Leslie had been abducted there.

Lance had died on a mountain road just north of town two years later.

Lauren couldn’t go to the supermarket without being stared at, talked about. She had been a constant presence on the television news there and in the newspaper as she tried to keep her daughter’s case in the public eye year after year. Every store owner in town knew her from the many times she had come by with a new poster for Leslie.

MISSING.

ABDUCTED.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

People had cringed at meeting her, first because they didn’t know what to say, then later because they didn’t know how to get rid of her. Over the years they had grown tired of seeing her, of hearing about the case. They couldn’t—didn’t want to—sustain the sympathy or the guilt that went with it. Unsolicited advice had gone from “hang in there” to “time to move on.”

Even the best of friends had suggested the latter. “It’s been so long, Lauren. Leslie is gone. You need to let go.”

Easy for them to say. Leslie wasn’t their daughter.

Sissy and Bump had been kinder. They had offered the house, supporting her plan to get away from Santa Barbara for a while. Or maybe they had wanted rid of her too. Out of sight, out of mind.

Whatever their motive, Lauren was grateful.

The house was located at the end of a dead-end road that reached out of town like a long finger pointing toward the purple hills to the west. It was a quiet, eclectic neighborhood. Most of the houses were older, and half-hidden from the road by overgrown bougainvillea and oleander bushes. The residents minded their own business. They had their own things going on. They lived on that street at least in part for the privacy.

A metal artist lived in a bungalow two houses down on the left with a front yard full of junk. An old hippie couple across the street from him had a huge vegetable garden and a clothesline full of tie-dyed T-shirts. Lauren’s nearest neighbor was a retired teacher from McAster College who liked to leave his windows open and played a lot of classical chamber music that drifted up the road on the cool evening breeze.

The Bristols’ house was the end of the line, a place designed for rest and peace. Behind the house, an open field of golden grass rambled down a little hill to an arroyo trimmed with a fringe of green trees. Beyond that rose the bony-backed range that separated the valley from the Santa Barbara vineyards and the coast. Lauren sometimes thought of the mountains as a wall, a wall that could hold the memories of the past few years away from her.

Or so she wished.