“Who, my wife?”

“No.” She shakes her head again. “After my sister drowned, we were devastated. Not only my family. Everyone. All of my friends, all of Gillian’s friends. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We started going down to the lake a lot, like a pilgrimage. We all wanted to be close to the water. That sounds strange, I know. You’d think that with everything that happened, we’d want to be as far from there as possible.” She pauses. “But something drew us there. We couldn’t stay away.”

I don’t know what to say, so I sit there. I’m aware of my food growing cold, but I have no interest in it.

“Anyway, I was sitting there one night, oh, probably a few years later, on the banks of the lake, and out of nowhere there’s this woman sitting beside me. It was dark, and I couldn’t get a good look at her. All I could see was that she had this silvery-gray hair, almost white. Figured she had come out with our group of friends or was a parent coming out to pick up her kid. I don’t know. There were so many of us.”

She stands abruptly, and I think I’ve lost her, but she bustles to the coffee maker, pours herself a cup, and raises a flat hand to a few customers who call out “Ma’am!” after her.

“I’m on break!” she says.

She settles into the booth and looks up at me as if I was the one talking. When I don’t say anything, she recovers.

“Right, right.” She shakes her head once more. “Here’s the thing. This woman, she tells me that when my sister died she took something of hers. This woman was missing something. She asked if I could help her find it. I didn’t know what to tell her.”

“Do you know what she was missing?” I ask.

Jenny shakes her head. “My sister never would have taken anything. She was a scared little wimp.” She laughs. “Anyway, this woman got a little pushy, made me mad, so I told her to bug off.”

“And that was that? You never heard from her again?”

“Not me. But when a few of my friends started acting weird, I managed to pry it out of them. She’d approached them too, asking for help to get this thing my sister supposedly stole.”

“Do you think they’d share their story with me? I’m trying to help my granddaughter.”

Jenny takes a deep breath. “My friends? No, I’m sorry. They disappeared soon after I saw that woman.”

“Disappeared?”

“It happened one night while we were out there by the lake. One minute they were there, the next they were gone. They were fun girls, not into any serious kind of trouble. They never would have run away.”

“Where do you think they are?”

“Where are they?” She gave a cynical laugh, but there were tears in her eyes that she tried to blink furiously away. “I think they drowned, like my sister.”