Safstrom’s columns on collecting had been published regularly, every few months, from 2005 until 2011. A news article in the Nassau Times dated March 2012 explained why they’d stopped: “Hermès Cruise Ship Passenger Remains Missing.” Forty-three-year-old Michael Safstrom had been on his honeymoon cruise when he went overboard from the eighth deck of the ship on its way to Bermuda. His wife, Amanda Quinn Safstrom, had reported him missing two days later when the ship reached Nassau.

Emily found his obituary, which ran in the Boston Globe four months later. It included the announcement of a memorial service at a church in Gloucester. There was nothing about burial. She wondered if his body had been recovered.

Emily pushed away from her computer, thinking. Four years after Michael Safstrom’s death, his widow, Amanda/Quinn, married Walter Newell, a man she claimed was so jealous and controlling that he wouldn’t let his wife bring so much as a photo album or a stuffed toy from her past into their home. And yet all over the house he’d displayed porcelain signs and magazine illustrations that looked suspiciously similar to what her first husband collected.

Similar to or identical?

For a start, Emily needed to take a closer look at those advertising signs, because how likely was it that a hyper-jealous, controlling husband would have allowed himself to be surrounded by items that had been coveted by his wife’s ex?

Getting into the Newells’ house wouldn’t be a problem. Quinn had given Emily the garage door opener and invited her to feel free to use it whenever. But Emily wasn’t about to spend another minute with Quinn Newell if she could help it. It would be much better if Emily got in and out of the house when Quinn wasn’t there. But when was that? Quinn didn’t have a job that took her out of the house. But she did exercise. Regularly. Emily remembered the morning vinyasa yoga classes circled on the fitness center calendar hanging in Quinn’s kitchen.

It took a minute for Emily to find the schedule of the local fitness center on its website. A yoga class was scheduled for tomorrow morning at eleven. It was worth a try.

FRIDAY

BEFORE EMILY WENT to bed, she had posted her stop-motion closet-sorting video to Instagram and Facebook along with a link to her website. When she checked the next morning, it had “reached” more than five hundred people and been shared by ten. It was nothing like the way her sock-sorting video had gone viral, but when she checked her email she was gratified to see a few queries from potential new clients. She forwarded them to Becca.