After ending the call, he decided to go back to the beginning of the video and view it again. But then he happened to notice the current time, displayed in the upper corner of his laptop screen. It was 5:48 p.m. Even if Madeleine had taken the longest of her usual trails through the woods—the one over the top of Carlson’s Ridge—she should have returned by now.

It was dinnertime, and she never … Oh, Christ! Of course!

He felt like an idiot. This was the day she was supposed to leave for her stay at the Winklers’. Too much was happening too damn fast. It was as though his brain couldn’t contain another speck of information, and every time something new got jammed in, it shoved something out the other side. It was kind of scary to think about. What else might he have forgotten?

That’s when he remembered that on his way in he’d seen her car parked by the house.

If she’s at the Winklers’, why the hell is her car still here?

Baffled, with a fast-growing feeling of unease, he called her cell number.

He was surprised a few seconds later to hear her phone ringing in the kitchen. Had she not gone to the Winklers’ after all? Was she somewhere around the house? He called out to her, but there was no answer. He went out from the den to the kitchen. Following the sound of the ring, he found her phone on the sideboard next to the stove. That was truly odd. As far as he knew, she never left the house without it. Perplexed, he gazed out the window, hoping that he might see her heading up through the pasture toward the house.

There was no sign or her. Just her car. Which meant she had to be somewhere in the general vicinity—unless she’d gone somewhere with a friend who’d picked her up. Or unless, God forbid, she’d had an accident and was taken away in an ambulance.

He strained to recall anything she might have said that would …

Just then a breeze caught the asparagus ferns, stirring them briefly apart, and something bright flashed at the corner of his eye.

Something pink, he thought.

Then the ferns settled back together, and he wondered whether he’d seen anything at all.

Curiosity drove him outside to check.

As soon as he reached the far side of the asparagus bed his question was answered—with a larger one. Madeleine was sitting on the grass in one of her pink T-shirts. Next to her on the ground were a few pieces of bluestone placed over what appeared to be freshly loosened earth. On the far side of the stones, a shovel, recently used, lay on the grass. With her right hand, Madeleine was gently patting down the dark earth around the edges of the stones.

At first she said nothing.

“Maddie?”