A young man passed and she grabbed his sleeve. Her expression seemed to alarm him as she asked if he was staying at the hotel and if he could use his keycard to let her in.

He hesitated, but then swiped the card to open the door. Nic thanked him and he quickly left, looking over his shoulder. Wondering if he’d made a mistake by letting this lunatic into the room. Her breaths were short, her face flushed and wet.

She sat on the floor in the corner and let it out. She wanted a drink. The thought of going back out into the crowd was the only thing stopping her.

So she’s dead. So she left us. What now? She could still be found. Nothing had changed since she’d packed a bag and driven to this place. She had to find her mother and bring her home.

The room had a long table with four desktop computers and a printer. Nic pulled herself up from the floor and sat down in front of a large PC. She turned it on, opened to a search engine.

She typed them in, one after the other. The names spinning in her mind. Daisy Hollander. Roger Booth. Charles Watkins. Kurt Kent. Results crowded the screen, faces with the same name, but none of them matching in any way that was helpful. She narrowed Daisy’s search to Hastings and got nothing. Then to New York City, and got over thirty faces. She hadn’t asked to see a photo. Many of the women in the search could be her—similar age, description. And yet, probably none of them would be. If she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be blasting her profile on Facebook and Snapchat.

The focus felt good. Her nerves began to settle, the panic subsiding. She continued.

Kurt Kent was on the social media sites, and all of them were active but private. Booth and Watkins showed up on people finder ads. Most of those were scams and, anyway, she didn’t need their addresses. She knew where they lived. She needed social media sites, something that might give her a window into their lives.

Then, a thought about Booth. About his property and the fence with the hole.

She pulled up a satellite image of the Hastings Inn, zoomed out. It was taken in the summer from the look of the trees—full canopies of green leaves. She couldn’t see the fence behind the inn, but there was something on an adjacent property. A thin line running across a stretch of cleared land before disappearing again in the dense woods.

She zoomed out and tried to connect the line to other structures—a house or barn or another fence. But it was impossible with all of the breaks into the woods. Still, that line of fence, if it was a fence, bent away from the inn, not toward it.