Caitlin turned north past the library. “I know. I just want to get a feel for the place. We won’t bother the residents.”

“There aren’t any. After the investigation, Doris took over the lease.”

Doris Chapman rented her missing daughter’s apartment to keep it intact, even two years later? Brilliant.

Lakshmi pulled a set of keys out of her backpack. “We can go in anytime.”

*   *   *

The Cedar Creek apartment complex consisted of six gray two-story buildings divided into clumps of four units, two down, two up—sixteen per building.

Lakshmi stepped onto a wooden-planked walkway. Caitlin followed, noticing several black-domed security cameras.

“Those work?”

“They added them after.”

Caitlin pointed toward another complex past the walkway’s end, maybe two hundred feet of thin forest away. “Is that the Villas?”

“Yes. There’s a path through the woods on the other side of the complex.”

Lakshmi opened Chapman’s door and stepped inside. Caitlin followed. She saw a room to the left, maybe fifteen by twenty, with a secondhand couch and TV setup, a cocktail table with two chairs, and a sliding door to a wooden deck. On the other side of the wall, a kitchen.

“It still smells like her,” Lakshmi said.

Caitlin hoped the girl’s memory, rather than actual senses, had spoken. The place smelled like rotten carpet and stale beer.

She walked the other way, saw a narrow half bath on one side of the hall, a longer full bath on the other, then two doors at the end, both closed. Caitlin opened the one on the right, found an empty room, no furniture. Devon’s room.

Lakshmi opened the door on the left and walked in. The pressure change rattled the posters on the wall. The whole room seemed ready to yell, “Welcome home.” Angela’s desk, an imitation-beech particle-board concoction, still looked new. Caitlin studied a plastic frame that held five photos: Angela and a soccer team—Lakshmi one of four in the shot. Angela and a basketball team—Lakshmi one of five in the shot. Angela next to Lakshmi at a party, a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other. Angela in a cap and gown with her parents, high school–graduation style. Angela seated in a tattoo parlor chair, showing off the new hummingbird tattoo on her neck.

“I come here sometimes,” Lakshmi said, quiet, like someone in a funeral home. “To be with her, to see if there’s anything I missed.”

Caitlin looked at the bed in the corner, a queen-sized mattress on a simple frame, the sheets a neutral cool gray. A two-year-old poster of the US Women’s National Soccer Team hung on the wall above.

Lakshmi continued, “I don’t know what I expect to find.”

Caitlin opened the closet, saw two rows of hanging clothes, shoes on the floor, a three-drawer dresser on the far right, a laundry basket on top. She opened the top drawer, found underwear, nothing too frilly.