So that was Anders’s plan—to gently ask questions that Piper might have a hard time answering. He wasn’t quite sure what that looked like, but he hoped it would come to him.
By the time he finally got to Mrs. Olecki’s Saturday morning (he had wanted to go over on Friday and have as much time as possible with Piper, but after Greta’s threat of firing, he knew he had to wait), he was a speedball of nervous energy. He rushed in the front door of the bed-and-breakfast, only to find it completely empty. No guests. No Mrs. Olecki. No Harold. He ran through to the back porch and up the stairs to Piper’s carriage house. He rapped briskly on the door.
No answer.
He was about to knock again, when a voice from below called his name.
Anders looked to find Harold’s head poking out of the shed door. “Something on fire?”
“No, sorry,” Anders said. “Was just looking for Piper.”
“I noticed.”
“It’s just that she’s always here around this time. We usually . . . hang out.”
“I noticed that, too.”
Anders paused then, trying to understand the underlying meaning of Harold’s words—or if there was an underlying meaning. He ran his palm over his cowlick. Finally, he said, “Well, do you know where she is?”
“Nope. Haven’t seen her all morning, come to think of it.”
“Oh.”
Anders slowly took the steps back down, thinking of where in town he might begin his search for Piper.
“Hey, do you mind giving me a hand?” Harold said.
Anders hesitated, glancing at his escape route up the alley between the houses where he could be on his way to find Piper. Then he looked at Harold, who had been nothing but kind to him, and he dropped his head a bit. “Of course. What do you need?”
Anders spent the entire afternoon prying the rusted-to-the-frames screens from the bed-and-breakfast’s windows and replacing them with the storm glass stored in the shed. At every window while he worked, he kept his gaze outward, glancing at the street, the backyard, the alley, hoping Piper would suddenly appear.
“You know, I’m starting to get a little offended,” Harold said, as they were carrying a stack of screens back to the shed behind the house. “All these months you’ve been here, and you haven’t asked me once what I think about climate change.”
“Oh,” Anders said, a bit dazed. Why hadn’t he asked Harold for an interview? “Well, I assumed, you know . . . Pearl—” He stuttered, unsure what excuse to give.
“I’m just ribbing you,” Harold said. “Everyone knows that’s not what you’re here for.”
Anders’s head jerked up. “They do?” he asked, his heart suddenly pounding in his ears.
“Anyone with two eyes and half a brain”—he paused, cocking an eyebrow—“who’s seen the way you look at Piper.”
“Oh.” Anders’s face relaxed. Harold didn’t know, after all. But then he looked up at Harold again and squinted. “Wait—what do you mean?”
“Hoo, boy,” Harold said, chuckling, and then mumbled something that sounded a lot like: You’re worse off than I thought.
When they were done with the windows, Anders shot out of the house and walked the entire length of town three times looking for Piper, to no avail. He even nabbed Tom’s bike from behind the bed-and-breakfast and rode all the way out to Graver’s Beach. She wasn’t there either. On the way back home, he pedaled slowly, as if she’d step out from behind the seagrass lining the roads at any second.
She didn’t appear.
Not at three, when she should have been walking Tom back from the docks.
Not at dinner, when Pearl invited him to help himself to the pot of chili on the stove.
Not after dinner, when she dished out bowls of apple crisp and turned on PBS, while Harold sat at the kitchen table dealing himself a game of solitaire.
As the sun dropped from the sky and they sat watching an antiques expert appraise an opulently jeweled egg for a hopeful blue-haired woman, Anders kept one ear out for any sign of life outside: footsteps, doors opening, anything that would indicate Piper coming home. While he was listening, he noticed something—a full silence in the house, save for the slow card-flipping by Harold.
“No guests this weekend?”
Pearl looked over at him. “No. I don’t accept reservations from October until April.”
Anders’s brow crinkled. There hadn’t been guests for three weeks’ time and he was just now noticing? He must have been more consumed with his podcast than he thought. With the podcast and Piper.
Piper. His knee involuntarily jiggled and Anders felt like he was going to come out of his skin if he didn’t say something. “Is anyone else worried about Piper?”
“Worried?” Pearl tilted her head. “How so?”
“She’s gone! I searched the whole island. She’s nowhere to be found.”
Pearl shrugged. “Well, I’m sure you didn’t explore the whole island. She’s probably off in one of the marshes or something. She’s always liked to explore.”
“In the dark?”
“Sure,” Pearl said, as if walking through swampy creeks in the pitch black was as normal as getting a tub of popcorn at the movies. Pearl shifted in her seat and, after a few moments, glanced up at Anders again. They each sat in matching Victorian armchairs, a side table separating them. Pearl leaned slightly over the table, and in a low voice said: “Listen, Anders. About Piper—”
“Pearl.” Harold’s voice shot out from the kitchen. A warning.
Pearl pursed her lips and straightened her spine, turning her full attention back to the show, where, alas, the egg was not one of the sixty-nine fabricated in Imperial Russia after all, due to its lackluster hot pink. “Fabergé layered his colors,” explained the expert, “giving them a richness that’s difficult to mimic.”
Anders stared at Pearl’s profile. What had she been going to say?
“Do you know where she is?” Anders
