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I’m reeling. And it’s hard for me to focus on the rest of Detective Riley’s questions. I’m about to ask her to repeat herself when my phone buzzes with a text.

“One moment.” I glance at the screen and find a message from a contractor who needs to meet with me about the HVAC system.

Stalling, I craft a reply to him, and it calms me down a little. After hitting send, I meet Detective Riley’s gaze. “Excuse me. Duty calls.”

“Of course,” she says in a soothing voice.

It’s not lost on me how much her demeanor changed when I pushed back on her demands. She knows she can’t push me too far, or I’ll just stop talking to her altogether.

“I know this is all very upsetting,” she says placidly. “We’ll go now. But please understand that we need to gather every speck of information about Tim’s last days. Somebody knows what really happened. We need to find that person.”

“Of course you do,” I manage. “But I’m as baffled as anyone.”

Detective Fry gets to his feet. “We really appreciate you taking the time to speak to us. If you think of anything at all that could be helpful, you’ll call?”

“Right. I have your card.”

“You’ve been helpful, too, Miss Chambers,” Riley says to Beatrice.

“I can’t see how,” Beatrice says tightly. “I’ll show you out.” She crosses to the office door and holds it open. It’s not subtle. I kind of love her for it.

But the cops are unhurried as they file past her, and I can almost see Beatrice fighting the urge to shove them through the corridor.

Trying not to look ruffled, I trail them into the foyer. Fry stops to glance around, his shrewd gaze sweeping over the crystal chandelier and following the curve of the staircase upward toward the gallery. “Wild to think that this was someone’s home.”

Riley nods in agreement. “It’s a magnificent building.”

“Magnificent. And so cozy.” Fry snorts.

When I glance at Beatrice, her face is full of rage.

Fry moves toward the door but doesn’t open it. He runs a hand over the carvings in the oak. It’s almost a caress.

I want to yank the door open and kick him through it.

Then, finally, the two cops leave, tossing meaningless pleasantries our way until Beatrice finally closes the door behind them. She leans back on the door and closes her eyes. “What the hell was that?” Her eyes spring open. “We have to talk.”

She marches past me, heading back to the office. I follow and immediately collapse into my chair. Beatrice takes the seat that Detective Riley vacated only minutes ago.

“Buddy, are you okay?” Beatrice asks.

Not even close . It’s just hitting me that I lied to the cops a second time. But what the hell was my daughter’s medallion doing in that car?

Beatrice stares at me, waiting for an answer.

“Honestly, I’m tired of that question,” I mutter. “Not that it’s off base.”

“Hey, I get it.” She folds her hands in her lap. “But that was really intense.”

Intense doesn’t even begin to cover it. I grab my phone and open the FriendFinder app to check on Natalie. It’s a relief to see her avatar at the high school where she’s supposed to be, but I won’t be able to take a full breath until I figure out if that really was her medallion in Tim’s car.

“Why did Tim have those photos?” Beatrice asks. “Did he steal them from you?”

A queasy feeling washes through me. “He must have? I have no idea why.”

“Yikes.” She blows out a breath. “Hank would lose his ever-loving mind if he knew the cops were asking about stolen photos of the family’s records on a dead guy’s phone.”

I feel bleak. “Do we have to tell him about it?”

She makes a thoughtful face. “Why do you think Tim took them? If you had to guess.”

“There’s no reasonable excuse. But he liked hearing about the history of the house. That’s all I can figure.”

But then there’s the fact of his adoption...

“What kind of questions did he ask you about the mansion?” she presses.

“Architecture questions. How gasoliers work. Where slate roof tiles come from.” None of it was very suspicious. “Why the servants’ entrances are always a few steps up or down from the other rooms in the house.” That’s because the servants’ wing had four stories to the mansion’s three. Apparently, commoners don’t need high ceilings. “He was a little obsessed.”

“But you don’t know why?”

I shake my head.

Beatrice rolls her neck in an uncharacteristic show of stress. “First that weird story in the coffee shop. And now this.”

“I know,” I say lamely. “But if he betrayed my trust, I don’t know if we’ll ever understand why.”

She frowns. “Why do you think the police are so obsessed with your phone?”

I pick up the incriminating device and turn it over in my hands, so that I don’t have to look her in the eyes. “They’re right about one thing,” I say in a voice that’s almost too low to hear. “I did check Tim’s location the week after he dumped me. More than a few times. I was just trying to understand what happened.”

When I lift my chin, Beatrice wears an expression of shocked disbelief. “You followed him everywhere he went?”

“No.” I give my head a firm shake. “I didn’t watch him every minute of the day. I wasn’t that bad. But the night after he broke it off, I saw him on the map. He’d gone out to dinner at his favorite first-date place. I was upset.”

She blinks. “And then?”

I shrug, even as my face is reddening. “I looked the next three nights, too.”

“So you saw him parked at the mansion on the night he died? You walked the dog here on purpose?”

I nod guiltily.

“ Rowan ,” she whispers. “Don’t tell another soul what you just told me. And don’t let them bully you into giving up your data.”

“Oh, I won’t. Because it’s even worse than that—I unfollowed him on the way to his car. I knew keeping track of him was unhealthy. I was going to stop.” I swallow hard. “But the timing would look suspicious. I must have tapped the unfollow button right around the time when he died.”

The color drains from her face. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

This is exactly why I wasn’t forthcoming to the police. “But I didn’t hurt him!”

She leans forward, her gaze pinning me to my seat. “Of course you didn’t. And his death is not your fault. But that looks bad , Rowan. You need to be more careful.”

“I’m trying.” The image of Natalie’s medallion swims through my vision, and I’m more frightened than I can admit.

She rubs her temples. “So he took those photos, but you don’t know when or why.”

Again, I shake my head. “I barely remember our conversation about them. He didn’t seem particularly fixated.” Or that’s what he wanted me to think . “Hank’s going to fire me if he hears about this, right? It’s bad.”

“We’re not telling the family,” she says in a hushed voice. “This stays between us. Hank would get angry, even though this will all blow over. As soon as they catch the guy, we can all move on.”

“Thank you,” I say stiffly.

“But listen.” She keeps her voice low, but her tone vibrates with intensity. “You need a lawyer. Tim’s death is all over the news, and those cops must be under a lot of pressure to make an arrest. I’m going to give you the names of a couple litigators that Hank has used.” She crosses the office and sits in front of her computer. Her manicure clicks rapidly on the keyboard. “I’m not joking. Put these numbers in your pocket.”

“Okay. But they can’t seriously pin this on me. I’ve never fired a gun. I don’t own a gun.”

“Don’t be na?ve.” She’s scribbling something on a card. “You’re a white woman who’s never been in trouble. That helps. But a white man is dead, and they need a killer. You need a professional in your corner.” She brings me the card. “Put this in your wallet. If you get another request for an interview, call one of these two.”

“Thanks,” I say, tucking the card away.

Beatrice collapses into a chair. “Is it five o’clock yet? It must be.”

The clock says two thirty. I need to see Natalie. “Seriously, I don’t think I can work right now. I’m too stressed out.”

She eyes me from her seat. “What if we knocked off early? We need a mental-health day. Nobody needs to know.”

“Good idea.” I give her a weak smile and rise from my chair. “Girl pact?”

“Always,” she says.

***

“Natalie?” I call out the moment I get home.

Silence.

She’s still at school, then. Or out with a friend.

Lick Jagger follows as I run through the house and up the narrow stairway to Natalie’s room. I push open the door and survey the wreckage. Clothes and shoes everywhere.

She’d kill me for searching her room like a cop, so I start with the visible surfaces—the tops of the desk, nightstand, and dresser.

No medallion anywhere.

She could be wearing it right now—that’s what I’m hoping. Aside from some books boxed up in our basement, this is the only thing she has of her father’s. It isn’t fancy, though. It’s the sort of thing they sell in Catholic church shops—Saint someone or other, depicted in silver with a palm frond over one arm and a lollipop-shaped religious artifact in the opposite hand.

There’s a jewelry box on top of her dresser, and I look there next. Under the lid is a mess of beaded friendship bracelets and clunky baubles from her dangly-earring phase.

No medallion, though. Hell.

Feeling frantic, I get down on my knees and begin poking through her desk drawers, looking for a flash of silver.

There’s no abyss as deep as a teenage girl’s bedroom, and panic begins to claw at my throat. Her desk drawers reveal nothing except a vast collection of cute office supplies.

She must be wearing it. She has to be.

I’m making myself ill trying to think up reasons it could have ended up in Tim’s car—without Natalie herself being in Tim’s car.

Unless Tim took it. I can’t think of why he’d do that. But neither can I imagine why he’d take photos off my phone.

Taking a deep breath, I try to recall if Natalie was wearing the medallion the night Tim was killed. I remember our argument outside my bathroom. Pesto pasta. A warm night. She was wearing a cute little white top.

If I try hard enough, I can picture the medallion around her neck. But I’ve seen it there a thousand times before, so I don’t know if it’s an actual memory or just an easily conjured desire.

So where is it? I get up and rifle through the dresser drawers. But I come up empty. Leaving Natalie’s room, I head for my own. Lickie whines when I pass by. She can’t understand why I’m home midday and not showing her some love.

But a terrible thought has occurred to me. Natalie loves to help herself to my jewelry without asking... I’m weak with relief when I find two pearl earrings inside my jewelry box.

“Okay,” I tell the dog. “Okay. There could be two identical medallions in the world, right?”

Lickie wags her tail.

“All right. Let’s go for a walk, then.”

She’s out the bedroom door and down the stairs before I can finish the sentence.

Outside, I scan the street for Natalie. While Lickie sniffs a tree, I take out my phone and debate texting her. I’m not sure what to ask. If Tim searched her room and took the medallion while I was in the shower, that’s one conversation. But if she’d been in Tim’s car herself...

Shivering, I open the FriendFinder app and check her location. But her avatar doesn’t pop up on the map. Beside her name it says: No location found.

I send a text.

Rowan: Call me. I need to speak to you.

I wait a polite thirty seconds or so, but when I call her, it goes right to voicemail.

There was a murder not four blocks from here, and my daughter can’t answer her phone when I call?

I march Lickie around the block and then try her phone again.

No answer.