In this case, I’m inclined to agree. If Katherine did indeed leave Tom, wouldn’t it be natural for her to leave her rings behind? The marriage is over. She wants a fresh start. She doesn’t need to keep the jewelry that symbolized their unhappy union. Also, I know from our first, dramatic meeting that Katherine doesn’t always wear her wedding band.

  Still, it’s suspicious enough for me to pull my phone from my pocket and snap a few pictures of the rings sitting in the bowl’s gentle curve. I keep the phone out as I peek into the bathroom, which is even bigger and more spa-like than the one in the guest room. Like everywhere else, the only thing it points to is that Tom Royce is a slob when left on his own. Exhibit A is the towel bunched next to the sink. Exhibit B is yet another pair of boxer shorts on the floor. This time, I don’t judge. Someone prowling my bedroom right now would see yesterday’s clothes in a heap at the foot of my bed and a bra tossed across the back of the easy chair in the corner.

  I move from bathroom to walk-in closet. It’s large and tidy, the walls covered by an elaborate grid of shelves, hanging rods, and drawers. Nothing appears to be missing, a realization that brings a renewed sense of worry. While roaming the house, I’d been slowly coming around to the idea that maybe Katherine really did just up and leave Tom without giving him a clue about where she went. All these clothes, bearing labels from Gucci, Stella McCartney, and, in a refreshing bit of normalcy, H&M, suggest otherwise. As does a matching set of luggage tucked in the corner that I would have assumed belonged to Tom if the tags dangling from the handles didn’t bear Katherine’s name.

  While I can understand leaving her engagement ring and wedding band behind, Katherine surely would have taken clothes with her. Yet the closet is filled with her things, to the point where I can spot only one empty hanger and one blank space on the shelves.

  When Katherine left—if she left—she took only the clothes on her back.

  I start opening drawers, seeing neatly folded sweaters, T-shirts and sweats, underwear in a rainbow of colors.

  And a phone.

  It’s stuffed into the back of Katherine’s underwear drawer, almost hidden behind a pair of Victoria’s Secret panties. Seeing it makes me think of Mixer and Katherine’s red triangle pinpointing her location.

  I use my own phone to take a picture of it, then swipe through my call log until I find Katherine’s number. The second I hit the call button, the phone in the drawer starts to ring. I brush aside the panties until I can see my number lit up across its screen. Below it is the last time I called her.

  Yesterday. One p.m.

  I let the phone keep ringing until her voicemail message kicks in.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Katherine.”

  More worry pulses through me. Everything Katherine brought with her—her phone, her clothes, her jewelry—is still here.

  The only thing missing is Katherine herself.

  I pick up her phone, using a pair of panties to keep my fingerprints from smudging the screen. Thank you, guest arc on Law & Order.

  The phone itself is locked, of course. The only information it provides is what’s available on the lock screen. Time, date, and how much juice is left in the battery. Very little, it turns out. Katherine’s phone is near death, which tells me it hasn’t been charged for at least a day, maybe longer.

  I put the phone back where I found it, just in case Tom is keeping tabs on it. No need to alert him to my presence. I close the drawer and am about to leave the closet when Katherine’s phone begins to ring again, the sound muffled inside the drawer.

  I return to the drawer, yank it open, see a phone number glowing white against the black screen. Just like me, whoever’s calling hasn’t been deemed familiar enough by Katherine to have their number saved in her phone.

  But they have called before.

  Along with the number is a reminder of the last time they did it.

  This morning.

  Because I can’t answer, I whip out my own phone and snap a picture of the number glowing on Katherine’s screen before the caller can hang up. It might be a good idea to call them later. Maybe they’re looking for Katherine, too. Maybe they’re as worried as I am.

  I pocket my phone, close the drawer, leave the closet. After that, I move out of the bedroom and into the second-floor hallway, on my way to the only room yet to be searched.

  The home office. Very much Tom’s domain. The furnishings have a more masculine feel. Dark woods and glass and a distinct lack of personality. There’s a shelf of antique barware befitting the name of his app and a bookcase filled with business-y titles heavy on aspiration. Sitting atop the shelf, in a silver frame, is the same wedding photo of Tom and Katherine I’d seen years before in People magazine.

  By the window is a glass-topped desk upon which sits Tom Royce’s laptop. It’s closed now, as flat and compact as a picture book. I glide toward it, remembering the night I watched Katherine at that desk, using that very computer. I can’t forget how surprised she had looked. So shocked it was clear even through the binoculars and a quarter mile of distance. I also recall how startled she seemed when Tom appeared in the doorway, barely managing to hide it.

  My hand hovers over the laptop as I debate opening it up and seeing what I can find. Unlike Katherine’s phone, there’s no way to use it without getting my fingerprints all over it. Yes, I could use my shirt to wipe it down when I’m done, but that would get rid of Tom’s and Katherine’s prints as well. That might look like tampering with evidence, which courts tend to frown upon. Another thing I picked up from Law & Order.

  On the flip side, this laptop could be the key we need to unlock the truth about what happened to Katherine. Showing Wilma Anson pictures of Katherine’s phone and discarded rings might not be enough to get a search warrant. In the meantime, it would be so easy for Tom to make sure no one else sees what’s on the laptop. All it would take is a single toss into Lake Greene.

  That thought—of the laptop sinking to the lake’s dark, muddy floor—makes me decide to open it. If I don’t look—right now—there’s a chance no one ever will.

  I crack the laptop open, and its screen springs to life, revealing a home page of a lake in full summer splendor. Trees a shade of green that only exists in July. Sunlight twinkling like pixie dust on the water. A sky so blue it looks like CGI.

  Lake Greene.

  I’d recognize it anywhere.

  I tap the space bar and the lake is replaced by a desktop strewn with tabs, icons, and file folders. I let out a relieved breath. I’d been worried the laptop was as locked down as Katherine’s phone.

  But now that I have access, I can’t decide what to search first. Most of the folders look Mixer specific, with names like Q2 data, Ad roster, Mockups2.0. I click on a few of them, seeing spreadsheets, saved memos and reports using so much business-speak they might as well be written in Sanskrit.

  Only one of the spreadsheets catches my eye. Dated three months ago, it consists of a column of numbers, all of them red. I take a picture of the laptop screen despite not knowing if the figures are dollars or subscribers or something else. Just because I can’t understand it doesn’t mean it won’t come in handy later.

  I close the folder and start looking for ones that seem unrelated to Tom Royce’s app. I choose one marked with a telling name.

  Kat.

  Inside are more folders, labeled by year and going back half a decade. I peek inside each one, seeing not only photos of Katherine from her modeling days but more spreadsheets. One per year. Atop each is the same heading: earnings. I scan a few of them, noting there’s not a red number to be found. Even though she’s no longer a model, Katherine’s been making an obscene amount of money. Far more than that net worth website estimated and far more than Mixer.

  I take photos of spreadsheets for the past three years and move on to the laptop’s web browser. Two seconds and one click later, I find myself staring at the browsing history.

  Jackpot.

  Immediately, I see that Tom hasn’t done any obvious web surfing in the past two days. There are no instantly suspicious searches for ways to dispose of a body or the best hacksaws for cutting through bone. Either Tom hasn’t touched the laptop since Katherine disappeared or he cleared the browsing history for the past forty-eight hours.

  Three days ago, however, brings up a bonanza of visited sites. Some, including the same Bloomberg Businessweek article about Mixer I’d found, strike me as the work of Tom Royce. Others, such as the New York Times fashion section and Vanity Fair, suggest Katherine’s doing. As does an interesting Google search.

  Causes of drowning in lakes.

  I click the link and see a brief list of reasons, including swimming alone, intoxication, and boating without a life jacket. That last one makes me think of Len. It also makes me want to clomp downstairs and pour myself something strong from the living room bar.

  Trying to rid myself of both the thought and the urge, I do a little shimmy and move on. I go to Google and check the most recent topics searched on the laptop, finding more about drowning and water.

  Swimming at night.

  Ghosts in reflections.

  Haunted lakes.

  A sigh escapes my lips. Eli’s campfire tale sent either Tom or Katherine running to Google. One of them, in fact, did a lot of searching a few days ago. In addition to lake-related topics, I find searches for World Series scores, the weather forecast, paella recipes.

  One topic, however, stops me cold.

  Missing women in Vermont.

  Why on earth was Tom or Katherine interested in this?

  Shocked, I move to click on the link when I spot a name just beneath it.

  Mine.

  Seeing my name in the browser history isn’t a surprise. I’m sure I’ve been Googled by plenty of complete strangers in the past year. It makes sense my new neighbors would do it, too. I even know what the top hit will be before I click it. Sure enough, there’s a picture of me guzzling down a double old-fashioned and the headline that will likely dog me for the rest of my life.

  “Casey’s Booze Binge.”

  Below it are articles about my firing from Shred of Doubt, my IMDb page, Len’s obituary in the LA Times. All of the links had been clicked, making it clear that either Tom or Katherine had been researching me.

  What’s not so clear is which one it was.

  And why.

  When I return to the browser history to try to find out, I notice another familiar name had been entered into Google.

  Boone Conrad.

  The search brought up an article about his wife’s death. Reading it over, I learn two surprising facts. The first is that Boone is indeed his real name. The second is that he was a cop in the police department closest to Lake Greene. Everything else in the article is exactly what he’d told me yesterday. He came home from work, found his wife at the bottom of the stairs, and called paramedics, who declared her dead. The chief of police—Boone’s boss—is quoted as saying it was a tragic accident. End of story.

  I move on, seeing that it’s not just people on the lake who have been Googled by one of the Royces. I also spot a search for someone I’ve never heard of: Harvey Brewer.

  Clicking on it brings up a staggering number of hits. I choose the first one—a year-old article from a Pennsylvania newspaper with a ghoulish headline.

  “Man Admits to Slowly Poisoning His Wife.”

  I read the article, each sentence making my heart thump faster. It turns out that Harvey Brewer was a fifty-something mail carrier from East Stroudsburg whose forty-something wife, Ruth, suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack inside a Walmart.

  Although she was a healthy type—“Fit as a fiddle,” a friend said—Ruth’s death wasn’t a complete surprise. Her siblings told police she had been complaining about sudden weakness and dizzy spells in the weeks leading up to her death. “She said she wasn’t feeling quite like herself,” one of her sisters said.

  Because Harvey was set to receive a healthy sum of money after her death, Ruth’s family suspected foul play. They were right. An autopsy discovered trace amounts of brimladine, a common ingredient in rat poison, in Ruth’s system. Brimladine, a stimulant that some experts have called “the cocaine of poisons,” works by increasing the heart rate. In rodents, death is instantaneous. In humans, it takes a good deal longer.

  When the police questioned Harvey, he caved immediately and confessed to giving his wife microdoses of brimladine for weeks. The poison, doled out daily in her food and drink, weakened Ruth’s heart to the point of failure. Harvey claimed to have gotten the idea from a Broadway play the two of them had seen on a recent trip to New York.

  Shred of Doubt.

  Holy.

  Shit.

  Harvey Brewer had been in the audience of my play. He’d seen me onstage, playing a woman who comes to realize her husband is slowly poisoning her. He’d sat in that darkened theater, wondering if such a thing could be done in real life. Turns out, it could. And he almost got away with it.

  By the time I reach the end of the article, different moments with Katherine are gliding through my thoughts like a slide show.

  Floating in the lake, motionless, her lips an icy blue.

  It was like my entire body stopped working, was how she later described it.

  Slumped in a rocking chair, gripped by a hangover.

  I’m just not myself lately.

  Woozy from only two glasses of wine.

  I don’t feel too good.

  It’s that night by the fire I latch on to the hardest, as details that seemed small at the time suddenly loom large with meaning.

  Tom telling me how fantastic he thought I was in Shred of Doubt.

  Him insisting on pouring the wine, doing it with his back to us, so we couldn’t see what he was doing.

  Him carefully handing each of us our own glass, as if they’d been specifically assigned.

  Katherine downing hers in a mighty gulp, getting a refill from her husband.

  For a second, I’m dumb struck. The realization is like an old-timey flashbulb going off in my face. White-hot and blinding. Dizzy from the shock of it all, I close my eyes and wonder if what happened to Ruth Brewer also happened to Katherine.

  It makes sense in the same way a jigsaw puzzle does once all the pieces have been snapped into place. Tom saw Shred of Doubt and, like Harvey, got to thinking. Or maybe he stumbled upon Harvey Brewer’s crime first and decided to see the play for himself. There’s no way to know the how, the why, or the when. Not that it matters. Tom decided to imitate both Harvey and the play, slipping Katherine tiny doses of poison when he could, weakening her until, one day, everything just stopped.

  And Katherine found out, most likely by doing what I’m doing now and simply seeing it in her husband’s browsing history.

  That’s what she saw the night before she vanished.

  That’s why she looked simultaneously shocked and curious as I watched her from the porch. Sitting in this very chair. Staring at this very laptop. As stunned as I am now.

  And it’s why she and Tom fought later that night. She told him she knew what he was doing. He denied it, maybe demanded to know where such an idea came from. How? Who?

  By dawn, Katherine was gone. Tom either killed her or she ran, leaving everything behind. Now she could be buried in the woods or resting at the bottom of the lake or in hiding. Those are the only options I can think of.

  I need to find out which one it is.

  And convince Detective Wilma Anson to help me do it.

  I grab my phone again and take a picture of the laptop screen, the article about Harvey Brewer unreadable but the headline crystal clear. I’m about to take another when I hear an unwelcome sound arrive outside the house.

  Tires crunching gravel.

  To my right is a window that provides a view from the southwestern side of the house. I go to it and see Tom Royce’s Bentley vanishing under the portico.

  Shit.

  I run out of the office, only to stop and turn back around when I realize the laptop is still open. I rush back to the desk, slam the laptop shut, speed out of the office again. I pause in the second-floor hall, unsure where to go next. Within seconds, Tom will be inside. If I run down the stairs now, it’s likely he’ll spot me. It might be wiser to stay on this floor and hide in a place he probably won’t enter. The guest room seems to be the best bet. I could crawl under the bed and wait until I’m certain I can escape unseen.

  Which could be hours.

  Meanwhile, Tom still hasn’t come into the house. Maybe he’s doing something outside. Maybe there is enough time for me to fly down the stairs and zoom out the front door.

  I decide to risk it, mostly because hiding here—possibly for a long time—is no guarantee Tom won’t find me anyway. The safest thing to do is leave the house.

  Right now.

  With no thoughts in my head other than getting out of here as fast as possible, I sprint for the stairs.

  Then down the stairs.

  Then toward the front door.

  I grab the handle and pull.

  The door is locked, which I already knew but had forgotten because, one, there are other things on my mind and, two, I’ve never done this before.

  As I reach for the lock, I hear another door being pushed open.

  The sliding glass door in back of the house.

  Tom is coming inside—and I’m a second away from being caught. The front door is just off the living room. If he goes anywhere but the dining room or kitchen, I’ll be spotted. Even if he doesn’t, the click of the lock and sound of the door opening will alert him to my presence.

  I spin around, ready to face him, my mind whirling to come up with a vaguely logical excuse as to why I’m inside his house. I can’t. My brain is blank with panic.