my way. It could happen. What I’d give to walk out of the bank and never go back, never have to approve another mortgage.”

“You have a dream,” Elizabeth said, almost dismissively. “And so do I.”

Albert smiled pityingly. “I know.”

Elizabeth broke eye contact.

“The important thing,” Albert said, “is you have to get better so you can get out of here, come home.”

“Albert, don’t,” she said. “The cancer’s eating me up. If it weren’t for all the damn painkillers they give me I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation.”

“You never know,” Albert said. “It could go into remission. You’d have more time. More time to be with all of us.”

“Not all of you,” Elizabeth said.

She closed her eyes for several seconds, as though the conversation, barely under way, had already exhausted her.

“I know,” Albert said.

“Dying isn’t the worst of it. It’s dying without knowing.”

“Mother, we all feel the same way.” He paused, then, “What about that letter? Last December?”

Elizabeth did a feeble raspberry with her lips. “That nut who wrote a letter claiming to be her? Please. Police get stupid things like that all the time. Bogus psychics, someone saying they saw her beamed up into a spaceship.”

She closed her eyes briefly, pinching out a tear on each side. “Even to know, for sure, that she was gone, that’d be something, I suppose. If I believed in heaven, that might be some comfort. The idea that we’d be reunited.” Elizabeth shook her head. “But all there is, is this. When you’re done, you’re done.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Albert said. “We’d all give anything to know where Brie is. If she’s alive... or not.”

Elizabeth’s gaze had turned back briefly to the television. “Facts,” she said. “The world no longer has any interest in them.”

She looked back at Albert, smiled weakly, and patted his hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be difficult. I know you, and Izzy, you’re both trying to say and do the right thing. There is no right thing. I’m very proud of you. I’m proud of all three of my children. You and Izzy. And Brie. There’s never been a moment when I haven’t wondered where she is.”

“I know.”

“Izzy’s never moved on, either,” she said. “I’m not saying you have, understand, but it’s different with her. It’s the hate, her wanting to get even, that’s consumed her. It’s devouring her. She hates Andrew so much, she’s so convinced he did it, that he did something to Brie. I say to her, where’s your proof? Give me something, other than a feeling. I think, sometimes, not about whether he really might have done it, but about what if he didn’t? What if Izzy’s wrong? And if Andrew didn’t do it, think how horribly we’ve treated him all this time. He’s suffered, too, you know. He lost his wife. He lost the love of his life.”

Albert gave his mother’s hand another squeeze. As the cancer spread and the end grew near, she spoke of little else but Brie. Would knowing what happened to Brie really bring Elizabeth any comfort if it turned out her daughter was dead?

Albert had his doubts.

“I think,” he said tentatively, “if Brie were alive, and knew what condition you’re in, she’d find a way to get here, to see you.”

The door opened and a male nurse walked in.

“Hey,” he said with false cheer. “How are we doing today, Mrs. McBain?”

She looked at her son, rolled her eyes, and said, “Just peachy.”

“Just wanted to see if you’d like to get wheeled down to the atrium for a change of scenery?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“I’ll check in on you again later in case you change your mind.” The nurse spun on his heel and left.

Albert leaned over his mom and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “I’ll come back and see you this afternoon. Is there anything you want? Anything I can bring you?”

“You know what I want,” she said, and her eyelids slowly descended.

Seven

Andrew

I’ll admit, looking at that image of the woman standing in the driveway did give me something of a jolt, prompting me to involuntarily let the son of God’s name slip from my lips.

But the image was by no means conclusive.

Did this woman — this blurry woman, at that — bear a passing resemblance to my wife, Brie? Yes. She was about the right height. She had dark hair and wore it roughly the same way. Above the shoulders, and curled around her face. The way she moved from the driver’s door to the tailgate, I couldn’t really say whether her gait was similar to Brie’s. It was only a few steps. Not enough to really tell.

The clearest shot was when she stood looking directly at the house, when she dropped her groceries, seemingly stunned by what she was looking at.

The house that was supposed to be there was gone.

If Brie were to miraculously return after six years, and if those six years for the rest of us had somehow seemed to be no more than a day to her, well, for sure, stepping out of some kind of time machine, finding your house gone and another one in its place, would certainly throw you for a loop.

But the very idea seemed preposterous.

Impossible.

Whoever this woman who’d shown up here this morning was, it could not be Brie.

How could it be? Unless...

“You done?” asked Brian Feehan, holding out his hand.

“I want to email myself this image.”

Brian seemed to be trying to think of any reason he should say no, and, not coming up with one, slowly said, “Fine, go ahead.”

It took me a second to figure out how to export the photo, but once I had, I typed in my own email address and hit send. A couple of seconds later, I heard the ding of an incoming message in my front pocket.

I gave him back the tablet. “Thanks.”

“Well?” he said. “Who is that?”

“No idea,” I said.

“But you want the picture anyway,” he said.

“Sorry to trouble you.”

As I started heading back to my ride I got out my phone to check that the pic had arrived intact. And it had, from Brian Feehan’s email address. I opened the email, made sure the picture was at least as good as the image from Feehan’s tablet — which was not saying a lot — and then closed it.

And wondered what the hell I should do with it. What I was supposed to feel about it.

Shocked? Bewildered? Hopeful? Worried?

Bewildered, certainly. I hardly knew how else to react to the picture without knowing what it really meant. Was I meant to believe that Brie was back, after six years?

I had questions, but wasn’t sure what they were or to whom they should be directed. But I needed to talk to somebody. I got out my phone, opened my contacts, and scrolled down to the R’s. I tapped on a name, put the phone to my ear, and waited for the pickup.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s happening?”

“Greg,” I said. “It’s me. How’s it going?”

“Been worse. Still buying lottery tickets, though, so I can become a man of leisure. What’s up?”

“Need to talk.”

“Yeah, sure.” His voice went low. “You in a bad place again, man?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“’Cause you sound sober.”

“I am.”

“Good, good, that’s good. I never want to see you like you were that time. So what’s happening?”

“I got something I need to show you. Where are you?”

“You know the old TrumbullGate Mall? The one they mothballed?”

I had to think. Maybe fifteen to twenty minutes north and west of Milford. “Yeah, and I can GPS it if I have to. What are you doing up there?”

“Picking over the bones. One of the owners, an old friend, is letting me go through it, recovering all kinds of stuff I can use before they hold a proper auction. From pipe to shelving to railings and fire extinguishers. All kinds of shit.”

“Since when did you do salvage?”

“It’s a buck. Anyway, I’m here. Come to the south service door. That’s about the only way in. Look for my truck. You might see Julie.”

“Julie?”

“She’s great. You’ll like her. She’s easy to spot. Turquoise hair. She’s kind of edgy.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and pocketed the phone.

I had my hand on the door when I realized Max was heading toward me.

“Andy, wait up,” he said. “Could you see her on Brian’s security camera? Did you see her?”

“I saw somebody.”

“Was it Brie?” he asked almost breathlessly.

“I don’t know who it was.”

Max bit his lower lip for a second. “I hope I haven’t opened up some can of worms. I know this whole thing, it really put you through the meat grinder. And you need to know, I never believed any of the bad things they said about you. I heard the rumors, saw what they did to you. But I think I know you, the kind of person you are.”

Max paused, as if waiting for me to thank him for not believing I was a murderer. But I said nothing.

“So when I saw what I saw, I was thinking, oh my God, if that really is Brie, I had to let you know. Not just because it’d be amazing news that she was okay, but it would blow away that cloud that’s been hanging over your head all this time.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said. “I’ve learned how to roll with all of it.”

Max nodded his understanding. “Sure, sure, I get that.”

I opened the door and put one leg up, ready to haul myself into the driver’s seat of the Explorer.

“One thing, though,” Max said.

I brought my leg back down and put it on the pavement.

“What’s that, Max?”

“You have to understand, what I did, I was trying to help.”

It was all coming back to me, what I used to find exasperating about Max when I lived next door to him. The man always took a long time to get to the point.

“Spit it out, Max.”

“Okay, well, you weren’t the only person I called.”

I waited.

“I put in a call to Detective Hardy. You remember Detective Hardy?’

I definitely remembered Detective Hardy.

Eight

Isabel: Have you arrested him?

Detective Hardy: No, Ms. McBain, we have not arrested him.

Isabel: What are you waiting for?

Detective Hardy: What you told me when I talked to you the other day is not evidence that Mr. Mason killed your sister, Ms. McBain.

Isabel: Of course it is. He wanted to go off with this other woman. He needed to get my sister out of the way so he could start a new life with her. Didn’t want to have to go through all the trouble of divorce. That seems pretty clear to me. I don’t know why you can’t see it.

Detective Hardy: That might, possibly, be a motive, generally speaking, when a spouse goes missing. But there is no evidence that Mr. Mason did any harm to Brie.

Isabel: Because you haven’t found the evidence. And you haven’t found her. Isn’t that evidence in itself? That you can’t find her? He killed her and got rid of her body. You really believe he was at his cabin all that time? I know how long it takes to get up there. He could have come back in the middle of the night and killed her and still had time to get back up there. Have you searched his cabin?

Detective Hardy: We have people up there, yes. Searching the cabin and the woods. The entire property and beyond. The state police have been up there.

Isabel: That’ll be where be buried her. You just wait.

Detective Hardy: Ms. McBain, I know you harbor a great deal of animosity against your brother-in-law, but negative feelings aren’t evidence. But I want to review some of what you told me about Mr. Mason’s relationship with Natalie Simmons.

Isabel: He was fucking her. That’s what I know.

Detective Hardy: When I asked Mr. Mason about Ms. Simmons—

Isabel: Whatever he said, it was a lie.

Detective Hardy: He made no attempt to hide the fact that he had a relationship with Ms. Simmons, but he said it was brief, that it was more than six months ago, and that he and Brie had worked things out.

Isabel: Yeah, right.

Detective Hardy: What can you tell me that makes you dismiss that?

Isabel: Brie was devastated by what he did. I don’t care if it was brief. If it had only been a one-night stand, that would have been devastating enough, but it was more than that.

Detective Hardy: So how long was it?

Isabel: Well, Brie says it went on for at least a couple of weeks. I really had to pry it out of her. I only found out by accident. I came by to see her and I could tell she’d been crying and I got her to tell me what happened. She tried to make out like it wasn’t a big deal but I knew better.

Detective Hardy: How did Mr. Mason meet this woman?

Isabel: Not sure. I did some checking on her myself and she went to UConn and that was where Andrew went, so I don’t know, maybe she was looking up old boyfriends on Facebook and found him, made a connection.

Detective Hardy: Mr. Mason isn’t on Facebook.

Isabel: Like I said, I guess she found him some other way. At the coffee shop or at the mall. Why are you asking me for details? Isn’t that your job?

Detective Hardy: So far as you know, were there other occasions when Mr. Mason was unfaithful?

Isabel: Not that I know of but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Detective Hardy: Did Brie tell you she and her husband had patched things up?

Isabel: (unintelligible)

Detective Hardy: I’m sorry?

Isabel: She said they had. But I think she was just putting a good face on things. She knew how angry I was with Andrew and she wanted to put him in a better light. Justifying why she hadn’t left him.

Detective Hardy: Have you ever known Mr. Mason to be abusive? Has he ever struck your sister? Did you notice any injuries? Did she, say, have a bruise and tell you she bumped into a door or something like that?

Isabel: No.

Detective Hardy: How about emotionally abusive?

Isabel: Having an affair is being emotionally abusive. Are you married? If your husband cheated on you, wouldn’t you call that abusive?

Detective Hardy: The relationship I have with my partner is not what we’re here to discuss today. Can you cite any specific examples where Andrew Mason was emotionally abusive to Brie? When you saw them together, did he speak disrespectfully to her, threaten her? Did Brie appear fearful of him?

Isabel: Not exactly.

Detective Hardy: Let’s come at this from the other direction. Mr. Mason told me that Brie had also been unfaithful. Do you know anything about that?

Isabel: No. Did he say who it was?

Detective Hardy: Yes.

Isabel: Who was it?

Detective Hardy: That’s not something I’m going to share with you, Ms. McBain. I want to check out this individual’s alibi.

Isabel: My guess is it’s not even true. Andrew’s making excuses. Wants to justify what he did by saying she did it, too. And even if it is true, it doesn’t matter. The only reason she might have done something like that is because Andrew wasn’t treating her right. It was horrible living with him. You know what he’d do?

Detective Hardy: Why don’t you tell me.

Isabel: He renovates houses. So they’d buy one that needed work, and he’d fix it up while they lived in it. Total chaos, living in a house while it’s being ripped apart. And then when it was all fixed, when they had a nice place to live, he’d sell it, make some money, and buy another fixer-upper, and do it all over again. Imagine living like that. Never having a place that’s really home. Brie couldn’t take it anymore.

Detective Hardy: I’m not so sure what you’ve described constitutes emotional abuse.

Isabel: All I’m asking you is to do your job.

Detective Hardy: And where were you this past weekend?

Isabel: Excuse me?

Detective Hardy: I’m just getting a sense of where everybody was. Building a timeline, that kind of thing.

Isabel: We went away Saturday, overnight, to Boston. To see family.

Detective Hardy: We?

Isabel: My husband, Norman, and I. And I feel sick about it. If we’d been in town, maybe there’s something we could have done. Brie might have called me if she was in some kind of trouble. You know, instead of talking to me, you should be out there looking for her.

Detective Hardy: Believe me, we’re doing that. Mr. Mason insists that he and Brie both felt guilty and regretful about what they’d done, and that it prompted them to reassess their marriage, that it actually brought them closer together.

Isabel: And you believe that?

Detective Hardy: Do you?

Isabel: What I believe is you need to talk to Natalie Simmons and see what she has to say. Maybe Andy told her he really was in love with her, that he wanted to make a life with her, and all he had to do was get my sister out of the way first.

Detective Hardy: We intend to talk to all relevant parties in our investigation.

Isabel: Have you talked to her already?

Detective Hardy: No, we have not.

Isabel: Good God, what kind of detective are you? You should have talked to her the moment I gave you her name.

Detective Hardy: I will. As soon as we’re able to find her.

Nine

Andrew

As I drove away from the scene of whatever it was that had happened on the street where Brie and I used to live, I noticed a car coming the other way that was obviously an unmarked police cruiser. You don’t exactly have to be Jack Reacher to spot them. Black or dark gray, unadorned by chrome, the cheapest hubcaps money can buy. You’d think the cops would have figured out by now that even a simple ten-dollar pinstriping kit would make it less obvious who they were.

I initially had an impulse to slide down into the seat, below the window, but that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re behind the wheel. So I sat up straight, back rigid, and tried my best not to turn for a better look at the driver as we slipped past each other. Being a gawker, I figured, would only draw attention to myself.

But I did get enough of a look to satisfy myself it was Detective Marissa Hardy behind the wheel.

Thanks, Max. Thanks a bunch.

She hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen her, which had been maybe a year and a half ago. I saw plenty of her, of course, in the eighteen months or so following Brie’s disappearance, and sporadically after that. An occasional encounter, to let me know she hadn’t forgotten me. She’d probably have visited me more often if I hadn’t hired a lawyer, Nan Sokolow, and threatened Hardy’s department with a harassment suit.

Hardy still had the short, almost buzz-cut salt-and-pepper hair, the oversized black-rimmed glasses. I’d always thought she looked more like a stern women’s prison librarian than a cop, but maybe that’s some unfair typecasting of prison librarians. But Marissa Hardy certainly never endeared herself to me. She was humorless and annoying and, I guess I have to give credit where credit is due, relentless. She was not the kind of person you wanted hounding you if you’d done something wrong.

Now it seemed likely she’d be back in my life again, unless she deemed what Max had to tell her as jumping to conclusions, or considered the surveillance video from the house next door as inconclusive. Except that didn’t strike me how Hardy would react. If she saw the slimmest opportunity to make my life hell again, she’d take it.

I headed north out of town on the Milford Parkway, and when I reached the Merritt Parkway I took the long curving ramp to get onto the westbound lanes. I stayed on the parkway until I got to Trumbull, where I took the White Plains Road exit. I made a few rights and lefts until I reached TrumbullGate Mall. Took no more than fifteen minutes.

It had been a few years since this place had been a shopping destination. The massive lot was empty, save for part of the south end that had been cordoned off and was full of new Hyundais. A local dealership was clearly renting some space to store their stock. Even though Greg had told me to come in through the south end service entrance, I did a loop of the mall just to get the lay of the land.

All the windows, including the grand entry points, were boarded up. Most malls, considering that they looked inward instead of to the outside, which explained why so many of them were so goddamn ugly, didn’t have that many outward facing windows to begin with. The outer perimeter of a mall was usually a maze of cinder-block corridors that allowed stores to bring in merchandise without traipsing it through the main concourse.

I found the south service entrance partially hidden behind a false front that would have allowed tractor trailers to be unloaded without being seen by the public. Tucked in there was an early 2000s Audi A3 in black parked behind Greg’s oversized pickup truck. The cargo bed was loaded with all manner of building materials. Scraps of railing, pipe, several mannequin torsos and limbs, undamaged ceiling panels.

A regular door up on the loading bay was propped open an inch with a chock of wood to keep it from locking. I was reaching for the handle when it opened from the other side.

A woman stepped out and was briefly startled to see me, then smiled broadly.

“You must be Andrew,” she said. “I’m Julie.”

She stuck out a hand. She was almost as Greg had described her on the phone. Short turquoise hair, yes, but also with streaks of black. Petite and instantly cheerful, with a smile that took over half her face.

“Hi,” I said.

“Oh hell,” she said, and threw her arms around me for a quick hug. “Greggy has told me so much about you I feel I know you.”

“Well,” I said, a bit caught off guard, “it’s nice to meet you.”

“I’m just heading off,” she said. “Back in a while with more donuts.”

I didn’t remember Greg being much of a junk food addict. She must have caught my puzzled expression.

“Not for him,” she said. “You’ll see. Just head in and follow the buzzing and hammering. You’ll find him. Gotta run.”

She headed for the Audi as I entered the facility. I found my way through the service area that shoppers never see until I reached a door that took me to the mall proper. There’s something about a now-abandoned but once-public space that raises the goose bumps on one’s arms. The mall consisted of two levels, open through the center so you could look down from the upper concourse to the one below. I’d come in on the lower level, near one of the abandoned anchor stores that at one time had been a thriving Sears, JCPenney, or Kohl’s.

Countless roof panels from the upper shopping level that hung over the first floor had come free and were arranged as though set up for some psychotic hopscotch game. Trees planted in interior gardens that had, at one time, brought a hint of nature to the concourse were now dead and leafless. Tentacles of ivy from those same gardens snaked out beyond their enclosure across the debris-strewn floor like something from an alien movie. Water dripped down from a cracked skylight overhead, no doubt from an overnight shower. An immobile, rusted escalator was just ahead, its rubber handrails missing, several steps absent, making the stairwell look like a gap-toothed, vertical mouth.

I saw no people, but that didn’t mean I was the only living thing here. A squirrel went bounding up the dead escalator. A couple of pigeons flew overhead. A rat was slinking into what used to be, judging by the cracked sign overhead, a Cinnabon.

Over by the entrance to one abandoned store I saw a grungy sleeping bag balled up against the wall. Not surprising that this place might have a few squatters, homeless people using it for shelter until this entire complex came tumbling down.

I was briefly startled by the shadow of something flying over me. I glanced up and saw not a pigeon, but what looked like a hawk, judging by the wingspan. It was a mini-postapocalyptic world in here.

And if it seemed foreboding now, I imagined what it would be like at night. The power would most certainly have been cut off to the facility, and had it not been for that windowed ceiling that ran from one end of the mall to the other, I’d have had a hard time finding my way without a flashlight.

Given that the place was not bustling with shoppers, noises carried, and somewhere on the floor above I could hear the sound of a power drill. I made my way carefully up the escalator, stepping over the gaps, and when I was on the upper level, I paused, waiting for another blast of the drill.

When one didn’t come immediately, I decided to make some noise.

“Greg!” I shouted, my call echoing throughout the abandoned space.

Some ten stores away, a goggled man stepped out of one of the stores, looked in my direction, and waved.

“Down here!” Greg shouted.

It didn’t surprise me that he’d be working on a Saturday. He’d always been something of a workaholic, as well as a hustler.

Greg and I’d had our ups and downs over the years, but we never stopped being friends. I didn’t have anyone from my high-school days that I kept in touch with, having moved from school to school depending on which foster home I was billeted with at the time. But I saved up my money to attend UConn, the University of Connecticut, and it was there I connected with Greg.

Back then he mostly went by the name his parents had given him: Gregoire. He figured college might be a good time to trade on his French name — his mother, from Lyon, had fallen in love with his father, an Albany native, when she’d come to America in her late teens as an exchange student. As a kid, he’d always gone by Greg because his classmates made fun of his real name, mispronouncing it on purpose, calling him “Greg-Wire.” But once he got to UConn, he went back to it, thinking it gave him something of an international flair. “Sounds sexy,” he told me back then.

“Yeah, well, not to me,” I said, and always called him Greg.

We’d met in some engineering classes we shared, and I soon saw in Greg the characteristics I lacked in myself. I was cautious where he was adventurous. I gave careful deliberations to the consequences of my actions while Greg was impulsive. I remember once, signing up for courses, picking ones that would complement my engineering classes. Math, physics, stuff like that. Greg was on the same track as me, but seconds before making his final selections he learned some hot student from Sweden he was desperate to bed was taking a poli-sci class, so he signed up for it. Didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics, but oh, how he wanted to sit next to that girl in the lecture hall. The joke was on him. At the last minute, she dropped the politics course for one in environmental science.

Greg wasn’t just adventurous. I saw him as fearless. He was the one who’d sneak into the college pool after hours for a midnight swim, who’d drive his dad’s car, when he had it for the weekend, at high speed over a small hill in the hopes of catching air, who’d take a running leap off a cliff’s edge into a quarry reservoir, who once kept a VCR that had literally fallen off the back of a truck that had been making a delivery to an electronics store. He had, in a word, balls.

While his impulsive nature ebbed some as he got older, there remained a youthful spirit. And there was also, I believed, beneath the bravado and playfulness, a good soul. Greg had been the one who kept an eye on me after Brie vanished. He was the one who had found me passed out, fully clothed, in that bathtub.

“Man,” he said to me at the time, “you have got to get your shit together. I am not going to let you do this to yourself.”

It was a wonder, in many ways, that we had remained friends.

We had once been business partners. We ran a contracting company together, but in the months before Brie’s disappearance we’d lost out on several jobs that could have turned around our fortunes. We decided, in the wake of those failures, to dissolve the company and go our separate ways.

Greg had kept himself afloat, in the years since, jumping from one contracting gig to another, usually offering discounts to clients who were willing to pay in cash. And if things got slow, he’d try something totally different, like spending a month working on a fishing boat, or joining a road construction crew. (“College prepared me well for flipping a sign from stop to slow,” he told me over a beer one night.)

Greg had the edge over me on impulsiveness, but it was that very trait that sometimes got him in over his head. And I was the one, he was willing to concede, who could think fast enough to rescue him. Like the time, a couple of years out of college, we were bar-hopping in Hartford and Greg, with about ten beers in him, took an unprovoked swing at some guy and knocked him out cold just as a police car was pulling into the parking lot. There wasn’t time to organize an escape, so I took a swing at Greg, bloodied his nose, and told him to drop.

When the cops wandered over and took in the scene, I laid it all out for them. The other guy swung first, broke my buddy’s nose, and Greg had but a second to land a punch of his own.

I got him out of there before the other guy came to. Good thing we’d settled our tab in cash, so there were no credit card receipts for the cops to use to follow up. To this day, Greg’s nose had a slight tilt to it, thanks to me.

Now, as I closed the distance between us, I saw Greg had one of his trademark cigarettes between his lips. As part of his image back in school, he started buying imported French tobacco and rolling paper to make his own smokes. The elaborate ritual of it became part of who he was, and it was a habit he had never lost.

Hanging from his arm was a cordless reciprocating saw, one of those Uzi-looking gadgets with a powerful cutting blade that stuck straight out the end of it like a tiny bayonet that moved back and forth at the speed of light.

“Good to see you, man,” he said, setting down the saw and tossing away that last millimeter of his cigarette so he could throw his arms around me.

“Same,” I said.

Greg looked a little thinner since I’d last seen him a month or two ago. His face and neck — with about two days’ worth of whiskers on them, as always — seemed more drawn, the skin hanging somewhat under his chin. His gray hair was thinner, too, but he was still a handsome guy, even if he did look closer to fifty when I knew he had only just turned forty.

“Sorry you missed Julie,” he said. “She really wanted to meet you.”

“We connected as I was coming in,” I said. “She new on the scene?”

Greg shrugged. “Five, six weeks, I guess. She’s great, heart of gold. She’s working on making me a better person.” He grinned. “Who knew I needed improving?”

“So what the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m the hyena feeding on the carcass,” he said with no small measure of pride. “They’re going to rip this whole place down soon, and I worked a deal with the company that’s going to do it to have a few days in here to get some very usable shit. There’s hundreds of dying malls across the country. Victims of online shopping, the loss of anchor stores that’ve gone tits up, and then you throw in a fucking pandemic on top of that. Malls can’t cut it.”

I shook my head, marveling that these were this huge structure’s final days. I went over to grasp the railing that overlooked the lower level, taking in the view.

“I wouldn’t lean against that, if I was you,” Greg said. “I’ve already started taking out some of the bolts securing it to the floor. I can repurpose those a hundred ways. On a balcony, around a deck.”

I stepped back. “I saw your truck. Looks like you’ve got a pretty full load already. Mannequins?”

He laughed. “All kinds of places will buy those. Last trip, scored some store signs. Like, a McDonald’s, a Baskin-Robbins. People snap those up, hang them in their rec rooms. You know the huge shed I’ve got behind my place? Gonna cram as much into that as possible.” He was digging into his pocket for papers and a small pouch of tobacco to make himself another cigarette. “How’s things going with Jayne?”

They had met a couple of times since Jayne had moved in with me.

“Good. And we’ve got her brother living with us now. Tyler. Sixteen. His dad passed, and he’s kind of messed up. Adrift, you know? Reminds me of myself at that age, when I was being shunted from home to home.”

I became aware of someone approaching. Thinking Julie had returned, I turned to say hello, but it was a young guy, mid-twenties, shuffling toward us. His clothes were worn and filthy, and he didn’t appear to have shaved in at least a week.

“Hey, Neil,” Greg said. He pointed his thumb into the store he’d stepped out of. “Box of donuts in there. Help yourself, but leave some for the others.”

Neil smiled. “Thanks, man. Sorry to interrupt.” He shuffled on into the store as I gave Greg a questioning look.

In a low voice, he said, “A few homeless living in here till they tear it all down. Me and Julie bring in a few treats for them. Best to have them on your side if you’re gonna be sharing space with them. Give some of them odd jobs, twenty bucks to haul stuff to my truck. So, what’s up?”

I got out my phone and brought up the picture I’d sent myself off Brian’s tablet. I handed it to Greg without comment. He studied the picture, then enlarged it with his thumb and index finger.

“What am I looking at here?” he asked.

“That was taken a couple of hours ago, off a security cam. Where my house used to stand. That’s the driveway.”

“Okay. And?”

I told him what Max had told me. And what the woman in the picture allegedly said. Asking what had happened to her house.

Greg kept staring at the picture. “What are you getting at here? What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m showing you that and waiting for your reaction.”

He gave the picture another five seconds and then handed the phone back to me. He finished making his cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with a lighter that he’d tucked into his shirt pocket.

“I don’t know, man. What are you thinking?”

“It’s not a very good picture.”

“Seriously, you know what it is? It’s just some woman took a wrong turn. Got her directions mixed up. Maybe it’s one of those grocery delivery services. Lot more of those since COVID. She made a mistake. Last week I got an Uber Eats at the door that I never ordered. Was for someone else. People are careless.”

“Maybe. Doesn’t explain why she got so spooked she dropped everything and took off.”

Greg took a drag off his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, and then exhaled. I’d snuck plenty of smokes when I was in foster homes, but it hadn’t turned into a lifelong habit. So I was no expert on tobacco, but this brand Greg favored had its own distinctive aroma.

He looked me in the eye.

“Whatever this is, Andy, and honestly, I have no idea what’s going on here, but you can’t let it get your hopes up. That can’t be Brie. I mean, okay, at a glance, whoever that is could pass for her from a distance, but it doesn’t make any sense. What are we supposed to take from this? That she suddenly reappeared as if five years—”

“Six.”

“What?”

“Six. It’s been six years.”

“Jesus, has it really been that long?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, are we supposed to think Brie’s actually okay and that she went through some Star Trek — like space-time continuum and thought it was six years ago and expected to find the house she used to live in?”

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to think.”

At this point, Neil came back out of the shop, chewing on a donut in one hand and carrying a second in his other. He raised it and said to Greg, “This one’s for Karen, okay?”

“No problem,” he said, then turned back to me and whispered, “He’s here with his girlfriend. Can you imagine, living here with someone?”

I shook my head.

“Anyway,” Greg said, “there was one of those stories on the news the other day, about some sick pervert who kept a couple of women prisoner in his house for years, and one of them escaped. Well, I’ll tell you this, she didn’t escape and get herself all dressed up nice and head to the supermarket with her station wagon. I mean, if Brie were back, or had, you know, escaped or something, she’d go to the police.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I mean, come on,” he said. “Look, I know it’s hard to move on, that it’s hard to put this behind you. I was thinking, back when I found you in the tub, passed out, that was kind of a turning point. You pulled yourself together after that, despite the odds. You’ve got this new lady in your life. And you’ve got a new name, which is like starting over, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re bringing in some money? Paying the bills?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like you. A job here, a job there. About to start on finishing off someone’s basement. Did a couple of decks last month. Moderately steady.”

“Good, good, that’s all good. Don’t let whatever’s going on in that picture fuck with your head. You’ve got a good life now.”

“You’re saying I should ignore this. Pretend I never saw it.”

Greg sighed. “If that was Brie, if it really fuckin’ was her somehow, appearing out of thin air, you think the first thing she’d do is go pick up some eggs and some Tater Tots? No. She’d call you. If we’re supposed to believe that’s her in that picture, then what the hell has she been doing for six years? She go to the store and get lost? She been wandering a Walmart since the last time you saw her?”

Greg put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, man. That was... insensitive. I know how hard this has been on you. All this time, the not knowing, the wondering. But there’s no rational answer to this. It can’t be her. Can’t be.”

He seemed to be trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince me.

“Did your neighbor — what’s his name?”

“Max.”

“This Max, did he see any camera crews around or anything?”

“Camera crews?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s one of those crime reenactment shows. You know. ‘Whatever happened to...’ kind of thing. Or some type of stunt.” His face lit up and he snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it.”

“What?”

“So this guy, the one who built that new house on your lot? It’s a nice house, right?”

“Yeah. Very.”

“Yeah, I drove by one day. Very sharp. So, someone out there wants to buy that house. But first they need to freak him out. Like, make him think a spirit that used to live on the property is coming back to haunt him and his family.”

“That’s beyond nuts.”

“They scare the guy into unloading the place at below market value.”

I sighed. “You’re insane.”

He smiled smugly. “Okay, I’m sure your explanation makes more sense.”

“I should go,” I said.

“Let me ask you something, and don’t take offense, okay?” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“What’s got you worried the most? That this lady making an appearance, it’ll get your hopes up and then they’ll get dashed, because it was a trick or a stunt? Or...”

“Or what?”

“Or... that it really is Brie? And if she’s back, it’s gonna turn your world upside down?”

Ten

Jayne was starting to wonder whether Andrew had run into a problem. A trip to Home Depot shouldn’t take this long. It wasn’t like him not to check in with her if he’d been delayed.

Maybe he’d run into someone he knew, she thought. Or maybe he couldn’t find what he was looking for at the Home Depot and decided to try another store. Although it struck her as unlikely that Home Depot would be out of weed and feed.

Jayne considered phoning him, but didn’t want him to feel hounded, like she was checking up on him, expecting a full accounting of his activities. She trusted him, didn’t need to keep him under surveillance. He’d been so good to her and her brother that she didn’t want him questioning whether he’d made the wrong decision, bringing the two of them into his home.

Jayne loved this man. He wasn’t perfect. She knew that. Maybe, one of these days, they’d even get married, but marriage was definitely a topic Andrew tended to steer away from. The worst was when he went into a deep, emotional funk, like something invisible was weighing him down. She worried about these moods and tried to draw him out, to get him to talk about what was on his mind, but he always told her it was nothing. He’d been forthcoming about his teenage years, after both his parents had died, and that horrible period when he was bounced from foster home to foster home.

Andrew had even told her he’d been married for a while, but it hadn’t worked out, and she didn’t press him on that subject when he declined to provide details. There were emotional wounds from that relationship that hadn’t healed, she supposed. And the last five or six years of Andrew’s life remained something of a mystery. A trauma of some kind. One of these days, she figured, he’d tell her.

When the phone finally rang at one point, she thought it would be him, but it turned out to be Tyler’s phone, which he had left sitting on the kitchen counter. Jayne looked at the screen, saw that it was Mr. Whistler, from the grocery store.

She answered. Tyler, Mr. Whistler said, could take the day off if he wanted because they were well staffed, but could he work Sunday instead?

“Hang on,” Jayne said, and took the phone with her up to Tyler’s room, where she found him sound asleep, stripped down to his boxers, facedown on top of the covers. If it weren’t for the gentle rising and falling of his back, someone might have taken him for dead.

Holding her finger over the speaker, she said, “Wake up. It’s Mr. Whistler.”

Tyler stirred, rolled onto his side. “What?”

Jayne handed him the phone. “You sort it out.”

Tyler said, “Hello?” Then: “Okay, sure, that’s good. Okay, see you tomorrow.”

He put the phone onto the bedside table, dropped his head back onto the pillow, and closed his eyes. Sensing that his sister was still in the room, he opened one eye and saw her standing there by the door, arms folded across her chest.

“What?” he said.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“I’ll be down in a while,” he said, closing his eye.

Jayne, not about to be dismissed, sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on his shoulder. “Not in a while,” she said. “Now.”

Tyler rolled onto his back, opened both eyes this time, and said, “Okay, I’m sorry, I fucked up. Sorry about barfing on Andy’s precious deck. I sprayed it off.”

“What happened last night?”

He sighed. “I was at Cam’s. We kinda had some vodka, I guess. I might’ve had a couple shots too many.”

“Where’d this happen?”

“At his place. His parents were out.”

“That’s the only place you were. Just between Cam’s place and here?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Tyler said.

“When we talked you said you were on your way home.”

Tyler managed a shrug while on his back. “You’re not my mom, you know. Or my dad. Never much of a sister, either.”

That might have cut deeper if it had been the first time he’d said it. She’d made her apologies, and excuses, before. It wasn’t her fault their parents had two kids thirteen years apart.

“I know,” Jayne said. “But let me lay it out for you. You’re right. I’m not your mom, and Andy’s not your dad. So maybe you’re thinking, you don’t owe us anything. But that works both ways. We don’t owe you anything. Andy sure doesn’t. But we’ve made a choice. We’ve stepped up. You’re my brother and I may not have been there for you in the past but I want to be there for you now. And Andy knows a lot about what it’s like not to have a home. He wants to make one for you here.”

Tyler moved his legs around Jayne so he could sit on the edge of the bed next to her. His head hung low. “I guess,” he said.

“It didn’t work out with Aunt Clara,” Jayne said. “She tried, gave it her best shot, but after what you—”

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“If it had been anyone else, you probably would have been charged. But she wouldn’t do that, because she loves you and understands you’ve been through a lot.”

“I didn’t know the glass would break like that. I kind of lost it for one second. Jesus, no one’s ever going to let me forget it.”

“I don’t want to debate that all over again now, Tyler. But you blew it with Aunt Clara. Andy letting you live here, this is your second chance.”

“You haven’t told him,” he said.

“No,” Jayne said. “And as long as you keep on the straight and narrow, there really isn’t any need to. But we’ve both got your best interests at heart. And there’s another thing.”

She paused, took a breath, let it out slowly. Tyler waited.

“I love him,” Jayne said. “I love this man, and I want to make it work. There’s things going on I haven’t even told you, or Andy, but it’s really crucial that we all have some, you know, structure in our lives right now. It’s important.”

“What haven’t you told me?” Tyler asked.

Jayne bit her lip, making a decision. She leaned in, put her lips close to his ear.

“You don’t have to whisper,” he said. “There’s nobody here.”

But whisper she did. Tyler’s eyes went wide as she moved her head away.

“So, I need you to help me make this work,” she said.

Tyler saw the tears forming in his sister’s eyes and slipped an arm around her. “I’ll try,” he said.

“That’s all I’m asking,” Jayne said.

When Jayne came back downstairs, she thought about what Tyler had said, wondered why he’d lied to her.

She knew he’d been places other than Cam’s house. Her little brother wasn’t the only one with some tech skills. Jayne had secretly put an app on his phone that would let her know where he was at any given time, and when she had looked at it earlier this morning she’d noticed he’d been hanging out in a nearby cemetery. Maybe that was where he and Cam had gone to get drunk.

But she’d decided not to call him on it. Once he knew what she’d done, he’d delete the app. The good thing was, unlike most kids his age, Tyler was not all that tech-savvy. It wasn’t that he couldn’t figure stuff out. It simply didn’t interest him that much. Anyway, Jayne tried not to overdo it when it came to snooping on her brother, but she believed it was a prudent move to be aware of his comings and goings.

She sent Andrew a text.

And hit send.

She watched the screen for a few seconds, waiting for the dancing dots that would indicate a reply was in the works.

Nothing.

And then she heard the car pull into the driveway.

Before she opened the door, she peeked outside. There was a black, nondescript sedan sitting there with a woman behind the wheel. Jayne wouldn’t have called herself an expert in these things, but she thought the car was some kind of police vehicle, given how plain it looked.

The woman behind the wheel got out and started walking toward the front door. Stocky, short hair, big glasses. Jayne opened the front door and stepped out.

“Can I help you?” Jayne said.

The woman smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Detective Marissa Hardy. Milford police.”

“Yes?”

Oh God, no. There’s been an accident.

This was why she hadn’t heard from Andrew. Someone running a red light had broadsided him. Something had fallen off a high shelf at Home Depot and crushed him. Maybe some crazy, random event with a shooter. There was always one of those somewhere in America on any given day.

“Is it Andrew?” she said. “Was he in an accident?”

“No, ma’am, not to my knowledge.”

Her second thought was that this had something to do with Tyler. Maybe when he got drunk with his friend last night they’d gotten into something they shouldn’t have. Broken a window, tipped over a mailbox, spray-painted the side of someone’s house.

“How are you today?” Hardy asked.

“Just fine,” she said, coming off the step and getting within whispering range. “Is this about Tyler?”

“Tyler?”

“My brother. He lives with us.”

“No,” the detective said. “I’m looking for Andrew.”

“Andrew?”

“Andrew Mason.”

Jayne blinked. “Who?”

Hardy paused, the corner of her mouth going up a tenth of an inch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Force of habit. I’d forgotten he goes by Andrew Carville now. Took me a little longer to find this place because of that. Is he here?”

Jayne suddenly felt dizzy.

Andrew Mason?

Andrew had changed his name? He’d never told her anything about that. Who changed their name? Movie stars, maybe. But not regular people.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Detective Hardy asked.

“Jayne Keeling.”

“You live here?”

“Yes.”

“With Andrew Carville?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“And is he here?”

Jayne shook her head slowly, her mouth suddenly very dry.

“Well, that’s too bad, but now that I’m here, I wouldn’t mind talking to you,” the detective said. She smiled innocently. “Maybe we could go inside and talk? Truth is, I could really use a coffee. If that’s not being too huge a bother.”

Jayne looked at the detective as though she were a talking giraffe.

“Coffee,” Jayne said.

“That’d be great,” she said.

Jayne’s phone, still in her hand, buzzed with the sound of an incoming text. She glanced down and saw the message from Andrew.

“Is that him?” Hardy asked.

“Yes. He’s out running some errands. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“That’s okay. We can talk before he gets here.”

Jayne turned and gestured for the detective to follow her into the house. She led her to the kitchen and pointed to a chair. Hardy sat down, placing her own phone facedown on the table.

“Decaf, if you have it,” she said. “But it’s okay if you don’t.”

“I... yes, I have that.”

Jayne opened the cupboard, brought down a tin of coffee, put a filter into the machine. As she spooned in some ground coffee, some of it spilled across the counter.

“Damn it,” she said.

She cleaned up the mess, and as she ran water into the carafe to pour into the coffee machine, she asked, “Why did you ask for Andrew Mason?”

“Are you married to Andrew?” Hardy asked.

“No.”

“But you’ve been together awhile?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Since the latter part of last year. And I moved in here with him a few months ago.”

“Oh,” Hardy said. “Are you from Stratford?”

“No,” Jayne said. “I moved here a couple of years ago. From Providence.”

“What made you move down to this neck of the woods?”

“I assess properties for insurance companies. The one I worked for in Rhode Island was winding down, the owner retiring, and an insurance firm in Stratford was looking for someone, so I made the move.”

“Just you?”

“I’m not — I wasn’t in a relationship. My family — my father and my brother — were there, but they didn’t move with me, of course.”

“And Tyler is...”

“That’s my brother. He joined me here later. After our father died. You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which one was that?”

The coffee machine was starting to make a gurgling sound.

“Why you called Andrew... Andrew Mason. That’s not his name.”

“That was his name. He had it legally changed four years ago. I can’t say as I blame him, considering.”

“Considering what?” Jayne asked. “A financial failure? A bankruptcy? He had a building company, with someone else, but that got dissolved some time ago. Did it have something to do with that?”

“No,” the detective said. “Since you’re relatively new to the area, I guess you wouldn’t have been exposed much to the news around here six years ago.”

That corner of Hardy’s mouth was still curled up a notch, as though she might actually be enjoying this.

“A splash of milk,” Hardy said.

“I’m sorry?”

“My coffee. That’s how I take it. I figured you’d get around to asking sooner or later.”

Jayne took two mugs down from the cupboard and a carton of milk from the refrigerator. The coffee continued to drip down into the carafe. When there was enough for one serving, Jayne filled one mug, added some milk, and put it on the table in front of Hardy.

“Thank you,” she said.

Jayne said nothing.

“Has Andrew ever mentioned anything to you about his wife?” Hardy asked.

Jayne blinked. “His ex-wife, you mean.”

Hardy shrugged. “Sure.”

“He told me he used to be married. That it didn’t work out. He doesn’t like to talk about her very much and honestly I don’t think it’s any of my business.”

“He tell you her name?”

“Brandy, I think,” she said.

That brought a smile to the detective’s face. She picked up her phone. “Let me show you something.”

She held up the device for Jayne, who took a couple of steps closer. A picture filled the screen. It was a soft image of a woman standing by a black car. It was parked in a driveway, the tailgate in the raised position, and there were what appeared to be a couple of bags of groceries spilled on the driveway.

“Okay,” Jayne said. “Who’s that?”

“That is the question,” the detective said. “The image could be crisper, I know. I got this nifty little app on my phone you can run photos through, the idea being that it sharpens them up some. Admittedly with varying degrees of success. So I used the app on this shot and enlarged it and it’s not a lot better, but there is some improvement. Here, have a look.”

She was about to pass the phone to Jayne when Tyler strolled into the kitchen. He’d pulled some jeans on over his boxers but was naked from the waist up, and shoeless.

“Oh,” he said, seeing Hardy. “I didn’t know someone was here.”

“Hi,” Detective Hardy said, putting the phone down and extending a hand. Tyler took it. “I’m Detective Hardy with the Milford police.”

Tyler looked as though he’d received a minor electrical shock. “Uh, what?”

“The police,” Jayne said. “Detective Hardy just had some questions about a neighborhood thing.”

Tyler saw the detective’s phone and picked it up. “Who’s this?” he asked, looking at the picture.

“That’s why I’m here,” Hardy said. “Wondering the same thing.”

“Nice ride,” Tyler said.

“I’m sorry?” the detective said.

“The Volvo wagon. I like those.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Tyler?” Jayne asked.

“Was just gonna get some breakfast or something.”

“Sleep in, did you?” Hardy asked.

He looked at her, not sure whether to answer. Jayne said, “Could you give us a couple minutes?”

“Fine,” he said, handing the phone back to Hardy and padding out of the room in his bare feet.

“Sorry about that,” Jayne said.

“No problem.” She tried again to hand her phone to Jayne, and this time Jayne took it and looked at the image.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“Do you recognize her?”

“No.”

Hardy took back the phone. “Okay. Let me ask you this. Where—”

“No,” Jayne said abruptly. “I’m not answering any more questions until you answer mine. Why did Andrew change his name, and why are you asking me about the woman in that picture?”

“Okay,” Detective Hardy said. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll fill you in.”

Eleven

Detective Hardy: Thanks for coming in, Mr. Raymus.

Greg: No problem. Anything to help. This is just an awful thing that’s happened.

Detective Hardy: Let me just get this right for the record. Your name is Gregoire Franklin Raymus.

Greg: Right, but I just go by Greg.

Detective Hardy: I want to ask you about the Saturday night when you and Mr. Mason were up at your respective cabins at Sorrow Bay, but first I’d like to ask you about how things have been between Mr. Mason and his wife, Brie.

Greg: Um, okay.

Detective Hardy: How would — I’m sorry, but you can’t smoke in here.

Greg: Oh, sorry. It’s not a joint or anything, but I do roll my own.

Detective Hardy: You just can’t smoke in here. How would you describe the relationship between your friend and his wife.

Greg: You know. It’s a good marriage, I guess. I mean, is there any marriage out there that’s perfect?

Detective Hardy: Are you married yourself, Mr. Raymus?

Greg: Me? No.

Detective Hardy: But you’d say that your friend and his wife were getting along okay.

Greg: You know, ups and downs.

Detective Hardy: By ups and downs, are you referring to the affair that Mr. Mason had?

Greg: Oh, you know about that.

Detective Hardy: Yes, I do.

Greg: It wasn’t that big a deal. Didn’t last long, and it ended some time ago. Months, in fact.

Detective Hardy: And you know this woman Mr. Mason was seeing?

Greg: No. I never met her. I mean, Andy told me about seeing her, about how he felt he’d made a big mistake, but I never knew her at all.

Detective Hardy: Do you know what prompted Mr. Mason to cheat on his wife?

Greg: I think they were in a bad place. I got the impression maybe Brie had kind of strayed, too.

Detective Hardy: Do you know with who?

Greg: Nope. Andy didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Thing is, they really love each other, but there was some friction about how they’ve been living. Getting a house, fixing it up, selling it, moving to another, doing it all over again. The lack of a permanent home base was getting to her. She talked about it in the office sometimes.

Detective Hardy: The office?

Greg: Our construction office. A trailer, actually. Brie comes in sometimes to help with the books and stuff. But I think Andy was saying this was the last time, that they’d probably stay in this house, the one on Mulberry.

Detective Hardy: You’ve known Mr. Mason a long time?

Greg: Since UConn. College. And then we eventually went into business together. Which we are now.

Detective Hardy: How’s that going?

Greg: A bit like a marriage. Ups and downs.

Detective Hardy: Your friendship, or the business?

Greg: Business is a little shaky right now. I guess you’d call it cash flow issues. Lost some jobs we thought we’d get. To be honest, I think we may be going our separate ways before long. I’m gonna do my thing, Andy’s gonna do his.

Detective Hardy: Do you know whether there’s an insurance policy on Brie Mason’s life?

Greg: Huh? Beats me. Christ, what are you suggesting? You think Andy did something to Brie to collect some insurance to help with the company? That’s totally insane. And if that was his plan, well, you’d want to know she was dead so they’d pay up, right? I mean, where is she?

Detective Hardy: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? What did you do to your leg?

Greg: It’s fine, hardly giving me any trouble at all now.

Detective Hardy: You’re using a cane.

Greg: Probably going to retire it this week. I’ll be limping for a while, but that’s okay.

Detective Hardy: What happened?

Greg: I was on a job site, working alone, and the ladder somehow fell over and I was up about ten feet on some scaffolding and figured I could make the jump. Could have done it, too, but there was a short length of angle iron I hadn’t noticed and I hit that and broke a bone. Stupid, you know. I shoulda known better.

Detective Hardy: Glad you’re on the mend. Do you have any idea where Brie might be? Would she have run away? Disappeared without saying anything to anyone?

Greg: You know, I suppose it could be something like that. That she just needed to get away and think things through. But she’ll probably show up anytime now.

Detective Hardy: If that’s what she did, you’d think she’d have taken her purse and credit cards and her car wouldn’t still be in the driveway.

Greg: Yeah, well, there’s that. But she still might have gone someplace to clear her head.

Detective Hardy: About what? You said two seconds ago you think their marriage is fine.

Greg: I don’t know. Maybe I’m not ready to think something bad has happened to her. I don’t want my mind to go there. I love Brie. She’s terrific. And if something’s happened to her, it’ll destroy Andy.

Detective Hardy: Your cabin, and Mr. Mason’s, are they pretty close together?

Greg: About a minute’s walk. If that.

Detective Hardy: Can you see his place from yours? And vice versa?

Greg: There’s a line of trees between the two cabins. At night you can see some light through the leaves. If it’s the fall, when the leaves are all gone, there’s a pretty clear sightline through, but not now.

Detective Hardy: Did you notice any lights on at Mr. Mason’s through the night?

Greg: I didn’t look.

Detective Hardy: You can make the drive from Milford to Sorrow Bay in, what, ninety minutes or so?

Greg: If there’s no traffic.

Detective Hardy: So, if you’d decided, say, for the sake of argument, at ten that night to drive back, you’d be in Milford by midnight. And if you wanted, you could turn around and come back in time for breakfast.

Greg: Yeah, well, I didn’t do that. I stayed. We went back Sunday, like I said.

Detective Hardy: So let’s talk about Saturday night.

Greg: We had some dinner at my place. I did some burgers on the barbecue. Didn’t catch any fish, so it was a good thing we brought food. Had some drinks. And around nine or so he went back to his place. We were pretty bushed. And my leg was throbbing some. Took some Advils for it.

Detective Hardy: And you saw Mr. Mason in the morning.

Greg: He came over for coffee around nine, ten, I guess it was.

Detective Hardy: You didn’t see Mr. Mason between nine the night before, and the following morning.

Greg: Um, no.

Detective Hardy: Did you hear his car start up after he left?

Greg: No.

Detective Hardy: You’re sure? Nothing at all?

Greg: Well, even if a car did start I’m not sure I’d hear it from my place. And anyway, I slept like I was in a coma. And I hadn’t even had that much to drink. I didn’t even get up in the night to take a piss, which, you know, sometimes I have to do.

Detective Hardy: You normally sleep that soundly?

Greg: Now that you mention it, no, not usually. Maybe it was all the fresh air, being out on the water, the booze, and the painkillers. Or maybe Andy slipped me some knockout drops.

Detective Hardy: Are you suggesting—

Greg: That’s just a joke. Sorry. I guess there’s not much about this that’s funny.

Twelve

Andrew

I had to know this day would come.

Now that it seemed to be upon me, I needed time to think. So I drove around town, doing just that.

Thinking.

Honestly, it was amazing things hadn’t started to unravel before now. The fact that Jayne had been with me for this long and still did not know my history was nothing short of a minor miracle. It helped, of course, that she hadn’t lived in this part of Connecticut when it all happened. While Brie’s disappearance occasionally attracted national interest, it was, for the most part, a local story. By the time Jayne had come from Providence to Stratford, next door to Milford where it all happened, my notoriety had diminished.

And I couldn’t have been more grateful.

But I feared this morning’s call from Max — even if it might not, ultimately, turn out to mean anything — was going to have the effect of a concussive blast, knocking us all off our feet in an ever-expanding radius.

If it hadn’t been this latest development, any day the truth could have come out in a thousand other ways. Running into someone at the mall when Jayne was with me. Maybe someone would stop to say hello, offer condolences, ask if I’d ever learned what had happened to Brie, or was it one of those cold cases by now. Or maybe someone would pass by and say nothing at all, but shoot a scornful look my way. A look I’d have to explain to Jayne.

I’d always been mindful of the risks of an awkward encounter in public. So I made a point, whenever we were together, of avoiding Milford. We dined out in Stratford, or places to the west, like Bridgeport or Norwalk or Stamford. We rarely went to the movies. I had a big-screen TV and subscribed to several streaming services. Why go out, I’d say, when we have access to so much entertainment at home?

I was masquerading as a homebody when I was anything but.

When there were errands to run, especially if they took me anywhere near where I used to live, I tended to do them alone. “I’ve got this,” I’d say to Jayne. “I won’t be long.” If I ran into people who knew or recognized me when I was out solo, well, that was fine. I could deal with that. And it wasn’t as though Jayne were waiting around to accompany me. She had her own career, and it kept her busy.

As I drove around town, I went over in my head how I would tell her the things I’d kept from her. And why. The second part was a little easier. I loved her and had worried that telling her everything about myself would scare her off. You don’t bring up in conversation on a first date that your wife is missing and the police consider you a prime suspect.

But I might very well scare Jayne off now.

“It’s time I told you more about myself,” I would say. “It’s true that I was married. But what I failed to tell you is how that marriage ended. Six years ago my wife, Brie, vanished.”

I was trying to picture the look on her face when I told her. And that was only the beginning.

Brie was never found, I would have to tell her. The police, after all this time, still did not know what had happened to her. They’d had to consider whether she had disappeared of her own accord, or if she’d been abducted. Maybe there had been an accident. Brie went for a walk and tumbled down a hill, her body hidden among the foliage.

Some of the theories were more preposterous than others. But one of them had to be true, right?

Jayne would probably ask whether Brie had been depressed. Was there a chance she’d committed suicide? Left the house in the middle of the night, walked to the middle of the Washington Bridge in the west end of town, and jumped into the Housatonic?

I would have to be honest and tell her Brie had not seemed depressed. Not in any clinical kind of way. I would have to tell Jayne that the police had considered that as a possibility, but no body had been found.

I would have to tell her that very quickly the investigation focused on me. That Milford Police Detective Marissa Hardy believed I had killed my wife because I was interested in taking up with a woman named Natalie Simmons. I would tell her it was a brief affair and meant nothing, but that Brie’s sister, Isabel McBain, had been convinced from the very beginning that I’d had a hand in her disappearance, and death.

If Jayne asked why I’d been unfaithful, I would tell her I’d been an idiot. That Brie and I had been going through a bad patch, that we both had made decisions we’d deeply regretted. If Jayne asked whether I knew who Brie had cheated on me with, I would have to say yes, but I would have to add that I had never revealed this person’s identity to anyone except Detective Hardy — after some prodding — and that she had looked into this person and concluded he had nothing to do with Brie’s disappearance.

I would have to tell her Detective Hardy believed I’d used a weekend fishing trip with my friend Greg as a cover story — an alibi — and that in the night I’d actually driven back to Milford, killed Brie and disposed of her body, then returned before dawn and joined Greg for coffee later that morning. She further believed it was possible I’d drugged Greg so that he slept through the night, thereby making it nearly impossible that he’d notice my absence.

I would have to tell her that, while I was never charged in connection with Brie’s disappearance, the media was well aware that I was a suspect. (I blame Hardy for that, she no doubt leaked it in order to put more pressure on me.) For a while there, I had TV news trucks sitting at the end of my drive every morning, trying to get some kind of comment from me.

I would have to tell Jayne that despite the lack of any concrete evidence that I’d done anything wrong, Isabel continued to campaign for my arrest, even though Brie’s mother, Elizabeth, and her brother, Albert, and his wife, Dierdre, seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. But Isabel’s stridency scared the other members of the family, including her own husband, Norman, from ever speaking up on my behalf.

Isabel’s harassment took several forms. She wrote letters to newspapers, filled with wild accusations, about what it was she believed I had done. The papers, thankfully, did not print them because they were deemed libelous, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t do occasional updates headlined “Where Is Brie?” or “Brie’s Fate Still a Mystery.”

Isabel hired a lawyer to sue me in civil court, where the bar is set a little lower than in criminal court when it comes to holding someone, at least financially, responsible. She didn’t win — Nan Sokolow’s firm helped me with that, too — but the legal bills wiped out most of my savings.

Isabel’s quest to get justice for her sister had always struck me as somewhat ironic, given that she’d always seemed to resent Brie and been jealous of her since they were much younger. It was a one-sided rivalry, so far as I could tell. Brie had always been happy for Isabel when something good came her way, but it was rarely the other way around. I believed it went back to their teens. Only a year apart in age, they competed in such fields as parents’ attention, academics, and boys.

Anyway, Isabel’s vindictiveness couldn’t have come at a worse time, considering that my business partnership with Greg was dissolving, and my prospects were not good.

I would have to tell Jayne that things deteriorated to the point that I decided to legally change my last name. At least that way, on paper people did not recognize me. There was no longer a need for an unlisted number. (Still a bit old school, I was and am one of the last people on earth to have a landline.) When anyone did a Google search on my new name, the allegations against me did not come up. I mean, who wanted to hire someone to work on their house who many believed had killed his wife and disposed of the body?

It was a lot to tell.

But I felt I was going to have to spill all of it to Jayne. It was better coming from me than someone else.

She’d have questions, I knew that. I’d have at least one for her, too. And it wasn’t to ask her whether she would forgive me. I couldn’t see any reason why she would, or even should. If the positions were reversed, could I forgive her for keeping something this big a secret?

No, my question for her would be more like, “Do you want to stay here and I’ll move out, or can I help you find a place?”

I would be willing to do either.

Of all the things she might choose to ask me, I imagined the number-one question would be short and to the point.

“Did you kill your wife?”

And I would look her in the eye and I would say, “No, I did not.”

I was imagining that exchange as I sat in a bar, sitting alone in a booth, working on my second or third or fourth Sam Adams. I didn’t remember driving here after seeing Greg and Julie, or even coming inside. I felt as though I had always been here, that this booth was my past, my present, and my future. I existed entirely in this moment in time.

As I sat there, I engaged in one of my nervous habits, which was to tear off bits of a paper napkin, roll them up into balls the size of a pea, then flick them off my upturned thumb with my middle finger. Sometimes the ball would fall off my thumb before I could launch it, other times I could shoot one across the room.

When the waitress, a heavyset woman in her fifties, came over to see whether I wanted another beer, she glanced down at the half dozen paper pellets I’d fired off.

“Nice range,” she said. “Another?”

I was about to say yes, but any more to drink and I wasn’t going to be able to drive myself home. I was probably already in the danger zone.

“No, I’m good,” I said.

The waitress stood there a minute, looking at me.

“You been in here before?” she asked.

“Not sure,” I said, which was true. “Not in a while, anyway.”

“Because you look familiar to me. Pretty sure I’ve seen you somewhere. Although not lately.”

“Maybe I just have that kind of face,” I said.

“What’s your name?”

“Carville,” I said. “Andrew Carville.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, nodding. “I had you pegged as somebody else, but his last name was Mason.”

“Well, there you go,” I said, and slapped some bills on the table as she waltzed away.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I went out, got in the Explorer, and headed for home.

I was almost there, not even a block away, when I saw that car again, the one I’d seen heading down the street to Max’s house.

Detective Hardy.

Coming from the direction of my place.

I watched her unmarked car disappear in my rearview, then hit the blinker to turn down my street.

When I got to my house, Jayne was sitting on the front step, waiting.

Looked like I wouldn’t have to tell Jayne much of anything, after all. I was guessing the detective had already filled her in.

Thirteen

“I brought flowers,” Isabel McBain said. “This room needs some color.”

Her mother, Elizabeth, turned her head wearily on the pillow to see what Isabel was up to. She was arranging a small bouquet in a foot-tall metal vase on the movable dining table that had been wheeled away from the bed. Isabel’s husband, Norman, tall, thin, and balding, stood back, watching his wife fuss about.

“What do you think of that?” she asked. “Don’t they look nice?”

“They look wonderful, Izzy,” Elizabeth whispered. “How are you today, Norman?”

“Fine, Elizabeth,” he said flatly while Isabel continued to arrange the bouquet. She took a step back, studied her handiwork, concluded they were not quite right, then repositioned several of them. “Norman, what do you think?”

“That one in the front seems a bit droopy.”

Isabel shot him a look. “It’s supposed to be that way.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Stop fussing with it, Izzy,” Elizabeth said. “I like it just the way it is.”

Isabel glanced at the television, saw that it was tuned, as usual, to a cable news show. “Oh, you have to stop watching this all the time,” Isabel said, looking for the remote half-hidden under the covers near Elizabeth’s hand. She grabbed it, aimed it at the screen, and powered it off. “It just gets your blood boiling, and you hardly need that right now.”

Done with the flowers and the television, Isabel turned her attention to her mother. “Look at you. You’re all wrinkled.”

She could have been talking about the woman’s face, but she was referring to Elizabeth’s nightgown, which had bunched up around her upper thighs. Isabel tugged the hem down toward her calves and admired her handiwork. “That’s much better.”

Elizabeth sighed. Norman, still standing, had taken out his phone and was reading some online news.

Isabel glanced over at the window, which was shielded by a blind in the down position. “You need some light in here,” she said. “It’s a beautiful, sunny day out there. Norman, open the blind.”

“I’d asked them to lower them,” Elizabeth said, “because of the glare. Made it hard to watch the TV.”

“Well, the TV is off now,” Isabel said, and waved a hand at Norman to get busy doing what she had asked him to do. He found the drawstrings and raised the blinds to the halfway point.

“All the way,” Isabel ordered.

Norman brought the blinds up until sunshine filled the room. Elizabeth, squinting like someone enduring a police interrogation, used her hand to shield her eyes.

“Isn’t that better?” Isabel said enthusiastically. “It makes the room cheerier, if you ask me.”

“Whatever you say,” Elizabeth said wearily, turning onto her side so her back was to the window.

“So what have you been up to?” Isabel asked with relentless cheeriness.

“Well,” Elizabeth said, “last night I went bowling, and this morning I went into the city to do a walk around Bloomingdale’s but didn’t end up buying anything.”

Isabel frowned. “Come on, now. That was a serious question. Are you comfortable?”

“Not really much different than yesterday or the day before that or the day before that,” her mother said.

Isabel looked down at her mother for several seconds and looked as though she might start crying.

“Don’t,” her mother said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get all emotional and weepy around me. I can’t bear it.”

“I just love you, that’s all.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I know.”

“I want to do anything I can for you, is all. If you don’t like the flowers, I can take them away.”

“They’re fine.”

“You want some magazines? I could go to the gift shop and get you a New Yorker or something.”

“Reading is hard,” Elizabeth said. “I need stronger glasses and I don’t see any point in getting them now. The TV is all the entertainment I need.”

Elizabeth’s eyes fluttered, signaling to Isabel that she was going to fall asleep. At that moment the door opened and Albert walked in. Isabel immediately put her finger to her lips, shushing him in advance of any sound he might make. Norman looked up from his phone, took a step toward his brother-in-law, and extended a hand.

“Hey, Albert,” he said quietly.

“Norman.”

They stood there for a moment, shoulder to shoulder, as though Norman had found an ally, someone who understood what it was like to be in a room with Isabel.

Albert took a step toward the bed and whispered to his sister, “How is she?”

Isabel stood and motioned for Albert to follow her out into the hall. Norman wasn’t included in the gesture, so he opted to stay in the room while the siblings excused themselves.

In the hallway, Isabel allowed the tears she had been holding back to flow. She pulled a tissue from inside her sleeve and dabbed at her cheek.

“What is it?” Albert asked. “Has something happened? Is she worse?”

“She’s so... tired. And kind of irritable. Her glasses aren’t strong enough for reading but she says there’s no point in getting new ones now.”

Albert offered a resigned shrug, acknowledging their mother was probably right. “So long as we’re able to make her comfortable, we’re doing the right thing,” he said.

“I want to be able to do more,” she said.

“We’re doing all we can, honestly.”

“Every day she looks thinner. Have you seen her arms? They’re like toothpicks.”

“Mom’s a fighter, Izzy. She’s always been a fighter.”

Isabel tucked the tissue away. “Oh for God’s sake, you say that like she’s suddenly going to get better.” She sighed. “I’m running on empty. I come every day, sometimes twice. Everything’s gone to shit at home.”

“We should go back in, see how she’s doing.”

“Norman can keep her entertained,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “He can tell her some gripping story about radial tires.”

“Come on, let’s go in.”

She sniffed, nodded, and followed him back into the room.

Norman was stepping away from the window and taking a seat close to Elizabeth, gazing mournfully at her while she slept. Isabel stood behind him, evidently waiting for him to get up and surrender the chair to her. Albert strolled over to the window, felt the sun on his face. He stood there looking out onto the parking lot below.

Norman got the unspoken message and vacated the chair. Isabel was lowering herself into it as Albert became fixated on something outside.

“Izzy,” he whispered.

Her butt had just landed and she was studying her mother’s face, her closed eyes, waiting on the chance that they might open. She either did not hear her brother, or had chosen to ignore him.

“Izzy,” he whispered again, more urgently.

Isabel turned her head. “What?”

He waved her to come over. When she was slow to rise out of the chair, he waved again, urgently.

She came to his side and whispered, “What?” The two, standing together, had crowded out Norman, who stood behind them, peering over their shoulders.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

Isabel took in the view of the parking lot and the roofs of buildings beyond. “Look at what?”

“Right there. Down there. See the red car? The Corvette?”

“I don’t know cars.”

“Who doesn’t know a Corvette?” Norman quipped.

“Do you see the red car?” Albert said. “The sports car?”

“Yes, okay.”

“Okay, count over two to the left. That woman.”

Isabel squinted. Slowly, she said, “I see her.”

Very slowly, Albert said, “Don’t you think she looks...”

Neither of them said anything for several seconds. They both seemed to have stopped breathing. Isabel placed her palm on the glass.

The woman, dark-haired, slender, was leaning up against a black Volvo station wagon, arms crossed, as though waiting for someone.

“It’s just... it’s just someone who looks like her,” Isabel said.

“Her hair, the way she’s holding herself...”

“Let me see,” said Norman, squeezing in between them so he could look for himself. “Where?”

“There,” Albert said.

Norman squinted.

“Sometimes... I feel like I see her all the time,” Isabel said softly. “I’ll see someone walking ahead of me in the mall, something about the way the woman is walking, it reminds me of her, and I’ll run and catch up, just to make sure...”

“I know, I know. I do the same.”

Isabel and Albert were now talking to each other, less focused on the woman in the parking lot.

“Guys, look,” said Norman.

The woman, as though she could sense she was being observed from afar, turned and gazed up in their direction.

Looked directly at their window.

And waved.

Fourteen

Jayne Keeling, listening to Detective Hardy, had felt her world falling apart.

She’d sat across the table from her, hearing details about Andrew that she could hardly bring herself to believe.

“Why do you suppose Andrew hasn’t told you any of this?” Hardy asked.

Jayne did not know what to say.

“He was lucky, finding someone like you, someone from out of town who wouldn’t have been following the news at the time.”

“What do you want?” Jayne asked. “Why are you telling me all this?”

The detective smiled, leaned in. “I guess, if I were you, I’d want to know. I would feel I had a right to know.”

“But why now?”

Hardy offhandedly pointed at her phone, still on the table. A reference to the picture she had shown her moments earlier. “A development.”

“Is it a development? I mean, what do you make of this?”

Hardy shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But I have to check it out.”

“But if... if that’s Brie, then everything you’ve believed about Andrew is wrong. She’s alive, and he had nothing to do with it.”

“The first part might be true. That she’s alive. But I don’t know that that means he had nothing to do with her disappearance. All the more reason for me to talk to him. Why don’t you text him and see when he’s coming back.”

“I did. Just before you got here.”

Hardy shook her head. “You know what? I’ll catch him another time.” She picked up her phone, scrolled through some contacts. “I still have a number in here from six years back, unless he changed that along with his name.” She read it out to Jayne. “Is that still it?”

“Yes.”

The detective pushed back her chair, stood, dropped the phone into the small purse that hung over her shoulder. She pulled a business card from it and placed it on the table.

“If you want to call,” she said.

Jayne glanced at the card but did not pick it up.

“And if you need someplace to go,” Hardy said, “I can help you with that. Someplace for yourself, and for your brother.”

“What are you talking about? Are you talking about a shelter?”

Hardy nodded.

“We don’t need to go to any shelter. I’m not being abused. Tyler’s not being abused.”

“Okay. But there’s my number, should you change your mind.”

Jayne followed Hardy out of the house and watched her get into her car, start it up, and drive off.

She was numb.

So this is what it’s like, she thought, to be in free fall, to be plunging through the air with a parachute that won’t open.

She was about to go back into the house, then decided to wait out here for his return. She sat on the front step, placed her palms on the cool concrete. As soon as he came around the corner in his Explorer, she would see him. And then she had a thought.

Maybe he isn’t coming back.

He knew all about what had happened that morning. The detective had told Jayne that when she went to talk to that Max person, he’d told her his first call had been to Andrew, that he had already been there, listened to Max’s eyewitness account, then seen what was on the next-door neighbor’s security camera.

So much for going to Home Depot for weed and feed.

Jayne wondered if what he’d seen in that surveillance camera image had somehow frightened him. Made him want to run.

She knew the truth, knew about the secrets he had kept from her, and now he was heading for the hills.

She thought of all the stories she’d read over the years of women who’d been duped. Women who had met the man of their dreams, only to learn he was a con artist intent on swindling them out of their fortune. Or a bigamist with another wife, and family, on the other side of the country.

Well, Jayne had no fortune, so there went that motive. And if Andrew had another family somewhere, he certainly hadn’t been spending any time with them.

But was he a murderer?

No, no, not possible.

Then she heard the car. There, coming down the street, was Andrew.

The sight of his SUV prompted both relief and a wave of dread. Relief that he’d not run, and dread over the discussion that lay ahead.

Why had he not told her about Brie? How did you go through something like that and not feel the need to talk about it?

She began to make excuses for him. As they’d grown closer, as they’d fallen in love — and she had no doubt, at least not until now, that she loved him and believed in her heart he loved her — he might have wanted to tell her everything, but was afraid that if he did, she’d break things off.

And she had to ask herself, had he been honest with her, would she have stayed in the relationship? Would she have moved in with him? Would she have brought her brother into this home?

That had to have been his reasoning. He didn’t want to lose her. He was afraid to tell her.

Of course that was it.

And let’s face it, she thought. It’s not like I’ve told him everything, either. About Tyler, or about myself.

Fifteen

Andrew

I pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, opened the door, and got out slowly. I was feeling a little woozy from my visit to the bar, or maybe it was stress that had thrown me off balance. Either way, I was glad I’d made it home without getting stopped.

I had a feeling my luck was about to run out.

Jayne remained sitting on the front step. Didn’t get up. I could see in her face she knew. I walked over slowly, stood a couple of feet away.

“So,” she asked, deadpan, “how’d it go at Home Depot? You get the weed and feed?”

“No.”

“A trip back to the old neighborhood instead?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And then I kind of drove around for a while.” Didn’t mention my trip up to Trumbull to talk to Greg.

Jayne nodded solemnly.

“Detective Hardy was here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And she filled you in.”

“Yes.”

I drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. “I’m sorry. I’ll pack up my things right now and get out. You can stay here. Whatever you want, that’s what I’ll do. Or I can just leave right now and you can throw my shit out here onto the lawn. I’ll come back later.”

She put one hand down on the cement to help push herself off the step. I extended a hand to help her up but she didn’t take it.

“I have one question,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice.

Here it was, I thought. I was ready with my answer.

No, I did not kill my wife.

“Okay,” I said.

“If it’s her, if she’s back, what happens to us?”

I blinked. Before I could think of what to say, she had a second question.

“Do you still love her?”

I didn’t know how to answer that question any better than the first one.

“Can we go inside and talk?” I asked.

She considered the suggestion, finally nodded, and said, “Okay.”

I followed her into the house.

Jayne already had a pot of coffee going, so she poured me some, refilled her own cup, and we sat down at the kitchen table. She looked particularly fragile. Her chin trembled ever so slightly, the mug shaking as she set it in front of me.

“I should have told you,” I said.

Jayne’s eyes were moist, and it was a safe bet she’d been crying.

“When we started going out, I kept thinking, I should tell you everything, and the more time that went by, the more difficult it was for me. Because the closer we got to each other, the more there was to lose.”

I wasn’t lying about that.

“I figured, if I told you everything, about Brie’s disappearance, about the police investigation, how Detective Hardy considered me the prime suspect for a long time, I’d lose you. And I wouldn’t have blamed you for bailing. If things had been reversed, I don’t know what I would have done. I know I’d have felt the way you do right now. Duped. Betrayed. Lied to. And this isn’t much of a defense, but I don’t think I ever lied to you. Not outright. But by omission, yeah, I plead guilty to that.”

Jayne had said nothing through all this.

“The thing is, you’re the one who saved me,” I said. “I was lost. I was coming out of a pretty low point, but I was still struggling up that hill. If I could have had some answers, if what had happened to Brie had been resolved, I might have been able to put my life together. I’d been drinking a lot. Unable to focus on work. Greg, you know, my friend, was with me the night Brie went missing. We’d gone up to our places on Sorrow Bay. I told you about that cabin I had, the one I ended up selling a few years ago because I needed the money when I wasn’t getting much work. I was spending too much time in my own head. Drinking. A lot. I was pretty depressed there for a while. Spent a lot of time just sitting on my ass, trying to find the energy to get back on my feet again.”

I took a breath, and a sip of the coffee. I picked up a paper napkin on the table and tore off a tiny corner of it, started balling it up with my fingers.

“Took me about four years to start coming out of it, to get my life back into some kind of order. I changed my name, legally. In this part of Connecticut, people remembered. If I said I was Andrew Mason, people would wrinkle their foreheads and say, hey, aren’t you the guy who killed his wife? What do you say to something like that? So I became Andrew Carville. Carville was my mother’s last name, so at least I was hanging on to something from the family, you know?”

My mouth was dry. I thought maybe if I paused Jayne would have something to say, but she showed no signs of ending the silence. So I had more coffee and kept on going.

“And going back a bit,” I said, “there was the matter of the house. When Brie and I bought it, the idea was that we’d fix it up. It needed a lot of work, but the basic structure was sound. I was going to redo pretty much everything. Knock out some walls, make the kitchen bigger, modernize the bathrooms. It would have taken a lot of time, but we got the house for a good price and whatever I didn’t know how to do myself, which wasn’t much, I knew the best people to do it. But after Brie vanished, I didn’t have any enthusiasm for anything, let alone fixing up that house, maybe flipping it for a profit. And then there was the fact that everyone knew where I lived. For a long time, I’d have reporters waiting to talk to me when I came out the front door. Gawkers, driving by, pointing, you know, hey, that’s the house that lady disappeared from.”

I set the pea-sized paper ball on my thumb and flicked it. It flew across the table and sailed across the room, landing just in front of the fridge. Jayne snatched the rest of the shredded napkin away from me and wadded it up into her fist. She did not look amused.

I went on with my story.

“So I put the house on the market, got what I could for it. And the new owners, they decided it made more sense to rip it down and start over, which, to be honest, was probably the smartest thing to do. And there was a part of me that was relieved, you know? If I happened to drive down that street, which I went to great pains not to do, at least I wouldn’t see the place where Brie and I had lived.”

I sighed. “And I guess Detective Hardy told you about Natalie Simmons.”

Jayne’s eyebrows popped up, as good a clue as any that Hardy had not, in fact, brought up the subject of Natalie Simmons.

Shit.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m that guy digging a hole and thinks the best way to get out is to keep on digging.” I tried a weak laugh, but if I thought Jayne was going to respond with a chuckle I was reading the room wrong.

I continued: “I need to back up a bit. Brie and I had gone through a bad patch. You know they say finances are the biggest cause of problems in a marriage. Anyway, it was how I made a living that was a source of stress for us. Fixing up homes, flipping them, never settling in one place. Brie was done with it, and I was too dumb at the time to appreciate why. We were hardly talking to each other, and that was around the time I met Natalie. It wasn’t a big thing, and it didn’t last long. A little after that, Brie kind of cheated on me, too. Once. I don’t know how, exactly, but we came to our senses, talked it through, forgave each other, and tried to move on. And I said that last house, if she wanted to stay there when it was fixed up, we would. If she didn’t, the next house would be permanent. We came through it, but we hurt each other along the way.”

I had a sip of cold coffee before continuing.

“No matter what Detective Hardy might have thought at the time, my lapse had nothing to do with Brie’s disappearance. The detective tried to turn it into a big deal. This Natalie woman, it wasn’t serious. At least, not for me. Maybe it meant more to her, but I broke it off and that was that.”

Jayne remained mute.

I pushed the chair back, stood up, paced the kitchen. I wanted Jayne to react. I wanted her to get angry. I wanted her to start screaming at me, throw something. She had every right. But she just sat there, watching me.

“Look, I should have told you. There’s nothing I can do about that. I fucked up. You deserved to know. I’ll understand if you can’t excuse that. I’m not going to ask for forgiveness. I don’t deserve it. All I can tell you is that you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in the last six years. You brought me back from the edge. Maybe that sounds like bullshit, like I’m laying it on thick so you won’t walk out that door and take Tyler with you. But it’s the truth.”

I put a hand to my forehead, stopped my pacing, and leaned my back up against the fridge, knocking a couple of magnets to the floor.

“I’ve got nuthin’ else,” I said. “Christ, say something.”

Maybe now, I thought. Maybe she’d ask me now.

If she didn’t ask whether I’d done something to Brie, it meant one of two things. It could mean she had faith in me, that she believed I wasn’t the kind of man who’d murder his wife. Or it might mean she was fearful I’d provide an answer she didn’t want to hear.

Anyway, she was looking like she was ready to break her silence.

She took a sip of her coffee, set the mug down, then linked her fingers together so tightly they looked like they might snap. She rested her hands on the table and looked right at me.

“I’m pregnant,” Jayne said.

Sixteen

By the time Isabel McBain emerged from the hospital and ran out to the parking lot, the woman was gone.

That moment when the woman had looked up at Isabel and her brother and her husband, grouped together in the window of their mother’s hospital room, and waved, changed everything.

A stranger wouldn’t have waved. A stranger wouldn’t have recognized them. A stranger would have assumed they were looking at something else and not her.

But Brie would have spotted them for who they were.

Brie would have waved.

“Oh my God!” Isabel had shouted, no longer thinking to whisper as her mother lay sleeping. “Oh my God!” she’d said a second time.

And then she had started running, pushing Norman and Albert out of her way. She raced from the room and down the hospital corridor to the elevator. She pressed the down button, but after five seconds she no longer had the patience to wait. She spotted the sign for the stairwell and dashed off in that direction, with her husband and brother right behind her.

She scurried down the stairs, not quite coordinated enough to jump every other step, but she made good time just the same. When she emerged from the stairwell and into the hospital lobby it took a moment to get her bearings, having zigged and zagged her way down to the ground floor, not sure which way to go to exit the building and reach the lot.

“This way,” said Albert, who’d reached the lobby half a second behind her.

The three of them emerged from the building and circled around to the parking lot, but there was no one there.

At least, not the woman they had seen waving to them.

“Are you sure this is the right lot?” a breathless Isabel asked.

“This is it,” Norman said. “There’s the red Corvette.”

“Where is she?” she asked. “She couldn’t just disappear into thin air!”

Albert looked back, and up, at the building. “There’s Mom’s room right there. This is the spot. This is where she was.”

Isabel nodded. Norman appeared miffed, as if she needed assurance from her brother over him.

She spun around, scanning. “This is insane. Where did she go?”

“It did take us a couple of minutes to get down here,” Albert said, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees as he struggled to get his wind back. “That’s enough time to run away or get in a car or God knows what.”

“Let’s split up,” Norman said urgently. “I’ll go that way, you guys head down the sidewalk in different directions, meet back here in a couple of minutes.”

Isabel didn’t need a second opinion from Albert. “Okay.”

They fanned out. And, as Norman had suggested, they regrouped a few minutes later. No one had spotted the woman.

“I didn’t believe... I didn’t believe it was her,” Isabel said. “I didn’t think it was possible, not until... not until she waved.”

“I know,” Albert said. “I mean, it could have been her, but it could have been a lot of people who looked a bit like her. But when she spotted us... Christ. It was like she knew who we were. Like she recognized us.”

Isabel was starting to look unsteady on her feet. Norman and Albert flanked her, each taking an arm, in case she suddenly fainted.

Crying, she said, “Oh God, could she really be alive?”

“I don’t know,” Albert and Norman said almost at the same time.

“If she is, why do this? Why torture us this way? How does she know Mom’s in the hospital? Is Brie watching us? Is she keeping tabs on us?”

“Izzy, Izzy, calm down,” Albert said. “We need to... we need to...”

“Need to what?”

“I don’t — maybe we should call her.”

“Call her? Call Brie? How the hell are we supposed to do that?”

“No, not Brie. The detective. What was her—”

“Hardy. Marissa Hardy. Yes, yes. Call her. Call her now.”

Albert got out his phone. “I don’t know if I still have her in my contacts...” Before he’d found a number, he stopped himself. “She’ll think we’re crazy. She’ll think we’re seeing things. And you... you were always on her case.”

Isabel looked defensive. “I was not.”

“You were, demanding that she arrest Andrew.”

“I had reason, and you know it. She never went after him hard enough. She should have charged him! That man should have been put on trial and—”

She stopped herself.

“Unless,” Albert said.

Isabel needed a moment to put it together. “If it is Brie, then...”

“Maybe we should be calling him.”

Isabel considered that for a second. “No, no, not him. We don’t know that was Brie. He’s not getting off the hook for this yet. Call that detective.”

Albert went back to scrolling through contacts on his phone. “Hang on, I think I still have... Here she is.”

Norman watched as Albert took the lead, tapping the screen and putting the phone to his ear, listening for the rings.

“It can’t be,” Norman whispered to Isabel. “There’s just no way.”

Isabel, ignoring him, said to Albert, “Is she answering?”

“Jesus, just hang on. Not yet— Hello? Is this Detective Hardy?”

Isabel sidled up close to him so she could hear both sides of the conversation.

“Yes, this is Hardy,” the detective said.

“You might not remember me, Detective, but my name is Albert McBain. Six years ago, my sister—”

“Our sister!” Isabel shouted loud enough to be heard at the other end of the call.

“Our sister, Brie, disappeared and you were the lead detective, and—”

“I remember. What can I do for you, Mr. McBain?”

“We weren’t even sure whether we should call you. Our mother, she’s in the hospital. We’ve been visiting. And we were looking out the window, and in the parking lot — I know this is going to sound pretty out there, but we think we might have seen Brie.”

Detective Hardy was silent.

“Hello?” Albert said. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Hardy said slowly. “When did this happen?”

“Just now. Like, ten minutes ago. We’re in the parking lot. We saw her, this woman, and rushed down, but by the time we got here she was gone. I mean, maybe it was someone who looked like her, but when she saw us in the window, she waved. It was like she recognized us.”

“That’s... interesting,” the detective said.

Isabel snatched the phone from her brother’s hand. “Detective Hardy? It’s Isabel.”

“Hello, Isabel.” Hardy’s voice suddenly sounded wearier.

“What do you mean, interesting?”

Another pause from the detective. “There was another... possible sighting of your sister this morning.”

“What? Where? Where was this? Why didn’t you call?”

“I don’t want anyone jumping to conclusions, but it was at her last known address, on Mulberry. The neighbor said a woman pulled into the driveway and seemed stunned that the house that was there several years ago was no longer standing.”

“He said it was Brie?”

“He said she looked something like your sister, but the identification was far from conclusive. Look, Ms. McBain, give me some time to look into this.”

“Do you think it’s even possible? Could Brie be—”

Hardy cut her off. “I said I’ll look into it. If you see whoever this was again, call me. Anytime, day or night. Goodbye.”

Isabel was ready with another question, but the detective had ended the call. Isabel, visibly annoyed, handed the phone back to her brother.

“She says she’ll look into it.”

“Do you believe her?” Albert asked.

Isabel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Norman spoke up. “My guess is she’s just shining you on. It’s crazy. She’s not going to do anything about it. If I were her, I wouldn’t take this seriously. I mean, come on.”

Albert was shaking his head. “If she says she’s going to look into it, I think she will. I’ve never known her to bullshit anyone.”

Isabel sighed, then slowly looked back up to the window of her mother’s hospital room.

“Oh God,” she said quietly.

Albert followed her gaze and guessed what she was thinking.

“What do we tell Mom?” Isabel asked.

Seventeen

Detective Hardy: Took us a little while to track you down, Ms. Simmons. Thank you for coming in.

Natalie: I’m sorry, I’ve been out of town.

Detective Hardy: Where were you?

Natalie: I was visiting an aunt in Nova Scotia. In Halifax.

Detective Hardy: Oh. Nice vacation?

Natalie: Not exactly a vacation. She’s been ill. She’s almost eighty and she’s having trouble moving around, so I had to organize visits from local support groups and that kind of thing. I’m pretty much her only living relative, so there you go. I went up about a week ago. Took the car. It’s about a thirteen-hour drive, so I broke it up into two days.

Detective Hardy: You went alone?

Natalie: Yes. Can you tell me why I’m here? No one’s told me anything. There was a note on my door when I got home.

Detective Hardy: We tried to reach you on your cell.

Natalie: I don’t have a cell phone.

Detective Hardy: Really? You’re a rare breed.

Natalie: They’re bad for you. The radio waves can affect your brain. But the media doesn’t report it because they’re getting paid off by the cell phone companies. If everybody finds out, they’ll stop using them and Verizon and all the others will lose a ton of money. Plus, they can track you, you know. They always know where you are.

Detective Hardy: They?

Natalie: The government. Whoever. It’s all over social media. I follow sites that investigate this kind of thing. That’s why people weren’t taking the vaccine. That’s another way they can keep tabs on you.

Detective Hardy: Would the government be having some reason to track your movements, Ms. Simmons?

Natalie: I think they’d be pretty bored if they bothered, but you never know. Right?

Detective Hardy: I suppose. Anyway, I wonder if we could get started.

Natalie: Okay.

Detective Hardy: First, I want to confirm some information. This address we have for you, that’s current?

Natalie: Yes.

Detective Hardy: And what do you do for a living?

Natalie: I work in an art gallery in Stratford. Maybe you know it? The Decca Gallery? Anyway, they’re pretty good there, and were totally understanding when I had to go up to Halifax.

Detective Hardy: I believe you know an Andrew Mason?

Natalie: Uh, yes.

Detective Hardy: Have you known him very long?

Natalie: Uh, I guess I met him a year ago? Something like that? But I sort of knew him from a long time ago. College. More like acquaintances back then.

Detective Hardy: So, more than an acquaintance now.

Natalie: Well...

Detective Hardy: Things will move along more quickly here if you’ll just answer the questions honestly and directly.

Natalie: I know him a bit better now, yeah. What exactly is this about?

Detective Hardy: When did you start going out with Mr. Mason?

Natalie: It was, I don’t know, a few months ago.

Detective Hardy: How would you describe the nature of your relationship with him, then?

Natalie: We, you know, we sort of were seeing each other.

Detective Hardy: Seeing each other?

Natalie: Seriously, what’s this about? Has something happened to Andy? Is he okay? Is he in some kind of trouble?

Detective Hardy: Were you and Mr. Mason in an intimate relationship?

Natalie: What do you mean, exactly, by intimate?

Detective Hardy: Was it a sexual relationship?

Natalie: Yeah, I guess that was a part of it.

Detective Hardy: Is there some doubt? I think that’s the kind of thing you’d know one way or another.

Natalie: Yeah, okay. It was what you said.

Detective Hardy: And when did this relationship begin?

Natalie: I guess around four months ago? It only went on for like a month.

Detective Hardy: Why was that?

Natalie: Well, he’s married.

Detective Hardy: Did you know that when you started seeing him?

Natalie: Sort of. I mean, he had a ring and all.

Detective Hardy: So is that when you broke it off?

Natalie: No, I didn’t break it off. Andy did.

Detective Hardy: Oh. Were you upset about that?

Natalie: (unintelligible)

Detective Hardy: Ms. Simmons? Are you okay?

Natalie: It’s just... I really liked him, you know? I mean, yeah, I knew he was married, but there must have been something missing there if he wanted to spend time with me. I started thinking, sure, this could get messy, but maybe there was more to it than just, you know, sex.

Detective Hardy: Have you been married, Ms. Simmons?

Natalie: Once. Lasted only two years. His name was, well, his name is Conroy Hill. He moved out to L.A. about ten years ago. He’s in the music business.

Detective Hardy: Did you ever entertain the idea, the hope, that Mr. Mason might leave his wife for you?

Natalie: I don’t know. I hoped. The thing is, he was so different than my usual type.

Detective Hardy: How do you mean?

Natalie: Well, you work in a gallery, you meet a lot of creative, artsy types. Head in the clouds, eccentric, pseudo-intellectuals. And, of course, half of those are gay. But Andrew, I mean, he’s like a carpenter, you know? Okay, more than that. A contractor. Works with his hands. Not my usual type. But he still appreciates stuff like movies and art. And he’s kind of... how do I put this? Manly. You know? Like, a more rugged type, and I liked that about him. But a bit stressed. But that could have been because he had business problems, and there was the whole thing with his marriage, of course.

Detective Hardy: Did you ever meet Brie?

Natalie: Once, and it was totally awkward. I was in the food court at the Post Mall and turned and there he was, and I was like, hey, how are you? And then I see this woman standing next to him. So his face is all flushed and he quickly introduces me to his wife, said I was someone he met through work, pretended like he couldn’t remember my last name. I could tell, though, looking at her, she knew he was lying. Look, I’m not answering any more questions until you tell me why you brought me in here.

Detective Hardy: Brie Mason is missing, Ms. Simmons.

Natalie: She’s what?

Detective Hardy: She’s been missing since this past weekend.

Natalie: Oh my God. No one’s heard from her?

Detective Hardy: No.

Natalie: And you — Jesus — and you think I had something to do with it?

Detective Hardy: No, I—

Natalie: Because whatever my ex told you, it’s bullshit.

Detective Hardy: Okay. Tell me about that.

Natalie: And it was a long time ago, too. What did Conroy tell you, anyway?

Detective Hardy: Maybe you should give me your side of it.

Natalie: It was a one-time thing. And it was after we’d split up. I saw him with Charlotte, and—

Detective Hardy: Charlotte?

Natalie: The first one he went out with after we separated. I saw them at the Stamford Mall, in the parking garage. I was heading for my car and I saw them getting into his, and yeah, okay, I walked right past the car, but there’s no way he could prove it was me that keyed his Jag.

Detective Hardy: You keyed his car?

Natalie: The security video didn’t show anything.

Detective Hardy: So it wasn’t exactly an amicable split with him.

Natalie: All I’m saying is, I’ve got nothing to do with this woman going missing.

Detective Hardy: What I was about to ask you was, did Mr. Mason ever say anything about his wife that would lead you to believe he might want to harm her in any way?

Natalie: Oh, okay. Wow, I’m such an idiot. I thought—

Detective Hardy: Did he complain about her? Make disparaging remarks?

Natalie: No. He was pretty depressed a lot of the time, feeling guilty, you know? About seeing me. I mean, okay, there was the one time he said he could just kill her, but—

Detective Hardy: He said what?

Natalie: Andy said... I’m trying to remember now... but he said something like, “I could just kill her.”

Detective Hardy: He said that.

Natalie: He did. But it was more in a kidding way. Like, a figure of speech.

Detective Hardy: What was the context?

Natalie: I think they’d a fight about something. A disagreement. They’re renovating that house, right? And I think it was about picking out things for the kitchen. Brie couldn’t make up her mind about colors or taps or countertops or something. I don’t really remember, but Andy was annoyed because it was slowing the project down.

Detective Hardy: Okay. That does sound like an offhand comment. My partner wanted to kill me when we were trying to pick a paint color for our bedroom.

Natalie: I know, I’m making too much of it.

Detective Hardy: So there was nothing else along those lines.

Natalie: Not really. In fact, he said one time, about Brie, he said, and this got me thinking that maybe it wasn’t going to work out with him, and these were his exact words: “I love her to death.”

Eighteen

Andrew

I have to admit, I hadn’t seen that coming.

If I had, maybe I would have known how to react, could have prepared myself, said something that gave the impression I was thrilled with Jayne’s news. Because when someone tells you she’s pregnant, you want to look delighted. And I’m not saying I wasn’t. I believe, given a moment to get my head around what Jayne had told me, I would have been more than delighted. I would have been downright fucking thrilled. Having a child was not something we’d really talked about, but we would have gotten there eventually, and when that time had come I know I would have been on board with the idea.

But considering the kind of morning it had been — the appearance of that woman, Detective Hardy coming to the house, my relationship with Jayne seemingly on the verge of unraveling as my past came to light — I wasn’t quite in a mood to jump up and down. I should have said something along the lines of, “That’s wonderful!” or, “Oh my God, that’s great!” A simple “Wow!” might have done the trick.

What I said was, “What?”

And I imagine I looked pretty stunned when I said it.

“I’m pregnant,” Jayne said again.

I was frozen for about two seconds, then bolted forward, and, given that she was still in the chair, went down to my knees and put my arms around her for a hug. She returned the embrace, but it didn’t feel as though she was putting as much into it as I was.

I pulled away and said, “When did you find out?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “I’d done the test last weekend, peed on the stick, you know? And it was positive, but I wanted to go to the doctor first, get her two cents’ worth, before I told you. I saw her yesterday.”

“That beer,” I said. “When you came out with those two bottles, yours looked different.”

“Non-alcoholic,” she said. “I picked up a six-pack yesterday, tucked them into the back of the fridge where you wouldn’t find them.” Jayne motioned for me to stand up, which I did, then sat back in the chair across from her. “You didn’t exactly look thrilled a moment ago.”

“You caught me by surprise,” I said. “It’s been a day full of them.” I ran my hand over the top of my head and sighed. “Man. How far along?”

“About seven weeks, the doctor figures,” she said. “I think it happened the weekend we went to Mystic. Couple of days before Tyler joined us.”

My mind immediately went back to that mini-vacation. I behaved like someone released from prison. Jayne was no less insatiable.

I couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah, it could have been then. We were going to do a charter, check out the museum, but I don’t remember our leaving that B&B much.”

“I’d had this plan,” she said. “That we’d go out to dinner tonight, that I would tell you the news, but now...”

“Jayne.”

“This can’t be happening,” she said. “Not now.”

“Wait, what do you mean? You don’t want to have the baby? I thought—”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “This, whatever this is, what’s happened today. That can’t be happening.”

“Jayne, I swear, I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“What if she’s back?”

“We don’t know that it’s Brie,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense that it’s Brie.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked. “How do you know it couldn’t be?”

That was the closest she’d come to asking the question. I took a moment to consider my answer.

“Because, if that was Brie, how do we explain it? Where’s she been for six years? Why would she just pop up out of nowhere? I mean, what’s she been doing all this time? If it was really her, why’d she decide that this, of all the times she could have come back, was the right time? Did someone keep her prisoner and she finally escaped? And if that was what happened, why didn’t she go straight to the police? How does she end up showing up at our old house? There’s no rational explanation for it.”

“But it happened.”

“Something happened. Someone showed up at the house.”

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, it is your wife,” Jayne said. “She... she was abducted by aliens and they just brought her back, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know. But if it is, don’t you want it to be her?”

Jesus, how to answer that.

Slowly, I said, “Yes.”

Jayne’s face looked ready to crumple.

“Yes,” I repeated. “Because if it’s her, it means no harm has come to her. That she’s alive. Who knows, maybe some harm had come to her, but it would mean that whatever it was, she’d survived it. She’d still be with us, and that would be a good thing. Never, not for a minute, have I hoped that she was dead. I admit, plenty of times I wished I knew one way or the other what had happened to her, but that doesn’t mean I actually hoped she was dead. So, yeah, I’d want it to be her.”

Jayne swallowed hard as she listened.

“And, you know, there’s been this cloud hanging over me for a long time. There are people out there who still think I killed my wife. I’m sure this latest development’s ruined Detective Hardy’s day, because I know she’s always thought I did it. She wants to believe I did it. If — and I think it’s a big if — but if this woman is Brie, then there you go. I’m not a murderer.” I managed a weak smile. “It’ll ruin Izzy’s day, too, although that might be offset by getting her sister back.”

I was almost finished.

“But if by some miracle it is Brie, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of us. We’ll find a way through this. We will.”

“It’s like Cast Away,” Jayne said.

“Like what?”

“The movie. With Tom Hanks, and what’s her name, the one from Mad About You. Helen Hunt. The one where his jet crashes on an island and he’s there for, like, I don’t know, a few years, and everyone thinks he’s dead. His only friend in the world is Wilson, a volleyball. And Helen Hunt, eventually she has to get on with her life, and she finds another man and falls in love with him and moves in with him, and then it turns out Tom’s not dead, and he comes back.”

I remembered the movie.

“I’m Helen Hunt,” I said.

That almost made Jayne smile when she nodded. “What’s she supposed to do? She loved Tom, but now she has this new man in her life, and she loves him, too. It’s devastating, for everyone involved. She’s in an impossible situation.”

“But she stays with the new guy,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean it will work out that way with us,” Jayne said. “We’re not in a movie.” She looked into my eyes. “Think back to the last day you saw her.”

“Okay.”

“On that day, before she went missing, did you love her?”

I reached across the table and took her hand in mine. “I love you,” I said.

“But that’s not my question. The last time you saw her, talked to her.” She took a breath. “Slept with her. Did you love her?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So doesn’t it stand to reason that if she walked through that door right now you’d still love her?”

“Jayne, I—”

“I mean, if you suddenly went missing, and six years went by, and you walked in here, I’d still love you, no matter how I’d gone on with my life.”

“These... these questions, I feel like there’s no right way to answer them.”

“I’m the one who’s going to have your baby.”

“I know.”

“You and Brie didn’t have children.”

“We... she said she didn’t want to raise a child if we didn’t have a home. A real home. Not one fixer-upper after another. Something stable. It was one of the issues we were working on.”

“Well, what we have here, I think this is a home, and it looks like I’m going to have a baby in it. That’s why this can’t be happening. I need to know you’re with me. Totally. All these things I learned about you today, they’re... God, they’re pretty fucking unsettling, is what they are. But even though you’ve kept so much from me, I believe, in my heart, that I know you. That I know the kind of man you are. I’m willing... I was going to say forgive. I don’t know that I’m there yet and I don’t know when I will be. But I want to move past this, so long as you’re totally honest with me going forward.”

“I will be,” I said.

“I feel like I’m walking along the edge of a cliff,” she said. “Any second now, I’m going to fall.”

I dragged my chair around the table until it was butted up next to hers, put my arm around her, and held her close.

“I’m telling you, we’re going to be okay.”

“You’re a good man,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I see how you are with Tyler. How patient you are. You’re not pushing things with him. He needs time.”

“I know.”

“He’s never going to see you like you’re his father. But a big brother, maybe. A mentor.”

“I’m giving it my best shot,” I said.

“Tyler’s not perfect.”

“Maybe that’s something he and I have in common.”

“Please tell me this is just a blip. That this, whatever this is, that it’s going to pass.”

“It will,” I assured her, putting my arm around her. I felt her softening in my arms, accepting my comfort.

I added, “Look, if it really was Brie, she’d call me, wouldn’t she? She’d get to a phone and she’d call me and say, hey, guess who’s back in town.”

That was when the phone in my pocket started to ring.

Nineteen

Albert and Isabel entered their mother’s hospital room quietly. They had brought someone with them. And it wasn’t Isabel’s husband, Norman.

Elizabeth had been taking a break from watching the news, her endless flipping through CNN and MSNBC and Fox, thinking that the world she was leaving was in a much bigger mess than the one she came into. She thought back to when she worked in newspapers, tried to remember if the country was ever in as bad a shape as it was now. Sure, she edited and slapped headlines on countless stories involving unimaginable heartache. But at least back then it seemed as though they were spaced out some. You didn’t have a mass shooting every day. There weren’t kids in cages. A pandemic hadn’t brought the nation’s hospitals to breaking point. You didn’t have political parties making excuses for domestic terrorists.

Maybe Isabel had been right the last time she was here, making her turn off the damn TV.

But now she was back, with her brother and this other man. Her eyebrows went up a notch at the sight of the stranger.

“Hey, Mom,” Isabel said. “This is someone we’d like you to meet. This is Max. Max, this is our mother, Elizabeth.”

Max stepped forward and, tentatively, extended a hand. Elizabeth placed her bony fingers into his palm and he gave them the gentlest of squeezes.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you a doctor?”

“Um, no,” Max said.

It had been nearly two hours since Albert, Isabel, and Norman had stood in the parking lot, wondering whether to go back to their mother’s room and tell her that they had seen a woman they thought could be Brie.

Albert, initially, thought it was a good idea to head straight up there and break the news. But Isabel was worried about giving their mother any false hope that their sister might still be alive.

Norman agreed. “You can’t go raising her spirits on something as flimsy as this. We saw that woman from several floors away. It could have been anybody.”

“Maybe a false hope is better than none,” Albert said.

But then he made the point that their mother might not even believe them. She was, after all, a hardened skeptic. She’d think they’d made it all up, that it was some cheap ploy to make her feel better, to boost her spirits in the time that she had left.

“But what if it was somebody other than us?” Albert had said. “Not a relative.”

“The neighbor,” Isabel had said. “Someone without a personal reason for wanting to give Mom some good news.” The detective, without getting into details, had said a former neighbor of Brie’s had reported seeing someone who looked like her.

“We have to find that person,” Albert said.

So Albert and Isabel had driven to Mulberry Street and found Max, who confirmed he was the one who’d called Detective Hardy about what he’d witnessed. (Norman had felt that they could handle this mission without him, and went home to check on their son and daughter, both in their mid-teens.)

Albert had asked Max whether he’d be willing to accompany them to the hospital and tell their mother what he’d seen. He’d be a more credible witness, Albert and Isabel argued. Not only would he have no reason to lie to Elizabeth, he’d gotten a much closer look at this woman than Albert and Isabel had from the hospital window.

With some reluctance, he agreed.

And now he was standing next to Elizabeth’s bed, but it was Albert who set the stage for the story he was about to tell.

“Mother,” said Albert, “there’s been something of a development today with regard to Brie.”

Elizabeth sat up in bed, surprisingly quickly, considering her health. Her face was a plane crash, every fold in her aging skin diving in anticipation of bad news.

“Oh God,” she said. “They found her.” And by her expression, it was obvious Elizabeth feared it was her daughter’s body that had been found.

Isabel jumped in. “No, Mom, it’s not like that. Just wait. Listen to what Max has to say, and then... then Albert and I have something to tell you as well.”

Albert turned to Max. “Over to you.”

Max told his tale. Elizabeth listened carefully and without interruption. When Max was done, she nodded thoughtfully.

“I see,” she said. “I have a few questions.”

“Of course,” Max said.

“How much distance was there between you and this woman?”

“I would guess maybe thirty, forty feet.”

“Do you drink?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you drink, Max? Had you been drinking the night before?”

“A couple of beers, maybe.”

“If, hypothetically, my daughter were to call you on the phone, out of the blue, would you recognize her voice?”

“Uh, well—”

Albert felt a need to step in. “You’ll have to excuse my mother, Max. Her background’s in journalism and fact-checking and always getting it right.”

Elizabeth shot her son a look. “Don’t apologize on my behalf.” She focused on Max again. “Would you know her voice?”

“I don’t suppose I would. But this woman didn’t not sound like Brie, if you know what I mean.”

Elizabeth’s expression turned sour. “Did you get a look at the license plate on the car?”

“No.”

“Did she call you by name, like she knew you?”

“No.”

Elizabeth found the strength to lift her hands six inches off the bed and wave them dismissively. “Thank you, Max.”

“There’s more,” Albert said.

He told her what he and Isabel and Norman had witnessed from the window, and how they had then raced down there to try to find the woman who had waved to them.

“But you didn’t find her,” Elizabeth said.

“We didn’t,” Isabel said.

“And you saw her from this window, which would have been a lot farther away than Max here was from her, if it was the same person.”

“True,” Albert said. “But—”

“Stop,” Elizabeth said. She appeared exhausted. “I don’t know what you expect me to think. It’s just... I don’t know. If only one of you had managed to get a picture.”

“Oh,” said Max. “I have a picture.”

The room went quiet as Elizabeth looked at him. “You have a picture?”

He got out his phone. “Our neighbor, Brian, the one who built the new house on the lot, has a security camera. Before I came over here I went over to see him and he gave me a screen capture—”

“A what?”

“A photo of what the security camera picked up,” Max said.

He brought the image up onto the phone’s screen and handed it to Elizabeth. She fumbled about under her covers for a pair of glasses, found them, and slipped them on.

“These don’t work that well for me anymore,” she said. “But let me have a look.” She still sounded skeptical as she touched the screen.

“What happened?” she asked, flustered. “What did I do?”

“It’s okay,” Max said. “You probably touched something you shouldn’t have.” He took the phone, found the image again, and held it out to her.

Elizabeth took a moment to focus. “It’s hard to see.”

Max took the phone back from her once again, this time using his thumb and index finger to enlarge the image. This time, he held it in front of Elizabeth so she wouldn’t have to touch the image and possibly disrupt it somehow.

“What do you think, Mom?” Albert asked.

His mother was silent for several seconds. She put her hand to her lips and held them there, as though trying to stop herself from saying what she wanted to say.

“Mom?” said Isabel.

Elizabeth took her hand away. When she spoke, her voice was no more than a whisper.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s Brie.”

Twenty

Andrew

The ringing of my phone had startled both of us, considering I’d just told Jayne that if Brie were still alive, she’d call. We both must have looked as though we’d heard an ominous sound in the basement. I felt my heart skip a beat.

I got out my phone and looked, first, at the screen. Nothing. The caller ID was blocked. Jayne had raised her head, trying to see who the caller was, so I turned the phone so she could see for herself. By this point, it had rung four times.

“Are you going to answer it?” she asked.

I nodded, tapped the screen, and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello?” I said.

Nothing.

“Hello?” I said again.

“Is it her?” Jayne asked. “Is it Brie?”

I wasn’t going to ask that question, but I allowed whoever was on the other end another five seconds to say something, anything. When no one spoke, I finally ended the call.

“Who was it?” Jayne asked.

“Nobody.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, they didn’t say anything. It was probably a nuisance call, like, from a telemarketer or something. Or someone threatening to come arrest me because I haven’t paid my taxes. I hear that half the time, when you answer, these scammers are still busy annoying someone else and never get to you. I’m sure that’s all it was.”

Jayne did not look convinced.

“Honestly,” I said, “I’m sure it was—”

The phone, still in my hand, rang again, causing us both to jump for a second time.

“Jesus,” I said. This time, however, there was a name on the screen. GREG. I answered. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Greg said. “Thought I’d check in, see if you knew anything more than you did a few hours ago.”

“No,” I said, looking at Jayne.

Jayne mouthed the words “Who is it?” and I mouthed my friend’s name.

She whispered back, “What does he want?”

“Hang on,” I said to Greg, then put my hand over the bottom half of the phone. “I went to talk to him. About this morning.”

“You talked to him before you talked to me?” she asked.

“I wanted his take, to—”

“Hello?” Greg said. “You there?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” I said.

Jayne was visibly pissed, no doubt because I had talked to Greg before I’d come clean with her. She pushed back her chair, stood, and walked out of the kitchen.

“Shit,” I said under my breath.

“What?” Greg said.

“Nothing. Just... not a good time.” I heard the front door open and close.

“Sorry, but I had a thought and wanted to pass it along.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” he said. “Because you’re my friend, no matter what, and I’ve got your back regardless, you know? I mean, I’ve always been straight with you, haven’t I?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I think you need to be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have the cops been around to visit you?”

“That detective, the one that gave me such a hard time back when it happened, came by when I was out. Remember her?”

“Yeah, I remember her. So if she’s coming to see you, have your guard up.”

“I’m not reading you, Greg.”

There was a pause. “It could be a trap.”

“A trap?”

“Yeah.”

I stood and walked out of the kitchen and to the living room window, wondering if Jayne was out front. “What do you mean, a trap?”

“Look, the odds that it was really Brie are like a million-to-one, right? But I’m thinking, you’re supposed to think it’s her.”

“And who would want to make me think that?”

“The police. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you did it. That you did something to Brie.”

“For fuck’s sake, Gre—”

“Hear me out, man. But that’s what this detective has always believed. So, if Brie suddenly shows up, that’s designed to put you on edge. Throw you off your game.”

“Greg, you can’t—”

“I’m almost done. If you’re the killer, suddenly you start doubting yourself. You go check and see if the body is where you left it. Like, say, in some concrete foundation or in the wall of a building. And when you do, bam! Hardy’s waiting for you like Columbo.”

I sighed. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Agreed. But I bet they’re watching you. Probably got a tracker on your car. And they’re clever, letting it be your old neighbor who sees her. Knowing he’ll call you. Maybe he’s even in on it.”

I said nothing.

“You still there?”

“I’m still here.”

“The thing is, Andy, I’ve got your back. Always have, always will. No matter what you’ve done.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was silence at the other end.

“Greg?”

“You don’t remember,” he said.

“Don’t remember what?”

“I mean, it’s not a surprise that you wouldn’t. You were so shit-faced at the time.”

I remained at the window, wondering if Jayne was still on the property, or whether she’d gone for a walk.

“What are you talking about?” I was starting to lose patience with my friend.

“That night I came over, found you sitting in the tub, taking a bath in your piss and vomit. The night you finally decided you had to get it together.”

“I haven’t forgotten that.”

“But I guess you forgot what you said to me.”

“What did I say, Greg?”

Another pause. “You said, ‘It’s all my fault.’ You said, ‘I fucked up.’ I asked you, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And you said, ‘Brie.’ But I never told a soul you said that. Never told that detective.”

An unmarked car came to stop out front of the house. Detective Marissa Hardy had returned.

“I’m gonna have to get back to you, Greg,” I said, and ended the call.

Twenty-One

When Tyler had wandered into the kitchen and found that police detective there, he thought, Holy shit.

His first assumption had been that she was there because of what he and Cam had been up to the night before. They’d done a little more than get ripped on some vodka. They’d wandered into one of the local cemeteries and, putting their combined weight behind the effort, managed to knock over half a dozen gravestones.

They’d gone to the cemetery only intending to get drunk, but then Cam had begun speculating on how hard it would be to knock over one of those marble slabs, and one thing led to another and whaddya know, it wasn’t that hard at all. At least, not with some of the smaller ones. After they’d dropped the sixth one, they saw some headlights at the entrance and, figuring it might be the police, beat it the hell out of there.

Even before that lady cop showed up at the house, he’d been worrying that he was going to get caught. Maybe there were surveillance cameras at the cemetery. Or, if not actually on the property, they might have been caught on some security video from a nearby business.

So when it turned out the detective wasn’t there about that, Tyler was mostly relieved, although he wondered if it was possible that she was there about his aunt Clara. But that had all been sorted out. The police got called but she didn’t press charges and that was the end of it. Tyler left the kitchen reasonably sure that the cop being in the kitchen had nothing to do with him.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.

So he went back upstairs to his bedroom, which was located directly over the kitchen, and if you put your ear close to the radiator grille on the floor, you could hear conversations down there pretty clearly.

When Andrew and his sister were down there, he’d hear the soft murmuring of their voices when he was sitting at the desk in his room, but what they had to say didn’t usually interest Tyler. Just boring shit, like who was going to pick up what at the store or how work was going, or what they might watch that night on Netflix. Stuff Tyler couldn’t give a rat’s ass about.

But this was different. It wasn’t every day you had a police detective in the house.

So Tyler closed his bedroom door and stretched out on the floor, on his back, his right ear near the floor heating vent, and looked at the ceiling.

What a fucking eye-opener.

Andrew Carville was actually Andrew Mason, and he was married to a woman named Brie, and this Brie chick had gone missing six years ago.

After the cop left, Tyler grabbed his laptop and entered several key words into the browser’s search field. Words like missing and Brie and Andrew Mason.

All sorts of stories came up, and not just newspaper accounts, but video from various TV stations. Most of the results were from more than five years ago. There were only a few more recent stories, whatever-happened-to kinds of pieces.

Tyler couldn’t find any story to suggest Andrew had been charged with anything. Brie’s disappearance remained a mystery. A cold case.

Whoa.

He was still reading stories when he heard Andrew come home from wherever he had been. Tyler got back into position, listening to the conversation between Andrew and Jayne.

Man oh man oh man.

He told her everything. Well, at least it sounded like he’d told her everything. Tyler kept trying to send his sister a telepathic message: “Ask him if he killed her!”

But Jayne never asked him a direct question like that and Tyler figured that was because it never even occurred to her that he might be guilty. Either that, or she was scared shitless about what he might say.

Tyler wasn’t sure how he felt. If the police had the goods on the guy, they’d have arrested him, right? Then again, if they couldn’t find a body, maybe they couldn’t prove it.

But all that went out the window if Brie had actually returned. Tyler had seen plenty of photos of Brie while he did his research, and he had to admit there was more than a passing resemblance between her and the woman he had seen in the photo on the detective’s phone. So if she was back, then Andrew wasn’t some bad guy, right? And that would be a good thing, because you didn’t want your knocked-up sister falling in love with some dude who’d killed his wife.

Speaking of which, Jayne had told Andrew what she had whispered into Tyler’s ear a couple of hours earlier. The news that she was pregnant.

Man, what a shit show.

Tyler could only begin to imagine how fucked up his sister must be feeling. It was one bombshell after another. And Tyler was wondering just how he should feel. What, if anything, should he be doing about this?

The thing was, he’d never had much problem making his sister feel guilty about never really being there for him when he was growing up. But he also knew, in his heart, that it really wasn’t her fault. She was already starting high school when he was born. By the time he reached that level of education, she was already out of college and had a job. Jayne couldn’t help it that their parents made something of a miscalculation the night he was conceived, probably thinking pregnancy was no longer in the offing for them, maybe getting a bit careless about taking precautions.

Tyler really did love his sister, had always looked up to her. From afar much of the time. And he knew she’d taken a chance, bringing him into this home, running the risk of ruining this good thing she had going with Andrew. Well, until today, that is. Everything was looking a little shaky today.

And Tyler had to admit that Andrew didn’t seem like that bad a guy. Tyler knew he’d been kind of a dick in his dealings with his sister’s boyfriend. It was almost like he didn’t want to be friends with him. Tyler was pretty good at pushing people away these days, even before his dad died shoveling snow.

That was supposed to be my job.

No sense getting close to people, Tyler reasoned, because it was inevitable that you were going to disappoint them.

Tyler acknowledged, to himself, that he might need to work on his attitude. Jayne wasn’t kidding when she said this place was his second chance.

He’d fucked things up big-time when he went to live with Aunt Clara after his father’s death. All that anger he was feeling, all that guilt, it was only a matter of time before he lost it. Clara, always trying to get him to talk about his feelings. Always asking how he was. Did he want to talk about losing his father? How are you today? Any better than yesterday? You know I’m here for you if there’s anything you want to talk about? They say that time heals all wounds. Did you know that? Things that hurt us only make us stronger.

He was listening to what he thought of as “Claratherapy” when he just couldn’t take it anymore. “Shut up! Just shut up and leave me alone!” he’d shouted at her. And then he took the drinking glass in his hand and slammed it down so hard on the table that it shattered. Right in his fucking hand. Got a nasty cut on his palm.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

One tiny little shard went flying. Right into Aunt Clara’s left eye.

She threw a hand over her eye and screamed.

“Oh shit!” Tyler said, and, wrapping a dish towel around his palm to stanch the blood flow, got his aunt to open her eye so that he could have a look. Thinking maybe he could get the glass out himself.

“Don’t touch it!” she shouted.

So Tyler ordered up an Uber and rushed her to the hospital. The staff in the emergency room wouldn’t stop asking questions about how Clara had been injured. The fact that she wouldn’t say led them to think the worst, and they called the police.

“I never threw it at her,” Tyler told the investigating officer. “I wasn’t aiming for her. It was a fluke.”

Clara didn’t lose her sight, but she had a bandage over that eye for the better part of three weeks. Clara, bless her, didn’t want her nephew hauled off to juvenile court or anything, but the authorities pressured Tyler to go for a period of counseling, some anger management shit, and he was pretty sure there remained a file on him back in Providence.

If he screwed up again, someone would dig up that file. If he screwed up again, even his sister might decide he was too much of a handful for her, the way Aunt Clara had.

And then where would he end up?

There’d be no Jayne. There’d be no Andrew. He’d end up spending the rest of his teen years the way his sister’s boyfriend had, living with strangers who really didn’t give a shit about him.

Tyler didn’t know how this was going to play out, but he knew how he wanted things to go. He wanted this mystery woman to be the real Brie. Tyler didn’t have a clue how that could possibly be, but if it did turn out that way, then the police, and everyone else, would know Andrew wasn’t a killer.

But he also wanted this Brie to decide she no longer wanted to make a life with Andrew. That’d mean Andrew would stay with his sister.

And when the baby came, Andrew would be there for her.

Me, too, Tyler thought. It’d be cool to become an uncle.

But if this woman was Brie, and she did want to go back to being Andrew’s wife, well, shit, what the hell was going to happen then?

Twenty-Two

Andrew

Detective Hardy backed her car up a few feet so that it blocked the end of the driveway. I guess she thought I was going to jump into my Explorer and make a run for it, which seemed kind of ridiculous, given that I’d never tried to escape from her in the past when things were looking pretty goddamn grim.

She got out of the car and smiled. “Caught you this time.”

“Sorry you missed me before,” I said. “But I gather you had lots to talk about with Jayne.”

Hardy closed her door and approached. “We had a good chat.”

“You never get tired of trying to ruin my life. My old one, and now my new one.”

“You make it sound like it’s personal, Mr. Mason. Oh, sorry, Mr. Carville.” She smiled. “It’s hard to get used to that.”

“Am I going to have to change it again?” I asked. “Have you already leaked a few juicy tidbits to the media? Am I going to have CNN on my doorstep by tomorrow?”

Hardy feigned hurt feelings. “I can’t control what the press chooses to cover. It’s a free country, you know.”

“I get this sense you’d like to make it a little less free for me.”

“There are matters still unresolved,” she acknowledged. “Brie’s still missing.”

“And I wish you would find her, or find out what happened to her. There’s nothing I want more in the world than that.”

Hardy nodded slowly. “Of course. I guess that’s why you hired your own private investigator to look for Brie, or started some big media campaign to get the public’s help to find her.”

I had done neither of those things, which of course was her point.

“You have no idea what I did trying to find Brie,” I said. “Maybe it didn’t include hiring my own detective, or mounting some social media blitz, but you know why? Because I was stupid enough, naïve enough, to believe you would do it because that was your job.”

Hardy winced, as though maybe I’d landed a glancing blow.

“It was your job — it’s always been your job — to find Brie, bring some kind of resolution for those who love her. And maybe if you hadn’t zeroed in on me as your number-one suspect from the very first day, you’d have opened your eyes to what else might have happened to her. But no, you make up for your ineptitude by accusing me of not being an amateur detective.”

I shook my head in disgust. “You have no idea what I did or didn’t do, no idea of the sleepless nights, no idea how many times I drove the streets at all hours, night and day, and wandered the malls and walked along creeks and searched everywhere I could think of. You have no idea how much I’ve tortured myself over this. I’ve wondered, could she be dead, and if so, how did it happen? Who killed her? But then I’d think, maybe she isn’t dead, maybe there’s hope, but then, if she’s alive, why hasn’t she been in touch? Why did she leave me? Why has she put me through this? What did I do that would make her want to hurt me this much? I mean, which would be worse? To find out she’s dead, or that she’s left me without so much as a goodbye. Answer me that.”

I was out of breath.

The silence between us lasted several seconds.

“Which brings us to today,” the detective said.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” I said, knowing what she had to be referring to.

“I’ve been doing a little digging,” she said. “You know, like, doing my job. The groceries she dropped were from the Stop & Shop in Milford’s east end. You ever shop there?”

“No.”

“Did you and Brie ever shop there?”

“Maybe occasionally.”

“Anyway, talked to the employees there, the folks working the checkouts, and no one remembered seeing her this morning. Of course, it’s pretty busy on a Saturday, and what with all that scanning and beeping, maybe no one noticed her.”

“Can’t you check the credit card receipt?” I asked.

“Saw the receipt from the bags she dropped. She paid cash. And then there’s the matter of the car.”

“It was a Volvo,” I said. “A station wagon.”

She smiled. “You know your cars. A wagon. A 2012 model, we think. Black. With what looked like a dimple in the hood, a little dent. Like if, you know, a baseball landed on it or something.”

I listened.

“The car didn’t look all that dirty, but you know what was? The license plate. Had some muck or something on it. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes plates get dirty.”

“Yeah, but if the rest of the car was more or less clean, why would the plate be the only thing that was dirty? Like this lady, whoever she was, or whoever owned that car if it wasn’t her, didn’t want anyone to make out that plate.”

“Sometimes people do that. To avoid tolls or tickets.”

“True,” she said. “Something deliberate.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Anyway, the make of the car, the model, its color, and that ding in the hood, that’ll help. We put the word out, folks out on patrol, they see a car like that they can do a check on it.”

“I would imagine there are a lot of black Volvo wagons in this part of Connecticut,” I said.

“Yup, no question. But you never know. We find that car, maybe we find that woman who was driving it.” She gave me a wry smile. “Whoever it happens to be.”

“You don’t think it’s Brie,” I said.

“I like to keep an open mind,” Hardy said. “But if it is, well, that opens up a whole lot of questions.”

“And if it isn’t, I’d say just as many.”

She nodded. “No argument there.” She pondered a moment. “But I ask myself, who would benefit if your wife were to be spotted around town?”

“I would imagine everyone who cares about her,” I said. “And, of course, Brie, because we’d rally around her, help her get through whatever happened.”

“Yes, but who would benefit most?”

I didn’t want to help her with this.

“No?” she said. “I think that would be you. If it began to look as though your wife was still among us, making mysterious cameo appearances here and there—”

“Here and there? Has she been seen someplace else?”

Detective Hardy waved away the question. “Anyway, if there are sightings of her, then you couldn’t very well have killed her, could you?”

“What are you saying? I’ve somehow staged this? Hired some woman to pretend to be Brie?”

“There has to be some explanation.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not it. I mean, why the hell would I do that? And why would I do it now? When Brie’s disappearance, I’m sorry to say, has clearly no longer been a priority for you? When most people, other than me and her family, have pretty much forgotten about her. Why now?”

“Good question,” Hardy said. “Maybe to convince your new girlfriend that you’re not a killer. Maybe she already knows more about your past than she’s let on. Maybe you need to put her mind at ease.”

“It’s been nice talking to you,” I said, and turned to head back to the house.

“One of these days,” she said, turning to walk back to her car.

“What did you say?”

Hardy stopped and turned. “One of these days, I’m going to get you. Maybe you’ve been thinking I’ve given up, but I haven’t. I’m just waiting for the right piece of evidence to come along, the one thing that will nail you to the wall. Maybe this is it. Maybe you’ve overplayed your hand, gotten a little too cocky. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.”

She walked off, got into her car, and drove away.

I didn’t go back into the house. I went into the garage, thinking about Greg’s theory, that the police were running a game on me, that Brie’s reappearance was designed to unnerve me, second-guess myself, go back to where I’d supposedly left Brie’s body.

With the cops following me all the way.

But to listen to Detective Marissa Hardy, I was the one behind this entire charade. I had someone out there pretending to be Brie to persuade Hardy, once and for all, that I had done nothing to harm my wife.

I was more confused now than I’d been all day. I was starting to wonder whether Brie really had returned, and was running a game on all of us.

And maybe that’s why my frustration level soared right up into the red, clouding my eyes with a bloody mist, but not so much that I couldn’t see the hammer atop my worktable. I grabbed it and swung it like a madman, over and over again, into the wood surface, leaving shallow, quarter-sized dents. The table shook so badly that a couple glass jars of nails slipped off the edge and hit the cement floor with a crash, nails and bits of glass scattering all over the place.

I thought I had my life together.

Yeah, well, not so fast, pal.

Twenty-Three

Truth be told, Matt Beekman was already feeling anxious and unsettled about this current assignment before he got the call, out of nowhere, concerning a problem with a previous job.

This latest gig had taken him all the way up to Hartford. Not that he hadn’t gone out of town before. About a year ago, there was a job that took him a few hundred miles away to Buffalo. In fact, that had been the last one he’d done before this. It wasn’t that Matt liked to space them out. It was more that this type of work didn’t come to him as often as he would have liked. He figured he only got the call when the A-list guys were busy. Pissed him off, but what could you do?

So when someone did have work for him, he jumped on it. He could always use the extra cash. Running the laundromat was keeping him and Tricia afloat, barely, but something unexpected was always coming up. Like when their fifteen-year-old fridge conked out last month. Beekman was pretty handy — he did most of the servicing of the washers and dryers at his business — but the old Frigidaire was toast. And Tricia was making noises about the kids needing new shoes. And had he noticed, she’d asked him the other day at breakfast, that their son Curtis’s two front teeth were sticking out, like maybe he was going to have buck teeth? They needed to get him to an orthodontist pronto for a consult.

Jesus fucking Christ, he thought. It’s always something.

So, a cash infusion was certainly welcome. A satisfactory outcome on this job would cover the fridge and maybe even the dental work.

The target’s name was Glenn Ford. No shit, just like the actor from years ago, the one who played Superman’s adoptive dad, Pa Kent, in the first Christopher Reeve movie. Not that many people today even knew who Glenn Ford was. Anyway, this Glenn Ford guy was a witness in a murder trial that was about to get under way. There’d been a little war between rival biker gangs around New Haven, and this Ford guy was some poor schlub who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw Wilson “Banger” Smith, from gang number one, shoot Delbert “Snooker” Bundy, from gang number two, right in the head.

Happened out front of a KFC, in the parking lot. Ford had just picked up a bucket of chicken and a side of slaw and was sitting behind the wheel of his Nissan Pathfinder. The windows were tinted dark enough that Wilson had taken no notice of him, but when the police showed up, Ford, a civic-minded individual — the dumbass — told them everything he had seen, providing not only a detailed description of Wilson, but the license plate number from his getaway car, which happened to be his wife’s Toyota Prius, she being more environmentally conscious than your average biker’s spouse.

Anyway, the state’s entire case rested on the testimony of Mr. Glenn Ford, so Wilson, through some of his associates, had put in a call to Matt to take care of things for him. Ordinarily he might have asked one of his biker buddies to do it, but the police were watching all of them pretty closely.

There was ten grand in it for Matt, so he said, “Okay.” Shit, if he’d been offered three he’d have done it.

The police hadn’t exactly hidden Ford away, although they’d taken some precautions. The first was the aforementioned surveillance of Wilson’s associates, the ones the cops believed were the most likely to do him harm. But the cops had also suggested Ford get the heck out of New Haven until the trial was over.

Ford was a writer who didn’t have to clock in to some factory or office every day from nine to five, so he could pretty much do his job from anyplace. Easy for him, but harder for his wife, who worked in a chiropractor’s office. But she opted to take a break from work and the two of them went to live with her sister, who had a nanny’s apartment in her basement and, as luck would have it, no longer any need for a nanny.

Ford and his wife had been pretty circumspect about their new living arrangement, but the bikers had gotten a tip from someone — didn’t much matter to Matt who it might have been — and were able to supply Matt with an address.

Matt had driven up to Hartford a couple of times to scope out the situation, get a sense of Ford’s routine. He felt there was a lot riding on this one. Do the job right, maybe more work would be coming his way. The wife left the house around eight every morning to go for a run that usually took about an hour, which was more than enough time to slip inside and kill Ford, but there was always the risk she might come back early, and then Matt would have to do her, as well. Then there was the issue of Ford’s sister-in-law, who lived in another part of the house. This whole thing could go south in a hurry if he wasn’t careful.

Ford and the missus left the house together midmorning to go to a local coffee shop. Weather permitting, they’d grab a table outside and chat while they sipped lattes and dipped biscotti. Again, not terribly helpful.

But in the evening, Ford liked to take a solitary contemplative walk, probably figuring out what he would write the next day. Matt didn’t know a lot about writers, but he figured they had to do a lot of thinking. Ford’s walk took him through a wooded area of a nearby park. And on the other side of the woods was a road where Matt could park his car.

Perfect.

So on his third trip to Hartford, Matt was ready. He dressed himself as a jogger — sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, iPod strapped to his arm with a wire running up to buds tucked into his ears — and timed it so he was running down the path through the wooded area as Ford was strolling along in the other direction.

No one else on the path.

When they were about thirty feet apart, Matt pretended to stumble, as though he had tripped on a lace, and went down.

“Shit!” he said.

And as he’d expected, Ford closed the distance, knelt down, and asked, “You okay?”

Which was when Matt took a mini-can of mace and sprayed it into Ford’s face. Ford let out a yelp as the mist blinded him, but he didn’t make noise for long. Matt made a fist and drove it into the man’s temple hard enough to render him unconscious. Then all he had to do was drag him into the bushes and finish him off, which he accomplished by straddling Ford and holding one hand over the man’s mouth while pinching his nose shut with the other.

Matt didn’t know quite how to explain it, but he liked this part. Was fascinated by it.

He’d be the first to admit he didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the mysteries of the universe, but he was intrigued by that moment when a living thing stopped being a living thing, and the power one felt at making that moment happen.

He tried to think of the word for it. A rush. That was it. It was all over so quickly. He wished he could make the feeling last a little longer.

A vibration from his muted phone brought him out of his reverie.

When Matt looked at the phone — one of two he had on him — he was surprised to see the name that came up. Not just because of who it was, but because the person wasn’t using a burner phone, or blocking the caller ID. There was the name, right fucking there. How would this person even have his cell number? And then Matt remembered that a few years ago he hadn’t been quite as careful as he was now, didn’t always have a burner as a backup. He’d learned a lot since then.

Matt took the call.

“Hey,” he said.

“We need to talk.”

“About what?”

“You fucked up,” the caller said.

“What’re you talking about?”

“Six years ago. You messed—”

“Shut up. Hang up. I’ll text you a number. Call it. A woman will give you my other number, and then you call that number, and not from your own phone. Think you can do that?”

A pause at the other end. “Yeah, okay, okay, sorry, I got it.”

Matt ended the call and shook his head. He called up his wife’s number and wrote:

Matt got out his second phone. The burner. The one he would get rid of on the way home. He waited. And with each passing second, his anxiety grew. What the hell was this person talking about? Fucked up what? It had been six goddamn years, and—

The burner buzzed.

“What?” Matt said.

“Something went wrong on that job. Did you even do it? Did I pay you for nothing?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She’s back.”

“Who’s back?”

“The one you were supposed to... you know, is back.”

Matt’s brow furrowed. “Back?”

“Brie. I’m talking about Brie. She’s been seen.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m telling you, it’s true. There are witnesses.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“I’ve seen enough to know this could be bad. Really bad. For both of us. If she’s back, if she’s alive, you think she’ll have forgotten you?”

Matt went quiet. His skin felt like a hundred spiders were crawling all over it. He hadn’t disguised himself, worn a mask, anything like that on that job. Just like tonight. What was the point? This wasn’t exactly a catch-and-release thing.

“It can’t be,” he said. “She was... she was dead. I felt... the moment.”

“The what?”

“I’m telling you, she was dead.” He paused. “She had to be.”

“You sound like you’re not sure.”

“Look, I didn’t do it in the house. Didn’t want to leave a mess. Chloroformed her, got her out of there, drove to the location, buried her. She was dead.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“I didn’t stay there.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“Why the fuck would I stay?”

“Could she have been, like, just unconscious when you put her in the ground?”

“Fuck, no. And even if she was, the dirt would have smothered her.”

“What if the second you walked away, somehow she dug herself out? Held her breath for a while. Like, an air pocket or something.”

“No way,” Matt insisted. “And even if, somehow, she got out, then what? She crawls out of a hole and goes on a six-year vacation? She go on a cruise?”

“Look, I don’t have all the answers. First step is confirming whether she’s alive. Second step is to find out where she’s been.”

Matt was thinking this was not good. This was not good at all.

“Maybe...” And now Matt was really grasping, trying to come up with any possible explanation. “Maybe someone saw me bury her. Rescued her, gave her mouth-to-mouth or something. And, you know, nursed her back to health.”

“You think someone else was out there?”

“If there had been, you think I wouldn’t have done something about it? This is insane. Maybe she had amnesia or something and just realized who she is.”

“You better hope she did get amnesia and still has it. She gets her memory back, she’ll remember the last person she saw before everything went dark.”

Matt looked at the dead writer. The day had been going so well.

“Where’s she been seen?”

“Milford.”

“Maybe she’s a fucking ghost,” he said. “My work doesn’t guarantee against spirits.”

“You better—”

But Matt had heard enough, and ended the call. He took a few deep breaths and let them out slowly.

He was so sure.

He remembered the moment so clearly. When her essence left her body. Like he had inhaled it. Before he put her in the ground.

Had Matt been mistaken? Had he imagined the moment? It was one of his earlier jobs.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

Looking down at the writer, Matt felt a wave of doubt wash over him. He was sure he’d suffocated the man, but what if he hadn’t?

So he scanned the ground for a rock that was equal to the task, picked it up with two hands, held it over Glenn Ford’s head, and made sure.

Twenty-Four

Andrew

I didn’t come up to bed right away.

Jayne and I barely spoke through dinner. Tyler was uncharacteristically agreeable, asking if he could get anybody anything when he got up to refill his glass with water, even clearing the table when we were done.

I almost responded sarcastically, wanting to ask him who he was and what had he done with the real Tyler. But instead, I placed my hand lightly on his back at one point and said, “Thanks, man.”

“No problem,” he said.

The miracles didn’t end there. As we were heading to the living room, Tyler said he was going upstairs to do some homework, some assignment that was due on Monday. This time it was Jayne who thought of making a quip, but she didn’t stop herself.

She looked at me and whispered, “Homework? On a Saturday night?” And then, as Tyler mounted the stairs, she called out, “Who are you?”

But Tyler was taking the steps two at a time and didn’t bother to reply. Jayne quietly told me she believed he was on his best behavior because she’d told him earlier in the day that she was pregnant.

“I don’t expect him to tiptoe around me for long,” she said. “But even a couple of days would be nice.”

We started watching one of the movies from the Bourne trilogy — I don’t even know which one, but they were the kind of movies you could drop into at any point and just let your brain go — but before it finished, Jayne said she was heading up to bed. We hadn’t spoken through the movie, and I knew she was not only trying to get her head around all that she’d learned about me today, she was annoyed I’d spoken to Greg about the supposed reappearance of Brie before I’d talked to her about it.

When I made motions to follow her upstairs, she held up a hand.

“It’s okay, finish the movie.”

I got the message.

Over the next hour, I puttered about, finally finding myself in the kitchen, staring into the fridge at a bottle of red. I wanted to pour myself a large glass, and then another, and another after that, but as much as I needed to deaden my senses, to round the edges of the day, I also needed a good sleep, and alcohol was not the way to go about it.

I finally went upstairs and entered our room quietly, figuring Jayne would be asleep. Her bedside light was off, and she was under the covers. But she was awake, eyes wide open.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied, the light from my side of the bed casting half her face in shadow. “Did I hear you on the phone earlier?”

“Nope,” I said. “Must have been the TV.”

“I thought maybe you were talking to Greg. Because clearly you talk things out with him first.”

“I’m sorry. He’s my friend. We made shitty business partners, but on a personal level, he’s always been there for me.”

I started to unbutton my shirt.

“I’m worried about Tyler,” Jayne said.

Of all the things she might have said, I wasn’t expecting that. “Okay.”

“He lied to me. He and his friend were hanging out in a cemetery last night, and there was a story online about some vandalism there. Graves knocked over.”

I didn’t have to ask her how she knew her brother had been there. She had told me about how she kept tabs on him.

“But tonight at dinner, I thought, maybe he’s trying to turn things around. He’s finally starting to settle in here, willing to give it a chance, but now...”

“What?”

“I asked you if he could come live with us because, first of all, I believed you’d be a good influence on him and that we could provide some stability. But now, well, this feels like a house of cards. Like it’s all going to come crashing down at any moment.”

“Because of me,” I said. “So this is about more than Tyler. It’s about you and Tyler.”

“It’s about all of us. You, me, him, and this baby that’s suddenly complicated everything.”

“It’s not a complication,” I said. “It’s wonderful news.”

“You didn’t look like you thought it was wonderful when I first told you.”

“I was surprised. But I’m not unhappy about it.”

Jayne did not look convinced.

I came around to her side of the bed, perched myself on the edge. I put my hand to her cheek and said, “I love you.”

Jayne said nothing for a few seconds. Then, “What if you have to make a choice? What if you love both of us?”

“Jayne, it’s not... it’s never going to come to that.”

“How can you know?”

I couldn’t come up with a reply.

Jayne said, “There’s no way this ends well, is there? I mean, if it’s Brie, then our life’s in total chaos. If it isn’t her, this detective never stops trying to prove you killed her. Either way, I could end up losing you.”

“No,” I said.

She turned her head away.

“We just have to see what happens,” I said.

“That’s your plan?”

“I don’t know what else to say. We can’t worry about things we’re powerless to change. Our priorities, as of this moment, are to make sure you and this baby you’re carrying are okay. And that we can make things work here for Tyler.”

I leaned in and hugged her. She put her arms around me but didn’t squeeze.

“Maybe I should... maybe this is the wrong time to bring a child...”

“No,” I said. “Don’t think that way.”

I stood, gave her the most comforting smile I could muster, and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I stood there, looking into the mirror, I had to concede that maybe Jayne was right.

There’s no way this ends well.

The last thing I did before I turned off the light was mute my phone and plug it into the charging cord I left sitting on the bedside table. A second after I hit the light, my phone lit up silently with an incoming call.

On the screen, the word NORMAN.

I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to talk to less than Isabel’s husband. So I flipped the phone over and got under the covers.

Twenty-Five

Norman was sitting in one of the two family room recliners, in darkness except for a dull glow from the phone he held in his palm, when Isabel tracked him down.

“What the hell are you doing down here?” she asked, flicking on a light.

“Nothing,” he said, tucking the phone under his thigh. He was in his pajamas, wrapped in a housecoat, his legs propped up, his upper body tilted back.

“I woke up, you weren’t in the bed. I thought maybe you were sick. Are you sick?”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Is it your stomach?” she asked, almost accusingly. “You buried your potato in sour cream. You know that can upset your stomach. I knew when you did it that you were going to have problems. Did you take some Pepto?”

“I told you, I’m fine,” he said.

“Maybe you should have some Pepto anyway, just to be sure,” Isabel told him.

He turned and looked at her. “Why can’t you ever just leave me alone?”

“I show some concern, and that’s what you say?”

“You’re never concerned,” he said. “You just look for opportunities to pick at me.” In a mocking voice, he said, “You had too much sour cream. Why’d you have that extra beer? Why didn’t you find a free parking space?”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Isabel said. “And maybe, if you’d been through what I’ve been through, you’d understand if I’m a little on edge.”

“Six years of being a little on edge is about six years more than I can take.”

Isabel found herself momentarily speechless.

“I keep wondering what it is that drives you,” he continued. “At first I thought it was an honest desire to get justice for Brie. That you were hounding Andrew because you believed it was the right thing to do. But I’ve decided it’s more than that. I’m not even sure you think he did something to Brie, that he killed her. I think you just need to shift the guilt you feel onto someone else.”

“How dare you,” Isabel said.

“At first I thought you felt guilty because you weren’t here for her, that we weren’t part of the search for the first couple of days. That if we hadn’t gone to Boston that Saturday night, if you hadn’t canceled plans to see your sister, maybe none of this would have happened. I still think it’s guilt that drives you, but not about us being away.”

“Jesus, Norman, you’re embarrassing yourself. You think you’re Dr. Phil.”

“You wish you could take it all back. All the things you said.”

“I have no idea what you’re—”

“Oh please, this is me you’re talking to. It was always a competition to you. Who was the smarter sister, the prettier sister. The way you talked about her behind her back, putting her down. Kind of like you do with me. It’s how you make yourself feel superior. But then when Brie vanished, you felt badly about all those things you’d said, all those—”

“I’m not listening to any more of this,” Isabel said, and started to walk out of the room.

But Norman wasn’t finished. “You know what I think? I think you’re hoping it wasn’t Brie that we saw today. That’d be the last thing you’d want. So then you can go on blaming Andrew. If it’s really her, you’d have to face her, come to terms with the contempt you’ve felt for her.”

Isabel kept on walking, flicking off lights along the way.

When he heard the upstairs bedroom door close, Norman took his phone back out from under his thigh and brought it to life. Still on the screen was an image he’d been looking at when he’d had to hide the phone from his wife.

A picture of Brie.

Maybe Isabel wasn’t the only one burdened with guilt, he thought. And you could mix in a dollop of fear while you’re at it. Fear that one day Isabel might learn the whole truth.

Twenty-Six

The nights were long for Elizabeth McBain, especially when she couldn’t sleep.

After all, when you were in a hospital bed, and spent your entire day stretched out in it, why should anyone be surprised when you lay awake half the night staring at the ceiling?

It gave her time to think, of course. Way more time than she needed.

So much to think about, when you were eighty-one years old. A lot to reflect on. One tended to spend far too much time on regrets, and contrary to what the song said, not too few to mention.

Starting with her husband, Jackson. Gone eleven years now. A long, drawn-out decline after a diagnosis of lung cancer. A heavy smoker, starting in his teens, he’d maintained the habit right up until his diagnosis. Actually, even after, because his lungs were so riddled with the disease that stopping wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

He lived the better part of a year after they’d discovered the cancer, but it had been a long year, the last three months spent in the hospital. At the time, Elizabeth kept thinking that when it was her turn, she wanted to go fast. A massive heart attack, maybe. Something that would kill her before she hit the ground.

And yet, here she was. One miserable day dragging into the next.

Elizabeth had managed to get through the loss of her husband with the help of her kids. Albert and Isabel, and, at least for a while, Brie.

With the kids married and out on their own, and now without a husband, Elizabeth had no need for a big house, and keeping it going on a reduced income was going to present some challenges, although she did make a few extra bucks doing some freelance editing. As newspapers and magazines started cutting back — staff editors getting the cut before reporters, in most cases — Elizabeth found her expertise in occasional demand. She did a lot of work for a glossy real estate magazine that was distributed throughout parts of the state. It didn’t pay much, but it was nice to keep her hand in.

Still, she hardly needed a house, so she sold the place and moved into an apartment not far from the Post Mall so she’d be handy to everything she might need.

Her children came to visit when they could. Albert had always been the most attentive, taking her to lunch every week, often popping in unannounced to see her. Izzy and Brie came by less frequently, but tried to make up for that with weekly phone calls. And it was always nice to have a visit with the grandkids. Andrew and Brie had no children, but Albert and his wife, Deirdre, had two — Randy and Lyla — and Izzy and her husband, Norman, had two in their teens, who were a handful but good-hearted.

Too bad about Albert and Dierdre, going through a trial separation. Elizabeth sometimes wondered whether she herself was partly to blame. Allowing Albert to tend to her so dutifully over the years had undoubtedly led to some resentment on Dierdre’s part. When Elizabeth’s husband died, Albert had insisted on taking her on a trip to Europe — without Dierdre — to help ease her grief. When Elizabeth’s cat passed, Albert was there the next day with a kitten. Elizabeth had always thought it was a mother’s role to ease a child’s suffering, but with Albert, it was the other way around.

It weighed heavily on her that both Albert and Isabel had troubled marriages. At least Isabel and Norman hadn’t separated. God knows she and Jackson had tried to set a good example. They’d been devoted to one another, always faithful. Even when Jackson had been on the road, back when he drove for a shipping company, she was certain he had never strayed.

Some things you just knew.

She’d made it a point not to pry into her children’s lives, but that didn’t mean you didn’t worry about them. What was that phrase? “I’m only as happy as my saddest child.” She knew Brie and Andrew had gone through some tough times. And when Deirdre wasn’t annoyed by Albert’s devotion to his mother, she had to resent the fact that he’d rather spend time on his theatrical projects than with her. Writing and directing plays was his passion. Who could blame him? Elizabeth thought. It had to be so boring, working in a bank.

And as for Izzy and Norman, well, if Elizabeth was honest with herself, it was Norman she felt sorry for. Izzy could be a handful. A complainer, a nitpicker, a proverbial dog with a bone on any number of issues. Relentlessly critical of her husband. She didn’t seem to understand that she had a good man in Norman and ran the risk of losing him if she didn’t change her ways. What kind of woman left a Post-it note over the toilet to remind her husband to pee straight?

After losing Jackson, she joined some clubs, attended lectures, took an online course in early American history, occasionally went into New York for an overnighter to see a show or tour a museum. (Albert was always buying her tickets to something.) There was even a man there for a while, a widower dentist who had retired and wanted her to tour New England with him. He had an Airstream trailer that he towed behind a Chevy Suburban big enough to have its own zip code. They went out on a couple of dates, but she took a pass on the New England adventure. She couldn’t stop comparing him to Jackson, and he came up short.

Life was more or less okay.

And then Brie disappeared.

As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, with no clue as to what had happened to her, Elizabeth came to envy Jackson. She wished she could have gone when he did. Jackson had been spared the anguish of Brie’s disappearance, the agony of not knowing.

Heartbreak, she believed, was worse than just about any disease you could think of.

Was there ever a day when she didn’t wonder what had become of Brie? Of course not. And who did she blame? Izzy had always been certain Andrew had killed Brie and disposed of her body somewhere. Elizabeth was less sure about that. But she thought it highly unlikely that Brie was still among the living.

Had she been alive, she’d surely have found a way to get in touch.

But then came today’s developments. Elizabeth didn’t know what to think, but she felt her natural inclination to skepticism being challenged.

That picture on Max’s phone.

Admittedly, not a very good image. Not sharp enough to say it was Brie, but not sharp enough to say it wasn’t. But it did look like her daughter. It was but a tiny sliver of hope. Nice to have at least that, when there was so little time left.

The cancer had continued its assault, tentacling its way to the far corners of her body. It wouldn’t surprise her, she thought, if she had cancer of the big toe. Staring at the ceiling of her darkened room, she chuckled. You found your laughs where you could.

Elizabeth closed her eyes, tried to get back to sleep. There were mercifully few noises at three in the morning. The occasional nurse walking in on her soft-soled shoes to check that she hadn’t fallen out of bed or gotten tangled up in her sheets. Sometimes soft chatter could be heard in the hallway.

She was aware, through her eyelids, of a brief flash of light. Probably the door opening. This was usually followed, within a minute, by a second flash of light, as one of Elizabeth’s uniformed nocturnal visitors departed.

But the second flash didn’t come. Slowly, Elizabeth began to sense that she was not alone in the room. She opened her eyes, which didn’t need time to adjust to the darkness.

There was someone there.

Standing over by the door. A darker figure silhouetted against a darkened wall.

“Who is it?” Elizabeth asked.

The person — Elizabeth was pretty sure it was a woman, given her height and shape — did not move.

She wondered whether she might be dreaming. Or maybe she was awake, but was hallucinating. A side effect from one of the many painkillers they’d given her. God knows they had her on enough meds these days.

She gave her arm a pinch.

I’m awake.

Unless the pinch was part of the dream.

“Who are you?” Elizabeth asked. “What do you want?”

The figure took two steps closer to the bed but remained shrouded in darkness. Elizabeth blinked several times, tried to focus. Definitely a woman, she had little doubt of that. Maybe five-three, five-four. But it wasn’t a nurse. The woman was dressed in black, appeared to be wearing a long coat.

The word caught in Elizabeth’s throat. “Brie?” she said.

The woman replied in a whisper. “I just wanted you to know I’m okay.”

Elizabeth struggled to pull herself up.

“No, no,” the woman whispered urgently. “Don’t do that. Stay put.”

“Where have you been?” Elizabeth asked, her voice breaking.

“Away.”

“But why... why have...”

“It’s too hard to explain. But I’m okay. I’m getting a few things in order.”

Tears started to run down Elizabeth’s cheeks. “I can’t believe it’s you. I’ve worried so. I never allowed myself to hope, not until now.”

Was there a smile on the woman’s face? Impossible to tell in the darkness.

“I love you,” the woman said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Come here,” Elizabeth said, reaching out a withered arm. “Come to me.”

“I... I can’t.”

Was she a ghost? Elizabeth wondered. If she could put her arms around her, would she dissolve in her arms like smoke? Elizabeth was certain she was awake, that this was not a dream, but that didn’t preclude a visit from the supernatural, did it?

“Are you... alive?”

A whispered giggle. “I’m standing right here, aren’t I?”

“I’ve missed you so much.”

“And I’ve missed you, Mom,” the woman said. “More than you can possibly know.” She glanced back toward the closed door. “I’m going to have to go.”

“No, please stay. Pull up a chair. Tell me where you’ve been. Tell me everything.”

“None of that matters. That I’m here, let that be enough. Visiting hours are over. If they find me here I’ll be in big trouble.”

“They’ll understand! Please, Brie, don’t—”

But she backed away and pulled the door open, allowing light from the hall to flood that corner of the room. The sudden brightness blinded Elizabeth and she instinctively closed her eyes for a second, shielded them with her hand.

When she opened them, and took her hand away, the door had closed, and the woman was gone.

Elizabeth twisted around in the bed, looked frantically for the buzzer that would send a message to the nurses’ station that she needed help. She found it, jammed it with her thumb repeatedly until, about thirty seconds later, the door opened and a male nurse ran in.

“Yes, yes, what’s the problem, Mrs. McBain?” he said.

“The woman!” Elizabeth said. “Bring her back! Stop her!”

“Woman? What woman?” he asked.

“My daughter! Tell her to come back!”

Calmly, he said, “Visiting hours were over long ago. It’s the middle of the night.”

“But she was—”

“I’ve been out there the whole time and I didn’t see anyone go by. You must have been having a dream or something. Here, let me get you tucked in.”

“But...”

“Shhh, now, you need to rest,” he said. “Get some sleep before they wake you at the crack of dawn for breakfast.”

The nurse gave her a patronizing smile before departing. “You have a good night, now.”