LITMIR.BIZ

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or someplace like that.”

      “Couldn’t have been me,” Bailey assured her. “I’m not a celebrity in disguise here.”

      “No, it was amazing! Everybody has been passing it around. It was about this little girl who disappeared and an artist drew what she’d look like now. And...wow. I’d swear it’s you.”

      The darkness inside Bailey rose, dimming her vision for a minute. But she didn’t let her expression change. “Really? That’s weird. Pretty sure I’ve never disappeared.”

      “Yes, but you ought to look at it. It’s totally uncanny.”

      She managed a laugh. “Okay. What’s my name?”

      The young woman frowned. “Hope something.” And then her face brightened. “Lawson. Hope Lawson.”

       Oh God, oh God. Could any of this be true?

      “I’ll look,” Bailey promised. “Gotta see my doppelgänger.”

      They were still looking over their shoulders at her on their way out. She was so engaged in holding herself together, she didn’t even check to see what kind of tip they’d left. She had another hour before she could leave.

      Part of the act of maintaining was convincing herself she wasn’t going to bother to look at the totally uncanny picture that supposedly looked like her. It probably really didn’t. And if it did? Why would she care? Nothing would ever make her Hope Lawson, even if by some bizarre chance that had been her name. Hope. She almost snorted. How sweet.

      Long after she collected her tips for the shift, as well as her paycheck, and went out to her car, dying to take off her very high heels even if it mean driving home with bare feet, she stayed in the mode that could be summed up as No Way. There’d been a time she would have given anything to be found, to have it turn out she had a perfect family somewhere who would welcome her back with cries of joy and who’d kept her bedroom exactly the way it was when she disappeared. Then, she’d imagined it as very pink, with a canopy bed. Every so often, she made alterations in what that perfect little girl’s bedroom would look like, but the canopy bed always stayed.

      By the time she was thirteen or fourteen, though, she realized she didn’t belong in that bedroom, and the family wouldn’t want the girl she was now back anyway. Not long after that, she quit believing they even existed.

      Now—was she really supposed to open herself to the possibility they actually did? That they were still looking for her? The idea would be ludicrous, except she’d occasionally, just out of curiosity, scanned websites focused on missing persons and seen the kind of age-progressed pictures the girl tonight had talked about. She’d read a little about how it was done, combining knowledge of how a face normally changed with age—what thickened or sagged or whatever—along with details of how that child’s parents’ faces had changed as they grew up, to achieve an approximation that was sometimes astonishingly accurate.

      As she turned onto West Sunset Boulevard, she thought, it might be interesting to take a look. And then she could dismiss the whole silly idea, instead of leaving it to fester. Which it would. She knew herself that well.

      Besides, if anyone else mentioned it, she could say, Saw it—definitely not me.

      She hated that her apartment house didn’t have gated parking, but that was one of those things you had to pay for. And she did, at least, have an assigned spot underneath the aging, three-story apartment house, so she didn’t have to hike a block or more when she got in late. Even so, she had to put her heels back on, because she knew all too well what she might step in—yuck. She took her usual careful look around when she got out and locked her car. Her handbag was heavy enough to qualify as a weapon, and she held it at the ready as she hustled for the door that let in to the shabby lobby and single, slow-moving elevator.

      Safely inside, she ignored the guy who was getting mail from his box. He had a key to it, so he must actually live here, too. He didn’t make any effort to get in the elevator with her, which she appreciated.

      There were only four apartments on each floor. She let herself into hers, turned both locks and put the chain on, then groaned and kicked off her shoes again. It sucked to have a job that required torturing herself like this, but sexy paid when it came to tips.

      Her laptop sat open on her desk where she’d left it. She didn’t let herself so much as glance at it, instead shedding clothes on her way to the bathroom, where she changed into the knit pj shorts and thin tank top she slept in at this time of year. Then she used cold cream to remove her makeup, brushed her teeth and stared at herself in the mirror. The light in here was merciless. She leaned in closer, the counter edge digging into her hip bones, and made a variety of faces at herself. It wasn’t as if she was so distinctive looking.

      But she knew that was a lie. She kind of was. Her cheekbones were prominent, almost like wings, her chin pointed, her forehead high enough she had her hair cut with feathered bangs to partly conceal it. Without makeup, her face was ridiculously colorless, given that her eyebrows weren’t much darker than her ash-blond hair, and her eyes were a sort of slate blue. She looked young like this, more like the girl she didn’t want to remember being. The one who had been invisible when she desperately wished someone would see her.

      “Fine,” she said aloud. “Just do it. Then you’ll know.”

      While her laptop booted, she turned on the air-conditioning unit even though she tried not to use it any more than she could, but today had been hot.

      Then she perched on her cheap rolling desk chair, went online and, in the search field, typed Hope Lawson.

      * * *

      A MONTH LATER, Seth admitted, if only to himself, that he’d done everything he could think of to do to bring resolution to the Lawsons.

      He had interviewed witnesses afresh, at least those who could still be found. He’d talked to the first responding officer and the investigator who’d pursued the case thereafter. He had tracked down neighbors of the Lawsons’, even those who had since moved. Hope’s teacher that year. He’d studied investigations and arrests made anywhere around the time of Hope’s disappearance, looking for parallels no one else had noticed. He’d read every scrap of paper in the box he recovered from the storage room in the basement.

      Meantime, he’d made sure her DNA and a copy of her dental X-ray were entered in every available database, along with the two photos. He’d worked social media sites to the best of his ability.

      The result? Something like a thousand emails, not one of which pinged. His best guess was that Hope had been raped and killed within hours of her abduction, and her bones were buried somewhere in the wooded, mountainous area bordering Puget Sound in northwest Washington state. Maybe those bones would be found someday, but given the vast stretches of National Forest and National Park as well as floodplain that would never be farmed, it was entirely possible no one would ever stumble on them.

      Sitting at his desk, he grimaced. He owed the Lawsons a phone call. If he didn’t get on it, Karen Lawson would pop up, sure as hell, apologizing but still expecting an explanation of what he’d done this week to find her missing daughter.

      And, if he was honest, he’d have to say, Nothing. I’ve done everything I can. I’m sorry.

      If he was blunt, would she accept his failure and go away?

      “Nope,” Kemper said behind him. “Not happening.”

      “What?” He swiveled in his chair.

      “You were talking to yourself. You asked—I answered.”

      He swore. Good to know he’d taken to speaking his every thought aloud. Was he talking in his sleep, too? Wouldn’t be a surprise. He’d been having a lot of nightmares lately, too many populated by Hope. In the latest unnerving incarnation, she was a ghost. Sometimes a little girl, sometimes a woman, always translucent. Either way, he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t escape her no matter what he did.

      The

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