Then there were the people who thought that Todd had just bailed on her. In some ways, they were the worst. Wild stories of him being seen at Dulles Airport the day of the wedding abounded, indicating that Todd might have sought a new life elsewhere on a 747. If this group saw her buying mac and cheese in a box at the supermarket, they turned their carts mid-aisle to avoid talking to her as though her misfortune were contagious. To avoid the look of pity, she started shopping at the all-night supermarket on the highway twelve miles away, peacefully steering her cart at three in the morning with the drunks and stoned college kids, bags of potato chips tucked under their arms. Then the daily copy of the Kerrigan Falls Express newspaper started going missing from the mailbox. Furious, Lara called the customer service line, only to learn that Caren, at Audrey’s request, had driven by each morning, snatching up the morning edition so Lara wouldn’t have to see that reporter Kim Landau had written yet another article on Todd’s disappearance. MISSING posters from well-meaning people went up around Kerrigan Falls like Todd was some cat who’d been let out in the night and never returned. A fundraiser was held. What the funds were for, Lara was never quite sure.
And what did she think? No one ever had the courage to ask her.
If they had, depending on the day or even the hour, Lara switched camps between the two prevailing theories, causing her to exist in a kind of limbo. Certainly the idea that Todd might be dead was a real possibility, yet a part of her couldn’t be sure. To give up on him felt like a betrayal. It was so tempting to get caught in the Todd Sutton and Peter Beaumont mystery, with its elaborate magical plot involving Wickelow Bend. In that theory, Todd was a victim, not a cad who’d abandoned her. She’d seen stories where loved ones left behind spearheaded these fantastical ideas only to look desperate and foolish when they were proven to be untrue. She couldn’t bear to let herself be embarrassed again. The wedding had been enough.
Lara was more of a believer in Occam’s razor. Publicly, this was the stance she’d taken, and it put her at odds with Todd’s family, who still held vigils at Wickelow Bend. He’d left her. Pure and simple. But even then, the question became: Where was he? His empty car being found the following morning threw a monkey wrench in this theory. Todd might have left her, but everyone who knew him agreed, he never would have abandoned his car.
After the wedding, she’d taken on more of the regular overnight shifts at the radio station where, for years, she’d only been doing them on weekends. Providing the soundtrack to her fellow people of the night—emergency room crews, bartenders, security guards—had great appeal to her. A month after the wedding, a notice to 99.7 K-ROCK employees was tucked in her paycheck: The owners had put the radio station up for sale. Something in her stirred as she read the announcement on blue copy paper. It informed 99.7 K-ROCK employees that “While no immediate changes are expected, another owner will have the right to change the station’s format.” That meant that 99.7 K-ROCK could become a country station and they’d all lose their jobs. It felt like a sign.
Her grandfather Simon Webster, founder of the Kerrigan Falls Express, had left her half of his fortune—which wasn’t so much of a fortune as he’d pretended it was, but it was enough to buy the radio station assets at the $200,000 asking price. Seeing an opportunity, she went to her father to see if he’d be interested in running it with her.
A week later, she saw that the FOR SALE sign was still up on the 1902 four-bedroom painted-brick Victorian that she and Todd had looked at before the wedding. They’d dreamed of fixing it up together. With its large porch, opulent woodwork, marble fireplace, and French doors, the house was $40,000. It also had ruined floors, drafty windows, and a non-functioning kitchen. She settled on the house for $5,000 less than the asking price the day before she bought the radio station assets.
She knew that both had been impulsive decisions, but she needed to put distance between herself and that wedding. All these things, these moving parts, night shifts, and broken-down houses, had kept her busy and exhausted and stopped her from thinking. She’d closed on the house in January. And after five months of sanding walls, painting, pulling out nails, replacing drafty windows with historically accurate ones, and replacing the old heating system, the mere mention of Todd didn’t cause her heart to pound like an infected wound anymore.
Surveying the disaster that was now her dining room floor, Lara thought seriously about hiring a professional. She’d thrown herself into sanding the Georgia pine floors. Of course the house had no air-conditioning, and with summer approaching she was thinking of buying a few window units. Last week’s heat wave had her sleeping in a puddle of sweat.
Her mother had been hovering over her lately, stopping by the station or her house daily under the guise of helpful remodeling advice, lugging paint chips and rug samples with her.
The door opened and Lara regretted giving her mother a key when the large Oorang Airedales, Oddjob and Moneypenny, came bounding into the living room, circling the sander and barking as though it were a menacing beast. The dogs were oddly old, yet they seemed like puppies. Lara could swear they’d been alive when she was a child, but Audrey insisted they were just different dogs with the
