And Elizabeth paused, the stack of books in her arms. I could feel something gathering in her. Did I want her to say she’d never liked Lena? That Lena was too brash, too loud, too judgmental, definitely the kind of person who’d end up on the nightly news? Maybe hearing that would make it okay for me to be angry; maybe it would make me want to defend Lena. Maybe it would be an indictment of me, the kind of person who hadn’t seen the real Lena, who’d either been taken in or been complicit.

But all Elizabeth said was, “I didn’t really know her.”

CHAPTER

20

BACK AT HOME, I was on my laptop while Grace pushed up on her forearms and then rocked on her little tummy. I sat on the floor, my back against the sofa.

A text buzzed on my phone. For a moment my heart leaped, as if I expected it to be Lena, but of course it wasn’t. And then the wave of grief pressed up, rising in me until I could feel the heat of tears and my vision blurred. It wasn’t fair. My best friend was gone. Impatiently, I swiped at my eyes. I was lucky that Michael was alive, that we had Grace and a home and an income. We had been so close to danger, only a few feet away, and we’d survived.

I glanced down and read a message from Elizabeth: I don’t know if this is what you were looking for, but there’s an online crime forum discussing the case. She’d included a link.

And I clicked on it.

I knew there was a world on the internet beyond comments on articles and reviews of restaurants. I’d been in online forums for art historians, but this was something else. Elizabeth had sent me to a site that offered discussions of thousands of crimes—current, centuries old, unsolved, famous, fictional. And it looked like every kind of person had a chat space specifically devoted to them. On my art historian forums, I might have found a neoclassicism discussion and one on Banksy and one on unionizing museum employees, but here there was a discussion group for forensic breakthroughs, another on a new theory of Jack the Ripper, and one titled Serial Killer in Sugar Land. In order to post, or to view the full profile of anyone who did, I’d have to register, but I could view the site anonymously.