“Did Rebecca ever tell you she lived here?”
“No.”
“Did she ever mention Daniel?”
“No.”
“Did Margaret?”
“Never.”
He nodded as though he had expected those answers.
Then I remembered the night before.
The boxes on Margaret’s living-room floor.
The photographs.
Rebecca whispering into Margaret’s ear after the traffic stop.
Both of them looking at me.
“They’re sorting old family pictures right now,” I said.
Mercer’s eyes sharpened.
“What?”
I told him everything: the dinner, Rebecca suddenly deciding to stay overnight, Margaret’s expression changing after the whisper.
Mercer stopped writing.
“Nathan, when you saw those photographs, did anything stand out?”
At first, I shook my head.
Then an image surfaced.
While carrying plates into the kitchen, I had passed an open box beside the sofa.
On top was a photograph of Rebecca when she was young.
A man’s shoulder and part of his face were visible beside her.
I hadn’t paid attention.
Now I looked down at Daniel Hart’s photograph.
Same dark hair.
Same narrow jaw.
“I think he was in one of them.”
Mercer stood.
He didn’t celebrate the discovery.
He didn’t tell me we had solved anything.
He simply picked up his phone and stepped into the hallway.
I sat alone with the file.
The longer I looked, the more pieces of my marriage rearranged themselves.
Rebecca had always hated questions about her early twenties.
There were almost no photographs of her before we met.
Whenever someone asked where she grew up, she gave short answers and changed the subject.
Margaret once mentioned an apartment Rebecca had rented when she was twenty-one.
Rebecca immediately corrected her.
“Twenty-three, Mom.”
At the time, I thought nothing of it.
Now I remembered the look that passed between them.
Mercer returned ten minutes later.
“I need you to do something difficult,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I frowned.
“Don’t confront Rebecca.
Don’t accuse Margaret.
Don’t go searching through their belongings.
Let us handle the investigation.”
“You expect me to just sit here after telling me my wife may have something to do with a man’s disappearance?”
“I expect you to understand that if Rebecca has hidden this for fifteen years, confronting her before we know the truth could destroy evidence or put you in a dangerous situation.”
Dangerous.
That word finally made the trooper’s warning make sense.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
