Text from Dawn to Gina, July 2nd, 3:09 p.m.: Play it off? ??

Text from Gina to Mom Squad Group Chat, July 2nd, 3:12 p.m.: Of course! The more the merrier! ??

Gina had sent Rebecca, like, five texts about the Holiday House Tour, and whether she was going to reclaim her spot on the committee. The first meeting was in August, so it was natural that Gina wanted to know. It was fine if Rebecca wanted the spot back; Gina just needed to plan her fall.

Rebecca left those texts unread. But she had time to text about Sherri coming on the boat. So we’ll let you decide where her priorities were.

And obviously nobody minded having an extra person on the pontoon. We were going to have to squeeze, but that wasn’t a big deal. The more the merrier is definitely a phrase we live by.

It was what Sherri did on the boat that was a little strange. We mean, you’re out on the water, you have to watch yourself! It was just a pontoon, we were only on the river, but still. You can’t be too careful. You can’t just go crazy like that.

29.

Sherri

When did she become aware that a teenage girl from two towns over was missing? Days after that night with the snack tray? Weeks? She became aware in the way that people do in this age of social media—a flash across her Instagram feed, a snippet heard on the little TV in the corner of the kitchen one morning over breakfast, a Facebook post. White, upper-middle-class private school girls simply did not go missing all that often, and when they did, it was news.

Her name was Madison Miller. She was sixteen years old, a sophomore in high school. She’d gone shopping by herself at a nearby Target for supplies for a school project and had never returned. There was security footage of her entering the store and leaving the store, and nothing after that. Her car had been abandoned in the parking lot.

She’d had her driver’s license for thirteen days. She’d made only three solo driving trips before: her parents were the overprotective type. The careful type. But as it turned out, not careful enough.

“How awful!” Sherri said to the television. She was making Katie’s lunch, trimming the crusts from her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The FBI was involved: it was a suspected kidnapping. There was Madison Miller’s picture. Madison Miller was just exactly in between plain and pretty, with ginger hair, a little space between her front teeth. A center part, a teal shirt, double piercings in both ears. “Terrible,” Sherri said, shaking her head. She kept making Katie’s lunch. She sliced carrots, washed an apple.

Now here were Madison Miller’s parents, holding a press conference, begging for information that might lead to their daughter’s safe return. The dad had thinning gray hair and a strong jaw; the mom looked exactly like Madison, except with a drawn and worried face and deep purple pockets underneath her eyes.

Bobby came in then. He glanced at the TV and there was the very slightest change in his face, almost a twitch. A flash, really, and then it was gone. Was the seed in Sherri’s mind planted then?

We’ll have to get rid of her.

Madison Miller was all over the news for a week. From this Sherri learned exactly what she was wearing at the time of her disappearance: Hollister jeans, ripped at the knee, size four, a gray hoodie, pink high-top Vans, size eight. A silver ring on the middle finger of her right hand made of interlocking leaves. A charm necklace with three charms: her birthstone (ruby), the number 16, the letters MRM, for Madison Rose Miller.

There was speculation, of course. She didn’t seem like the type to run away, by all accounts, but teenagers are notorious for keeping their real selves hidden from those who love them best. That’s what the psychologist on the television said. Was she an addict? Did she have a boyfriend nobody knew about, maybe an older man? Did she have secrets?

“What do you think?” Sherri asked Bobby once. “About this missing girl?”

He shook his head regretfully. “Hell of a shame,” he said. He squinted at the photo in the paper she held out to him. “Cute girl,” he said. Then he looked at her quizzically. “Why are you spending so much time on this girl, babe? People go missing all the time. Shit happens.”

Was the seed planted then?

Once, entering a supermarket to buy a carton of orange juice and a tub of the cream cheese Katie liked on her bagels, Sherri found herself face-to-face with a poster that showed a different photo of Madison Miller than what she’d seen in the past, which was a casual family photo in front of an ocean. But now here came a school photo, fall foliage in unnatural shades of red and orange: a background. On the bottom of the poster at the supermarket was a number to call with any information: an FBI tip line. Sherri copied the number on a receipt and shoved the receipt back into her wallet.

She brought the groceries home and toasted a bagel for Katie.

What could she say if she called the FBI? Could she say, “I have a bad feeling about this”? What did she know, for sure? She knew nothing to connect Bobby and the guys with Madison Miller. She knew he had a secret computer, and she knew he engaged in business that was not quite legal. But did that make him a kidnapper? Was a bad feeling a tip? If she called the FBI, their lives would crumble around them.

“They still haven’t found the girl,” she told Bobby later that evening.

He said, “What girl?” But before he said that he paused, and she watched him arrange his face carefully. She watched him reach for the right words.