When she’d finished, Carl turned and stared at the fireplace, or maybe at thin air in the middle of the room. For thirty seconds he said nothing. Then he stood and went to the sliding door, and looked out into the shaded back yard.

“I thought you might still have contacts in the FBI,” Danica said. “Someone I could talk to. Whatever this is that’s happening to me, I just thought … it would be safer this way.”

She watched him, in profile. Watched for any reaction. She wasn’t sure he’d even heard her.

“Carl?”

“Can’t be,” he said. He seemed to be speaking only to himself.

Danica rose from the couch. She went to where he stood at the glass door. For a moment he didn’t acknowledge her.

“After all this time,” he whispered.

“What are you talking about?”

He looked at her, at last. In the indirect sunlight through the door pane, she saw a sheen of sweat on his forehead. It hadn’t been there a moment before.

“Carl, if you know something—”

“Tell me again,” he said. “These two people who tried to grab you, you didn’t think they were doing it for their own reasons?”

“It didn’t fit. I mean, if I were a teenage girl, and they were a couple of weirdos, that would be one thing. But I’m not, and these two looked like…” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. “They looked like a prom king and queen who tied for valedictorian and then went to med school. They looked professional.”

“And you’re sure there’s nothing going on in your life that explains that—someone hiring people to abduct you. No ex-boyfriend who ripped off a drug dealer, no employer cooking the books—”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing like that. There’s nothing strange in my life. There never has been.”

Carl turned away from her again. He squinted at the glare coming through the glass.

“There has,” he said softly.

Danica stared. “What?”

“There has been something strange. In your life.”

In the silence, Danica could hear a lawnmower running, somewhere down the block.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

Carl ran his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “Christ,” he whispered.

“Carl, tell me.”

He was quiet a moment longer. Then he shook his head. “I’ll show you.”

He nodded for her to follow, and moved toward the back hall that led to his bedroom.

When Danica had last seen the bedroom, her mother’s craft desk had been in the far left corner. Her final stained glass project, a half-finished tiger, had still been sitting there a month after she died. No sign of the desk now; the tiger was probably in a box somewhere. It was hard to imagine even Carl Gilmore throwing it away.