Rebecca.
I stared at her name until the call stopped.
Seconds later, it rang again.
“Don’t answer yet,” Mercer said.
A third call came from Margaret.
Mercer and I looked at each other.
“They know something is wrong,” I said.
“Maybe.”
My phone buzzed with a message.
I didn’t open it.
Mercer arranged for another investigator to speak with the prosecutor who had reviewed Daniel’s case years earlier.
The old file was formally reopened, and both Rebecca and Margaret were contacted for voluntary interviews.
For several hours, neither agreed.
Then Rebecca called Mercer herself.
I wasn’t in the room when they spoke, but when Mercer returned, his expression had changed.
“She’s coming in.”
“Here?”
“Yes.
Margaret is coming too.”
“Does Rebecca know I’m here?”
“Not from me.”
I waited in another office while Rebecca entered the station.
Seeing her through the narrow glass panel in the door was almost worse than seeing her photograph in Daniel’s file.
She looked exactly like my wife.
Same gray coat.
Same habit of pushing her hair behind her right ear when she was nervous.
Same woman who had sat beside me through funerals, birthdays, illnesses and ordinary Sunday mornings.
But now I knew there was an entire life behind her eyes that she had never given me.
Margaret arrived ten minutes later.
They were interviewed separately.
At first, Rebecca denied everything that mattered.
Yes, she had known Daniel.
Yes, they had dated.
No, they had never been engaged.
No, she had not been with him the night he disappeared.
She claimed she had hidden the relationship from me because Daniel had been controlling and she wanted to erase that period from her life.
Margaret told a different story.
She admitted Daniel and Rebecca had been engaged.
She admitted they had used the cabin regularly.
But she still insisted she never went there that night.
Mercer came back to me after nearly two hours.
“Their stories aren’t matching.”
“Is that enough?”
“Not yet.”
Then another detective entered carrying a clear evidence bag.
Inside was an old photograph.
I recognized it immediately as the one from Margaret’s living-room box.
Rebecca and Daniel stood outside a wooden cabin, smiling at the camera.
On the back was a handwritten date.
Two days before Daniel disappeared.
Margaret had agreed to let investigators look through the photograph boxes after insisting there was nothing relevant inside.
There was.
Several photographs established that Rebecca and Daniel’s relationship had continued far longer than she had just claimed.
One showed Margaret at the cabin with both of them.
Another showed Daniel’s truck parked there.
None of those images proved what happened the night he vanished.
