Don't Look for Me(49)

The look on Evan’s face. The image of their mother holding her dead child. The harrowing sound that left her body that Nic could still hear.

Guilt. Despair. Self-loathing. There were so many words to describe what lived in those hollow spaces. They laughed in the face of the counselors and their therapy bullshit.

And now she’d caused their mother’s disappearance with her wretched words. Gone or dead—there was no way around it, no thinking her way out of those scenarios.

Confusion. Panic—she had to get someplace quiet, alone, before people started to notice.

She walked along the side of the wall, head down, away from the entrance to the casino. There was a hallway on the other side with restrooms, elevators, conference areas. And a business center.

A young man passed and she grabbed his sleeve. Her expression seemed to alarm him as she asked if he was staying at the hotel and if he could use his key card to let her in.

He hesitated, but then swiped the card to open the door. Nic thanked him and he quickly left, looking over his shoulder. Wondering if he’d made a mistake by letting this lunatic into the room. Her breaths were short, her face flushed and wet.

She sat on the floor in the corner and let it out. She wanted a drink. The thought of going back out into the crowd was the only thing stopping her.

So she’s dead. So she left us. What now? She could still be found. Nothing had changed since she’d packed a bag and driven to this place. She had to find her mother and bring her home.

The room had a long table with four desktop computers and a printer. Nic pulled herself up from the floor and sat down in front of a large PC. She turned it on, opened to a search engine.

She typed them in, one after the other. The names spinning in her mind. Daisy Hollander. Roger Booth. Charles Watkins. Kurt Kent. Results crowded the screen, faces with the same name, but none of them matching in any way that was helpful. She narrowed Daisy’s search to Hastings and got nothing. Then to New York City, and got over thirty faces. She hadn’t asked to see a photo. Many of the women in the search could be her—similar age, description. And yet, probably none of them would be. If she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be blasting her profile on Facebook and Snapchat.

The focus felt good. Her nerves began to settle, the panic subsiding. She continued.

Kurt Kent was on the social media sites, and all of them were active but private. Booth and Watkins showed up on people finder ads. Most of those were scams and, anyway, she didn’t need their addresses. She knew where they lived. She needed social media sites, something that might give her a window into their lives.

Then, a thought about Booth. About his property and the fence with the hole.

She pulled up a satellite image of the Hastings Inn, zoomed out. It was taken in the summer from the look of the trees—full canopies of green leaves. She couldn’t see the fence behind the inn, but there was something on an adjacent property. A thin line running across a stretch of cleared land before disappearing again in the dense woods.

She zoomed out and tried to connect the line to other structures—a house or barn or another fence. But it was impossible with all of the breaks into the woods. Still, that line of fence, if it was a fence, bent away from the inn, not toward it.

Fences usually went in a circle or a square, closing off a parcel of land. It would be odd for the fence to veer off away from the parcel where the inn was located, even if that parcel spanned hundreds of acres. No—this fence did not enclose the parcel of land owned by Booth. It belonged to the parcel that sat behind it just like that person from town had told her father.

And then she saw something else—another stretch of clearing within that adjacent parcel. She followed it, zoomed in until it was clear—a house.

A house, and the clearing before it—a driveway.

She zoomed out again, followed the driveway until it disappeared behind more trees. But, assuming it remained straight, it would end at the next road.

Like the driveway and the fence, the road weaved through woods. Still, she was able to guess at the path it carved through Hastings. And the point where it intersected another road, which ran along the river. River Road. And that road eventually intersected Hastings Pass.

Nic held her finger to the screen. She started at the inn, and followed Hastings Pass until it ended at the river. Then she followed it to the left, along River Road, until it met the road with the driveway. Abel Hill Lane. And from there, all the way to the driveway and then to the house—the house that sat on the parcel enclosed by the fence. Farther down Abel Hill Lane was a small cluster of redbrick buildings with flat black rooftops and narrow roads connecting them to one another and to two roads—Abel Hill Lane and River Road. Maybe that had once been the pharmaceutical company that had closed down years before. Or the chemical company before that. Maybe they were the same set of buildings, one company taking over the other.

Nic searched for addresses on Abel Hill Lane. There were seven in total. She pulled them up one at a time, first on the map and then on satellite imagery. There was a small ranch, number 53. Then a cape, number 67. Then five others—none of them matching the satellite image of the house with the fence. None of them with a long driveway. None of them with enough acreage to be that same property.

She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

Everyone was lying about something. And now Edith Moore wanted the reward money. She knew about the purse, the three letters.