The woman looked over their shoulder, as if to verify that they’d arrived in a cop car. She was going to be disappointed. A.L.’s SUV didn’t look special. Although Rena knew from personal experience that it ran pretty damn smoothly at over a hundred miles per hour.

“Perhaps out here,” the woman said. She stepped onto the small porch. There was only one lawn chair. None of them sat.

“On Wednesday, in Baywood, Wisconsin, a five-year-old girl disappeared from her day care.”

“I know,” the woman said.

“And how did you know that, ma’am?” Rena asked, keeping her voice level.

“I saw it on the news. Then I looked online at the articles in the Baywood newspaper. Then I spoke to Alice Quest.”

“Do you know Alice Quest?”

The woman shook her head. “No. But what I would have given ten years ago if somebody had reached out to me and said that they understood the terror. It’s...hard for someone to understand, but part of what makes the situation so terrible is that you feel very alone. Even your friends, people you’ve known for years and imagined cared for you, turn against you. No one wants to support the person who let this happen.”

“You were the director of the day care when Corrine Antler went missing in what seems to be a similar situation,” Rena said.

“Yes. I’d been the director for over ten years. Nothing bad had ever happened. We’d never even had a broken arm on the playground. But everybody forgot that pretty quickly.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Rena said.

The woman shrugged. “Of course, it’s not about me. It’s about Corrine Antler and her parents. Her siblings. But I called Alice because I’m probably the only one who understands what she’s going through.”

A.L. shifted, maybe to get the late afternoon sun out of his eyes. “I imagine you might have had your suspicions about what happened?”

“I was confident that Corrine had somehow gotten outside and wandered off. And at first, I guess I imagined that she’d be found pretty quickly. It wasn’t until we were about two days into it that I realized that it wasn’t going to turn out okay. That nothing would ever be right again.”

“Did you ever adjust your thinking about the cause of her disappearance?”

Brenda stared at them. “I never thought it was anybody from the day care. My staff. Other parents. I just couldn’t see that. But then again, I also couldn’t imagine that a stranger had gotten inside our day care and that nobody had seen him or her. So, no. I guess I didn’t. But now...now that it’s happened again, maybe I was wrong.”