And there it was. The reason she was tossing and turning in the middle of the night—Wichita, Kansas. It was a good enough place to grow up, the kind of little city where a cop dad and a bookkeeper mom could afford a three-bedroom ranch house, complete with a finished basement and a picket fence. The public schools were better than average and, at least back then, provided a haven where kids were all treated the same, regardless of zip codes. It had been a middle-school PE teacher who convinced a skeptical Ellie to enter a junior-miss beauty pageant to start squirreling away some college money, a few hundred dollars at a time. Kansas had turned her into the kind of person who could move to New York City at the age of twenty-one and sign up for criminal justice classes at John Jay.
But Kansas was also the state she never left—not once, not even to Kansas City, Missouri—until she was in the tenth grade for that impromptu trip to Mexico. It was the home that had never taught her about delicacies such as foie gras and escargot. And it was the place where her father died when she was only fourteen years old.
She shifted from her comfortable spot in the crook of Max’s arm and fumbled around on the nightstand until she found her phone. The glow of the screen lit the room in a yellowish haze, but Max seemed undisturbed.
She suddenly remembered she was in a foreign country and would have to pay data fees. Fuck it. A few texts would cost less than dessert at tonight’s overpriced restaurant.
Are you up?
Dots immediately appeared in a text box on the screen, suggesting that her brother was indeed awake.
I am now. You know I leave my phone on in case of last-minute cancellations.
She felt a pang of guilt. Jess was a barely-working musician. Here she was, feeling sorry for herself for being a fish out of water in St. Barts, but she was a detective with a salary, benefits, overtime, and a pension waiting for her down the road. Jess had to keep his cell phone on max volume next to his pillow in case some dive bar needed an over-the-hill punk band on short notice.
Sorry, she typed. I had a dream about Dad.
No dots. No response. Jess never wanted to talk about Dad or Wichita or anything else that brought up old feelings. But he was her only person when it came to this particular subject.
Finally the dots reappeared. His reply was brief.
What about him?
Some kids, they remember their parents pushing them on swings or coaching their teams or hugging them at graduation. But Jess would know those weren’t the kinds of dreams Ellie would have about their father. When she thought about her dad, it was almost always about either his death or the deaths that obsessed him while he was still alive.
When we went to the hospital, she typed.
More dots. Yeah, that sucked.
You were right, you know. About the hospital. You knew before anyone.
She pictured her brother fully awake now, in bed at the Murray Hill rent-controlled one-bedroom that had been hers before she moved in with Max. Maybe he was alone. Maybe not. Jess was Jess.
I don’t think they give trophies for that particular skill. Long pause. Seriously, R U OK?
She stared at her screen as she listened to the fan click. She adjusted the blankets again. One leg under, one leg out.
I don’t know.
Jess’s response took so long that she wondered if he had decided to go back to sleep. Dad killed himself, but we’re over that, remember? Get your groove on at that fancy island.
She shut her eyes, rolled over on her side, and tried to find a spoon position beside Max before another message popped up again.
Do you need me to call you?
She typed no and regretted it as soon as she hit send.
She sifted through the events of the day, wondering what had led her subconscious into the past. Then she heard her brother’s voice in her head, speaking the words he had just texted: Dad killed himself. They had finally learned the truth about her father’s death almost four years before, when the Wichita Police arrested the man she had always assumed was her father’s killer. We’re over that, remember?
She turned off her phone and laid it next to the lamp on the nightstand.
By the time Ellie fell asleep, the five-bedroom, four-bath house in Sagaponack, on the south side of Montauk Highway, listed for not quite $3 million, was spotless and staged, ready for the next day’s open house.
Ellie would not learn the name Hope Miller for another nine days. She had no way of knowing that what had happened nearly seventeen hundred miles away on Long Island at the exact moment she had dreamed about her father would force the past to collide with the present once again.
4
Monday, June 14, 7:20 p.m.
Two Days Later
Robin Stansfield stood in the middle of the living room, her quilted Vera Bradley tote still in hand. It was a favorite among her collection—black with yellow-and-white sunflowers. Everything about it made her happy.
But she wasn’t thinking about her cheerful bag. Her focus was entirely on her surroundings as her eyes darted from one area of the room to another. Sofa. Media cabinet. Coffee table. Something wasn’t right. Something.
She didn’t even notice her husband, Stan—his parents had actually named him Stanley Stansfield—make his way into the room. His left hand pulled her giant Tumi roller case. His right managed to juggle both of their carry-ons.
“Thanks anyway, Robin.” His voice momentarily interrupted her meditation. “Really, I’ve got this all under control.”
She muttered an apology and made a kissing sound in his direction, which he returned. “I’ll leave a nice tip for you on checkout.”
She had known Stan since they were in the ninth grade. He was the sort-of-cute band geek who sat next to her, a junior varsity cheerleader, in algebra. He became her harmless, reliable friend when he got a provisional driver’s license and began offering her rides from school. She never thought of him as anything more until he and his friends formed a band the summer after sophomore year. The sight of him and his bass guitar playing “Hungry Like the Wolf” at yard parties had locked her down.
Now she was fifty-five years old, but they’d just celebrated their thirty-fifth anniversary with a week at the Four Seasons in Maui. Her gift to him was all the golf he’d played this week. Stan loved golf almost as much as he loved Robin.
Stan disappeared into the kitchen, then walked through the living room again, eating a piece of string cheese on his way to the garage to grab the next round of bags from the car.
By the time he returned, she was rotating slowly and methodically in a circle.
“You look like the top of a music box with a bum battery. Are you going to keep doing that?”
Yes, she was. At least until he returned a second time to the living room, plopped himself onto the sofa, and pointed the remote at the plasma screen TV on the wall. He had just landed on ESPN when she turned to face him.
“You know those days where you think you’re losing your mind?”
“A lesser man would say something slightly misogynist around now.”
Now he was just pushing her buttons. “You’re gaslighting me, aren’t you? Did you do this while I was dillydallying in the driveway?”
“Don’t you remember? I was getting my golf bag ready so I can take it to the club tomorrow. How am I gaslighting you now?”