“You may be the only one who can. I’m Vera Portman’s mother. I believe you two were…” friends? enemies? “…acquaintances?”

“Oh, wow. Yeah, Vera was…is…my best friend.” She relaxed her grip on the door. “Do you want to, like, come in? I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do to help, but I’ll try.”

I glanced at Cody. His eyes widened, lips discreetly mouthed a no, but what choice did I have?

“Uh, sure, thank you. This is Cody, by the way. My brother-in-law. He’s here for, uh…”

“Moral support,” Cody spoke up.

“You look like a narc,” said Blythe.

Cody chuckled nervously. “Do I? Actually, I’m a used car salesman.”

Blythe’s wry expression suggested that was even worse. “I’m just yankin’ your chain,” she said. “Come on in.”

Blythe swung the door wide and stepped aside, letting me, then a very rigid Cody, step into the entryway. She looked every bit the awkward and uncertain teen, now that we were face to face. I wondered if Vera, too, would have let a total stranger into our home. It didn’t matter. I was inside, and that’s all that mattered.

My phone buzzed in my back pocket. Without looking at the screen, I reached around and silenced it. Nothing was more important right now than this girl. Nothing more pressing than getting answers.

“Blythe, I’m just going to come right out and explain why I’m here. Vera wrote quite a bit about you in her journal.”

Blythe wiped her nose with her wrist. “She did? I didn’t know she kept one.”

“Yeah, and some of what she wrote suggested that you two had a fight of some kind? Maybe a falling out?”

“Really? No, we never fought. Like, ever. Why—what did she write?”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is if you have any idea what happened to her, or where she would have gone?”

A long-haired calico slinked up to Blythe’s legs, circled around her ankles in figure eights. Animal lovers? I suppose even serial killers had pets too.

“I mean, Vera told me she was dealing with some stuff at home, but she never said what. When she disappeared, everyone was shocked. Vera wouldn’t even, like, play hooky, let alone run away.” Blythe’s voice turned earnest. “Mrs. Portman, if I had an idea of where she went, I would have called the police and told them.”

I highly doubted that. Considering Blythe was a drug user, I couldn’t imagine her willingly approaching the cops for anything.

“So you have no idea what prompted her to run away from home?”