I was glad my job was to be quiet then, because I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. Was I looking at the person I would become if we didn’t get Robert back? She was feral and simmering, either drunk or high on something. Whatever she’d taken, it was not enough to push down her quaking fury at her husband, at the police, at the awful state of not-knowing she’d been left in for six weeks.

I had a strong maternal urge to pull her into my arms, as if she were one of my own girls. I wanted to rock her and let her scream out her rage. I wanted to scream with her. It was all I could do to keep my face in the plain, interested shape of Potential Publicist, trying to get hired.

“Do you think he’ll be back soon?” Marshall asked. Her husband was the one we most wanted to talk to. He was a law professor, likely an ex-lawyer, and closer to Spencer’s age.

“Sure. I mean, how long can that particular errand possibly take?” She snorted at her own joke, then extended one arm in a parody of gracious welcome. “Shall we await him in the living room?”

The foyer had wide arches on either side, showing me a dining room with a formal living room across from it. They looked like stage sets for an updated production of A Doll’s House. Everything matched, perfectly. It was as if she’d gone to some upscale Rooms To Go and had them pack up entire staged areas for her, even the oversize stone vase and the painted wall fan and the mirror.

She started toward the living room but then paused, staring at her sofa and the matchy-matched floral chairs as if she’d never seen the room before.

“No. Let’s go back to the kitchen. I could use a drink. You want a drink?” She didn’t wait for an answer, though a drink was the very last thing she needed. As we followed her deeper into the house, Marshall shot me a warning look, though what he was warning me against, I could not fathom. “I hate that couch. I was pregnant when I picked it out. The house, too. It was the second house we looked at, and I said, ‘This one, please,’ like I was picking out an ice-cream flavor, and he bought it for me, just like that. His wife still lives in his real house. She got most of his real furniture, too.”

“I’m very sorry,” Marshall said, grave and truthful. I knew him well enough to recognize that for these three words at least, he was not in character.

We came into a huge kitchen with a dining nook and an open keeping room behind it. On the back wall was a stone fireplace with a large flat-screen TV over the mantel.