“Yeah. Tara. From Georgia. Southern Georgia, I think, yeah, some tiny podunk town. A Georgia Peach, whatever that means. I don’t know much about her. No one did. I mean I saw her a few times, but never thought twice. Then she ended up missing; no one really realized she was gone, for a while.”

“So that’s why no one rented the place?”

“Mrs. Calloway put it on the Internet and stuck the FOR RENT sign up, then Rylee Ames disappears. Now the missing girls are big news again—I can’t believe you didn’t know!—but by then, you’d rented the place.” She plucked a tiny feather off the overstuffed arm of the chair and let it drift to the floor.

The hairs on the back of Kristi’s neck raised as she thought about Tara Atwater. Had she really rented a space most recently occupied by a girl who was missing, who could have ended up the victim of foul play? Damn, what were the chances of that? Kristi observed her studio with new eyes. She asked, “And the police, they’re sure she disappeared…that the others disappeared, too? That they weren’t just runaways?”

“‘Just runaways,’” Mai repeated. “Like that’s okay.” She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know what the police think. I really don’t think they put the whole thing together until recently.” She let out a disgusted sigh. “What’s that saying about our culture, huh? Just runaways.”

Kristi thought about the latches and locks in her apartment that didn’t work. “So tell me about Hiram.”

“Irene’s grandson?” Mai shrugged. “Major geek. Into all things technical.”

“He’s supposed to fix the latches on my windows and install a new dead bolt.”

“In which century? He’s like a ghost, you never see him.”

“A techno-major geek ghost?”

“Exactly. Hey, if you’re not busy on New Year’s Eve, some of my friends and I are going to hang out at the Watering Hole. You could join us and y’know, ring in the new year. ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ funky little hats, confetti, champagne, and crap. The cover’s really cheap. Just enough to pay for the band.”

“Maybe,” Kristi said, acting as if her social calendar wasn’t completely empty. “I’ll see.”

The first notes of a classical piece Kristi couldn’t quite place erupted and Mai reached into her pocket for her cell. She glanced at the screen and grinned. “Gotta run,” she said quickly as she climbed to her feet. “Nice to meet ya.”

“You, too.”