Chapter 3

The second we were down I killed airplane mode.

The phone buzzed in my hand.

Bennett.

I let it ring twice. Then I put on a voice.

"Hey, sweetie. Just landed. It's freezing here."

"I know you just landed, but you're in Oregon."

"I--- I'll call you tonight. Have a safe trip, sweetheart."

Click.

He didn't ask why. He didn't tell me to come home.

I have been in a screaming fight with that man exactly twice in six years, and I would have taken either one of them over the sound of him hanging up gently.

Two hours down the coast the rental came out of the pine and there it was.

The Driftwood Lodge.

Twelve rooms on a cliff over gray water, and the last place Sloane's credit card ever worked.

The girl at the desk was maybe twenty-two.

"She stayed here a month ago." I turned my phone around. "Do you remember her?"

She looked at the picture. Then at me. Then at the empty lobby behind me.

"We're not supposed to give out guest information."

"She's missing. Please. She's been gone thirty-two days."

The girl bit her lip.

Then she started typing.

"Three nights. Room 315. She never checked out. Her suitcase is still up there."

A month. Nobody called anybody.

"Was there a man on that floor?"

She scrolled.

"312. Checked in the same day."

Three doors down.

"Did she leave anything?" I had both hands on the counter now. "Mail anything?"

"Oh." She blinked. "Yeah, actually. The morning she disappeared. She paid for triple, and I remember because nobody ever does that here."

"Why?"

"I don’t know. But she insisted on it."

Three weeks ago.

And it came up out of the bottom of my head like something surfacing.

Three weeks ago.

Bennett standing over a padded envelope with his pocket knife already through the tape.

I'd asked him what it was.

He'd folded the flap back down, and given me a tired smile, and said, "Just a contract, Emma."

"That guy came down every morning," the girl said.

I looked up.

"312. He never talked to anybody. He'd just sit downstairs for hours."

She was looking past me now, at the end of the counter.

"Just sitting there. Watching the front door."

The security monitor cycled to the lobby camera.

There was a man in the armchair by the fireplace.

A dark blue hoodie. A baseball cap pulled low. A magazine up in front of his face.

Then he lowered the magazine.

He looked across the lobby, then to the camera.

My breath caught.

It was Bennett.

Suddenly, the screen went black.