She went back to Facebook and sent a friend request to Katy Barnes, along with a message request: I am a lawyer in New York City and saw your post on the Wichita COP camp page about past abuse at the camp. I am terribly sorry to raise what I am sure is a traumatic topic for you, but I assure you that the matter is urgent. She left her contact information and hit send.

If Lindsay was right, and Hope’s childhood abuser had confronted her, perhaps Hope was in shock. Or hiding for her own safety. Or maybe the message Lindsay had received wasn’t from Hope at all. Maybe Hope was dead, and the abuser was covering his tracks.

Her cell phone buzzed, rescuing her from her own thoughts. It was the handyman. He was ten minutes out.

24
Tuesday, June 22, 2:40 p.m.

Hope’s computer was nowhere to be found in the cottage. Lindsay didn’t know what to make of that. Her best guess was that Hope had taken the laptop with her to the open house, but she knew its disappearance was another point on the board for the runaway theory.

A second, closer inspection of all the drawers and closets was inconclusive. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to find. The aftermath of a ransacking? It looked exactly as it had when Lindsay left after the move.

Her journals appeared to be untouched, lined neatly to fill the bottom two shelves of a bookcase across from the meticulously made bed. She knew that her friend had kept all of them, going back to when she was still at the hospital. Hope thought of the journals as a safe place for her to interrogate herself, trying to shake a memory loose from her old life, while documenting her efforts to build a new one. She joked that someday she’d use them to write a best-selling memoir when she finally knew who she was and could accept a royalty check in her actual name.

To read these personal thoughts under any other circumstance would feel like the worst betrayal, but to leave them unread in the face of Hope’s disappearance was unfathomable. Lindsay wasn’t spying, she assured herself. She was investigating. If the police had taken her case seriously from the outset, the journals would have been a logical starting point.

She opened the nightstand drawer to find a Tiffany-blue notebook in a butter-smooth calfskin, a Christmas gift from Lindsay last year.

The first page was dated May 15—the day Hope moved to East Hampton. Lindsay smiled as she read, remembering the hours they’d spent setting up the cottage together. She sat on the edge of the bed and flipped to the next entry.

May 18