Page 3

C HAPTER 3

T rue to my word about staying, I spent the afternoon exhausting the kids in the pool before I helped with dinner and bath time. I read Max a bedtime story while Libby rocked Ada to sleep in the next room over.

I’d just finished our book and was going to turn off Max’s bedroom light when I caught glimpse of something small and shiny on his floor. He had plenty of toys, but the object lying near a herd of stuffed animals seemed out of place.

I crossed the room to pick it up and saw that it was a key. A small gold one that looked suited for a mailbox or maybe a bike lock. I turned it over and saw no distinct marking, no engraved initials or indication of what it might open. It was entirely nondescript. He must have found it somewhere and had kept it as treasure, as he was prone to do.

I pocketed the shiny, little choking hazard and turned off his light.

I left his room and crept back downstairs. The cavernous house stood silent and softly glowing like a caramel-orange sky in the moments after the sun sinks below the horizon. My brother-in-law had it rigged with lighting that optimized circadian performance, which basically meant it was hazy golden orange at night and crisp white blue in the morning and daytime. John funded their life with a career in robotics engineering that even I struggled to understand half the time, and that often took him away on business. Like right now, when he was spending three months in Tokyo to work with a team that was going to build something to save the planet in one way or another.

The living-room lights turned on with a slowly rising glow rather than a harsh flick when I entered, another one of John’s tricks. My eyes easily adjusted as I sank down onto the couch.

It didn’t take long for Libby to join me and fall asleep watching old sitcom reruns with her feet pressed into my hip, despite having the length of her enormous sectional to stretch out on. She hugged a pillow and quietly snored through a canned laugh track and set of familiar jokes playing on a TV screen big enough to be seen from outer space. I wore a pair of her borrowed pajamas—cotton shorts and an oversized T-shirt. The lights were low, all the doors locked. I was nestled and comfortable and pulled out my phone to do something I’d been wanting to do all day, but hadn’t gotten the chance.

Stalk Anthony Pierce on social media.

I went through the major platforms, one by one. There were dozens of Anthony Pierces, ranging from teenagers to business professionals, gym rats to retired old men. I clicked through a few and didn’t see his smoldering eyes staring back at me from any of the profile photos.

After several fruitless minutes, I frowned and set my phone down. Plenty of people didn’t do social media; it didn’t have to mean anything suspicious. But the lack of a digital footprint coupled with everything else that had happened had me reaching for my laptop I’d left on the coffee table to dig a little deeper.

The episode playing on TV ended and Libby stirred. I’d just typed Anthony Pierce, New York into a browser when she suddenly sat up and spoke.

“Oh no, she’s still missing?” she said in a sleepy drawl.

“Who’s missing?” I asked without looking up from my screen. My eyes widened. My search returned more results than I expected.

Libby pushed herself up to sit and reached for the remote balanced on the coffee table. “Portia Slate. Don’t you watch the news?”

The name rang a bell, but not because I’d heard it any time recently. “Sorry, end of the semester has been a little busy.”

The volume on the TV rose, and a news anchor’s voice cut into the room’s quiet hum. I looked up from my screen.

“. . . missing since last Saturday. The tech billionaire’s wife was last reported seen at the couple’s home in Woodside, the affluent community west of Palo Alto. Her husband, Connor Slate, CEO of EnViSage, reported her missing after she did not return from a jog. Local authorities have been searching the wooded area around the Slates’ property. A missing person report has also been issued and shared with regional and state-level authorities. Mrs. Slate was reported to be wearing black leggings, a dark blue fleece sweater, and blue running shoes when she was last seen. The news of Mrs. Slate’s disappearance came just days after her husband made headlines for EnViSage’s failed acquisition of StarCloud. We will continue updating on the story as we learn more.”

“Rough week for that guy,” Libby muttered. “He loses a multibillion-dollar deal and his wife goes missing? I bet he killed her.”

As the news anchor spoke, a brief carousel of images cycled through: Portia in a smart pantsuit with her blond hair pulled back into a low ponytail, waving at a crowd from a stage at a convention. Portia in a sparkling gown, with her famous husband in a tux, on a red carpet. Portia in a bikini on a boat, surrounded by a shock of teal water, squinting for a vacation selfie in the bright sun. Portia on a sidewalk in jeans and a baseball cap, looking like she was trying to blend in on a coffee run. She was young, beautiful, and married to one of the richest men on the planet.

“Oh, my God,” I said in shock. The dawn of realization hit me like a sledgehammer. Pieces snapped and clicked into place so quickly, I lost control of my breath.

“What’s the matter?” Libby asked as I sat up.

I reached for the remote in her hand and tried to stop the images on the screen. “I know her,” I said in a daze as I frantically jabbed at buttons. It wasn’t only Portia. There was someone else in the periphery of each photo that I needed a closer look at, and the images were going by too fast. “How do I pause it?”

Libby snatched the remote away, giving me a flashback to our youth when we used to squabble over control of the TV. “What’s going on, Pen? You know Portia Slate?”

The pieces continued crashing together as the news story transitioned into another topic. “I don’t know her, know her. But I’ve met her, and I think . . .” I trailed off and opened a new tab on my laptop, lost in the chaos of my own thoughts. I jammed in Portia Slate public and hit an image search.

Libby gave me her full attention. She sat at the couch’s edge and leaned over to see what I was doing. “You think what? And when did you meet her?”

I was half listening, half remembering the day of our brief interaction. “She came to campus once. The Slate Foundation donated a new computer lab to the school last year, and they sent her for the occasion. She met with the university president and the department deans, and then they made me take her for coffee. I guess because they think only young women can socialize with other young women. Or maybe they were all too intimidated, I don’t know. But it wasn’t only her, it was also . . .” I trailed off again, scanning the grid of images that had populated my screen. Many of the photos were the same ones we’d seen on TV, but now I could zoom in, look closer, and take my time to connect the frayed threads unspooling in my head.

“You had coffee with a billionaire’s wife and never told me?” Libby said, glomming on to a truly trivial element, given the situation.

“It was a work thing; I didn’t think you’d care,” I muttered, and kept scanning.

She sputtered in disagreement right as my eyes landed on what I was looking for. My heart surged up into my throat and beat there with a force that strangled my voice.

“No way. It is him.”

“Him who?” Libby demanded, elbowing her way closer to my screen.

She didn’t need to, because I refined my search to Portia Slate bodyguard and turned my computer to face her.

“Him.” I pointed at an image of a broad man with buzzed hair wearing sunglasses and a black T-shirt. He was a shadow, a background prop, a houseplant. Invisible in every photo unless you went looking for him. The search results ranged from casual sidewalk candids to black-tie events, his wardrobe adapting from streetwear to a tux. But one constant remained: He was always an arm’s length away from Portia Slate.

“That’s why I recognize him, Lib. He’s Portia Slate’s bodyguard! He was with her that day on campus. And he was . . .” I swallowed hard, only daring to imagine the full implications of my realization. “He was the body that fell out of the closet.”

Libby stared at me with eyes wider than the moon. Her mouth popped open and slowly closed a few times before she could summon words. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. You saw him too. Don’t you agree?”

She squinted at my screen with a look of unease. “I mean, that guy was dead, and this guy is very much not dead. He’s huge. ” Her eyes popped again, and I could see her remembering the size of the body that had fallen at our feet. She shook her head in shock. “If it’s him, what does it mean?”

I looked back at the photos as my certainty that it was the same man, and my uncertainty over what it meant, both grew to unsettling proportions. I could think of several scenarios that would explain why Portia Slate’s dead bodyguard was in Anthony Pierce’s closet, and all of them were too chilling to voice aloud.

In our stunned silence, the next news story spilled out into the room. The female anchor narrated.

“A local estate sale was cut short today when a body was found inside a closet in the house. Authorities were called to the scene just before noon. The homeowner, the late Lou Griotti, passed away last week. His nephew, who recently inherited the house, Anthony Pierce, was hosting the sale and has been questioned by police. Authorities have not yet released the identity of the body or named any suspects in the incident, though Mr. Pierce is a person of interest. He can be seen in this photo captured outside the police station today, along with his lawyer and the woman believed to be his girlfriend.”

My jaw dropped through the floor. It was me. In Anthony’s arms. Looking like a distressed damsel right in the moment after he’d caught me, and before his lawyer had interrupted us.

“What. The. Hell.” Libby voiced what I was thinking. “Who took that picture? And how did it get on the news?!”

My heart was pumping too much blood to my ears to hear straight. My vision began to blur. All I knew was that the two news stories on TV were connected, and the man next door had turned me into the glue.

Despite my sister’s protests, I shoved on flip-flops and marched over to Anthony’s house. The bulk of the Victorian sat dark, sucked into the backdrop of inky night, except for a few lights on the first floor, which had the house eerily glowing like a jack-o’-lantern. I knew he was still up. Libby tried to force me to take a can of pepper spray, but I didn’t have any pockets. All I had was my phone and a raging fury propelling me into the warm night. I swore to her that I wouldn’t go inside, and I knew she would supervise our entire interaction from her kitchen window.

My borrowed rubber sandals smacked the same path I’d walked up that morning when I existed in a world without dead bodies and mysterious neighbors. Everything had changed, and I hoped a conversation with the person responsible would be enough to change it back. I could not afford a police investigation this summer. The only thing that could tank a tenure case faster might have been plagiarism.

The arthritic front steps creaked under my feet, announcing my arrival before I even reached the doorbell. When I pressed the button, it chimed like a church organ into the gulch of the house.

Nothing happened.

I shifted my weight and glanced over at Libby, where I could see her hovering inside her kitchen window, backlit by the recessed lights and chewing her lip. Crickets chirped; trees rustled. A car engine purred in the distance.

A pang of guilt hit me that I might truly be disturbing Anthony so late at night. I let it go with an annoyed huff, thinking of all the ways he’d already disturbed my life, and knocked.

After a solid minute that almost made me give up and turn home, the door cracked open an inch. Anthony’s dark eye filled the narrow gap. He blinked a few times and then opened the door farther.

“Oh. It’s just you,” he said.

“Were you expecting someone else?” My hand landed on my hip of its own accord. I felt his eyes take in my pajamas and flip-flops, my hair in a messy bun, and phone gripped in one hand.

He pulled the door all the way open and scanned the street behind me. His sharp gaze almost made me turn around to see if there was anything there worth looking at. “At eleven p.m.? I can’t say I was expecting anyone to ring my doorbell.”

“Well, I won’t take much of your time. I came over to say you obviously didn’t clear things up with the police, because I saw on the news that I’m supposedly your girlfriend!” My voice cut the night like a blade. He leaned back from it and from my phone that I shoved in his face. “‘Anthony Pierce, person of interest, and his girlfriend outside the police station,’” I quoted from the news article I’d pulled up. The same photo from TV filled the screen.

He blinked at the bright screen in the dim porch light. He reached out for my wrist to hold my hand steady so he could read the small print. “Oh. I’m very sorry about that.”

I wasn’t expecting an apology. I bit back the next bullet loaded on my tongue ready to continue my rampage. I swallowed and composed myself. “You should be. What are you going to do about it?”

He looked at me like he was really considering a solution. It gave me time to notice he was still in all black, but this time, a pair of joggers slung low around his hips and a T-shirt. He wore only socks on his feet, and something about seeing him shoeless set the air on an intimate edge, which made me shift my weight again. He hadn’t let go of my wrist. His long fingers circled it in a gentle loop like he might have been checking my pulse. I hoped he wasn’t, because it was beating at a rather embarrassing pace.

He opened his mouth to speak, but snapped it shut just as quickly. His hand clamped down on my wrist with a suddenness that stole my breath. Before I could even throw a desperate glance at Libby, he yanked me inside his house.

I stumbled over the threshold with a yelp, my flip-flops smacking the hardwood floor and my free arm cartwheeling. I almost landed on my face. “What are you doing?!” I demanded as he let go of me and threw the door shut. I spun around, ready to defend myself, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was pressed up against the door, peering out the peephole.

My heart absolutely jackhammered my ribs. It was fit to beat out of my chest, and the manic wailing on my bones only compounded when I saw what was tucked into the back waistband of his joggers.

A gun.

I froze as if I’d been dropped into a pen with a tiger. If I stopped moving, stopped breathing, maybe he wouldn’t notice I was there.

As the seconds ticked by, a primitive chamber of my brain screamed at me to run. But to where? He was blocking the door, and there was no way I could shove a man of his size out of the way to get by—especially if he had a gun.

Why did he have a gun?!

I realized then I didn’t really want to stick around to find out. Libby had probably already called the police. For the second time today, the house would be crawling with authorities any minute.

In its spiral of panic, my brain managed to remember it was the second time today that I’d needed to escape this house. The first time, I’d gone out the back door, and I could do it again.

With Anthony’s attention still out the front door, I took a step back, deeper into the foyer. When my flip-flop smacked on the floor, I winced. As quickly and as quietly as I could, I removed each shoe and prepared to silently run for the back door. The hardwood floor was smooth and cold beneath my bare feet, like a river rock in the shade. I crept backward a few more steps, cautiously pressing the balls of my feet into the floor and praying it didn’t creak. When he didn’t turn around after three steps, I pivoted and sprinted for the hall.

Shadows lurched out of every corner in the dim house. I passed the living room and then the closet, with its shiny green knob protruding like a gemstone. The hallway was put back together, as if nothing had happened. I flew down it toward the door at its end. The only other light spilled out from the last room on the left. The door stood open, and a golden swath painted the hall from a glowing lamp.

I stomped to a stop when something inside caught my eye. The room, a neatly appointed office, had dark green wallpaper, the same wooden floor I stood on, a hulking desk, and a leather chair, which was nothing short of a throne. None of that was out of place. What caught my eye was a crowbar on the desk and the painting swung out into the room, a secret hatch to reveal a safe nestled into the wall. A safe with a keyhole. A golden keyhole that looked suited for the small key I’d found on Max’s bedroom floor.

“Penny! Wait!” Anthony called from the other end of the house, far enough away to sound like he was shouting down a tunnel.

My heart had never stopped pounding, but it picked up pace again at sight of him coming my way.

I bolted for the back door and tore it open. The back porch creaked the same as the front porch, and soon I was padding over the concrete of his driveway, still holding my shoes. I turned left and ran straight toward Libby’s backyard gate. A strip of cool grass momentarily soothed my feet when I reached the side yard separating the two lots. The gate only opened from Libby’s side, and there was no way I could reach over to lift the latch. I was ready to scale the fence barefoot when the gate flung open. Libby stood on the other side, her face awash with panic and anger.

I plowed into her, never having stopped running.

She took the hit like a tackle and fell back onto her lawn, with me on top of her. “Penny! What are you doing?” she demanded, and tried to sit up.

“What are you doing?” I gasped, out of breath and shocked, but thankful to see her.

“I was coming to get you! I saw him pull you inside, and when you didn’t come back out the front door, I figured I’d go in through the back door.”

I pushed up off her and noticed then she was holding a tennis racket. “And do what, hit him with your backhand?”

“It was this or John’s nine iron. You know we don’t have any weapons in the house,” she said as she sat up.

By weapons, she meant guns. Any number of things in her house could serve as a weapon in a pinch: sports equipment, kitchen knives, pruning shears, a handful of Max’s Legos strategically strewn about. The thought of the gun in Anthony’s waistband made me shudder.

I flinched when the light from his back porch flicked on. Libby took the cue from me and reached for my hand. Like we were fleeing a searchlight, she hunched over and led me back to her house. My speeding heart only began to slow once we were inside behind her locked doors.

“I told you that was a bad idea,” she said, and set the tennis racket on the dining table.

I released a long breath in agreement. “What was in the street when he pulled me inside? All he did was shut the door and look out the peephole.”

“He didn’t hurt you? You didn’t have to escape?” she said with unmistakable relief.

“Well, I mean I kind of escaped. But he wasn’t trying to stop me. He didn’t tie me up or anything.” I felt my wrist where he’d held it, the warmth of his hand a fading memory.

“Good. Now I don’t have to kill him.”

A weak laugh popped from my mouth, though I didn’t think she was kidding. “What was he looking at?” I repeated my question.

“A car drove by. That’s all I saw.”

“Did you recognize it?”

“It’s pretty dark, but it looked like a normal car.”

“Normal?”

She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know, Pen! A black car, with dark windows. I didn’t pay too much attention, because I was too worried about my idiotic little sister getting snatched!”

“I didn’t get snatched.” But he has a gun.

I didn’t say the last part out loud because, surely, she would begin screeching again and perhaps attack me with the tennis racket.

“Well, not for lack of trying. You’re not allowed to go over there again,” she scolded, and pointed a finger at me like I was a rebellious teenager sneaking out to see my boyfriend.

I couldn’t promise her I wouldn’t. We still had to sort out the girlfriend issue, and my curiosity about the key Max had found belonging to the safe in that back office was gnawing, to put it mildly. Not to mention, moments before I’d discovered the world believed me to be Anthony Pierce’s girlfriend, I’d identified the body in his closet as Portia Slate’s bodyguard.

The pieces were enough to make me shudder. Part of me wanted to run far away from it all and another part wanted answers. But the biggest part—that was connected straight to my heartstrings—had me wanting to stay with my sister and quell the look of terror in her eyes.

“I’ll be careful, Lib,” I said. “And I’ll go up to the city tomorrow and get my stuff to stay here for a while, okay?”

Her shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank you.”

We said good night, but I knew I would be chasing sleep for hours.

Back upstairs, I resumed the internet search that got cut off when the news had come on. Anthony Pierce, New York. The tab I’d opened was still there waiting for me. As it turned out, the hefty haul of results I’d seen was due to the news breaking about the body, not anything to do with Anthony in general. In fact, his absence on social media bled over into any kind of digital footprint. Other than stories about the estate sale, he didn’t seem to exist. I even used a VPN to hide my sister’s IP address before combing a few dark corners of the Web, locations I’d learned from an old grad school roommate who was poached out of our program to go work for the NSA. Even in those unseemly places, nothing.

I frowned all over again. Existing in today’s world without any kind of digital footprint was near impossible, and a feat only accomplished by conspiracy theorists or people who had legitimate reasons to stay offline. While mysterious and cagey, the man next door did not strike me as the type to hole up in a basement with canned goods and a doomsday clock. Anthony Pierce was invisible on purpose.

A list of the types of people to be invisible on purpose ran through my mind, and I quickly cross-referenced it with who might also have a body in their closet and a gun in their pj’s: a spy, a black-ops agent, or, the most likely option, a criminal.

I swallowed a thick lump.

As invisible as Anthony was online, I, on the other hand, was very visible. A simple search of my name would bring up my faculty profile, lists of publications, conference presentations, ratemyprofessor.com ratings. There was no way I could scrub myself from the internet, and all it would take was someone recognizing me from the photo for the already-moving snowball to gather speed into an avalanche. I was already battling stereotypes as one of the only women in my department. I couldn’t give them any reason to doubt me, and showing up on the nightly news in suspicious fashion would not work in my favor.

I weighed the options of getting out in front of it by notifying my tenure committee versus keeping quiet and hoping they didn’t notice. The latter seemed unlikely, given it was already all over the internet and on TV. Dr. Benson, my committee chair, watched the nightly news like religion. He’d probably already seen it and was drafting my termination letter.

The thought hadn’t even fully formed in my mind before my email pinged with a message that sent a shock wave of terror through me.

Dr. Benson had watched the evening news and felt compelled to reach out about it. He was notorious for emailing at all hours, and the expected response time was nothing short of instant. His preferred style of communication was short bursts of speech or text that the recipient was responsible for interpreting: Concerning story on the news tonight.

He didn’t have to say more because we both knew what he meant.

I blinked at my screen until my eyes were dry, silently panicking over how to respond. The idea of late-night messaging with my committee chair about dead bodies and fake boyfriends was nearly as terrifying as the dead body itself. I had a vision of him giving me one of his stern stares that made undergrads cry and felt my career circling dangerously close to a drain.

I took a bracing breath and typed out a response.

Hi, Dr. Benson,

It’s all a misunderstanding. My sister lives next door to the house where the estate sale was, and we happened to be there at the time of the incident. I had no part in it, other than being a witness. I don’t even know Anthony Pierce and we certainly aren’t dating.

Penny

I hit send and considered diving under a pillow.

His response came almost instantly: Good. I’d hate for there to be any distractions that could complicate your tenure case, and the school doesn’t need any bad press.

Even if he didn’t mean it as a threat, I took it as one: Of course, Dr. Benson, there won’t be. I’ll take care of it.

I hit send on my reply and shut my laptop with a snap. I wished I could go back in time and forget everything about the candlesticks. I wished I’d never gone to the estate sale. I wished I’d stayed in the city, where we had predictable crimes, like muggings and corner store hold-ups and hit-and-runs. But no, I’d come to suburbia for the weekend and was now neck deep in a crime because of a giant misunderstanding.

I stood from the bed. When I crossed the room to close the curtains, ready to attempt sleep, I froze in my tracks. My bedroom window faced Anthony’s living-room window, among many others. He stood in his living room, staring up at my window and sipping something in a glass tumbler. When he saw me eyeing him, he didn’t even flinch. He stood there, calmly sipping and watching me.

I steeled myself and tried to stare back, but I only lasted a few seconds before I yanked the curtains closed and turned off the light.