The reaction struck Sam as odd, but only a little; it was scary stuff to hear about. He stood from the chair and put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re not alone with this stuff anymore,” he said. “It makes sense to be scared. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I’m not scared for me,” Dani said.

Before Sam could say anything back to that, Dani turned to the third framed photo again. She pulled it closer to her, and stared into it.

“Coleman is Lauren’s last name,” she said. “It’s her father that disappeared. And so did she.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The room went silent except for the cassette recorder, still playing random office sounds. Sam could hear a dot-matrix printer screeching and droning somewhere in the background.

“I thought Lauren and her dad moved away,” Sam said.

Dani nodded. “They were moving away. They were packed and ready. I helped Lauren box up her room and put everything in their van, the last night I saw her. They were leaving the next day, but she said she’d come over before they left. I mean, obviously. It wasn’t like she was going to leave without saying goodbye.”

A tear finally overspilled her eye. She wiped at it, looking miserable.

“And then she did,” Dani said.

“What?”

“She did leave without saying goodbye.”

The tears were in her voice now. He could hear her pitch rising, her throat tightening. She took a deep breath and forced a bit of control.

“That’s what I thought,” Dani said. “I woke up the next morning and walked down to her house, and the van was gone. I knocked on the door. Nothing. They’d just … taken off. No goodbye. And you know what? It made sense after I thought about it. I imagined Lauren lying in her bed that last night, so relieved to finally be getting the hell out of here, getting all this behind her, and I imagined her thinking, Do I really want to stay connected to all this shit? Do I want to stay in touch with Dani? Do I want to call, or write? Don’t I just want this over with? I imagined her walking outside that next morning, and looking down the street toward my house, and feeling bad just for a minute … and then getting in the van and not looking back. That’s what I thought, until I heard this tape twenty minutes ago.”

On the recording, the dot-matrix printer finished. The sound of the keyboard came back in.