She shook her head and said around a huge yawn, “Kimberly.”

“I’m looking for Jane.” Maggie glanced over the girl’s shoulder at a room strewn with clothes. “Is she around?”

Kimberly stretched, her arms making a wide arc that ended with her hands slapping her thighs. Flatly: “She’s long gone.”

Maggie gasped. Oh God! “Dead?”

“What? No.” She tilted her head to the side, an impatient gesture. “Moved out. She’s back home.”

Back home? Back home? Where the hell was that? Texas? Missouri? California?

“… and failing her classes,” Kimberly was saying. The broad shoulders came up. “That much was obvious.” Drily, she added, “You can’t pass your classes if you don’t get out of bed.”

Maggie chewed on her lower lip. Why had she never guessed that Jane’s silence had to do with the possibility that she’d dropped out of school? After all, it’s what Maggie had done, though not officially—she’d been granted a leave of absence. But maybe Jane had made her leaving official, prompting CC to suspend her email account …

Cautiously, Maggie asked, “Did she ever tell you what was wrong?”

“Nope.” Kimberly grunted. “Jane was kind of weird.”

She grimaced at the assessment—recognized, after everything she’d gone through last year, that the description applied to herself as well. It was hard to stay normal under certain circumstances. “I really need to get in touch with her. Do you have her phone number and home address?” She held her breath, half-expecting Kimberly to shake her head and turn Maggie away.

Instead, she said, “Sure,” and trudged across her room, swatted a hoodie off her desk, and yanked open a drawer. She pulled out a notebook and opened it to its first page. “Thought so. Jane lives in Wilson.”

Hope flared. “That’s outside of Albany, right?” Not far away at all. She, Linnie, and Caleb could drive straight there.

“Close to Saratoga.” She picked up what looked like a short essay, made a face at the grade, and turned it over. As she scrawled across the blank side, she said without looking up, “Tell Jane I said hi.” Holding out the paper, she added, “She left her ironing board. It’s still here if she wants to come and get it. You can tell her that, too.”

Maggie didn’t realize what she’d expected to find until she and her friends finally reached the Cannon residence, then the truth struck her—she’d assumed the address would lead them to a modest, two-story Colonial, just like a house in Carlton. The one Maggie had grown up in.

But there was nothing middle-class about the Cannons’ house.

Linnie, sitting in front, summed it up: “Wow. A mansion.”

Caleb gave the steering wheel a nervous drum. “I feel funny parking my car here.”

“Like a big brown turd on the side of the road,” Linnie murmured.

He frowned. “Hey.”