He was shouting now. “Rose! I don’t care aboutThefuckingMorning Hour. We’ve got bigger things going on right now.”
I blinked, surprised at his tone. Outside ofthatyear, when we were all violent and angry all of the time, we had never spoken to each other like that.
“Have you heard from Hazel?” Tommy pressed, his voice desperate. “Pleasetell me she’s there with you.” I could hear his wife, Suzannah, and the kids in the background. It sounded loud wherever he was.
“What? No,” I said quickly. “Why would Hazel be inManhattan? She isn’t with Dad?”
There was the sound of something crashing to the ground and then a whine that must’ve come from my nephew, Felix.
Tommy let out a strangled noise. “Shit!”
My stomach lurched and I clutched the phone to my ear.
“No one can find her, Rose. No one has seen or heard from her since yesterday afternoon. She’s not with Dad. Or Mom. Or any of her friends …”
I felt my hands start to shake. Hazel was responsible. She always checked in. She went to bed early. She asked for permission even to go to a footballgame. She was the great hope of the Dearling clan. Hazel didn’t pull stunts like this. She wasn’t me.
“Is she visiting Will? Maybe?” I tried to say, my throat going dry.
Will was serving his sentence in a maximum-security correctional facility in Miami, an hour and a half south of our hometown. It was an easy drive, one that Hazel could have managed on her own at sixteen, but far enough that they might not have thought to look there yet.
“Nope. I already checked,” Tommy said impatiently.
It occurred to me that there was no one I would think of that Tommy hadn’t already. I couldn’t come up with the name of even one of her friends.
Tommy was still talking. “We’re freaking out here. The police are talking like she was abducted—”
“Thepolice?”I demanded. “You called the police?”
“We had to. It’s been over twelve hours since we last heard from her. We’re all at Dad’s—even Mom. No one can find her, Rose.”
I had stopped walking, frozen in the street by a familiar kind of fear. If both of my parents were there together, in Loxahatchee, so long after they separated …
“Her phone is here,” Tommy continued. “She hasn’t used her debit card. This is serious.It feels like …” He paused.
There was dead silence on the phone. Neither of us needed to elaborate. We were both thinking about eleven years ago, the last time a girl from Loxahatchee disappeared without a trace. The year that ruined our family.
“Tommy—” I started, my voice breaking in two. I could feel the two emotions battling for ground inside my head.Panic or fear.
This couldn’t be happening again. It couldn’t. The events of 2010 were anisolated incident. That’s what everyone said, right? Loxahatchee was safe. It didn’t have an unknown killer systematically preying on young women.
The thing was, I had never believed this narrative. I knew my brother was not capable of murder. But if Will didn’t kill Alex, then who had? I’d spent years following leads as research for my book, and still I didn’t know who the culprit was—despite mycreativeending. As bad as it sounded, I had been waiting for over a decade for a killer to surface. It was proof of my theory that the real perpetrator was still out there. And now, it was coming to fruition in the worst way possible.
“Rosie,” Tommy said as he let out a small sob disguised as a cough. I could picture his watery eyes, his pink cheeks. “You need to come home.”
2
Loxahatchee had changed.
When I was growing up, it had been a rural landscape forty minutes west of Palm Beach. It was swampy and secluded and distinctly blue collar. The kind of place where you could still build a brand-new house for cheap and keep an RV in your yard without endless bitching and moaning from an HOA. People had moved there for the quiet, the space. But now, nearly a decade since I’d last visited, it looked completely different.
Homes I’d used as markers for directions were sold and painted. Lots full of trees and shrubs had been cleared for construction, and average homes were going for well over a million dollars. A hotly contested gated community had been built on the outskirts of town, comprising large, tasteless houses for people who wanted brand-new everything but still wanted to feel as though they’d escaped the trappings of city life. It had made the area expensive, sending the older, more inflexible rednecks running for the neighboring town of Okeechobee. Dirt roads were paved. Restaurants had appeared. They even had Uber Eats now. My mother would have loved it if she’d stuck around long enough to experience it.
I didn’t have a problem with the changes. The locals I’d grown up with had been vicious enough to us that I hoped they’d been outnumbered and priced out. I hadn’t been back since I left for college in New Hampshire seven years ago.
My wrists locked as I gripped the steering wheel. It had gotten dark on the ride home from the airport, and despite all of its updates, Loxahatchee hadapparently still refused to get streetlights on most of the roads, making the drive more treacherous than it needed to be.
Deep down, I knew I had to havesomegood associations with this place. There had been family Christmases, picnics, birthday parties. I had the pictures and memorabilia to prove it. But they’d been superseded the moment Alex was killed. The painful years thereafter stuck out far more than any family gathering before.
