He had a point. Robin did have a tendency to accuse him of mischief every time she couldn’t find her keys. He called her the girl who cried wolf. She told him that’s what he got for being such a practical joker.
She did another slow, circular turn. She didn’t want to accuse Stan again, but she was certain that the house wasn’t as she left it. Little things were different. The Marimekko throw pillow was in the center of the sofa, not stacked in front of the larger, solid green one in the corner. When Stan reached for the remote control, it had been on the coffee table, not on the porcelain tray on the media console beneath the TV, the way she liked it. The blinds over the sliding glass door to the deck were flipped up, not down.
She asked Stan if he had arranged for the housekeeper to come while they were out of town.
“You give me far too much credit if you think I know how to call . . . huh, I don’t even know her name.”
“Gina.”
“Whatever,” Stan said. “Stop obsessing. I’m sure it was probably Evan not putting things back after the open house.”
Robin felt stupid the second her husband mentioned Evan. Right, of course: the realtor. After living in New York City for nearly a quarter century, using this house as their weekend respite, Stan had declared two months earlier that he was tired of what he had taken to calling “this garbage city.” Now that their daughter was out of college and working in Phoenix, he wanted to accept his company’s offer of a transfer to Irvine. How could she say no?
She knew that plenty of people would kill to be in her position. She was in love with a husband who loved her back and asked little in return. And the new place would be closer to Hannah.
But, man, she was going to miss this house. They were only going to be here for three days before they headed down to Palm Beach for another vacation. Stan was taking full advantage of the downtime he had negotiated before he needed to start work in California.
“Is it awful that I keep forgetting we’re selling this place?”
Stan’s face softened as he looked up at her from the sofa. “We’ve got a lot of good memories here, sweetie. We’ve still got half a lifetime left to make some more. Now turn off your OCD and keep me company on the sofa over here.”
But as she took her usual spot at his side, she couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
5
Wednesday, June 16, 10:40 a.m.
Two Days Later
Thanks to summer traffic, even on a Wednesday morning, Lindsay was nearly three hours into a 107-mile drive when the GPS began to guide her through a network of back roads. In a stop-and-go line of vehicles stretching from Southampton through Sag Harbor, she watched the sunlight glisten blue on Noyack Bay and tried to still her thoughts. What had begun as lingering anxiety about Hope’s new life had evolved into full-blown panic after four days. Until Hope moved to East Hampton, they had never gone more than a day without talking. It had now been a week, even after Lindsay broke her vow to give her friend space and began calling and texting frantically.
Her cell phone announced that she was approaching her destination. As Lindsay came to a stop, she pictured Hope arriving at this exact spot a month earlier. She had given a quick beep-beep with her car horn and then gestured out the window for Lindsay to pull the moving van into the driveway. Hope nearly tripped as she tumbled from the driver’s seat, beaming as she spun in circles on the lawn.
When she finally stopped spinning, her almond-shaped green eyes squinted against the sun. “It’s cute, right?”
The cottage was tiny and the siding weathered, but the front door was painted bright orange, and white-and-purple hydrangea blossomed across the yard. Lindsay assured her that it was adorable.
“This is my very first time having a whole house all to myself.” That she knew of, of course. That was always an unspoken truth with Hope.
Lindsay had hugged her friend and told her she’d never seen her so happy. “It’s like rainbows are bouncing off you right now. That’s how happy you look.”
Hope had opened her mouth as if to say something, but then stopped and shook her head. “Just excited is all,” she had said. “I think I might actually have my life back soon.”
Lindsay had been replaying that moment in her mind over and over again for days. What life, Hope? What life did you have before I found you?
She banged on the front door and peered through the windows. Through a part in the bedroom curtains, she could see that the bed was made. Nothing seemed out of place. But no Hope, and no Honda Civic in the driveway or on the street. She’d need to track down the landlady’s contact information to see about getting a key, but she had an appointment in a few minutes that she fully intended to miss.
Lindsay loved to linger at the real estate offices along Main Street in East Hampton, browsing the listings in the windows of Corcoran and Sotheby’s. Six-bedroom, nine-bath houses on two oceanfront acres. Old farmhouses brought up to pristine standards. Even a mid-century ranch slapped with some white paint could garner more than a million if it had room for a pool. Primo real estate porn.
But Evan Hunter, Hope’s under-the-table employer, was definitely not that caliber of listing agent. His office address didn’t even appear in his sponsored ads on Facebook and Instagram. Evan’s flinch when Lindsay stepped through the door made it clear he wasn’t used to walk-ins. He scrambled to his feet to welcome her with a handshake.
In person, he looked older and more bloated than in his online photographs, with thinner and more disheveled hair. Even so, if she were searching for someone to trust with a major real estate transaction, she actually preferred the real-life version to the slickster featured in his official headshots.
“What brings you in this afternoon?” he asked with a chipper smile.
Three unreturned calls brought me in. “My name’s Lindsay Kelly. I left you a couple of messages?”
He turned his focus to arranging the loose papers on his desk into tidy piles, avoiding her gaze. “Sorry, I was about to get back to you. It’s a nonstop crush out here in the summer. I drove to Amagansett just now only to have a client stand me up. Not even a phone call.”
“That’s so rude.” After Lindsay’s voice-mail messages went unreturned, she had tried another tactic, posing as a potential buyer to schedule a property viewing for eleven o’clock. Instead of showing up for the appointment, she had waited down the street and then followed him back here, to a storefront that she vaguely recalled had once been a liquor store. “But speaking of phone calls, I made it pretty clear in my messages that the matter was urgent, Mr. Hunter. It’s not like Hope not to answer her cell or respond to text messages. You could’ve at least let me know if you’d seen her or talked to her lately.”
“With all due respect, Miss . . .”
“Lindsay is fine.”
“With all due respect, Lindsay, you called me once Monday, and then two times yesterday, back-to-back, asking about an employee I’ve only known a month. It was a little out of the blue, and I’ve been quite busy today, in no small part because your friend went AWOL on me.”
“Well, with all due respect, Evan, some people might say it’s more than a little suspicious that you’d be so cavalier about the disappearance of a woman that you agreed to hire under a highly untraditional arrangement. I think this is the part of the TV show when the police start looking into your background.”