“I found a house that no one wanted to move to,” Rachel said. Danny raised his eyebrows but didn’t prod any further. Rachel leaned forward. “What doyouthink happened to Nina Faraday?”
Danny’s eyes slid away from hers. Like any good cop, he didn’t answer directly. “Like I said, I don’t have all the information. I don’t know what was investigated, what wasn’t. I don’t know who they spoke to. But I think those boys knew something, for sure. Whether Tommy put hands on her, I can’t say. But my bet is he knew just exactly where she was. It usually is the boyfriend, you know. The boyfriend or the ex. Tommy was both, from what I understand, depending on the week.”
He was right, of course. Rachel knew from her brief time covering the crime desk for KWMC out of Detroit. People craved real mysteries—juicy suspects, major twists—but they were surprisingly hard to come by. Most crime scenes traced back to the same sad story. An angry husband. A jealous wife. Someone who needed money.
Most mysteries weren’t very mysterious in the end. They didn’t make for good stories. They were just sad.
Still, Rachel found herself strangely resistant to the idea that Tommy Swift was, after all, to blame. There was the issue of his alibi. Even if all his teammates had lied for him, she didn’t see how a random pizza delivery guy could be persuaded to get in on the cover-up unless he’d been bribed—or possibly threatened. Still, it seemed implausible; that kind of loose end tended to unravel with time.
Then there was the fact that Tommy had seemed devastated by Nina’s disappearance. He’d dropped twenty places in the national rank within six months; a year after that, he was kicked off the University of Arizona team, moved home, and got arrested for drunk driving. Meanwhile, his old teammates were flourishing. Coach Steeler had moved on to a lucrative position at Indiana State University. Tommy’s old friend Jack Vernon placed third at nationals.
Guilt, some people said. To Rachel, it didn’t quite fit. If Tommy had done something to Nina, if he’d murdered her and staged her disappearance, he wasn’t likely to be the kind of person who felt bad about it later.
But maybe Rachel didn’t want to admit that after sixteen long years, the Faraday mystery might simply die out with a whimper, relegated to the compost heap of obvious stories. In a weird way, she wanted more for Nina. Maybe they all did—the clamor of internet sleuths, the podcasters who’d come digging for remains, even the locals who insisted that Nina must have run off with a stranger.
Maybe they were all just looking for a better story.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Danny said.
“Sure,” Rachel said. “But I may not answer.”
“Teenagers go missing every day in this country. Girls turn up dead. There are hundreds, thousands of unsolved cases, and a lot of them aren’t sixteen years cold. So why this one?”
Rachel hesitated. She wondered whether to tell him the truth. She wondered whether she even knew the truth herself. Finally she said, “I met her once.”
Danny looked surprised, but only for a second. Just as quickly, his expression shuttered into a kind of attentive neutrality. “Nina?”
Rachel nodded. “It was only in passing. I didn’t know who she was at the time. My cousin put it together later.” It was at that same Halloween party, the one that Kelly had dragged her to off campus. She remembered the way the news had shuddered around the party when several high school boys arrived with their girlfriends. Swimmers, someone had mentioned.Sharks.One of them had some family connection to the host. Still, their presence leaned the crowd into unease. Everyone was afraid that the sheriff would arrive.
“She must have made quite an impression,” Danny said.
“She didn’t,” Rachel said. “But the Sharks did.” She was sure that Tommy Swift must have been among the handful of boys clustered on the front lawn trying to wrestle a drunk friend to his feet. She could still see it: the shouting, the urgency, the knot of teenage girls standing birdlike several feet away, agitating with nerves. She remembered the way those girls had eddied across the lawn when the boys’ coach arrived, the soft pitch of their voices explaining, excusing, asking for help. Rachel watched the whole scene play out from the hood of one of the cars logjamming the driveway. At one point after the crisis had passed, the boy on the lawn revived and the teenagers dispatched into respective cars, Jay Steeler had spotted her struggling to light a cigarette. She had never forgotten the cool way he slid his gaze over her bare legs.
You’re too pretty to smoke,he’d told her.
Rachel was drunk enough to be flattered.
After lunch, Danny and Rachel returned to the parking lot together. After the dim cloister of the Old Mill, Rachel was shockedby the sudden brightness, surprised to find the afternoon still intact, still puttering on busily without her. Danny offered to put Rachel in touch with a friend who’d covered the case once Nina’s disappearance had become state news.
“And Rachel,” Danny added after they’d already fumbled through an awkward hug. “You be careful, okay?”
Rachel reassured him that she would. Minutes later, back in her car, she wondered what had compelled him to say that. What possible danger could there be in investigating a sixteen-year-old cold case? She shrugged it off. No doubt Danny had made the comment out of a misguided attempt at chivalry. He seemed the type.
She drove home feeling grateful, and also guilty. She hoped Danny Wilkes would find a nice woman someday.
Lucy was home early, stringing cobwebs between a display of plaster headstones. They’d spent an obscene amount on Halloween decorations for the house. Lucy had sworn that she would start babysitting as soon as possible so she could contribute—ifanyone trusted her with a child after learning where she lived. Rachel had pointed out that the forty-five-dollar severed heads that Lucy had insisted on for the gates wouldn’t do her any favors on care.com.
“Guess what?” she announced as soon as Rachel got out of the car. “The podcast episode dropped today. I goteighteennew follow requests.”
“And you’ll say no to all of them,” Rachel said, hefting a bag of birdseed from the trunk. “I don’t want any strangers looking at your pictures.”
“Why does it matter? You barely let me post anything,” Lucy said. Rachel gave her a look. “Okay, okay. Fine. There go my dreams of a brand deal. Also, you got a letter. I think it’s from your publisher. For some reason they left it on the porch.”
Rachel set the birdseed on the back porch and picked up the letter addressed to R.C. Barnes from the mat. She barely registered that there was no return address.
Inside was a folded piece of paper with a simple typed message:We don’t want you here.
“What is it?” Lucy asked, studying her mother’s face.
