After a few seconds she dared a peek through the window. The salesman—Simon Hess—was standing in the driveway where she had just been, looking back and forth up the street. He was still wearing the pants and rolled-up dress shirt he’d been wearing in the kitchen. His gaze hit her car and passed over it, seeing it empty. Viv held her breath.
He turned back to his own car, circled it. He looked in the passenger window and opened the passenger door. He picked up the stack of papers.
Did I put them back in the right place? Did I?
He stared at the stack for a long time. Too long. Thinking, Viv knew. Trying to pin down what wasn’t quite right. Trying to think of who had been in his car in his driveway—the passenger door had thunked shut when she closed it, she knew that, and now she knew he’d heard it. He was trying to put this together with the strange phone call. Trying to think of who it could be.
Slowly he put the papers back in the car and closed the door again. He turned and walked around the side of the house, disappearing.
Viv straightened quickly, turned on her car, and drove away. Her hands were slick and icy on the wheel.
Her mind raced. The salesman would see her footprints in the soft dirt of the garden at the side of the house: slim tennis-shoe prints. He would know it was either a boy or a girl who had been snooping at his house, not a large man. He’d figure a teenager. Viv’s shoes were white unisex tennis shoes, and technically they could belong to a teenage boy. The salesman was more likely to believe a boy prowler rather than a girl.
That would work to her advantage—if the daughter didn’t give her away.
She didn’t think the daughter would give her away.
Still, the phone call had been from a woman. He would be suspicious, on his guard. Wondering what someone wanted from him. Because he knew, now, that someone wanted something.
I am hunting the hunter, and he suspects it.
The game is on.
She was afraid. Terrified, actually. But she was just starting.
Now she needed her next move.
Fell, New York
November 2017 CARLY
The Internet was a gold mine of information on Cathy Caldwell. Whereas I’d spent months subsisting on the few paragraphs I could find about my aunt Viv, Cathy Caldwell was a whole different ball game. Cathy Caldwell was famous.
She hadn’t always been famous. My first search for her name brought up a list of articles from the last few years—true-crime blogs, a podcast, and a Reddit thread with dozens of posts. Google showed me a photo, a 1970s color snapshot of a pretty woman with sandy brown hair standing in a sunlit back yard somewhere, smiling with a small baby on her hip. She was wearing short shorts and a turquoise halter top, her face a little blurry the way old snapshots always are from the days of film cameras with manual focus. The picture looked like the kind that was stuck in those old photo albums with plastic film that you smoothed over each page.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Cathy Caldwell,” I said to Heather as I sat glued to my laptop after we got back from talking to Jenny Summers.
I was half joking, but Heather answered me seriously. “I told you we have a lot of dead girls in Fell.”
“You weren’t kidding. What was the other name she said? Victoria something?”
“Lee.” Heather was standing in the kitchen, like she’d gone in there for something and then forgot what it was. She zipped the collar of her zip-up hoodie all the way up her neck, as if she was cold. She looked blankly at the closed door of the fridge. “That one was solved, and then it wasn’t.”
I frowned at her, though she wasn’t looking at me. “What does that mean?”
“Her boyfriend was convicted, and then it was overturned a few years later. He was proven innocent.”
“Truly?” I opened a new tab and started a new search. “That’s incredible.”
Heather turned and looked at me, her face still set in serious lines. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”
I took my hands from my laptop keys. “What?”
“The dead girls. I spent too much time reading about them a few years ago. It put me in a bad place. I’m not supposed to read about them anymore, you know?”
“Depression?” I asked her. “Anxiety?”
“A mix.” She shrugged. “They go together. They bring the insomnia. And the bike accident I had—there was trauma from that.” She glanced down at her zipped-up hoodie. “I have other issues, too, I think you may have guessed. My therapist says I have to work through it, but I can’t get . . . fixated on negative things.” She glanced at me. “I guess I’m not as much help as I thought I was. Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I showed up in your life and brought my problems. It’s my fault.”
She rolled her eyes and waved her hand. “It’s fine. Just do the searches yourself. I’m going to go study. Maybe have a nap.” She walked toward her bedroom, still hunched into her sweatshirt. It was so big, and she was so small, that she looked like a young girl in it. She got to her bedroom doorway, then put her hand on the frame and looked back at me over her shoulder. “Look up Betty Graham,” she said. “And when you’re done, help yourself to my meds.” Then she went into the room and closed the door behind her.
• • •
Cathy Caldwell. Young, married, mother of a baby, her husband deployed. Left work one day and never came home; her body was found
