“Their father doesn’t communicate with me.” She closed her eyes for a second and sighed. “But I had to get in touch with him. I mean, what if the girls had gone there? So I texted his sister and she was going to call him. But have I heard back? No. No surprise there. He’ll probably think . . . oh, that it was some kind of ploy for me to, I don’t know, gain his sympathy or attention, but that’s just nuts. Hopefully Bette can get through to him.” She lifted her cup to her lips, then set it down before taking a sip. “Of course, I’ve contacted everyone I could think of. I left messages for the dean of students at the college. I spoke with the resident director at their dorm, Harmony Hall.”

“They’re still in a dorm?” At twenty-one, the twins had to have been older than most of the students residing in campus housing.

“Yeah, I know, most kids move to an apartment after their first year, and believe me the girls lobbied long and hard for their own place. They called living on campus ‘archaic,’ and—what was the term Zoe used?—uh, Machiavellian. But it’s the one thing their father insisted upon. If he was going to pay any part of their schooling, then the deal was that they had to stay in a dorm or a co-op or some other type of campus-run housing and go to school in the summer to make sure they graduated on time. I went along with it. Carson hasn’t been exactly generous with his daughters, you know, and he owes them at least part of their education. Besides that, I thought it would be safer.” Her lip trembled at the irony of it. “Turns out I was wrong. There is no safer.”

Despite the morning sunlight beginning to stream through the windows, a pall had settled over the house.

“What about boyfriends?” The Denning girls were beautiful and smart, and they’d always been socially active in high school.

“Oh, I tried the old boyfriends. Left messages and texts, none of them have gotten back to me yet.”

“That’s not surprising, considering that it was the middle of the night.”

“But neither of the girls is dating anyone that I know of right now. Chloe just broke up with Tommy Something-Or-Other.” Selma paused. “Wait, his name was Tommy Jones, like the singer my mother had a crush on, like, a hundred years ago. Chloe went with him for nearly a year, I think, but a while back she called it off.” Selma’s eyes darkened. “She didn’t tell me why. Didn’t want to. Accused me of ‘prying,’” she said, making air quotes with her fingers. “She also pointed out that her love life was really none of my business.”

“What about Zoe?”