I smell coffee so it must be his dead wife who liked tea. He wants me to have some now. Maybe he wants to put my mind at ease—because there is no need to worry. He will contact my family. They will come for me.

As he turns to leave the kitchen, a thought rushes in and I call after him.

“My purse!” I say. “Is it with my clothes?”

He shrugs. Ponders.

“I think you left it in the truck. I didn’t see it last night in the house.”

I can’t remember either, but it’s unlike me to leave my purse. I carried it with me into the storm.

“Can you bring it inside? Before you go?”

“Sure thing,” he says.

He leaves the room. Alice and I make tea. I listen for the door, for the man to return with my purse.

But the next sound I hear is the truck driving away.

Chapter Six

Day thirteen

Roger Booth owned the Hastings Inn and the diner next door, and the fifty acres of land that sat behind them. The businesses shared a parking lot of cracked, potted asphalt. The painted white lines had all but faded. A parking free-for-all.

The inn was rarely occupied, as Nic had learned the last time she’d been here. It was mostly the diner that kept the business afloat. Booth lived in an apartment on the first floor.

He owned it all free and clear, a parting gift from his father who had been an executive at the pharmaceutical company before it closed. Booth Senior had managed to get out before the crash, retiring to Florida with his wife of thirty-two years. There was a sister, as well, though she had married and moved to Buffalo. Booth was left with the family’s properties and was the unofficial mayor of Hastings because of it.

None of this was information Nic had intended to gather, or keep in her head for that matter. But one of the waitresses liked to talk. So did the bartender across the street. The Booth family are the Kennedys of Hastings. That depiction had been dead on.

Nic parked in front of the entrance to the inn. It was a pristine, fabricated white farm house with a wraparound porch, one of the few with that style of architecture that sat along the road. Most of the original farm houses lined Route 7. The Booths’ inn was sadly out of place.

The diner, however, was true to form—a rectangle with a silver roof. Black smoke billowing from a chimney. Big windows. Neon sign.

They sat side by side, a small row of shrubs and about twenty feet between them.