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missing stepdaughter.

    “So what do you think might have happened to her?” I said.

    Her hands flew up, palms open. “I don’t know.” She looked at Marcus in bewilderment.
    “We don’t know. We just want you to find her!”

    “Have you called the police?” I said.

    “Of course not,” Marcus said.

    “Of course not ?” I said.

    Belinda said, “The police aren’t going to do anything. They’ll come and take a report and tell us to wait until twenty-four hours is up, and then it’s just gonna be file-and-forget.”

    “She’s under eighteen,” I said. “They take missing-teenager cases pretty seriously. I suggest you call them right now.”

    “Nick,” Marcus said, “I need you to look for her. Not the cops. Have I ever asked for your help before?”

    “Please,” Belinda said. “I love that girl so much. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her.”

    Marcus waved a hand and said something like “Poo-poo-poo.” I think that was meant to ward away the evil eye. “Don’t talk like that, baby,” he said.

    “Have you called any of the hospitals?” I said.

    The two exchanged a quick, anxious look before Belinda replied, shaking her head, “If anything had happened to her, we’d have heard by now, right?”

    “Not necessarily,” I said. “That’s the first thing you want to do. Let’s start there.”

    “I think it may be something else,” Marcus said. “I don’t think my little girl got hurt. I think…”

    “We don’t know what happened,” Belinda interrupted.

    “Something bad,” Marcus said. “Oh, dear God.”

    “Well, let’s start by calling the hospitals,” I said. “Just to rule that out. I want her cell phone number. Maybe my tech person can locate her that way.”

    “Of course,” Marcus said.

    “And I want you to call the police. Okay?”

    Belinda nodded and Marcus shrugged. “They won’t do bupkes ,” he said, “but if you insist.”

    None of the hospitals between Manchester and Boston had admitted anyone fitting Alexa’s description, which didn’t seem to give Marcus and his wife the sense of relief you might expect.

    Instead it seemed that the two of them were harboring some deep-seated dread that they refused to divulge to me, that they were holding back something important, something dire. I think that gut instinct was the reason I took Marcus’s request seriously. Something was very wrong here. It was a bad feeling, and it only got worse.

    Call it the gift of fear.

    8.

    Alexa stirred and shifted in her bed.

    It was the throbbing in her forehead that had awakened her, a rhythmic pulsing that had steadily grown stronger and stronger, tugging her into consciousness.

    Knife-stabs of pain pierced the backs of her eyeballs.

    It felt like someone was pounding an ice pick into the top of her skull and had just broken through the fragile shell, sending cracks throughout the lobes of her brain right behind her forehead.

    Her mouth was terribly dry. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She tried to swallow.

    Where was she?

    She couldn’t see anything .

    The darkness was absolute. She wondered whether she’d gone blind.

    But maybe she was dreaming.

    It didn’t feel like a dream, though. She remembered … drinking at Slammer with Taylor Armstrong. Something about her iPhone. Laughing about something. Everything else was blurry, clouded.

    She had no recollection of how she’d gotten home, to her dad’s house, how she’d ended up in her bed with the shades drawn.

    She inhaled a strange musty odor. Unfamiliar. Was she at home in bed? It didn’t smell like her room in the Manchester house. The sheets didn’t have that fabric-softener fragrance she liked.

    Had she crashed at someone’s house? Not Taylor’s, she didn’t think. Her house smelled like lemon furniture polish, and her sheets were always too crisp. But where else could she be?
    She had no memory of … of anything , really, after laughing with