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Is it you my brother is scared of?

Was it you outside my daughter’s day care?

Hyde stared back at her from the painting, his expression still confused, as though even if she’d been able to ask him those questions in person he wouldn’t have understood them clearly enough to answer.

She leaned away again.

Her gaze moved to one of the pictures of Chris as a baby. In this one, he was staring off to one side. But then she tilted her head and frowned. Something about it wasn’t right. The nose and the eyes. The shape of the whole face. There were other photographs of her brother as a baby in the composition, and in each of those she could already see traces of the man he would grow up to be.

But this one didn’t look anything like him at all.

She stepped back from the painting. As she did so, the individual images of the past disappeared, vanishing into the larger picture of the present they had been arranged to create. Then she turned around and walked over to the table, and began to search through the material Alderson had been working from. Most of it was photographs, but halfway down the pile she found something else. It was a small, torn piece of newspaper. There was no date visible, but the paper was brittle and yellow, and it was clearly many years old.

The baby on the canvas.

The print composing the child’s face was long faded now, and the words beneath only barely visible. But she could still just about read them, and asshe did so she felt a shiver run down her back, like a cold finger tracing the length of her spine.

Nathaniel Leland, seven months, remains missing.

A door opened downstairs, and the distant sound of the radio became a little louder.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice calling up from the landing below.

Then the creak of a foot on the stairs.

“You guys back?”

She held her breath and kept still.Just a student, she told herself. Nothing to worry about. And yet she didn’t want to be discovered here. So she waited. There were a few more seconds of silence, and then she heard whoever was down there retreating, followed by the sound of a door being closed.

She looked down at the newspaper clipping again. Who was this child? But that was a mystery she couldn’t solve right now, and so she folded the clipping carefully and put it in her pocket.

You guys back?

The man downstairs must have been referring to Chris and Alderson. And while they weren’t here now, if they had been once, then perhaps they would be again. She found a chunky pencil, the tip sharpened roughly with a knife, then leaned over the blank canvas on the table and began to write.

Chris. It’s Katie. I want to know you’re okay. Please call me.

She added her cell phone number. Then she stared at the message for a few seconds, hesitating.

Unsure.

But in the end she did it, adding another line in underneath. One that had felt blocked in her head for a moment there, but which then seemed to unspool out of her.

I love you.

Katie leaned the canvas against the wall, where anybody walking into the room would see it. And then, after one last look at that painting behind her—at all those pasts that had come together to create the present—she headed out of the room, closed the door behind her, and crept quietly downstairs again.

Thinking:

Who were you so frightened of, Chris?

And where the hell are you?

Fourteen

A park.