And Watkins had failed to mention he owned a dark gray truck. Now that she thought about it, so had Officer Reyes. And who else? This was a small town. Watkins must drive that truck when he is off duty. Up and down Hastings Pass. Day after day. Year after year. All of them would have seen it—Booth, Mrs. Urbansky. Reyes. Even Kurt Kent, the bartender.
And what about Kurt? He’d driven her all the way into thosewoods to meet Daisy’s sister, knowing about Roger Booth the whole time.
There was no one she trusted.
Was that true? Or was she just being paranoid? So what if Watkins drove a gray truck? Edith Moore couldn’t even be sure of the color. It might have been black or brown. And so what if Watkins picked up a prostitute one day, then helped teenagers with scholarships the next? People were complicated. She’d learned that from all those nights spent in bars. She wasn’t a sheltered teenager anymore.
Still, her life these past five years had left her with just one person she could trust—and that person was now missing.
What now? She thought about her car just outside. She could leave—drive straight home. Her father would come and collect her things from the inn. She didn’t have to stay here. There was nothing left to do.
The sea of humanity was all around her, coming from or going to the casino that was just on the other side of the lobby. So many faces—happy, pensive, worried, excited. The energy began to seep inside, feeding the panic that had already taken hold.
Maybe everyone was lying to her for this very reason. Because she couldn’t handle the facts. The truth. Because she hadn’t been able to navigate her life since Annie died.
She drew a breath but couldn’t feel it reach her lungs. It felt shallow. Suffocating.
They weren’t wrong. After that Sunday afternoon when she’d had that first drink, she hadn’t been able to go back.It’s just peer pressure, the school had told her worried parents after she’d been drunk at a dance.This will scare her and she’ll stop. After all, she had so much to lose. Williams College had offered her early acceptance. She was captain of the cross country team. In the running for valedictorian.
And then, after they’d found vodka in a water bottle she kept in her locker, the counselors had gotten involved.It’s survivor’s guilt,they’d said. That one she’d read just recently in her mother’s emails and it all made perfect sense now. How they made her go to therapy sessions where they talked about how she’d done nothing wrong by continuing to live.
After the third time when she’d passed out in the school bathroom, drunk off her ass, the month before graduation—her grades on free fall—they’d had no choice but to expel her. The new theory—she was looking for attention. She’d tried to get it by being good but it hadn’t been enough. Now she had to be bad. The horror that had followed was now a powerful, visceral memory. Therapy sessions with both parents, telling her they loved her and how sorry they were that they hadn’t noticed her suffering because they’d been dealing with their own.
No one listened to her about the hollow spaces that nothing could fill. They didn’t understand how they’d come to be there if not from some affliction out of their textbooks. She wished she’d had a film of it—of Annie running and Nic screaming and then the car and the blood. The dozens of missed calls on her phone from their mother, begging to know if they were all right. Why hadn’t Annie made it to her friend’s house for the playdate?
The look on Evan’s face. The image of their mother holding her dead child. The harrowing sound that left her body that Nic could still hear.
Guilt. Despair. Self-loathing. There were so many words to describe what lived in those hollow spaces. They laughed in the face of the counselors and their therapy bullshit.
And now she’d caused their mother’s disappearance with her wretched words. Gone or dead—there was no way around it, no thinking her way out of those scenarios.
Confusion. Panic—she had to get someplace quiet, alone, before people started to notice.
She walked along the side of the wall, head down, away from the entrance to the casino. There was a hallway on the other side with restrooms, elevators, conference areas. And a business center.
A young man passed and she grabbed his sleeve. Her expression seemed to alarm him as she asked if he was staying at the hotel and if he could use his key card to let her in.
He hesitated, but then swiped the card to open the door. Nic thanked him and he quickly left, looking over his shoulder. Wondering if he’d made a mistake by letting this lunatic into the room. Her breaths were short, her face flushed and wet.
She sat on the floor in the corner and let it out. She wanted a drink. The thought of going back out into the crowd was the only thing stopping her.
So she’s dead. So she left us. What now?She could still be found. Nothing had changed since she’d packed a bag and driven to this place. She had to find her mother and bring her home.
The room had a long table with four desktop computers and a printer. Nic pulled herself up from the floor and sat down in front of a large PC. She turned it on, opened to a search engine.
She typed them in, one after the other. The names spinning in her mind. Daisy Hollander. Roger Booth. Charles Watkins. Kurt Kent. Results crowded the screen, faces with the same name, but none of them matching in any way that was helpful. She narrowed Daisy’s search to Hastings and got nothing. Then to New York City, and got over thirty faces. She hadn’t asked to see a photo. Many of the women in the search could be her—similar age, description. And yet, probably none of them would be. If she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be blasting her profile on Facebook and Snapchat.
The focus felt good. Her nerves began to settle, the panic subsiding. She continued.
Kurt Kent was on the social media sites, and all of them were active but private. Booth and Watkins showed up on people finder ads. Most of those were scams and, anyway, she didn’t need their addresses. She knew where they lived. She needed social media sites, something that might give her a window into their lives.
Then, a thought about Booth. About his property and the fence with the hole.
She pulled up a satellite image of the Hastings Inn, zoomed out. It was taken in the summer from the look of the trees—full canopies of green leaves. She couldn’t see the fence behind the inn, but there was something on an adjacent property. A thin line running across a stretch of cleared land before disappearing again in the dense woods.
She zoomed out and tried to connect the line to other structures—a house or barn or another fence. But it was impossible with all of the breaks into the woods. Still, that line of fence, if it was a fence, bent away from the inn, not toward it.
Fences usually went in a circle or a square, closing off a parcel of land. It would be odd for the fence to veer off away from the parcel where the inn was located, even if that parcel spanned hundreds of acres. No—this fence did not enclose the parcel of land owned by Booth. It belonged to the parcel that sat behind it just like that person from town had told her father.
