“Not a clubber?” Chet crossed the room to a desk nestled between the dormers. He switched on a desk lamp.

“No.” Hannah remembered the evening at Carnival. The lights and music had been irritating. But she’d never reacted with dizziness. Maybe that neurologist hadn’t been entirely wrong. She sneezed again. Or it was allergies?

He grabbed a metal folding chair and opened it in front of a computer monitor. “That’s something you and Brody have in common. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a bar.”

Random comment? Or not . . .

Hannah scanned the room, her belly cringing. Magnetic whiteboards held dozens of images of a teenage girl with long dark hair. In some of the photos, she was looking away, her body projecting discomfort, as if she didn’t want her picture taken. In other shots, she clearly didn’t know she was being photographed. Handwritten notes accompanied each shot. There were pictures of other people as well, and Post-it notes or index cards full of scrawled annotations. A date in red ink headed each group of photos.

It was a timeline of Chet’s daughter’s disappearance, and the progress of his investigation.

Hannah brought her gaze back to Chet. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.” He leaned over and pressed the on button of the computer tower under the desk. The computer hummed to life. Behind them, a printer beeped.

“Why haven’t you been up here?”

Chet dropped into the chair. His gaze followed the timeline. At the very end, he’d scrawled “Happy Birthday” in blue. “Last March was Teresa’s eighteenth birthday.”

“So you stopped looking for her?”

He stared at his timeline, his eyes moving from entry to entry, the scrawled notes becoming neater and more detailed as his investigation wore on. “Teresa hit puberty, and she changed. She was a pretty normal kid until then, maybe a little shy. But from the age of about twelve, she became increasingly unstable and erratic. Her mood swings went far beyond any normal range, even for a teenager. The doctors diagnosed her as bipolar. We managed her condition with medication for a couple of years, but the drugs had side effects, and it was hard to get the dosage just right, the way her hormones were all over the place. She was nauseous and lethargic and didn’t want to take the meds. With the medication, she felt sick. Without them, she was uncontrollable. School was out of the question. My wife attempted to homeschool her, but really, her full-time job was keeping Teresa safe. Eventually, she ran away, from us, from the medications we were forcing her to take.” He paused for a few breaths, his eyes roaming over the photos strung around the room.