“I don’t think so.” Emily comes over to look, strain clouding her beautiful features. “Why would she need to do that?”

When I press my thumb against the screen frame, it gives instantly, popping forward. Cameron’s removed the screen more than once, or someone else has. “What’s on the other side of these woods?”

“The coast road. Maybe half a mile away?”

“When Sheriff Flood’s team combed the property, did they bring dogs in?”

“They did. What’s going on? I’m confused. Are you trying to say Cameron ran away on her own?”

“I can’t be sure, but that would explain a lot.”

“Where would she go? Why?”

I don’t answer her immediately, waiting to find the right words. Of course Emily’s confused. She’s been mostly blind to her daughter’s pain, but also doesn’t seem to understand her own.

She grew up despising her father only to marry a carbon copy of him. She pitied her mother but had become her. Had her flight to Hollywood accomplished anything in the end? She’d found stardom, yes, playing a role millions of people loved and identified with, but I wonder if what she’d really been after was an elusive freedom from what she’d left behind.

In my years as a detective and particularly with Searchlight, I’ve learned so much about cycles of violence in family systems. But cycles of silence can be just as dangerous—and they repeat through generations with startling consistency. A mother’s dieting becomes her daughter’s obsessive control over bonsai trees. Secret glaring infidelity becomes wordless assent and then emptiness. Cameron was exposed to all of this. Silver spoon or no, Emily had fed her powerlessness.

“I don’t think your daughter was abducted,” I say. My words are blunt, and I’m jumping to conclusions. But there isn’t time for anything else.

“No,” Emily says so thinly she might be saying Yes. The two words never live all that far apart, I’ve learned.

“If someone has Cameron now, I think she knows him. I think she went willingly.”

(nineteen)

“You okay?” Will asks when we’re back in his squad car, sensing the precariousness of my mood.

I hand him the folded slip of paper. “Troy Curtis’s girlfriend.”

“I guess I’m not surprised.”

“Me neither, but I wanted better. For all of them.”

Moments later, we pass through the security gate, and the camera’s eye pivots to follow us silently. I think of Cameron in her room, planning to evade that eye, a girl with a secret self, clinging to a hope she may have voiced to no one, and written nowhere.

“What do you think about Drew Hague being so nearby?” I ask Will. “Tell me more about him.”