I wander the halls, looking in bedrooms, in bathrooms, in the kitchen. The home is three narrow floors tall, each room as Spartan as the next. In the child’s bedroom, the bed is covered with woodland creatures, deer and squirrels and such. There’s a rug on the floor.

Another room is an office with a desk inside. I go to the desk, pull the drawers out at random. I’m not looking for anything in particular. But there are things I see, like felt-tip pens and reams of paper and a box of stationery.

I return downstairs. I open and close the refrigerator door. I peel back a curtain and look outside to be sure no one is coming.

How long do I have until Courtney realizes that her keys are missing?

I sit lightly on the sofa, paying attention not to disturb the careful order of things. I thumb through the mail, keeping it in the same order that it is, in case there’s some method to the madness that I can’t see. It’s bills and junk mail mostly. But there are other things, too, like legal petitions. State of Maine is typed across the envelopes, and that’s what makes me peel the flaps back, slide the documents out with my gloved hands.

I was never very good with legalese, but words like child endangerment and immediate physical custody leap out at me. It takes but a minute to realize Jeffrey and Morgan Baines were attempting to gain full custody of his and Courtney’s child.

The thought of someone taking Otto or Tate from me makes me instantly upset. If someone tried to take my children from me, I don’t know what I’d do.

But if I know one thing, it’s that getting between a woman and her child will never end well.

I slide the documents back into their envelopes, but not before first snapping a photo of them on my phone. I put the mail back how it was. I rise from the sofa and slip back out the front door, done with my search for now. I’m not sure if what I found is enough to suspect Courtney of murder. But it is enough to raise questions.

I drop the keys into a zipped compartment in my bag. I’ll dispose of them later.

People lose their keys all the time, don’t they? It’s not such an unusual thing.

I’m halfway to my car parked on the other side of the street when my cell phone rings. I pull it from my bag and answer the call. “Mrs. Foust?” the caller asks. Not everyone knows that I’m a doctor.

“Yes,” I say. “This is she.”

The woman on the other end of the line informs me that she’s calling from the high school. My mind goes instinctively to Otto. I think of our short exchange as we drove to the dock this morning. Something was bothering him but he wouldn’t say what. Was he trying to tell me something?

“I tried calling your husband first,” the woman tells me, “but I got his voice mail.” I look at my watch. Will is in the middle of a lecture. “I wanted to check on Imogen. Her teachers marked her absent today. Did someone forget to call her in?” this woman asks, and—feeling relieved the call isn’t about Otto—I sigh and tell her no, that Imogen must be playing hooky. I won’t bother myself with making up lies for Imogen’s absence.

Her tone isn’t kind. She explains to me that Imogen is required to be in school and that she is quickly closing in on the number of unexcused absences allowed in a school year.

“It’s your responsibility, Mrs. Foust, to make sure Imogen is in school,” she says. A meeting will be scheduled with Will and me, Imogen, teachers and administrators. An intervention of sorts. If that fails, the school will be forced to follow legal protocol.

I end the call and climb into my car. Before I pull out, I send Imogen a text. Where are you? I ask. I don’t expect a reply. And yet one comes. Find me, it reads.

Imogen is playing games with me.

A series of photos comes next. Headstones, a bleak landscape, a bottle of prescription pills. They’re Alice’s old pills, used to manage fibromyalgia pain. An antidepressant that doubles as a nerve blocker. Her name is on the label.

I have to get to Imogen before she does something stupid with them, before she makes a careless decision she can’t take back. I speed away, forcing the legal documents I found in Courtney’s home out of my mind for now. Finding Morgan’s killer will have to wait.

MOUSE

Fake Mom didn’t give Mouse any dinner that night, but Mouse heard her down in the kitchen, making something for herself. She smelled the scent of it coming up to the second floor through the floor vents, slipping under the crack of Mouse’s bedroom door. Mouse didn’t know what it was, but the smell of it got her tummy rumbling in a good way. She wanted to eat. But she couldn’t because Fake Mom never offered to share.

By bedtime, Mouse was hungry. But she knew better than to ask about dinner because Fake Mom told her explicitly that she did not want to see her until she said it was okay. And Fake Mom never said it was okay.

As the sun set and the sky went dark, Mouse tried to ignore the hunger pangs. She heard Fake Mom moving about downstairs for a long time after she had finished eating, doing the dishes, watching TV.

But then the house got quiet.

A door closed, and Fake Mom, Mouse thought, had gone to bed.

Mouse pulled her own door open an inch. She stood just behind the door, holding her breath, making sure that the house stayed quiet. That Fake Mom hadn’t only gone in the bedroom to come right back out again. That Fake Mom wasn’t trying to trick her into coming down.

Mouse knew she should go to sleep. She tried going to sleep. She wanted to go to sleep.

But she was hungry.

And, even worse than that, she had to use the bathroom, which was downstairs. Mouse had to go really badly. She’d been holding it for a long time, and didn’t think she could hold it much longer. She certainly couldn’t hold it the whole night. But she also didn’t want to have an accident in her bedroom because she was six years old, too old to have accidents in her bedroom.

But Mouse wasn’t allowed to leave her bedroom until Fake Mom said she could. So she pressed her legs together real tight and willed the pee to stay inside of her. She used her hand, too, squeezing it into her crotch like a cork, thinking that might hold the pee in.