It was what Sherri did on the boat that was a little strange. We mean, you’re out on the water, you have to watch yourself! It was just a pontoon, we were only on the river, but still. You can’t be too careful. You can’t just go crazy like that.

29.

Sherri

When did she become aware that a teenage girl from two towns over was missing? Days after that night with the snack tray? Weeks? She became aware in the way that people do in this age of social media—a flash across her Instagram feed, a snippet heard on the little TV in the corner of the kitchen one morning over breakfast, a Facebook post. White, upper-middle-class private school girls simply did not go missing all that often, and when they did, it was news.

Her name was Madison Miller. She was sixteen years old, a sophomore in high school. She’d gone shopping by herself at a nearby Target for supplies for a school project and had never returned. There was security footage of her entering the store and leaving the store, and nothing after that. Her car had been abandoned in the parking lot.

She’d had her driver’s license for thirteen days. She’d made only three solo driving trips before: her parents were the overprotective type. The careful type. But as it turned out, not careful enough.

“How awful!” Sherri said to the television. She was making Katie’s lunch, trimming the crusts from her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The FBI was involved: it was a suspected kidnapping. There was Madison Miller’s picture. Madison Miller was just exactly in between plain and pretty, with ginger hair, a little space between her front teeth. A center part, a teal shirt, double piercings in both ears. “Terrible,” Sherri said, shaking her head. She kept making Katie’s lunch. She sliced carrots, washed an apple.

Now here were Madison Miller’s parents, holding a press conference, begging for information that might lead to their daughter’s safe return. The dad had thinning gray hair and a strong jaw; the mom looked exactly like Madison, except with a drawn and worried face and deep purple pockets underneath her eyes.

Bobby came in then. He glanced at the TV and there was the very slightest change in his face, almost a twitch. A flash, really, and then it was gone. Was the seed in Sherri’s mind planted then?

We’ll have to get rid of her.

Madison Miller was all over the news for a week. From this Sherri learned exactly what she was wearing at the time of her disappearance: Hollister jeans, ripped at the knee, size four, a gray hoodie, pink high-top Vans, size eight. A silver ring on the middle finger of her right hand made of interlocking leaves. A charm necklace with three charms: her birthstone (ruby), the number 16, the letters MRM, for Madison Rose Miller.