He was about to get out of bed when his phone on the bedside table began to vibrate. He checked the screen. It was a Kennewick number.

“Harry, it’s Detective Dixon. Sorry to bother you so early.”

“It’s okay. What’s happened?”

“I was wondering if you knew where your stepmother was.”

“Is she missing?”

“She is, actually.”

“I don’t know where she is. I’m actually not in Maine right now. What do you mean, she’s missing?”

“Well, she never came home to her friend’s house last night, and no one can find her. Her car’s at Jake Richter’s condo, but she’s not there.”

“I’m sorry. I have no idea where she might be.”

“We’ll keep looking. I’m sure she’s fine, but call me if you hear from her, okay, Harry?”

Harry promised he would, and ended the call. The mention of Alice jarred loose a dream he’d had the night before last. Alice, naked, in the window of Grey Lady, Harry watching from the driveway. She was tapping on the glass, but it wasn’t making any sound. His father was there as well, changing a tire on his old Volvo, not paying a whole lot of attention to anyone. The house was stirring, and the dream disappeared. Harry sat for a moment longer in the bed, knowing, somehow instinctively, and with complete certainty, that Alice, despite what Detective Dixon had just said, was not going to be fine.

Chapter 35

Then and Now

Once Alice went back to her bedroom—after Jake had told her he’d seen her return from the beach the night Gina drowned—she knew she’d never sleep with Jake again. That part of her life, the part with Jake, was over. Life was restarts, one after another, and some were good and some weren’t. Her life had first restarted when her mother got the settlement money and they moved to Kennewick. It started again when Jake arrived, standing over her on the beach, and she could feel the way he was looking at her. It even restarted after Scott Morgan told everyone at school she was a slut, and she decided it didn’t matter, that whatever they said couldn’t touch her. And now she would have to start again, because Jake thought she’d had something to do with killing her own mother, or letting Gina drown, when both those things had happened accidentally. They’d happened to her, not because of her.

Jake, in the days following, tried only once to get Alice back. She was in her room, the door closed, rereading Tender Rebel, a dumb romance novel she’d read many, many times. Jake knocked, then half entered, standing in the door frame.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

She held the book up. “Reading.”

“Thought you might like to read a little in bed with me. It’s lonely in there.”