Lisa returned Poppy’s wave, but it was a mad and panicked gesture. Both arms.

Then, behind Lisa, the front door opened and Scott came out onto the porch. He was followed by Alex and John, then Kimmy and Ryan.

When Poppy got close, she felt a sudden, nameless dread settle over her. She said, “What’s up, guys?”

Scott said in a voice that was tight and stricken, “She’s not with you?”

Alex said, “Mommy, we hoped she was with you.”

Poppy said, “Who?”

Lisa’s face was stretched long, white, and corpse-like. She said, “Rae is gone.”

23

UNABLE TO SLEEP, Lisa had gotten out of bed for an early morning cup of tea. This was when she noticed that both the door to Rae’s bedroom and the front door of the house were slightly ajar.

Rae’s body was found by surfers around seven thirty that morning. She was still wearing her yellow pajamas.

A homicide investigation was launched, but it was soon abandoned when tests indicated a high level of alcohol in Rae’s blood, coinciding with the empty glass in her room. No signs pointed to forced entry or a struggle. The early-morning rain had erased any potential trace of footprints, but no physical evidence either in their home or on Rae’s body suggested foul play. No sexual assault. No blunt force trauma. And there was that powerful riptide to consider.

In a fit of desperation, Lisa offered up the name of Keats Firestone to investigators, pointing out that he was a local sexual offender and explaining that they’d had several encounters with him, including one between him and Rae. But the investigators quickly confirmed his alibi: Keats had been working on a hot tub on the far side of the island from midnight until eight o’clock the next morning. The houseguests with the hot tub were there the whole time.

Scott offered up the names of the guys from Newark; they knew where he was staying, he said, and he didn’t get a good vibe. But investigators were able to confirm that these guys had left the island around three o’clock yesterday afternoon. There was video surveillance of all of them in a car passing a toll bridge into New Jersey that night, many hours before Rae disappeared.

The most likely scenario, the investigators concluded and gently explained to her parents, was that the girl had left the house in the early-morning hours in a highly intoxicated state, made her way down to the water, gone for a swim, been overtaken and dragged out to sea by an undercurrent, lost control, and drowned. Scott and Lisa conceded that she was not a strong swimmer.

When they asked Lisa if her daughter was emotionally unstable or upset about something, if there was anything that had occurred that same night that might have set her off, Lisa did not allow her face to convey the horror that chilled her body to ice.

There was, of course, the possibility that Rae had witnessed Lisa and Ryan together outside, and that this was what had propelled her to flee the house in such a state. But Lisa wouldn’t say this aloud. Not to the investigator, not to her husband, not to Poppy, with whom she shared nearly everything.