“This is exactly why I didn’t want her to leave Hopewell. At least there, people got to know her.” That wasn’t to say that every town resident believed that Hope was telling the truth about her condition. At least one cop, Sergeant Prescott Hanson, had made his suspicions known on several occasions, but Lindsay knew for a fact that it was because Hope had shot that jerk down when he made the moves on her at a party. As a general matter, though, the people of Hopewell treated Hope as a known quantity.

“You could report the car stolen,” he said. “It’s in your name. It would guarantee that any cop who happened to run the plate would take action.”

“Yeah, but the kind of action that would end with Hope getting arrested.”

“And then you wouldn’t press charges, and at least we’d know where she is. If someone spotted her in the car, it would be a way to have the police make a stop.”

“I’ll think about it.” Lindsay felt like she was running out of options. She still hadn’t been able to get inside Hope’s cottage, and Decker hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to help with that either. She had gotten the cottage owner’s name—Catherine Gondelman—from city property records, but hadn’t been able to reach her yet. She thought of mailing a letter that might get forwarded, but the cottage was on a street without mail service, and the post office had refused to tell her the landlady’s PO box number. Lindsay had sent a Facebook message to the only account she found under that name, but had received no response. She would have gotten into that house four days ago if Hope had gotten a spare key made for her, like she had suggested when they did the move.

“I’m sorry. I know how worried you are.”

She thanked her dad again for his help and went back to reading about the string of murders in Wichita, Kansas, when she was still a child. Her coffee was long cold by the time Scott emerged from the bedroom, wearing boxer briefs and a Yale T-shirt he kept in one of his drawers.

“I think that second bottle of wine got the best of me last night.” He moved behind her and dropped a kiss on the nape of her neck. “I heard you on the phone. Jimmy K?” Scott’s nickname for her father. It was a mutual lovefest between those two.

“Uh-huh.”

“Any news?”

It took only a few minutes to relay what she had learned, but she realized when she was done how gruesome her description of the Kansas murders had been.