She tried to run, but she can’t escape the other Mrs.

Sadie and Will Foust have only just moved their family from bustling Chicago to small-town Maine when their neighbor Morgan Baines is found dead in her home. The murder rocks their tiny coastal island, but no one is more shaken than Sadie.

But it’s not just Morgan’s death that has Sadie on edge. It’s the eerie and decrepit old home they inherited. It’s Will’s disturbed teenage niece, Imogen, with her threatening presence. And it’s the troubling past that continues to wear at the seams of their family.

As the eyes of suspicion turn toward the new family in town, Sadie is drawn deeper into the mystery of Morgan’s death. But Sadie must be careful, for the more she discovers about Mrs. Baines, the more she begins to realize just how much she has to lose if the truth ever comes to light.

MARY KUBICA is The New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Good Girl. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American Literature. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and two children.

Visit Mary at http://www.marykubica.com/

Also by Mary Kubica

The Good Girl

Pretty Baby

Don’t You Cry

Every Last Lie

When the Lights Go Out

The Other Mrs

Mary Kubica

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Mary Kyrychenko 2020

Mary Kyrychenko asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9781474057639

Note to Readers

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Praise for The Other Mrs

‘Kubica ratchets up tension and intrigue in The Other Mrs.

Her salacious, thoroughly mysterious characters bear the qualities

we all crave in a thriller – seductive, seemingly unknowable, and

altogether unpredictable’

Karin Slaughter

‘Terrifying. Kubica’s best work yet’

Caroline Kepnes, author of You

‘Brilliantly propulsive and engrossing, with twists you won’t see

coming, The Other Mrs is that rare thing: a thriller with heart’

JP Delaney, author of The Girl Before

‘A labyrinth of deception and family secrets, each one more

shocking than the last, with an ending that left me thunderstruck’

Samantha Downing, author of My Lovely Wife

‘Mary Kubica’s best book yet! I tore through the twisty,

spine-tinglingly creepy pages’

Sarah Pekkanen, co-author of The Wife Between Us

‘An utterly absorbing tale of deception and subterfuge’

Liv Constantine, author of The Other Mrs Parrish

Praise for Mary Kubica

‘Creepy and oh so clever, with a brilliant twist!’

Alice Feeney, author of Sometimes I Lie

‘Brilliant, intense, and utterly addictive’

B A Paris, author of Behind Closed Doors

‘Grabs you from the moment it starts’

Daily Mail

‘Gets right under your skin and leaves its mark.

A tremendous read’

The Sun

For Michelle and Sara

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Praise

Dedication

SADIE

SADIE

SADIE

CAMILLE

SADIE

CAMILLE

SADIE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

CAMILLE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

CAMILLE

SADIE

SADIE

SADIE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

CAMILLE

SADIE

CAMILLE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

SADIE

SADIE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

MOUSE

SADIE

SADIE

WILL

SADIE

WILL

SADIE

WILL

SADIE

WILL

SADIE

WILL

SADIE

WILL

SADIE

SADIE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Publisher

SADIE

There’s something off about the house. Something that nags at me, makes me feel uneasy, though I don’t know what it is that makes me feel this way. On the surface, it’s perfectly idyllic, gray with a large covered porch, one that runs the full width of the house. It’s boxy and big, a foursquare farmhouse with windows aligned in rows, symmetrical in a way I find eye-pleasing. The street itself is charming, sloped and tree-covered, each home as lovely and well kept as the next.

On the surface, there’s nothing not to like. But I know better than to take things at face value. It doesn’t help that the day, like the house, is gray. If the sun were out maybe I’d feel differently.

“That one,” I say to Will, pointing at it because it’s identical to the one in the picture that was given to Will from the executor of the estate. He’d flown in last week, to Portland, to take care of the official paperwork. Then he’d flown back, so we could drive here together. He hadn’t had time to see the house then.

Will pauses, bringing the car to rest in the street. He and I lean forward in our seats at exactly the same time, taking it in, as do the boys in the back seat. No one speaks, not at first, not until Tate blurts out that the house is gigantic—transposing his soft and his hard g’s as seven-year-olds have a tendency to do—and Will laughs, overjoyed that someone besides him can see the advantage of our move to Maine.

The house is not gigantic, not really, but in comparison to a 1,200-square-foot condo, it is, especially when it comes with its own yard. Tate has never had his own yard before.

Will gently steps on the gas, easing the car into the driveway. Once in Park, we climb out—some more quickly than others, though the dogs are the quickest of all—stretching our legs, grateful, if for nothing else, to be done with the long drive. The air outside is different than what I’m used to, infused with the scent of damp earth, salty ocean and the woodsy terrain. It smells nothing like home. The street is quiet in a way I don’t like. An eerie quiet, an unsettling quiet, and at once I’m reminded of the notion that there’s safety in numbers. That bad things are less likely to happen among crowds. There’s a misconception that rural living is better, safer than urban living, and yet it’s simply not true. Not when you take into account the disproportionate number of people living in cities, the inadequate health care system in rural parts.

I watch Will walk toward the porch steps, the dogs running along beside him, passing him up. He’s not reluctant like me. He struts as much as he walks, anxious to get inside and check things out. I feel resentful because of it, because I didn’t want to come.

At the base of the steps he hesitates, aware only then that I’m not coming. He turns toward me, standing still next to the car, and asks, “Everything all right?” I don’t answer because I’m not sure if everything is all right.

Tate goes dashing after Will, but fourteen-year-old Otto hovers like me, also reluctant. We’ve always been so much alike.

“Sadie,” Will says, modifying his question, asking this time, “are you coming?” He tells me it’s cold out, a fact of which I was unaware because of my focus on other things, like how the trees around the house tower high enough to block the light. And how dangerously slick the steep street must be when it snows. A man stands up at the top of the hill, on his lawn with a rake in hand. He’s stopped raking and stands perched, watching me, I think. I raise a hand and wave, the neighborly thing to do. He doesn’t wave back. He turns away, goes back to raking. My gaze goes back to Will, who says nothing of the man. Surely he saw him as well as I did.

“Come on,” Will says instead. He turns and climbs the steps with Tate beside him. “Let’s go inside,” he decides. At the front door, Will reaches into his pocket and pulls out the house keys. He knocks first, but he doesn’t wait to be let in. As Will unlocks the door and pushes it open, Otto moves away from me, leaving me behind. I go, too, only because I don’t want to be left alone outside.

Inside we discover that the house is old, with things like mahogany paneling, heavy drapery, tin ceilings, brown-and-forest-green walls. It smells musty. It’s dark, dreary.

We crowd together in the entryway and assess the home, a traditional floor plan with the closed-in rooms. The furnishings are formal and unwelcoming.

My attention gets lost on the curved legs of the dining room table. On the tarnished candelabra that sits on top of it. On the yellowing chair pads. I hardly see her standing at the top of the stairs. Were it not for the slightest bit of movement caught out of the corner of my eye, I might never have seen her. But there she stands, a morose figure dressed in black. Black jeans, a black shirt, bare feet. Her hair is black, long with bangs that slant sideways across her face. Her eyes are outlined in a thick slash of black eyeliner. Everything black, aside from the white lettering on her shirt, which reads, I want to die. The septum of her nose is pierced. Her skin, in contrast to everything else, is white, pallid, ghostlike. She’s thin.

Tate sees her, too. At this, he moves from Will to me, hiding behind me, burrowing his face into my backside. It’s not like Tate to be scared. It’s not like me to be scared, and yet I’m well aware that the hairs on the nape of my neck now stand on end.

“Hello,” I say, my voice weak.

Will now sees her, too. His eyes go to her; he says her name. He starts climbing the steps to her, and they creak under his feet, protesting our arrival. “Imogen,” he says with arms wide, expecting, I think, that she’ll fold herself into them and let him hold her. But she doesn’t because she’s sixteen and standing before her is a man she hardly knows. I can’t fault her for this. And yet the brooding, melancholic girl was not what I’d imagined when we discovered we were given guardianship of a child.

Her voice is acidic when she speaks, quiet—she doesn’t ever raise her voice; she doesn’t need to. The muted tone is much more unsettling than if she screamed. “Stay the fuck away from me,” she says coolly.

She glowers down over the stair banister. My hands involuntarily move behind me and to Tate’s ears. Will stops where he is. He lowers his arms. Will has seen her before, just last week when he came and met with the executor of the estate. It was then that he signed the papers and took physical possession of her, though arrangements had been made for her to stay with a friend while Will, the boys and I drove here.

The girl asks, her voice angry, “Why’d you have to come?”

Will tries to tell her—the answer is easy, for were it not for us, she’d likely have entered the foster care system until she turned eighteen, unless she was granted emancipation, which seemed unlikely at her age—but an answer is not what she wants. She turns away from him, disappearing into one of the second-story rooms where we hear her futzing angrily with things. Will makes a move to follow, but I say to him, “Give her time,” and he does.

This girl is not the same as the little girl Will had shown us in the photograph. A happy-go-lucky freckled brunette of about six years old. This girl is different, much changed. The years have not been kind to her. She comes with the house, just another thing that’s been left to us in the will, mixed in with the house and the heirlooms, what assets remain in the bank. She’s sixteen, nearly able to be on her own—a moot point that I tried arguing, for certainly she had a friend or some other acquaintance who could take her in until she turned eighteen—but Will said no. With Alice dead, we were all that remained, her only family, though she and I were meeting just now for the first time. She needs to be with family, Will told me at the time, days ago only, though it feels like weeks. A family who will love and care for her. She’s all alone, Sadie. My maternal instinct had kicked in then, thinking of this orphaned child all alone in the world, with no one but us.

I hadn’t wanted to come. I’d argued that she should come to us. But there was so much more to consider, and so we came anyway, despite my reservations.

I wonder now, and not for the first time this week, what kind of disastrous effect this change will have on our family. It can’t possibly be the fresh start Will so auspiciously believes it to be.

SADIE
Seven Weeks Later...

The siren woke us at some point in the middle of the night. I heard the scream of it. I saw the dazzling lights that streamed in the bedroom window as Will grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and sat up abruptly in bed, adjusting them on the bridge of his nose.

“What’s that?” he asked, holding his breath, disoriented and confused, and I told him it was a siren. We sat hushed for a minute, listening as the wail drifted farther away, quieting down but never going completely silent. We could hear it still, stopped somewhere just down the street from our home.

“What do you think happened?” Will asked, and I thought only of the elderly couple on the block, the man who pushed his wife in a wheelchair up and down the street, though he could barely walk. They were both white-haired, wrinkled, his back curved like the hunchback of Notre Dame. He always looked tired to me, like maybe she was the one who should be doing the pushing. It didn’t help that our street was steep, a decline to the ocean below.

“The Nilssons,” Will and I said at the same time, and if there was a lack of empathy in our voices it’s because this is what is expected of older people. They get injured, sick; they die.

“What time is it?” I asked Will, but by then he’d returned his glasses to the bedside table and said to me, “I don’t know,” as he pressed in closely and folded an arm around my waistline, and I felt the subconscious pull of my body from his.

We fell back asleep that way, forgetting altogether about the siren that had snatched us from our dreams.

In the morning I shower and get dressed, still tired from a fitful night. The boys are in the kitchen, eating breakfast. I hear the commotion downstairs as I step uneasily from the bedroom, a stranger in the home because of Imogen. Because Imogen has a way of making us feel unwelcome, even after all this time.

I start to make my way down the hall. Imogen’s door is open a crack. She’s inside, which strikes me as odd because her door is never open when she’s inside. She doesn’t know that it’s open, that I’m in the hallway watching her. Her back is to me and she’s leaned into a mirror, tracing the lines of black eyeliner above her eyes.

I peer through the crevice and into Imogen’s room. The walls are dark, tacked with images of artists and bands who look very much like her, with the long black hair and the black eyes, dressed in all black. A black gauzy thing hangs above her bed, a canopy of sorts. The bed is unmade, a dark gray pintuck duvet lying on the floor. The blackout curtains are pulled taut, keeping the light out. I think of vampires.

Imogen finishes with the eyeliner. She snaps the cap on it, turns too fast and sees me before I have a chance to retreat. “What the fuck do you want?” she asks, the anger and the vulgarity of her question taking my breath away, though I don’t know why. It’s not as if it’s the first time she’s spoken to me this way. You’d think I might be used to it by now. Imogen scuttles so quickly to the door that at first I think she’s going to hit me, which she hasn’t ever done, but the speed of her movement and the look on her face make me think she might. I involuntarily flinch, moving backward, and instead, she slams the door shut on me. I’m grateful for this, for getting the door slammed in my face as opposed to getting hit. The door misses my nose by an inch.

My heart thumps inside my chest. I stand in the hallway, breathless. I clear my voice, try to recover from the shock of it. I step closer, rap my knuckles on the wood and say, “I’m leaving for the ferry in a few minutes. If you want a ride,” knowing she won’t accept my offer. My voice is tumultuous in a way that I despise. Imogen doesn’t answer.

I turn and follow the scent of breakfast downstairs. Will is by the stove when I come down. He stands, flipping pancakes in an apron, while singing one of those songs from the jaunty CDs Tate likes to listen to, something far too merry for seven fifteen in the morning.

He stops when he sees me. “You okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say, voice strained.

The dogs circle Will’s feet, hoping he’ll drop something. They’re big dogs and the kitchen is small. There isn’t enough room for four of us in here, let alone six. I call to the dogs and, when they come, send them into the backyard to play.

Will smiles at me when I return and offers me a plate. I opt only for coffee, telling Otto to hurry up and finish. He sits at the kitchen table, hunched over his pancakes, shoulders slumped forward to make himself appear small. His lack of confidence worries me, though I tell myself that this is normal for fourteen. Every child goes through this, but I wonder if they do.

Imogen stomps through the kitchen. There are tears up the thighs and in the knees of her black jeans. Her boots are black leather combat boots, with nearly a two-inch heel. Even without the boots, she’s taller than me. Raven skulls dangle from her ears. Her shirt reads, Normal people suck. Tate, at the table, tries to sound it out, as he does all of Imogen’s graphic T-shirts. He’s a good reader, but she doesn’t stand still long enough for him to get a look at it. Imogen reaches for a cabinet pull. She yanks open the door, scanning the inside of the cabinet before slamming it shut.

“What are you looking for?” Will asks, always eager to please, but Imogen finds it then in the form of a Kit Kat bar, which she tears open and bites into.

“I made breakfast,” Will says, but Imogen, blue eyes drifting past Otto and Tate at the kitchen table, seeing the third, vacant place setting set for her, says only, “Good for you.”

She turns and leaves the room. We hear her boots stomp across the wooden floors. We hear the front door open and close, and only then, when she’s gone, can I breathe.

I help myself to coffee, filling a travel mug before making an effort to stretch past Will for my things: the keys and a bag that sit on the countertop just out of reach. He leans in to kiss me before I go. I don’t mean to, and yet it’s instinctive when I hesitate, when I draw back from his kiss.

“You okay?” Will asks again, looking at me curiously, and I blame a bout of nausea for my hesitation. It’s not entirely untrue. It’s been months now since the affair, and yet his hands are still like sandpaper when he touches me and, as he does, I can’t help but wonder where those hands have been before they were on me.

A fresh start, he’d said, one of the many reasons we find ourselves transported to this home in Maine, which belonged to Will’s only sister, Alice, before she died. Alice had suffered for years from fibromyalgia before the symptoms got the best of her and she decided to end her life. The pain of fibromyalgia is deep. It’s diffused throughout the body and often accompanied by incapacitating exhaustion and fatigue. From what I’ve heard and seen, the pain is intense—a sometimes stabbing, sometimes throbbing pain—worse in the morning than later in the day, but never going completely away. It’s a silent disease because no one can see pain. And yet it’s debilitating.

There was only one thing Alice could do to counter the pain and fatigue, and that was to head into the home’s attic with a rope and step stool. But not before first meeting with a lawyer and preparing a will, leaving her house and everything inside of it to Will. Leaving her child to Will.

Sixteen-year-old Imogen spends her days doing only God knows what. School, presumably, for part of it at least, because we only get truancy calls on occasion. But how she spends the rest of the day I don’t know. When Will or I ask, she either ignores us or she has something smart to say: that she’s off fighting crime, promoting world peace, saving the fucking whales. Fuck is one of her favorite words. She uses it often.

Suicide can leave survivors like Imogen feeling angry and resentful, rejected, abandoned, full of rage. I’ve tried to be understanding. It’s getting hard to do.

Growing up, Will and Alice were close, but they grew apart over the years. He was rattled by her death, but he didn’t exactly grieve. In truth, I think he felt more guilty than anything: that he did a negligent job of keeping in touch, that he wasn’t involved in Imogen’s life and that he never grasped the gravity of Alice’s disease. He feels he let them down.

At first, when we’d learned of our inheritance, I suggested to Will that we sell the home, bring Imogen to Chicago to live with us, but after what happened in Chicago—not just the affair alone, but all of it, everything—it was our chance to make a new beginning, a fresh start. Or so Will said.

We’ve been here less than two months, so that we’re still getting the lay of the land, though we found jobs quickly, Will and me, he working as an adjunct professor teaching human ecology two days a week, over on the mainland.

As one of only two physicians on the island, they practically paid me to come.

I press my lips to Will’s mouth this time, my ticket to leave.

“I’ll see you tonight,” I say, calling again to Otto to hurry up or we’ll be late. I grab my things from the countertop and tell him I’ll be in the car waiting. “Two minutes,” I say, knowing he’ll stretch two to five or six as he always does.

I kiss little Tate goodbye before I go. He stands on his chair, wraps his sticky arms around my neck and screams into an ear, “I love you, Mommy,” and somewhere inside of me my heart skips a beat because I know that at least one of them still loves me.

My car sits on the driveway beside Will’s sedan. Though we have a garage attached to the house, it’s overrun with boxes that we have yet to unpack.

The car is cold when I arrive, covered in a thin layer of frost that has settled on the windows overnight. I unlock the door with my key fob. The headlights blink; a light turns on inside.

I reach for the door handle. But before I can give it a tug, I catch sight of something on the window that stops me. There are lines streaked through the frost on the driver’s side. They’ve started to liquefy in the warmth of the morning’s sunlight, softening at their edges. But still, they’re there. I step closer. As I do, I see that the lines are not lines at all, but letters traced into the frost on the window, coming together to form a single word: Die.

A hand shoots to my mouth. I don’t have to think hard to know who left this message for me to find. Imogen doesn’t want us here. She wants us to leave.

I’ve tried to be understanding because of how awful the situation must be for her. Her life has been upended. She lost her mother and now must share her home with people she doesn’t know. But that doesn’t justify threatening me. Because Imogen doesn’t mince words. She means just what she said. She wants me to die.

I make my way back up the porch steps and call through the front door for Will.

“What is it?” he asks, making his way from the kitchen. “Did you forget something?” he asks as he cocks his head to the side, taking in my keys, my bag, my coffee. I didn’t forget something.

“You have to see this,” I say, whispering now so the boys don’t hear.

Will follows me barefoot out the front door, though the concrete is bitterly cold. Three feet from the car I point at it, the word inscribed in the frost of the window. “You see it?” I ask, turning my eyes to Will’s. He sees it. I can tell as much in his expression, in the way it turns instantly distressed, mirroring mine.

“Shit,” he says because he, like me, knows who left that there. He rubs at his forehead, thinking this through. “I’ll talk to her,” he says, and I ask defensively, “What good will that do?”

We’ve talked to Imogen many times over the last few weeks. We’ve discussed the language she uses, especially around Tate; the need for a curfew; more. Though talking at would be a more fitting term than talking to because it isn’t a conversation we have. It’s a lecture. She stands while Will or I speak. She listens, maybe. She rarely replies. She takes nothing to heart and then she leaves.

Will’s voice is quiet when he speaks. “We don’t know for certain that she left this here,” he says softly, floating an idea by me, one I’d rather not consider. “Isn’t it possible,” Will asks, “that someone left that message for Otto?”

“You think someone left a death threat on my window for our fourteen-year-old child?” I ask, in case Will has somehow misconstrued the meaning of that word Die.

“It’s possible, isn’t it?” he asks, and though I know that it is, I tell him, “No.” I say it with more conviction in my voice than I feel, because I don’t want to believe it. “Not again,” I insist. “We left all that behind when we moved.”

But did we? It isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that someone is being mean to Otto. That someone’s bullying him. It’s happened before. It can happen again.

I say to Will, “Maybe we should call the police.”

But Will shakes his head. “Not until we know who did this. If it’s Imogen, is that really a reason to involve the police? She’s just an angry girl, Sadie. She’s grieving, lashing out. She’d never do anything to hurt any of us.”

“Wouldn’t she?” I ask, far less sure than Will. Imogen has become another point of contention in our marriage. She and Will are related by blood; there’s a connection there that I don’t have.

When Will doesn’t reply, I go on, arguing, “No matter who the intended recipient, Will, it’s still a death threat. That’s a very serious thing.”

“I know, I know,” he says, glancing over his shoulder to be sure Otto isn’t on his way out. He speaks quickly, says, “But if we get the police involved, Sadie, it will draw attention to Otto. Unwanted attention. The kids will look at him differently, if they don’t already. He won’t stand a chance. Let me call the school first. Speak to his teacher, the principal, make sure Otto isn’t having trouble with anyone. I know you’re worried,” he says, voice softening as he reaches out, runs a comforting hand along my arm. “I’m worried, too,” he says. “But can we do that first,” he asks, “before calling the police? And can I at least have a conversation with Imogen before we just assume this was her?”

This is Will. Always the voice of reason in our marriage.

“Fine,” I tell him, relenting, admitting that he might be right. I hate to think of Otto as an outcast in a new school, of him being bullied like this.

But I also can’t stand to consider the animosity Imogen has toward us. We have to get to the bottom of this without making things worse. “But if it happens again, if anything like this happens again,” I say, pulling my hand from my bag, “we go to the police.”

“Deal,” Will agrees, and he kisses me on the forehead. “We’ll get this taken care of,” he says, “before it has a chance to go too far.”

“Do you promise?” I ask, wishing Will could snap his fingers and make everything better, just like that.

“I promise,” he says as I watch him skip back up the stairs and inside the house, disappearing behind the door. I scribble my hand through the letters. I wipe my hands on the thighs of my pants before letting myself into the cold car. I start the engine and blast the defrost, watching as it takes the last traces of the message away, though it’ll stay with me all day.

The minutes on the car’s dash pass by, two and then three. I stare at the front door, waiting for it to open back up, for Otto to appear this time, slogging to the car with an unreadable expression on his face that gives no indication of what’s going on inside his mind. Because that’s the only face he makes these days.

They say that parents should know these things—what our kids are thinking—but we don’t. Not always. We can never really know what anyone else is thinking.

And yet when children make poor choices, parents are the first to be blamed.

How didn’t they know? critics often ask. How did they overlook the warning signs?

Why weren’t they paying attention to what their kids were doing?—which is a favorite of mine because it implies we weren’t.

But I was.

Before, Otto was quiet and introverted. He liked to draw, cartoons mostly, with a fondness for anime, the hip characters with their wild hair and their larger-than-life eyes. He named them, the images in his sketch pad—and had a dream to one day create his own graphic novel based on the adventures of Asa and Ken.

Before, Otto had only a couple of friends—exactly two—but those that he had called me ma’am. When they came for dinner, they brought their dishes to the kitchen sink. They left their shoes by the front door. Otto’s friends were kind. They were polite.

Otto did well in school. He wasn’t a straight A student, but average was good enough for him and Will and me. His grades fell in the B/C range. He did his homework and turned it in on time. He never slept through class. His teachers liked him, and only ever had one complaint: they’d like to see Otto participate more.

I didn’t overlook the warning signs because there were none to overlook.

I stare at the house now, waiting for Otto to come. After four minutes, my eyes give up on the front door. As they do, something out the car window catches my eye. Mr. Nilsson pushing Mrs. Nilsson in her wheelchair, down the street. The slope is steep; it takes great effort to hang on to the rubbery handles of the wheelchair. He walks slowly, more on the heels of his feet, as if they are car brakes and he’s riding the brakes all the way down the street.

Not yet seven twenty in the morning, and they’re both completely done up, him in twill slacks and a sweater, her in some sort of knit set where everything is a light pink. Her hair is curled, tightly woven and set with spray, and I think of him, scrupulously wrapping each lock of hair around a roller and securing the pin. Poppy is her name, I think. His might be Charles. Or George.

Right before our home, Mr. Nilsson makes a diagonal turn, going to the opposite side of the street from ours.

As he does, his eyes remain on the rear of my car where the exhaust comes out in clouds.

All at once the sound of last night’s siren returns to me, the waning bellow of it as it passed by our home and disappeared somewhere down the street.

A dull pain forms in the pit of my stomach, but I don’t know why.

SADIE

The drive from the ferry dock to the medical clinic is short, only a handful of blocks. It takes less than five minutes from the time I drop Otto off until I pull up to the humble, low-slung blue building that was once a house.

From the front, it still resembles a house, though the back opens up far wider than any home ever would, attaching to a low-cost independent living center for senior citizens with easy access to our medical services. Long ago someone donated their home for the clinic. Years later, the independent living center was an addition.

The state of Maine is home to some four thousand islands. I didn’t know this before we arrived. There’s a dearth of doctors on the more rural of them, such as this one. Many of the older physicians are in the process of retiring, leaving vacancies that prove difficult to fill.

The isolation of island living isn’t for everyone, present company included. There’s something unsettling in knowing that when the last ferry leaves for the night, we’re quite literally trapped. Even in daylight, the island is rocky around its edges, overcome with tall pines that make it suffocating and small. When winter comes, as it soon will, the harsh weather will shut much of the island down, and the bay around us may freeze, trapping us here.

Will and I got our house for free. We got a tax credit for me to work at the clinic. I said no to the idea, but Will said yes, though it wasn’t the money we needed. My background is in emergency medicine. I’m not board-certified in general practice, though I have a temporary license while I go through the process of becoming fully licensed in Maine.

Inside, the blue building no longer resembles a house. Walls have been put up and knocked down to create a reception desk, exam rooms, a lobby. There’s a smell to the building, something heavy and damp. It clings to me even after I leave. Will smells it, too. It doesn’t help that Emma, the receptionist, is a smoker, consuming about a pack a day of cigarettes. Though she smokes outside, she hangs her coat on the same rack as mine. The smell roves from coat to coat.

Will looks curiously at me some nights after I’ve come home. He asks, Have you been smoking? I might as well be for the smell of nicotine and tobacco that follows me home.

Of course not, I’ve told him. You know I don’t smoke, and then I tell him about Emma.

Leave your coat out. I’ll wash it, Will has told me countless times. I do and he washes it, but it makes no difference because the next day it happens all over again.

Today I step into the clinic to find Joyce, the head nurse, and Emma waiting for me.

“You’re late,” Joyce says, but if I am, I’m only a minute late. Joyce must be sixty-five years old, close to retirement, and a bit of a shrew. She’s been here far longer than either Emma or me, which makes her top dog at the clinic, in her mind at least. “Didn’t they teach you punctuality where you came from?” she asks.

I’ve found that the minds of the people are as small as the island itself.

I step past her and start my day.

Hours later, I’m with a patient when I see Will’s face surface on my cell phone, five feet away. It’s silenced. I can’t hear the phone’s ring, though Will’s name appears above the picture of him: the attractive, chiseled face, the bright hazel eyes. He’s handsome, in a take-your-breath-away way, and I think that it’s the eyes. Or maybe the fact that at forty, he could still pass for twenty-five. Will wears his dark hair long, swept back into a low bun that’s growing in popularity these days, giving off an intellectual, hipster vibe that his students seem to like.

I ignore the image of Will on my phone and attend to my patient, a forty-three-year-old woman presenting with a fever, chest pain, a cough. Undoubtedly bronchitis. But still, I press my stethoscope to her lungs for a listen.

I practiced emergency medicine for years before coming here. There, at a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in the heart of Chicago, I went into each shift without any idea of what I might see, every patient coming in in distress. The victims of multiple-vehicle collisions, women hemorrhaging excessively following a home birth, three-hundred-pound men in the midst of a psychotic break. It was tense and dramatic. There, in a constant state of high alert, I felt alive.

Here, it is different. Here, every day I know what I will see, the same rotation of bronchitis, diarrhea and warts.

When I finally get the chance to call Will back, there’s a hitch to his voice. “Sadie,” he says, and, from the way that he says it, I know that something is wrong. He stops there, my mind engineering scenarios to make up for that which he doesn’t say. It settles on Otto and the way I left him at the ferry terminal this morning. I got him there just in time, a minute or two before the ferry would leave. I said goodbye, my car idling a hundred feet from the waiting boat, watching as Otto moped off for another day of school.

It was then that my eyes caught sight of Imogen, standing at the edge of the pier with her friends. Imogen is a beautiful girl. There’s no rebutting that. Her skin is naturally fair; she doesn’t need to cover it in talcum powder, as her friends must do, to make herself look white. The piercing through her nose has taken some getting used to. Her eyes, in contrast to the skin, are an icy blue, her former brunette showing through the unkempt eyebrows. Imogen eschews the dark, bold lipstick the other girls like her wear, but instead wears a tasteful rosy beige. It’s actually quite lovely.

Otto has never lived in such close proximity to a girl before. His curiosity has gotten the better of him. The two of them don’t talk much, no more than Imogen and I speak. She won’t ride with us to the ferry dock; she doesn’t speak to him at school. As far as I know, she doesn’t acknowledge him on the commute there. Their interactions are brief. Otto at the kitchen table working on math homework last night, for example, and Imogen passing through, seeing his binder, noting the teacher’s name on the front of it, commenting: Mr. Jansen is a fucking douche.

Otto had just stared back wide-eyed in reply. The word fuck is not yet in his repertoire. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.

This morning, Imogen and her friends were standing at the edge of the pier, smoking cigarettes. The smoke encircled their heads, loitering, white in the frosty air. I watched as Imogen brought a cigarette to her mouth, inhaled deeply with the expertise of someone who’d done this before, who knew what she was doing. She held it in and then exhaled slowly and, as she did, I was certain her eyes came to me.

Did she see me sitting there in my car, watching her?

Or was she just staring vacantly into space?

I’d been so busy watching Imogen that, now that I think back on it, I never saw Otto board the ferry. I only assumed he would.

“It’s Otto,” I say aloud now, at the same time that Will says, “It wasn’t the Nilssons,” and at first I don’t know what he means by that. What does Otto have to do with the elderly couple who lives down the street?

“What about the Nilssons?” I ask, but my mind has trouble going there, because—at the sudden realization that I didn’t see Otto board the ferry—all I can think about is Otto in the single seat across from the principal’s office with handcuffs on his wrists, a police officer standing three feet away, watching him. On the corner of the principal’s desk, an evidence bag, though what was inside, I couldn’t yet see.

Mr. and Mrs. Foust, the principal had said to us that day and, for the first time in my life, I attempted some clout. Doctor, I said to him, face deadpan as Will and I stood behind Otto, Will dropping a hand to Otto’s shoulder to let him know that whatever he’d done, we were there for him.

I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I was quite certain I saw the police officer smirk.

“The siren last night,” Will explains now over the phone, bringing me back to the present. That was before, I remind myself, and this is now. What happened to Otto in Chicago is in the past. Over and done with. “It wasn’t the Nilssons after all. The Nilssons are perfectly fine. It was Morgan.”

“Morgan Baines?” I ask, though I’m not sure why. There isn’t another Morgan on our block, as far as I know. Morgan Baines is a neighbor, one I’ve never spoken to but Will has. She and her family live just up the street from us in a foursquare farmhouse not unlike our own, Morgan, her husband and their little girl. Because they lived at the top of the hill, Will and I often speculated that their views of the sea were splendid, three hundred sixty degrees of our little island and the ocean that walls us in.

And then one day Will slipped and told me they were. The views. Splendid.

I tried not to feel insecure. I told myself that Will wouldn’t have admitted to being inside her home if there was something going on between them. But Will has a past with women; he has a history. A year ago I would have said Will would never cheat on me. But I couldn’t put anything past him now.

“Yes, Sadie,” Will says. “Morgan Baines,” and only then do I make out her face, though I’ve not seen her up close before. Only from a distance. Long hair, the color of milk chocolate, and bangs, the type that hang too long, that spend their time wedged behind an ear.

“What happened?” I ask as I find a place to sit, and, “Is everything all right?” I wonder if Morgan is diabetic, if she’s asthmatic, if she has an autoimmune condition that would trigger a middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room. There are only two physicians here, myself and my colleague, Dr. Sanders. Last night she was on call, not me.

There are no EMTs on the island, only police officers who know how to drive an ambulance and are minimally trained in lifesaving measures. There are no hospitals as well, and so a rescue boat would have been called in from the mainland to meet the ambulance down by the dock to cart Morgan away for treatment, while another waited on shore for the third leg of her commute.

I think of the amount of time that would have taken in sum. What I’ve heard is that the system works like a well-oiled machine and yet it’s nearly three miles to the mainland. Those rescue boats can only go so fast and are dependent on the cooperation of the sea.

But this is catastrophic thinking only, my mind ruminating on worst-case scenarios.

“Is she all right, Will?” I ask again because in all this time, Will has said nothing.

“No, Sadie,” he says, as if I should somehow know that everything is not all right. There’s a pointedness about his reply. A brevity, and then he says no more.

“Well, what happened?” I urge, and he takes a deep breath and tells me.

“She’s dead,” he says.

And if my response is apathetic, it’s only because death and dying are a part of my everyday routine. I’ve seen every unspeakable thing there is to see, and I didn’t know Morgan Baines at all. We’d had no interaction aside from a onetime wave out my window as I drove slowly by her home and she stood there, thrusting the bangs behind an ear before returning the gesture. I’d thought about it long after, overanalyzing as I have a tendency to do. I wondered about that look on her face. If it was meant for me or if she was scowling at something else.

“Dead?” I ask now. “Dead how?” And as Will begins to cry on the other end of the line, he says, “She was murdered, they say.”

“They? Who’s they?” I ask.

“The people, Sadie,” he says. “Everyone. It’s all anyone’s talking about in town,” and as I open the door to the exam room and step into the hall, I find that it’s true. That patients in the waiting room are in the thick of a conversation about the murder, and they look at me with tears in their eyes and ask if I heard the news.

“A murder! On our island!” someone gasps. A hush falls over the room and, as the door opens and a man steps in, an older woman screams. It’s a patient only, and yet with news like this, it’s hard not to think the worst of everyone. It’s hard not to give in to fear.

CAMILLE

I’m not going to tell you everything. Just the things I think you should know.

I met him on the street. The corner of some city street, where it crosses beneath the “L” tracks. It was gritty, grungy there. The buildings, the tracks didn’t let the light in. Parked cars, steel girders, orange construction cones filled the road. The people, they were ordinary Chicago people. Just your everyday eclectic mix of hipsters and steampunk, hobos, trixies, the social elite.

I was walking. I didn’t know where I was going. All around, the city buzzed. Air-conditioning units dripped from up above; a bum begged for cash. A street preacher stood on the curb, foaming at the mouth, telling us we’re all hell-bound.

I passed a guy on the street. I was going the other way. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew his type. The kind of rich former prep school kid who never fraternized with the trashy public school kids like me. Now he was all grown up, working in the Financial District, shopping at Whole Foods. He’s what you’d call a chad, though his name was probably something else like Luke, Miles, Brad. Something smug, uptight, overused. Mundane. He gave me a nod and a smile, one that said women easily fell for his charms. But not me.

I turned away, kept walking, didn’t give him the satisfaction of smiling back.

I felt his eyes follow me from behind.

I spied my reflection in a storefront window. My hair, long, straight, with bangs. Rust-colored, stretching halfway down my back, over the shoulders of an arctic-blue tee that matched my eyes.

I saw what that chad was looking at.

I ran a hand through my hair. I didn’t look half bad.

Overhead, the “L” thundered past. It was loud. But not loud enough to tune out the street preacher. Adulterers, whores, blasphemers, gluttons. We were all doomed.

The day was hot. Not just summer but the dog days of it. Eighty or ninety degrees out. Everything smelled rancid, like sewage. The smell of garbage gagged me as I passed an alley. The hot air trapped the smell so there was no escaping it, just as there was no escaping the heat.

I was looking up, watching the “L,” getting my bearings. I wondered what time it was. I knew every clock in the city. The Peacock clock, Father Time, Marshall Field’s. Four clocks on the Wrigley Building, so that it didn’t matter which way you came at it from, you could still see a clock. But there were no clocks there, on the corner where I was at.

I didn’t see the stoplight before me go red. I didn’t see the cab come hustling past, racing another cab to snatch up a fare down the street. I stepped right into the street with both feet.

I felt him first. I felt the grip of his hand tighten on my wrist like a pipe wrench so that I couldn’t move.

In an instant, I fell in love with that hand—warm, capable, decisive. Protective. His fingers were thick; his hands big with clean, short nails. There was a tiny tattoo, a glyph on the skin between his fingers and thumb. Something small and pointy, like a mountain peak. For a minute, that was all I saw. That inky mountain peak.

His grip was powerful and swift. In one stroke, he stopped me. A second later, the cab raced past, not six inches from my feet. I felt the rush of it on my face. The wind off the car pushed me away, and then sucked me back in as it passed. I saw a flash of colors only; I felt the breeze. I didn’t see the cab shoot past, not until it was speeding off down the street. Only then did I know how close I came to being roadkill.

Overhead, the “L” screeched to a stop on the tracks.

I looked down. There was his hand. My eyes went up his wrist, his arm; they went to his eyes. His eyes were wide, his eyebrows pulled together in concern. He was worried about me. No one ever worried about me.

The light turned green, but we didn’t move. We didn’t speak. All around, people stepped past us while we stood in the way, blocking them. A minute went by. Two. Still, he didn’t let go of my wrist. His hand was warm, tacky. It was humid outside. So hot it was hard to breathe. There was no fresh air. My thighs were moist with sweat. They stuck to my jeans, made the arctic-blue tee cling to me.

When we finally spoke, we spoke at the same time. That was close.

We laughed together, released a synchronous sigh.

I could feel my heart pound inside of me. It had nothing to do with the cab.

I bought him coffee. It sounds so unimaginative after the fact, doesn’t it? So cliché.

But that was all I could come up with in a pinch.

Let me buy you a coffee, I said. Repay you for saving my life.

I fluttered my eyelashes at him. Put a hand on his chest. Gave him a smile.

Only then did I see that he already had a coffee. There in his other hand sat some iced froufrou drink. Our eyes went to it at the same time. We sniggered. He lobbed it into a trash can, said, Pretend you didn’t just see that.

A coffee would be nice, he said. When he smiled, he smiled with his eyes.

He told me his name was Will. There was a stutter when he said it, so that it came out Wi-Will. He was nervous, shy around girls, shy around me. I liked that about him.

I took his hand into mine, said, It’s nice to meet you, Wi-Will.

We sat in a booth, side by side. We drank our coffees. We talked; we laughed.

That night there was a party, one of those rooftop venues with a city view. An engagement party for Sadie’s friends, Jack and Emily. She was the one who was invited, not me. I don’t think Emily liked me much, but I planned to go anyway, just the same as Cinderella went to the royal ball. I had a dress picked out, one I took from Sadie’s closet. It fit me to a T, though she was bigger than me, Sadie with her broad shoulders and her thick hips. She had no business wearing that dress. I was doing her a favor.

I had a bad habit of shopping in Sadie’s closet. Once, when I was there, all alone or so I thought, I heard the jiggle of keys in the front door lock. I slipped out of the room, into the living room, arriving only a second before she did. There stood my darling roommate, hands on her hips, looking quizzically at me.

You look like you’ve been up to no good, she said. I didn’t say one way or the other whether I’d been being good. It wasn’t often that I was good. Sadie was the rule follower, not me.

That dress wasn’t the only thing I took from her. I also used her credit card to buy new shoes, metallic wedge sandals with a crisscross strap.

I said to Will that day in the coffee shop about the engagement party: We don’t even know each other. But I’d be an idiot not to ask. Come with me?

I’d be honored, he said, making eyes at me in the café booth. He sat close, his elbow brushing against mine.

He’d come to the party.

I gave him the address, told him I’d meet him inside.

We parted ways beneath the “L” tracks. I watched him walk away until he got swallowed up in pedestrian traffic. Even then, I still watched.

I couldn’t wait to see him that night.

But as luck would have it, I didn’t make it to the party after all. Fate had other plans that night.

But Sadie was there. Sadie, who had been invited to Jack and Emily’s engagement party. She was out of this world. He went right up to her, fawned all over her, forgot about me.

I’d made it easy on her, inviting him to that party. I always made things easy for Sadie.

If it wasn’t for me, they never would’ve met. He was mine before he was hers.

She forgets that all the time.

SADIE

There isn’t much to our street, just like any of the other inland streets that lie braided throughout the island. There’s nothing more than a handful of shingled cottages and farmhouses bisected by patches of trees.

The island itself is home to less than a thousand. We live on the more populous part, in walking distance of the ferry, where there’s a partial view of the mainland from our steeply sloped street, the size of it shrunken by distance. And yet the sight of it brings comfort to me.

There is a world out there that I can see, even if I’m no longer a part of it.

I drive slowly up the incline. The evergreens have lost their needles now, the birch trees their leaves. They’re strewn about the street, crunching beneath the car’s tires as I drive. Soon they will be buried by snow.

Salty sea air enters the window, open just a crack. There’s a chill to the air, the last lingering traces of fall before winter arrives full bore.

It’s after six o’clock in the evening. The sky is dark.

Up above me, across the street and two doors down from my own home, there is a flurry of activity going on at the Baineses’ home. Three unmarked cars are parked outside, and I imagine forensic technicians inside, collecting evidence, fingerprinting, photographing the crime scene.

The street looks suddenly different to me.

There is a police car in my own driveway as I pull up. I park beside it, a Ford Crown Victoria, and climb slowly out. I reach into the back seat to gather my things. I make my way to the front door, looking warily around to be sure that I’m alone. There’s the greatest sense of unease. It’s hard not to let my imagination get the best of me, to imagine a killer hiding among the bushes watching me.

But the street is silent. There are no people around that I can see. My neighbors have gone inside, mistakenly believing they’re safer inside their own homes—which Morgan Baines must have thought, too, before she was killed in hers.

I press my keys into the front door. Will leaps to his feet when I enter. His jeans are slouchy, baggy in the knees, his shirt partly tucked. His long hair hangs loose.

“There’s an officer here,” he says briskly, though I see this for myself, the officer sitting there on the arm of the sofa. “He’s investigating the murder,” Will says, practically choking on that word. Murder.

Will’s eyes are weary and red; he’s been crying. He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a tissue. He dabs his eyes with it. Will is the more thin-skinned of us, the more sensitive. Will cries at movies. He cries when watching the evening news.

He cried when I found out he’d been sleeping with another woman, though he tried in vain to deny it.

There is no other woman, Sadie, he said as he fell to his knees all those months ago before me and cried his eyes out, pleading his innocence.

To his point I never saw the woman herself, but the signs of her were everywhere.

I blamed myself for it. I should have seen it coming. After all, I was never Will’s first choice for a wife. We’ve been trying hard to get past it. Forgive and forget, they say, but it’s easier said than done.

“He has some questions for us,” Will says now, and I ask, “Questions?” looking toward the officer, a man in his fifties or sixties with receding hair and pitted skin. A small tract of hair grows above the upper lip, a would-be mustache, brownish gray like the hair on his head.

“Dr. Foust,” he says, meeting my eye. He extends a hand and tells me his name is Berg. Officer Berg, and I say that I am Sadie Foust.

Officer Berg looks troubled, a bit shell-shocked even. I gather that his typical calls are complaints of dogs leaving their feces in neighbors’ yards; doors left unlocked at the American Legion; the ever-popular 911 hang-up calls. Not this. Not murder.

There are only a handful of patrolmen on the island, Officer Berg being one of them. Oftentimes they meet the ferry down by the dock to be sure everyone boards and departs without any problems, not that there ever are. Not this time of year anyway, though I’ve heard of the change we’ll see come summer, when tourists abound. But for now, it’s peaceful and quiet. The only people on the boat are the daily commuters who paddle across the bay for school and work.

“What kind of questions?” I ask. Otto sits slouched in a chair in the corner of the room. He fidgets with the fringe of a throw pillow, and I watch as strands of blue come loose in his hands. His eyes look weary. I worry about the stress this is causing him, having to hear from a police officer that a neighbor was murdered. I wonder if he’s scared because of it. I know I am. The very idea is unfathomable. A murder so close to our own home. I shudder to think about what went on in the Baineses’ home last night.

I glance around the first floor, looking for Imogen, for Tate. As if he knows what I’m thinking, Will says to me, “Imogen isn’t home from school yet,” and Officer Berg, taking interest in this, asks, “No?”

School ends at two thirty. The commute is long, but still, Otto is home most days by three thirty or four. The clock on the fireplace mantel reads ten after six.

“No,” Will tells the officer, “but she’ll be home soon. Any minute,” he says, citing some tutoring session that Will and I know she didn’t have. The officer tells us that he’ll need to speak with Imogen, too, and Will says, “Of course.” If she isn’t home soon, he offers to drive her to the public safety building tonight. It’s a catchall building, where a couple of police officers double as EMTs and first responders in the case of fire. If our home went up in flames, Officer Berg would just as likely appear at my door in a fire truck. If Will or I had a heart attack, he’d come in the ambulance.

Only seven-year-old Tate has been spared from the police officer’s interrogation. “Tate is outside,” Will tells me, seeing the way my eyes look for him. “He’s playing with the dogs,” he says, and I hear them then, the dogs barking.

I give Will a look, one that wonders how smart it is to leave Tate alone outside when there was a murderer on our street just last night. I stray toward a rear-facing window to find Tate, in a sweatshirt and jeans, a wool hat thrust down over his head. He’s having a go with the dogs and a ball. He lobs the ball as far as he can—laughing as he does so—and the girls dash after it, arguing over which will be the one to carry it back to Tate’s waiting hand.

Outside, there’s evidence of a fire in the backyard firepit. The fire is dying down now, only embers and smoke. There’s no longer a flame.

It’s far enough away from Tate and the dogs that I don’t worry.

Officer Berg sees the smoldering fire, too, and asks if we have a permit for it.

“A permit?” Will asks. “For the fire?” When Officer Berg says yes, Will goes on to explain that our son Tate had come home from school begging for s’mores. They’d read a book about them, S is for S’mores, and the rest of the day, Tate had a craving for them.

“The only way we did s’mores back in Chicago was in the toaster oven. This was just a quick treat,” Will says. “Completely harmless.”

“Around here,” Officer Berg tells him, uninterested in Tate’s craving, “you need a permit for any open fire.”

Will apologizes, blames ignorance, and the officer shrugs. “Next time you’ll know,” he says, forgiving us this one transgression. There are bigger issues at hand.

“Can I be excused?” Otto asks, saying he has homework to do, and I see this discomfort in his eyes. This is a lot for a fourteen-year-old boy to handle. Though much older than Tate, Otto is still a child. We forget that sometimes. I pat him on the shoulder. I lean in close to him and say, “We’re safe here, Otto. I want you to know that,” because I don’t want him to be scared. “Your dad and I are here to protect you,” I tell him.

Otto meets my eyes. I wonder if he believes me when I’m not so sure myself. Are we safe here?

“You can go,” the officer tells him and, as he leaves, I find my way to the other arm of the sofa, Officer Berg and I bisected by a velvet sofa the color of marigolds, the furniture left behind in the home all midcentury, and not, unfortunately, midcentury modern. It’s just old.

“You know why I’m here?” the officer asks, and I tell him that Will and I heard the siren late last night. That I know Mrs. Baines was murdered.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and I ask how she was murdered, though the details of her death have not yet been released. They’re waiting, he says, until the family has been notified.

“Mr. Baines doesn’t know?” I ask, but all he’ll say is that Mr. Baines was traveling for business. The first thought that crosses my mind is that, in cases like this, it’s always the husband. Mr. Baines, wherever he is, has done this, I think.

Berg tells us how the little Baines girl was the one who found Mrs. Baines dead. She called 911 and told the operator that Morgan wouldn’t wake up. I sharply inhale, trying not to imagine all the things that poor little girl might have seen.

“How old is she?” I ask, and Berg replies, “Six years old.”

A hand rises to my mouth. “Oh, how awful,” I say, and I can’t imagine it, Tate finding either Will or me dead.

“She and Tate are in school together,” Will declares, looking at Officer Berg and then me. They share the same teacher. They share the same peers. The island school serves children in grades kindergarten through fifth while the rest, those in middle school and beyond, have to be ferried to the mainland for their education. Only fifty-some students go to the elementary school. Nineteen in Tate’s classroom because his first grade is combined with the kindergarten class.

“Where is the little girl now?” I ask, and he tells me that she’s with family while they try to connect with Jeffrey, traveling for business in Tokyo. The fact that he was out of the country doesn’t make Jeffrey Baines any less culpable in my mind. He could have hired someone to carry out the task.

“The poor thing,” I say, imagining years’ worth of therapy in the child’s future.

“What can we do to help?” I ask Officer Berg, and he tells me he’s been speaking to residents along the street, asking them questions. “What kind of questions?” I ask.

“Can you tell me, Dr. Foust, where you were last night around eleven o’clock?” the officer asks. In other words, do I have an alibi for the time the homicide occurred?

Last night Will and I watched TV together, after we’d put Tate to bed. We’d lain on different sides of the room, him spread out on the sofa, me curled up on the love seat as we do. Our allocated seats. Shortly after we’d gotten situated and turned on the TV, Will brought me a glass of cabernet from the bottle I’d opened the night before.

I watched him for a while from my own seat, remembering that it wasn’t so long ago that I would have found it impossible to sit this far away from Will, on separate sofas. I thought fondly of the days that he would have handed me the wine with a lengthy kiss to the lips, another hand feeling me up as he did so, and I would have found myself easily wiled by the persuasive kiss and the persuasive hands and those eyes. Those eyes! And then one thing would have led to the next and, soon after, we would have giggled like teenagers as we tried to hastily and noiselessly make love on the sofa, ears tuned in to the creaks of the floorboards above us, the rasp of box springs, footsteps on the stairs, to be sure the boys still slept. There was a magnanimity about Will’s touch, something that once made me feel giddy and light-headed, drunk without a drop to drink. I couldn’t get enough of him. He was intoxicating.

But then I found the cigarette, a Marlboro Silver with lipstick the color of strawberries along its filter. I found that first, followed shortly after by charges for hotel rooms on our credit card statement, a pair of panties in our bedroom that I knew weren’t mine. I realized at once that Will was magnanimous and intoxicating to someone other than me.

I didn’t smoke. I didn’t wear lipstick. And I was far too sensible to leave my underwear lying around someone else’s home.

Will just looked at me when I shoved the credit card statement under his nose, when I asked him outright about the hotel charges on our bill. He appeared so taken aback that he’d been caught that he didn’t have the wherewithal to manufacture a lie.

Last night, after I’d finished that first glass of wine, Will offered to top me off and I said yes, liking the way the wine made me feel weightless and calm. The next thing I remember was the siren rousing me from sleep.

I must have fallen asleep on the love seat. Will must have helped me to bed.

“Dr. Foust?” the officer asks.

“Will and I were here,” I tell him. “Watching TV. The evening news and then The Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert,” I say as Officer Berg transcribes my words onto a tablet with his stylus. “Isn’t that right, Will?” I ask, and Will nods his head and confirms that I am right. It was The Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert.

“And after The Late Show?” the officer asks, and I say only that after The Late Show we went to bed.

“Is that right, sir?” Officer Berg asks.

“That’s right,” Will says. “It was late,” he tells the officer. “After The Late Show, Sadie and I went to bed. She had to work in the morning and I, well,” he says, “I was tired. It was late,” he says again, and if he notices the redundancy, he doesn’t show it.

“What time was that?” Officer Berg asks.

“Must’ve been around twelve thirty,” I say because even though I don’t know for sure, I can do the math. He makes note of this, moving on, asking, “Have you seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days?”

“Such as?” I inquire, and he shrugs, suggesting, “Anything unusual. Anything at all. Strangers lurking about. Cars you don’t recognize, cruising by, surveilling the neighborhood.”

But I shake my head and say, “We’re new here, Officer. We don’t know many people.”

But then I remember that Will knows people. That when I’m at work all day, Will has been making friends.

“There was one thing,” Will says, speaking up all of a sudden. The officer and I turn to him at the same time.

“What’s that?” asks Officer Berg.

But just as soon as he’s said it, Will tries to renege. He shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sure it means nothing, just an accident on my part.”

“Why don’t you let me decide,” Officer Berg says.

Will explains, “There was a day not so long ago, a couple of weeks maybe. I’d taken Tate to school and headed out on a few errands. I wasn’t gone long, a couple of hours, tops. But when I came home, something was off.”

“How so?”

“Well, the garage door was up, for one. I would’ve bet my life I put it down. And then, when I came inside, I was nearly knocked over by the smell of gas. It was so potent. Thank God the dogs were okay. Lord only knows how long they’d been breathing it in. It didn’t take long to find the source. It was coming from the stove.”

“The stove?” I ask. I tell Will, “You didn’t tell me this.” My voice is flat, composed, but inside I feel anything but.

Will’s voice is conciliatory. “I didn’t want you to worry for nothing. I opened the doors and windows. I aired the house out.” He shrugs and says, “It probably wasn’t even worth mentioning, Sadie. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It had been a busy morning. I was making French toast. Tate and I were running late. I must have left the burner on in a mad scramble to get out the door on time. The pilot light must have blown out.”

Officer Berg dismisses this as an accident. He turns to me now. “But not you, Doctor?” he asks. “You haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary?” I tell him no.

“How did Mrs. Baines seem the last time you spoke to her, Doctor?” Officer Berg asks me now. “Was she...?” he begins, but I stop him there and explain that I don’t know Morgan Baines. That we’ve never met.

“I’ve been busy since we arrived,” I say, apologizing, though there’s really no need to. “I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself,” I tell him, thinking—though I don’t dare say it; that would be insensitive—that Morgan Baines also never found the time to stop by and introduce herself to me.

“Sadie’s schedule is fast and furious,” Will interjects, so that the officer doesn’t judge me for not making friends with the neighbors. I’m grateful for this. “She works long shifts, nearly every day of the week, it seems. My own schedule is the opposite. I teach only three courses, which overlap with Tate’s school schedule. It’s intentional. When he’s here, I’m here. Sadie’s the breadwinner,” Will admits with no indignity, no shame. “I’m the stay-at-home dad. We never wanted our children to be raised by a nanny,” he says, which was something we came up with long ago, before Otto was born. It was a personal choice. From a financial standpoint, it made sense that Will would be the one to stay home. I made more money than him, though we never talked about things like that. Will did his part; I did mine.

“I spoke to Morgan just a couple of days ago,” he says, answering the officer’s question for me. “She seemed fine, well enough at least. Their hot water heater was on the fritz. She was waiting on a repairman to see if it could be fixed. I tried to fix it myself. I’m handy enough,” he says, “just not that handy.

“Do you have any leads?” Will asks, changing topics. “Any signs of forced entry, any suspects?”

Officer Berg flips through his tablet and tells Will that he can’t reveal too much just yet. “But,” he tells Will, “what I can say is Mrs. Baines was killed between the hours of ten and two last night,” and there, on the arm of the sofa, I sit up straighter, staring out the window. Though the Baineses’ home is just out of view from where I sit, I can’t help but think about how last night as we were here, drinking wine and watching TV, she was there—just beyond my viewpoint—being murdered.

But that’s not all.

Because every night at eight thirty in the evening, the last ferry leaves. Which means that the killer spent the night among us, here on the island.

Officer Berg stands up quickly, startling me. I gasp, my hand going to my heart.

“Everything all right, Doctor?” he asks, gazing down at me, trembling.

“Fine,” I tell him. “Just fine.”

He runs his hands down the thighs of his pants, straightening them. “I suppose we’re all a bit jumpy today,” he tells me, and I nod my head and agree.

“Anything Sadie and I can do,” Will tells Officer Berg as he walks him to the front door. I rise from my seat and follow along. “Anything at all, please let us know. We’re here to help.”

Berg tips his hat at Will, a sign of gratitude. “I appreciate that. As you can imagine, the entirety of the island is on edge, people fearful for their lives. This kind of thing doesn’t bode well for tourism either. No one wants to visit when there’s a murderer on the loose. We’d like to get this wrapped up as quickly as we can. Anything you hear, anything you see...” he says, voice drifting, and Will says, “I understand.”

The murder of Morgan Baines is bad for business.

Officer Berg says his goodbyes. He hands Will a business card. He’s about to leave, but before he does, he has one last inquiry.

“How’s the house treating you?” he asks off topic, and Will replies that it’s been all right.

“It’s dated and, as dated things go, has issues. Drafty windows, a faulty furnace that we’ll need to replace.”

The officer grimaces. “A furnace isn’t cheap. That’ll run you a few grand.”

Will tells him he knows.

“Shame about Alice,” Officer Berg says then, meeting Will’s eye. Will echoes his sentiment.

It isn’t often that I broach the subject of Alice with Will. But there are things I find myself wanting to know, like what Alice was like, and if she and I would have gotten along if we’d ever had the chance to meet. I imagine that she was antisocial—though I’d never say that to Will. But I think that the pain of fibromyalgia would have kept her at home, away from any sort of social life.

“I never would have pegged her for the suicide type,” Officer Berg says then and, as he does, I get the sense that my instinct was wrong.

“What does that mean?” Will asks, a hint of defensiveness in his voice.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Officer Berg says, though clearly he does because he goes on to tell us how Alice, a regular at Friday night bingo, was affable and jolly when he saw her. How she had a smile that could light up a room. “I guess I just never understood how a person like that winds up taking their own life.”

The space between us fills with silence, tension. I don’t think he meant anything by it; the man is a bit socially awkward. Still, Will looks hurt. He says nothing. I’m the one to speak. “She suffered from fibromyalgia,” I say, realizing Officer Berg must not know this, or maybe he’s one of those people who think it’s more of a mental disorder than a medical one. Fibromyalgia is highly misunderstood. People believe it’s made up, that it isn’t real. There is no cure, and, on the surface, a person appears to be fine; there’s no test that can be used to diagnose fibromyalgia. Because of this, the diagnosis is based on symptoms alone—in other words, widespread pain that can’t otherwise be explained. For this reason, a large portion of physicians themselves question the credibility of the condition, often suggesting patients see a psychiatrist for treatment instead. It makes me sad to think about, Alice in so much pain and no one believing it.

“Yes, of course,” Officer Berg says. “It’s such a terrible thing. She must have really been hurting to do what she did,” he says, and again, my eyes go to Will. I know that Officer Berg doesn’t mean to be rude; in his own awkward way, he’s offering his sympathy.

“I liked Alice a lot,” he says. “She was a lovely lady.”

“Indeed she was,” Will says, and again Officer Berg mumbles, “Such a shame,” before he says a final goodbye and goes.

Once he’s gone, Will heads quietly to the kitchen to start dinner. I let him go, watching out the narrow pane of glass alongside the door as Officer Berg pulls his Crown Vic from our drive. He heads uphill, about to join his cohort at the Baineses’ home, or so I think.

But then he doesn’t go to the Baineses’ home. Instead he pulls his car to the end of the drive across the street from theirs, at the home of the Nilssons. Officer Berg steps out. He leaves the car running, red taillights bright against the darkness of night. I watch as Berg places something inside a mailbox and closes the door. He returns to his car, disappearing over the crest of the hill.

CAMILLE

I disappeared that night after Will and Sadie met. I was full of anger, of self-loathing.

But I couldn’t stay away from Will forever. I thought about him all the time. He was there every time I so much as blinked.

Eventually, I sought him out. A little internet surfing told me where he lived, where he worked. I looked for him. I found what I was looking for. Though by then he was older, grayer, with kids, while in all those years, I hadn’t changed much. My gene pool was apparently a good one. Age couldn’t touch me. My hair was still the color of rust, my eyes an electric blue. My skin had yet to betray me.

I put on a dress, a black off-the-shoulder dress. I put on makeup, perfume. I put on jewelry. I did my hair.

I followed him for days, showed up where he least expected to see me.

Remember me? I asked, cornering him in a deli. I stood too close. I grasped him by the elbow. I called him by name. Because there’s nothing that excites us more than the sound of our own name. It’s the sweetest sound in the world to us. Corner of Madison and Wabash. Fifteen years ago. You saved my life, Will.

It didn’t take but a moment for him to remember. His face lit up.

Time had taken its toll on him. The strain of marriage, of parenting, of a job, a mortgage. This Will was a burned-out version of the Will I met.

It was nothing I couldn’t fix.

He just needed to forget for a while that he had a wife and kids.

I could help him with that.

I gave him a wide smile. I took him by the hand.

If it wasn’t for you, I said, leaning in to whisper the words in his ear, I’d be dead.

There was a spark in his eyes. His cheeks flushed. His eyes swept me up and down, landing near my lips.

He smiled, said, How could I ever forget?

He lightened up; he laughed. What are you doing here?

I tossed my hair over a shoulder, said, I was outside, just passing by. I thought I saw you through the window.

He touched the ends of my hair, said it looked nice.

And that dress, he said, followed it up with a long, low whistle.

He wasn’t looking at my lips anymore. Now he was looking at my thighs.

I knew where I wanted this conversation to go. As I often did, I got my way. It wasn’t instantaneous, no. It took some power of persuasion, which comes naturally to me. Rule number one: reciprocity. I do something for you, you do something for me in return.

I wiped the mustard from his lip. I saw that his drink was empty. I reached for the cup, refilled it at the soda fountain.

You didn’t have to do that, he said as I sat back down, slid his Pepsi across the table, made certain our hands touched as I did. I could have gotten it myself.

I smiled and said, I know I didn’t have to. I wanted to, Will.

And just like that, he owed me something.

There’s also likability. I can be extremely likable when I want to be. I know just what to say, what to do, how to be charming. The trick is to ask open-ended questions, to get people to talk about themselves. It makes them feel like the most interesting person in the world.

There’s also the importance of touch. Compliance is so much easier to achieve with a single touch to the arm, the shoulder, the thigh.

Add that to the fact that his and Sadie’s marriage read more like a guidebook on abstinence, from what I’d seen. Will needed something only I could give to him.

He didn’t say yes at first. He grinned sheepishly instead, turning red. He said he had a meeting, somewhere else he needed to be.

I can’t, he said. But I convinced him he could. Because not fifteen minutes later, we were slipping down an adjacent alleyway. There in that alley, he leaned me against a building. He eased his hand under the hem of the dress, pressed his mouth to mine.

Not here, I said, thinking only of him. I’d be fine doing that there. But he had a marriage, a reputation. I had neither. Let’s go somewhere, I said into his ear.

There was a hotel he knew, half a block away. Not the Ritz, but it would do. We raced up the stairs, into the room.

There, he threw me on the bed, had his way with me. When we were done, we lay in bed, breathing heavy, trying to catch our breath.

Will was the first to speak. That was just... He was tongue-tied when we were through, but radiant, beaming.

He tried again. That was amazing. You, he said, kneeling over me, hands on either side of my head, eyes on mine, are amazing.

I winked, said, You’re not so bad yourself.

He stared at me awhile. I’d never been looked at like that by a man, like he couldn’t get enough of me. He said that he needed this, more than I’d ever know. An escape from reality. My timing, he said, was impeccable. He’d been having a shitty day, a shitty week.

This was perfect.

You, he said, drinking me in with his eyes, are perfect.

He listed for me the reasons why. My heart swelled as he did, though it was all skin-deep: my hair, my smile, my eyes.

And then, like that, I was kissing him again.

He pushed himself from bed when he was through. I lay there, watched as he slipped back into a dress shirt and jeans. You’re leaving so soon? I asked.

He stood there at the end of the bed, watching me.

He was apologetic. I have a meeting. I’m going to be late as it is. You stay as long as you’d like, he said. Take a nap, get some rest, as if that was some consolation prize. Sleeping alone in a cheap hotel.

He leaned over me before he left. He kissed my forehead, stroked my hair. He gazed into my eyes, said, I’ll see you soon. It wasn’t a question. It was a promise.

I smiled, said, Of course you will. You’re stuck with me, Will. I won’t ever let you go, and he smiled and said that was exactly what he wanted to hear.

I tried not to be jealous as he left. I wasn’t the jealous type. Not until I met Will, and then I was, though I never felt guilty for what happened between Will and me. He was mine. Sadie took him from me. I didn’t owe her a thing.

If anything, she owed me.

SADIE

Two times I circle the house. I make sure all the doors and windows are locked. I do it once, and then, because I can’t be sure I got them all, I do it again. I pull the blinds, the curtains closed, wondering if it would be prudent to have a security system installed in the home.

This evening, as promised, Will drove Imogen to the public safety building to speak with Officer Berg. I hoped Will would come home with news about the murder—something to settle me—but there was nothing to report. The police weren’t any closer to solving the crime. I’ve seen statistics on murders. Something like one-third or more of murders become cold case files, leaving police departments mired in unsolved crimes. It’s an epidemic.

The number of murderers walking among us every day is frightening.

They can be anywhere and we’d never know.

According to Will, Imogen had nothing to offer Officer Berg about last night. She was asleep, as I knew she’d been. When asked if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few weeks, she turned stiff and gray and said, “My mom hanging from the end of a fucking noose.” Officer Berg had no more questions for her after that.

As I contemplate a third go-round of the windows and doors, Will calls to me from the top of the stairs, asks if I’m coming to bed anytime soon. I tell him yes, I’m coming, as I give the front door a final tug. I leave on a living room lamp to give the pretense we’re awake.

I climb the stairs and settle into bed beside Will. But I can’t sleep. All night, I find myself lying in bed, thinking about what Officer Berg said, how the little Baines girl was the one to find Morgan dead. I wonder how well Tate knows this little girl. Tate and she are in class together, but that doesn’t mean they’re friends.

I find that I’m unable to shake from my mind the image of the six-year-old girl standing over her mother’s lifeless body. I wonder if she was scared. If she screamed. If the killer lurked nearby, getting off on the sound of her scream. I wonder how long she waited for the ambulance to arrive, and if, in that time, she feared for her own life. I think of her, alone, finding her mother dead in the same way that Imogen found her own mother dead. Not the same, no. Suicide and murder are two very different things. But still, it’s unfathomable for me to think what these girls have seen in their short lives.

Beside me, Will sleeps like a rock. But not me. Because as I lie there unsleeping I start to wonder if the killer is still on the island with us, or if he’s gone by now.

I slip from bed at the thought of it, my heart gaining speed. I have to be sure the kids are okay. The dogs, on their own beds in the corner of the room, take note and follow along. I tell them to hush as Will rolls over in bed, pulling the sheet with him.

On the wooden floors, my bare feet are cold. But it’s too dark to feel around for slippers. I leave them behind. I step out of the bedroom, moving down the narrow hall.

I go to Tate’s room first. There, in the doorway, I pause. Tate sleeps with the bedroom door open, a night-light plugged in to keep monsters at bay. His small body is set in the middle of the bed, a stuffed Chihuahua held tightly between his arms. Peacefully he sleeps, his own dreams uninterrupted by thoughts of murder and death, unlike mine. I wonder what he dreams of. Maybe puppy dogs and ice cream.

I wonder what Tate knows of death. I wonder what I knew of death when I was seven years old, if I knew much of anything.

I move on to Otto’s room. There’s a roof outside Otto’s window, a single-story slate roof that hangs over the front porch. A series of climbable columns hold it upright. Getting in or out wouldn’t be such a difficult task in the middle of the night.

My feet instinctively pick up pace as I cross the hall, telling myself Otto is safe, that certainly an intruder wouldn’t climb to the second floor to get in. But in that moment, I can’t be so sure. I turn the handle and press the door silently open, terrified of what I’ll find on the other side. The window open, the bed empty. But it’s not the case. Otto is here. Otto is fine.

I stand in the doorway, watching for a while. I take a step closer for a better look, holding my breath so I don’t wake him. He looks peaceful, though his blanket has been kicked to the end of the bed and his pillow tossed to the floor. His head lies flat on the mattress. I reach for the blanket and draw it over him, remembering when he was young and would ask me to sleep with him. When I did, he’d toss a heavy arm across my neck and hold me that way, not letting go the entire night. He’s grown up too fast. I wish for it back.

I go to Imogen’s room next. I set my hand on the handle and sluggishly turn, careful not to make any noise. But the handle doesn’t turn. The door is locked from the inside. I can’t check on her.

I turn away from the door and inch down the stairs. The dogs follow on my heels, but I move far too slowly for their liking. At some point, they bypass me and dash down the rest of the steps, cutting through the foyer for the back door. Their nails click-clack on the wooden floors like typewriter keys.

I pause before the front door and glance out the sidelight window. From this angle, I catch a glimpse of the Baineses’ house. There’s activity going on even at this late hour. Light floods the inside of it, a handful of people milling about inside. Police on a quest. I wonder what they’ll find.

The dogs whine at me from the kitchen, stealing my attention away from the window. They want to go outside. I follow them, opening the sliding glass door, and they go rushing out. They make a beeline for the corner of the yard, where they’ve recently begun digging divots in the grass. The incessant digging has become their latest compulsion and also my pet peeve. I clap my hands together to get them to stop.

I brew myself a cup of tea and sit down at the kitchen table. I look around for things to do. There’s no point in going back to bed because I know I won’t sleep. There’s nothing worse than lying in bed, restless, worrying about things I can’t do anything about.

On the edge of the table sits a book Will has been reading, a true crime novel with a bookmark thrust in the center of it.

I take the book into the living room, turn on a lamp and settle myself on Alice’s marigold sofa to read. I spread an afghan over my lap. I open the book. By accident Will’s bookmark comes tumbling out, falling to the floor beside my feet.

“Shit,” I say, reaching down for the bookmark, feeling guilty that I’ve lost Will’s page.

But the guilt only lasts so long before it’s replaced with something else. Jealousy? Anger? Empathy? Or maybe surprise. Because the bookmark isn’t the only thing that’s fallen out of the pages of the book. Because there’s also a photo of Erin, Will’s first fiancée, the woman he was supposed to marry instead of me.

My gasp is audible. My hand comes to a stop inches above her face, my heart hastening.

Why is Will hiding a photograph of Erin inside this book? Why does Will still have this photograph at all?

The photo is old, twenty years maybe. Erin looks to be about eighteen or nineteen in it. Her hair is wild, her smile carefree. I stare at the picture, into Erin’s eyes. There’s a pang of jealousy because of how beautiful she is. How magnetic.

But how can I be jealous of a woman who is dead?

Will and I had been dating for over a month before he mentioned her name. We were still in that completely smitten stage, when everything felt noteworthy and important. We’d talk on the phone for hours. I didn’t have much to say about my past, and so, instead, I told him about my future, about all the things I planned to one day do. Will’s future was undecided when we met, and so he told me about his past. About his childhood dog. About his stepfather’s diagnosis with cancer, the fact that his mother has been married three times. And he told me about Erin, the woman he was supposed to marry, a woman he was engaged to for months before she died. Will cried openly when he told me about her. He held nothing back, and I loved him for it because of his great capacity to love.

In all my life, I didn’t think I’d ever seen a grown man cry.

At the time, the sadness of Will losing a fiancée only attracted me to him more. Will was broken, like a butterfly without wings. I wanted to be the one to heal him.

It’s been years since her name has come up. It’s not as if we talk about her. But every now and then another Erin is mentioned and it gives us pause. The name alone carries so much weight. But why Will would dig this photograph out of God knows where and carry it around with him is beyond me. Why now, after all this time?

My hand grazes the photograph but I don’t have it in me to pick it up. Not yet. I’ve only seen one other photograph of Erin before, one that Will showed to me years ago at my request. He didn’t want to, but I insisted. I wanted to know what she looked like. When I asked to see a picture, he showed me with circumspection. He wasn’t sure how I’d react. I tried to be poker-faced about it, but there was no denying the sharp pains I felt inside. She was breathtaking.

I knew in that instant: Will only loved me because she was gone. I was his second pick.

I brush my finger against Erin’s fair skin now. I can’t be jealous. I simply can’t. And I can’t be mad. It would be insensitive of me to ask him to throw it away. But here I am, after all these years, feeling like I’m playing second fiddle to the memory of a woman who’s dead.

I reach for the photo and hold it in my hand this time. I won’t let myself be a coward. I stare at her. There’s something so childish about her face, so audacious and raw, that I feel the greatest need to scold her for whatever it is she’s thinking as she makes a pouty face at the camera, one that is as provocative as it is bold.

I jam the picture and the bookmark somewhere back inside the book, rise from the sofa and bring the book to the kitchen table. I leave it there, having suddenly lost the desire to read.

The dogs have begun to bark. I can’t leave them outside barking in the middle of the night. I open the slider and call to them, but they don’t come.

I’m forced outside into the backyard to get their attention. The patio is freezing cold on my bare feet. But that discomfort is secondary to what I feel inside as I get taken in, swallowed by the darkness. The kitchen light fades quickly behind me as the December night closes in.

I can see nothing. If someone was there, standing in the darkness of our yard, I wouldn’t know. An unwanted thought comes pummeling into me then. My saliva catches in my throat and I choke.

Dogs have adaptations that people don’t have. They can see much better than humans in the dark. It makes me wonder what the dogs see that I can’t see, what they’re barking at.

I hiss out into the night, calling quietly for the girls. It’s the middle of the night; I don’t want to shout. But I’m too scared to go any farther outside than I already am.

How do I know that Morgan Baines’s killer isn’t there?

How do I know that the dogs aren’t barking because there’s a murderer in my yard?

Backlit by the kitchen light, I’m a fish in a fishbowl.

I can see nothing. But whoever is there—if anyone is there—can easily see me.

Without thinking it through, I take a step suddenly back. The fear is overwhelming. There’s the greatest need to run back into the kitchen, close and lock the door behind myself, pull the drapes shut. But would the dogs be able to fend off a killer all on their own?

And then the dogs suddenly stop their barking and I’m not sure what terrifies me more, the barking or the silence.

My heart pounds harder. My skin prickles, a tingling sensation that runs up and down my arms. My imagination goes wild, wondering what horrible thing is standing in my yard.

I can’t stand here waiting to find out. I clap my hands, call to the dogs again. I hurry inside for their biscuits and shake the box frantically. This time, by the grace of God, they come. I open the box, spill a half dozen treats on the kitchen floor before closing and locking the slider, pulling the drapes tightly closed.

Back upstairs, I check again on the boys. They’re just as I left them.

But Imogen’s door, this time as I pass by, is open an inch. It’s no longer closed. It’s no longer locked. The hallway is narrow and dark with just enough light that I’m not blind. A faint glow from the lamp in the living room rises up to me. It helps me see.

My eyes go to that one-inch gap between Imogen’s door and the frame. It wasn’t like that the last time I was here. Imogen’s room, like Otto’s, faces onto the street. I go to her door and press on it, easing it open another inch or two, just enough so that I can see inside. She’s lying there, on her bed, with her back to me. If she’s faking sleep, she does so quite well. Her breathing is rhythmic and deep. I see the rise and fall of the sheet. Her curtains are open, moonlight streaming into the room. The window, like the door, is open an inch. The room is icy cold, but I don’t risk stepping inside to close it.

Back in our bedroom, I shake Will awake. I won’t tell Will about Imogen because there’s nothing really to say. For all I know, she was up using the bathroom. She got hot and opened her window. These are not crimes, though other questions nag at the back of my mind.

Why didn’t I hear a toilet flush?

Why didn’t I notice the chill from the bedroom the first time I passed by?

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Will asks, half-asleep.

As he rubs at his eyes, I say, “I think there’s something in the backyard.”

“Like what?” he asks, clearing his throat, his eyes drowsy and his voice heavy with sleep.

I wait a beat before I tell him. “I don’t know,” I say, leaning into him as I say it. “Maybe a person.”

“A person?” Will asks, sitting quickly upright, and I tell him about what just happened, how there was something—or someone—in the backyard that spooked the dogs. My voice is tremulous when I speak. Will notices. “Did you see a person?” he asks, but I tell him no, that I didn’t see anything at all. That I only knew something was there. A gut instinct.

Will says compassionately, his hand reassuringly stroking mine, “You’re really shaken up about it, aren’t you?”

He wraps both hands around mine, feeling the way they tremble in his. I tell him that I am. I think that he’s going to get out of bed and go see for himself if there’s someone in our backyard. But instead he makes me second-guess myself. It isn’t intentional and he isn’t trying to patronize me. Rather, he’s the voice of reason as he asks, “But what about a coyote? A raccoon or a skunk? Are you sure it wasn’t just some animals that got the dogs worked up?”

It sounds so simple, so obvious as he says it. I wonder if he’s right. It would explain why the dogs were so upset. Perhaps they sniffed out some wildlife roaming around our backyard. They’re hunters. Naturally they would have wanted to get at whatever was there. It’s the far more logical thing to believe than that there was a killer traipsing through our backyard. What would a killer want with us?

I shrug in the darkness. “Maybe,” I say, feeling foolish, but not entirely so. There was a murder just across the street from us last night and the murderer hasn’t been found. It’s not so irrational to believe he’s still nearby.

Will tells me obligingly, “We could mention it to Officer Berg anyway in the morning. Ask him to look into it. If nothing else, ask if coyotes are a problem around here. It would be good to know anyway, to make sure we keep an eye on the dogs.”

I feel grateful he humors me. But I tell him no. “I’m sure you’re right,” I say, crawling back into bed beside him, knowing I still won’t sleep. “It probably was a coyote. I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to bed,” I say, and he does, wrapping a heavy arm around me, protecting me from whatever lies on the other side of our door.

SADIE

I come to when Will says my name. I must have spaced out.

He’s there beside me, giving me a look. A Will look, fraught with worry. “Where’d you go?” he asks, as I look around, get my bearings. A sudden headache has nearly gotten the best of me, making me feel swimmy inside.

I tell him, “I don’t know,” not remembering what we were talking about before I spaced out.

I look down to see that a button on my shirt has come undone, revealing the black of my bra beneath. I button back up, apologize to him for zoning out in the middle of our conversation. “I’m just tired,” I say, rubbing at my eyes, taking in the sight of Will before me, the kitchen around me.

“You look tired,” Will agrees, and I feel the agitation brim inside. I glance past Will and into the backyard, expecting to see something out of place. Signs of a trespasser in our yard last night. There’s nothing, but still, I prickle anyway, remember what it felt like as I stood in the darkness, pleading for the dogs to come.

The boys are at the table, eating the last of their breakfast. Will stands at the counter, filling a mug that he passes to me. I welcome the coffee into my hands and take a big gulp.

“I didn’t sleep well,” I say, not wanting to admit the truth, that I didn’t sleep at all.

“Want to talk about it?” he asks, though it doesn’t seem like something that needs to be said. This is something he should know. A woman was murdered in her home across the street from us two nights ago.

My eyes breeze past Tate at the table, and I tell him no because this isn’t a conversation Tate should hear. For as long as we can, I’d like to keep his childhood innocence alive.

“Do you have time for breakfast?” Will asks.

“Not today,” I say, looking at the clock, seeing that it’s even later than I thought it was. I need to get going. I begin gathering things, my bag and my coat, to go. Will’s bag waits for him beside the table, and I wonder if he stuck his true crime novel inside the bag, the book with the photograph of Erin hidden inside. I don’t have the courage to tell Will I know about the photograph.

I kiss Tate goodbye. I snatch the earbuds from Otto’s ears to tell him to hurry.

I drive to the ferry. Otto and I don’t say much on the way there. We used to be closer than we are, but time and circumstance have pulled us apart. How many teenage boys, I ask myself, trying not to take it personally, are close with their mother? Few, if any. But Otto is a sensitive boy, different than the rest.

He leaves the car with only a quick goodbye for me. I watch as he crosses the metal grate bridge and boards the ferry with the other early-morning commuters. His heavy backpack is slung across his back. I don’t see Imogen anywhere.

It’s seven twenty in the morning. Outside, it’s raining. A mob of multicolored umbrellas makes its way down the street that leads to the ferry. Two boys about Otto’s age claw their way on board behind him, bypassing Otto in the entranceway, laughing. They’re laughing at some inside joke, I assure myself, not at him, but my stomach churns just the same, and I think how lonely it must be in Otto’s world, an outcast without any friends.

There’s plenty of seating inside the ferry where it’s warm and dry, but Otto climbs all the way up to the upper deck, standing in the rain without an umbrella. I watch as deckhands raise the gangplank and untie the boat before it ventures off into the foggy sea, stealing Otto from me.

Only then do I see Officer Berg staring at me.

He stands on the other side of the street just outside his Crown Victoria, leaned up against the passenger’s side door. In his hands are coffee and a cinnamon roll, just a stone’s throw away from the stereotypical doughnut cops are notorious for eating, though slightly more refined. As he waves at me, I get the sense that he’s been watching me the entire time, watching as I watch Otto leave.

He tips his hat at me. I wave at him through the car window.

What I usually do at this point in my drive is make a U-turn and go back up the hill the same way I came down. But I can’t do that with the officer watching. And it doesn’t matter anyway because Officer Berg has abandoned his post and is walking across the street and toward me. He motions with the crank of a hand for me to open my window. I press the button and the window drops down. Beads of rain welcome themselves inside my car, gathering along the interior of the door. Officer Berg doesn’t carry an umbrella. Rather, the hood of a rain jacket is thrust over his head. He doesn’t appear to be bothered by the rain.

He jams the last bite of his cinnamon roll into his mouth, chases it down with a swig of coffee and says, “Morning, Dr. Foust.” He has a kind face for a police officer, lacking the usual flintiness that I think of when I think of the police. There’s something endearing about him, a bit of awkwardness and insecurity that I like.

I tell him good morning.

“What a day,” he says, and I say, “Quite a doozy.”

The rain isn’t expected to go on all day. The sun, however, won’t make an appearance anytime soon. Where we live, just off the coast of Maine, the climate is tempered by the ocean. The temperatures aren’t as bitter as they are in Chicago this time of year, though still it’s cold.

What we’ve heard is that the bay has been known to freeze come wintertime, ferries forced to charge through ice floes to get people to and from the mainland. One winter, supposedly, the ferry got stuck, and passengers were made to walk across yards of ice to get to the shoreline before the Coast Guard came in with a cutter to chop it up.

It’s unsettling to think about. A bit suffocating, if I’m being honest, the idea of being trapped on the island, cordoned off from the rest of the world by a giant slab of ice.

“You’re up early,” Officer Berg says, and I reply, “As are you.”

“Duty calls,” he says, tapping at his badge. I reply, “Me, too,” finger at the ready to hoist the window up so that I can leave. Joyce and Emma are expecting me, and if I’m not there soon, I’ll never hear the end of it. Joyce is a stickler for punctuality.

Officer Berg glances at his watch, makes an offhand guess that the clinic opens around eight thirty. I say that it does. He asks, “Have a moment to spare, Dr. Foust?” I tell him a quick one.

I pull my car closer to the curb and put it in Park. Officer Berg rounds the front end of it and lets himself in through the passenger’s side door.

Officer Berg cuts straight to the chase. “I finished speaking to your neighbors yesterday, asking them the same questions I asked of you and Mr. Foust,” he tells me, and I gather from his tone that this isn’t merely an update on the investigation—though what I want is an update on the investigation. I want Officer Berg to tell me that they’re ready to make an arrest so I can sleep better at night, knowing Morgan’s killer is behind bars.

Early this morning before the kids were up, Will searched online for news about her murder. There was an article detailing how Morgan had been found dead in her home. There were facts in it that were new to Will and me. How, for example, the police found threatening notes in the Baineses’ home, though they didn’t say what the threats said.

Overnight the police released the little girl’s 911 call. It was there online, an audio clip of the six-year-old girl as she fought back tears, telling the operator on the other end of the line, She won’t wake up. Morgan won’t wake up.

In the article, she was never referred to by name, only ever as the six-year-old girl, because minors are blessed with a certain anonymity adults don’t have.

Will and I lay in bed with the laptop between us, listening to the audio clip three times. It was gut-wrenching to hear. The little girl managed to remain relatively calm and composed as the dispatcher talked her through the next few minutes and sent help, keeping her on the line the entire time.

But there was something about the audio clip that got under my skin, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It pestered me nonetheless, and it wasn’t until the third go-round that I finally heard it.

She calls her mother Morgan? I’d asked Will, because the little girl didn’t say her mother wouldn’t wake up. She said Morgan wouldn’t wake up. Why would she do that? I asked.

Will’s reply was immediate.

Morgan is her stepmother, he said. Then he swallowed hard, tried not to cry. Morgan was her stepmother, I mean.

Oh, I said. I don’t know why this mattered. But it seemed it did.

Jeffrey was married before? I asked. It’s not always the case, of course. Children are born out of wedlock. But it was worth asking.

Yes, he said, but he said no more. I wondered about Jeffrey’s first wife. I wondered who she was, if she lived here on the island with us. Will himself is the product of divorced parents. It’s always been a sore subject with him.

How long were Jeffrey and Morgan married? I asked, wondering what else she told him.

Just over a year.

They’re newlyweds, I said.

They’re nothing anymore, Sadie, Will corrected me again. He’s a widower. She’s dead.

We stopped talking after that. Together, in silence, we read on.

I wonder now, as I sit in my car beside Officer Berg, about signs of forced entry—a broken window, a busted doorjamb—or blood. Was there blood at the scene? Or defensive wounds, maybe, on Morgan’s hands? Did she try to fight her intruder off?

Or maybe the little girl saw the attacker or heard her stepmother scream.

I don’t ask Officer Berg any of this. It’s been over twenty-four hours since the poor woman was killed. The etched lines on his forehead are deeper today than they were before. The pressure of the investigation is weighing on him, and I realize then: he’s no closer to solving this crime than he was yesterday. My heart sinks.

Instead I ask, “Has Mr. Baines been located?” and he tells me that he’s on his way, though it’s a twenty-some-hour trip from Tokyo with layovers at LAX and JFK. He won’t be home until tonight.

“Have you found her cell phone? That might give you something to go on?” I ask.

He shakes his head. They’ve been looking, he says, but so far they can’t find her phone. “There are ways to track a missing cell phone, but if the phone is off or the battery is dead, those won’t work. Obtaining a warrant for records from a telecommunications company is tedious. It takes time. But we’re working on it,” he tells me.

Officer Berg shifts in the seat. He turns his body toward mine, knees now pointed in my direction. They bump awkwardly into the gearshift. There are raindrops on his coat and his hair. There’s icing on his upper lip.

“You told me yesterday that you and Mrs. Baines never met,” he says, and I have trouble snatching my eyes from the icing as I reply, “That’s right. We never met.”

There was a photograph online of the woman. According to the paper, she was twenty-eight years old, eleven years younger than me. In the photo, she stood surrounded by her family, her happy husband on one side, stepdaughter the other, all of them dolled up in coordinating clothes and wreathed in smiles. She had a beautiful smile, a tad bit gummy if anything, but otherwise lovely.

Officer Berg unzips his rain jacket and reaches inside. He removes his tablet from an interior pocket, where there it stays dry. He taps on the screen, trawling for something. When he finds the spot, he clears his throat and reads my words back to me.

“Yesterday you said, I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself. Do you remember saying that?” he asks, and I tell him I do, though it sounds so flippant now, my words coming back to me this way. A bit merciless, if I’m being honest, seeing as the woman is now dead. I should have tacked on an empathetic addendum, such as, But I wish I had. Just a little something so that my words didn’t sound so callous.

“The thing is, Dr. Foust,” he begins, “you said you didn’t know Mrs. Baines, and yet it seems you did,” and though his tone is well-disposed, the intent of his words is not.

He’s just accused me of lying.

“I beg your pardon?” I ask, taken completely aback.

“It seems you did know Morgan Baines,” he says.

The rain is coming down in torrents now, pounding on the roof of the car like mallets on tin cans. I think of Otto all alone on the upper deck of the ferry, getting pelted with rain. A knot forms in my throat because of it. I swallow it away.

I force my window up to keep the rain at bay.

I make sure to meet the officer’s eye as I assert, “Unless a onetime wave out the window of a moving vehicle counts as a relationship, Officer Berg, I didn’t know Morgan Baines. What makes you think that I did?” I ask, and he explains again, at great length this time, how he canvassed the entire street, spoke to all the neighbors, asked them the same questions he asked Will and me. When he came to the home of George and Poppy Nilsson, they invited him into their kitchen for tea and ginger cookies. He tells me that he asked the Nilssons what they were doing the night Morgan died, same as he did Will and me. I wait to hear their reply, thinking Officer Berg is about to tell me how the older couple sat in their living room that night, watching out the window as a killer slipped from the cover of darkness and into the Baineses’ home.

But instead he says, “As you can expect, at eighty-some years old, George and Poppy were asleep,” and I release my withheld breath. The Nilssons didn’t see a thing.

“I don’t understand, Officer,” I say, glancing at the time on the car’s dash, knowing I’ll need to leave soon. “If the Nilssons were asleep, then...what?”

Because clearly if they were asleep, then they saw and heard nothing.

“I also asked the Nilssons if they’d seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days. Strangers lurking about, unfamiliar cars parked along the street.”

“Yes, yes,” I say, nodding my head quickly because he also asked this question of Will and me. “And?” I ask, trying to hurry things along so that I can get on to work.

“Well, it just so happens that they did see something out of the ordinary. Something they haven’t seen before. Which is saying a lot, seeing as they’ve lived half their lives on that street.” And then he taps away at that tablet screen to find his interview with Mr. and Mrs. Nilsson.

He goes on to describe for me an afternoon just last week. It was Friday, the first of December. It was a clear day, the sky painted blue, not a cloud to be seen. The temperatures were cool, crisp, but nothing a heavy sweater or a light jacket wouldn’t fix. George and Poppy had gone for an afternoon walk, Officer Berg says, and were headed back up the steep incline of our street. Once they reached the top, George stopped to catch his breath, pausing before the Baineses’ home.

Officer Berg goes on to tell me how there Mr. Nilsson rearranged the blanket on Poppy’s lap so that she didn’t catch a draft. As he did, something caught his attention. It was the sound of women hollering at one another, though what they were hollering about he wasn’t sure.

“Oh, how awful,” I say, and he says it was because poor George was really shaken up about it. He’d never heard anything like that before. And that’s saying a lot for a man his age.

“But what does this have to do with me?” I ask, and he reaches again for the tablet.

“George and Poppy stayed there in the street for a moment only, but that’s all it took before the women stepped out from the shade of a tree and into view and George could see for himself who they were.”

“Who?” I ask, slightly breathless, and he waits a beat before he replies.

“It was Mrs. Baines,” he says, “and you.”

And then, from some recording app on his device, he plays for me the testimonial of Mr. Nilsson, which states, “She was fighting with the new doctor lady on the street. The both of them were hooting and hollering, mad as a hornet. Before I could intercede, the doctor lady grabbed a handful of Ms. Morgan’s hair right out of her head and left with it in her fist. Poppy and I turned and walked quickly home. Didn’t want her to think we were snooping or she might do the same thing to us.”

Officer Berg stops it there and turns to me, asking, “Does this sound to you like an altercation between two women who’d never met?”

But I’m speechless.

I can’t reply.

Why would George Nilsson say such an awful thing about me?

Officer Berg doesn’t give me a chance to speak. He goes on without me.

He asks, “Is it often, Dr. Foust, that you swipe handfuls of hair from women you don’t know?”

The answer, of course, is no. Though still I can’t find my voice to speak.

He decides, “I’ll take your silence as a no.”

His hand falls to the door and he pushes it open against the weight of the wind. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, “so that you can get on with your day.”

“I never spoke to Morgan Baines” is what I manage to say just then before he leaves, though the words that emerge are limp.

He shrugs. “All right, then,” he says, stepping back out into the rain.

He never said if he believed me.

He didn’t need to.

MOUSE

Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father had called her that.

The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it was something special between her father and her, even if she didn’t know why.

Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.

She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse. If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip, ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom, climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but she didn’t see any whiskers there.

Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.

But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cookies that he called her Mouse.

Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing its way through wood.

Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night, when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pockets for a late-night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.

Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would taste just as good as the cookie had.

But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her. There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.

But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called her Mouse.

Because by then, she already was Mouse.

Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even cartwheels on the moon if that was what she wanted to do because Mouse didn’t need silly things like oxygen or gravity. She was afraid of nothing because she was immortal. No matter what she did, no harm could come to imaginary Mouse.

Mouse loved to draw. Her bedroom walls were covered in pictures of her father and her, her and her teddy bears. Mouse spent her days playing pretend. Her bedroom, the only one on the second floor of the old home, was full of dolls, toys and stuffed animals. Each animal had a name. Her favorite was a stuffed brown bear named Mr. Bear. Mouse had a dollhouse, a toy kitchen set with pretend pots and pans and crates of plastic food. She had a tea set. Mouse loved to set her dolls and animals in a circle on her floor, on the edge of her striped rag rug, and serve them each a tiny mug of tea and a plastic doughnut. She would find a book on her shelf and read it aloud to her friends before tucking them into bed.

But sometimes Mouse didn’t play with her animals and dolls.

Sometimes she stood on her bed and pretended the floor around her was hot lava oozing from the volcano at the other end of the room. She couldn’t step on the floor for risk of death. Those days, Mouse would scramble from her bed to a desk, climbing to safety. She’d tread precariously across the top of the small white desk—the legs of it wobbling beneath her, threatening to break. Mouse wasn’t a big girl but the desk was old, fragile. It wasn’t meant to hold a six-year-old child.

But it didn’t matter because soon enough Mouse was clambering into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the bedroom floor. As she did, she took extra care not to step on the floor, breathing a sigh of relief when she was safely inside the basket. Because even though the basket was on the floor, it was safe. The basket couldn’t get swallowed up by lava, because it was made of titanium, and Mouse knew that titanium wouldn’t melt. She was a smart girl, smarter than any other girl her age that she knew.

Inside the laundry basket, the girl rode the waves of the volcano until the lava itself cooled and crusted over, and the land was safe enough to walk on again. Only then did she venture out of the basket and go back to playing along the edge of the rag rug with Mr. Bear and her dolls.

Sometimes Mouse thought that that, her tendency to disappear to her bedroom—quiet as a church mouse, as her father put it—and play all day, was the reason he called her Mouse.

It was hard to say.

But one thing was certain.

Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And then she no longer did.

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