After they’d placed him on the gurney and wheeled him into the ambulance, Caitlin followed them—no sirens, just lights—as they drove what had to be less than two miles to a modern, rectangular block of a building that looked more like a building in an office park than a hospital. She parked in the visitors’ lot, then walked to the emergency room, where she was pointed toward a seat in the small, overly lit waiting area, a TV bolted into the wall playing CNN. She sat still for a moment, listening to the woman at the check-in desk talking quietly on her cell phone. One week ago, she was living in Boston, worried about how to tell her mother that her relationship with Dan was over, and wondering if her sister was going to spend the rest of her life chasing older men. And now she was here in Maine, waiting to fly with her sister’s body back to Michigan and accompanying a stranger to a hospital. And someone had been watching her room.

She was so relieved when she saw Detective Dixon walk through the double doors that she almost began to cry. She stood up and waited for him as he talked briefly and quietly with the receptionist, then he came into the waiting area. “What happened?” he asked. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Caitlin sat back down and told the detective everything that had happened that night.

“Why was he coming to your room in the first place?” the detective asked.

“He was just coming to say good-bye.”

“And he sounded sure that there was someone watching your room?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“Have you felt watched at all, since being here in Kennewick? Any sense of being followed?”

Caitlin thought for a moment. “No, not really.”

Detective Dixon was scrolling through his phone for something, then showed Caitlin the screen. There was a photograph—a mug shot, actually—of a scruffy-looking man somewhere in his thirties. “Does he look familiar to you at all?”

He didn’t, and Caitlin said so to the detective.

“How about her?” He showed her another picture, more pixelated than the previous one, of a blond woman with a round face. The picture looked like it had been cropped from a larger shot.

“No,” Caitlin said, shaking her head. “Who are they?”

Detective Dixon didn’t answer, because two more people had entered the waiting room: a curvy, middle-aged blonde that Caitlin instantly knew was Alice, Harry’s stepmother; and a much older man, maybe her father, with a bald head and a white mustache. Alice had her arm through his, as though she was unable to stand on her own. Definitely father, Caitlin thought, then remembered that Harry had mentioned an older man who worked at the bookstore, and she wondered if that was who it was, instead.