Lindsay loved to linger at the real estate offices along Main Street in East Hampton, browsing the listings in the windows of Corcoran and Sotheby’s. Six-bedroom, nine-bath houses on two oceanfront acres. Old farmhouses brought up to pristine standards. Even a mid-century ranch slapped with some white paint could garner more than a million if it had room for a pool. Primo real estate porn.

But Evan Hunter, Hope’s under-the-table employer, was definitely not that caliber of listing agent. His office address didn’t even appear in his sponsored ads on Facebook and Instagram. Evan’s flinch when Lindsay stepped through the door made it clear he wasn’t used to walk-ins. He scrambled to his feet to welcome her with a handshake.

In person, he looked older and more bloated than in his online photographs, with thinner and more disheveled hair. Even so, if she were searching for someone to trust with a major real estate transaction, she actually preferred the real-life version to the slickster featured in his official headshots.

“What brings you in this afternoon?” he asked with a chipper smile.

Three unreturned calls brought me in. “My name’s Lindsay Kelly. I left you a couple of messages?”

He turned his focus to arranging the loose papers on his desk into tidy piles, avoiding her gaze. “Sorry, I was about to get back to you. It’s a nonstop crush out here in the summer. I drove to Amagansett just now only to have a client stand me up. Not even a phone call.”

“That’s so rude.” After Lindsay’s voice-mail messages went unreturned, she had tried another tactic, posing as a potential buyer to schedule a property viewing for eleven o’clock. Instead of showing up for the appointment, she had waited down the street and then followed him back here, to a storefront that she vaguely recalled had once been a liquor store. “But speaking of phone calls, I made it pretty clear in my messages that the matter was urgent, Mr. Hunter. It’s not like Hope not to answer her cell or respond to text messages. You could’ve at least let me know if you’d seen her or talked to her lately.”

“With all due respect, Miss . . .”

“Lindsay is fine.”

“With all due respect, Lindsay, you called me once Monday, and then two times yesterday, back-to-back, asking about an employee I’ve only known a month. It was a little out of the blue, and I’ve been quite busy today, in no small part because your friend went AWOL on me.”

“Well, with all due respect, Evan, some people might say it’s more than a little suspicious that you’d be so cavalier about the disappearance of a woman that you agreed to hire under a highly untraditional arrangement. I think this is the part of the TV show when the police start looking into your background.”