Page 37 of Find Me

If Katy Barnes had responded to the post, she hadn’t done so publicly, at least not on this page.

What did any of this have to do with Hope? She pulled a legal pad from her bag and started jotting down every piece of information she had gathered.

The blood at the camp den mother’s house. Sexual abuse at the camp. Lindsay’s long-held suspicion that Hope’s amnesia could be the result of psychological trauma.

Lindsay had only once asked Hope directly whether she believed she might have been sexually abused. It was after Hope’s longest relationship—almost two years—had ended. Carl Walsh was Hopewell’s best mechanic, the older brother of one of Lindsay’s childhood classmates. He was nice and loved Hope like crazy. Lindsay thought he’d be around for the long haul. Instead, Hope showed up at Lindsay’s apartment in New York City, saying she needed to get out of Hopewell for a few days. She and Carl were over.

Only after three nights of avoiding the subject did Hope finally tell her that the problem was sex. Carl needed it. Hope hated it. He’d been patient, and she had tried, but frustration had evolved into resentment and, at least in Carl’s case, sufficient blame and rationalization that he had started up with the garage office manager. There was no going back.

Lindsay’s immediate response came in the form of twenty ways Carl could fuck himself, but then the conversation took a turn. She and Hope never spent much time talking about sex or men, whether there were boyfriends in the picture or not. “Was he just bad at it or something?” Lindsay had asked. “Like a jackrabbit on meth? Because I could totally picture that.”

Instead of eliciting the expected laugh, the question made Hope break out in tears. She explained that she was utterly incapable of enjoying sex. She thought of it as a chore. She’d try to feign pleasure, but she must have been a bad faker, because with time, men always realized she wasn’t into it. She had no problem experiencing pleasure on her own, but simply shut down when she was with another person.

“Hope, I don’t want to upset you, but that’s similar to what I’ve heard from clients who were abused as children. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Of course. I’ve talked about it with Rebecca over the years, but I just don’t remember, because—well, obviously. And then it becomes this chicken/egg question. Is my amnesia from abuse? Or do I not remember the abuse because I have amnesia? Either way, I have no way to know for certain. Maybe I’m just a bad lay.”

Lindsay didn’t know how to respond to Hope’s self-deprecating laugh. Instead, they drank another bottle of outrageously expensive cabernet.

What if Hope was abused at the summer camp in Wichita? The blood at Janice Beale’s house could have belonged to the abuser. If the abuser now lived on Long Island, he might have spotted Hope when she moved to East Hampton and recognized her as his former victim. Had Hope started to remember? Had she confronted him? Or maybeshe hadn’t recognized him at all. Perhaps the abuser, with no knowledge of Hope’s amnesia, had become convinced that she was going to expose him. Either way, Lindsay imagined a faceless man following Hope to the Stansfield house, pushing her inside as she opened the door to leave.

She went back to Facebook and sent a friend request to Katy Barnes, along with a message request: I am a lawyer in New York City and saw your post on the Wichita COP camp page about past abuse at the camp. I am terribly sorry to raise what I am sure is a traumatic topic for you, but I assure you that the matter is urgent.She left her contact information and hit send.

If Lindsay was right, and Hope’s childhood abuser had confronted her, perhaps Hope was in shock. Or hiding for her own safety. Or maybe the message Lindsay had received wasn’t from Hope at all. Maybe Hope was dead, and the abuser was covering his tracks.

Her cell phone buzzed, rescuing her from her own thoughts. It was the handyman. He was ten minutes out.

24

Tuesday, June 22, 2:40 p.m.

Hope’s computer was nowhere to be found in the cottage. Lindsay didn’t know what to make of that. Her best guess was that Hope had taken the laptop with her to the open house, but she knew its disappearance was another point on the board for the runaway theory.

A second, closer inspection of all the drawers and closets was inconclusive. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to find. The aftermath of a ransacking? It looked exactly as it had when Lindsay left after the move.

Her journals appeared to be untouched, lined neatly to fill the bottom two shelves of a bookcase across from the meticulously made bed. She knew that her friend had kept all of them, going back to when she was still at the hospital. Hope thought of the journals as a safe place for her to interrogate herself, trying to shake a memory loose from her old life, while documenting her efforts to build a new one. She joked that someday she’d use them to write a best-selling memoir when she finally knew who she was and could accept a royalty check in her actual name.

To read these personal thoughts under any other circumstance would feel like the worst betrayal, but to leave them unread in the faceof Hope’s disappearance was unfathomable. Lindsay wasn’t spying, she assured herself. She was investigating. If the police had taken her case seriously from the outset, the journals would have been a logical starting point.

She opened the nightstand drawer to find a Tiffany-blue notebook in a butter-smooth calfskin, a Christmas gift from Lindsay last year.

The first page was dated May 15—the day Hope moved to East Hampton. Lindsay smiled as she read, remembering the hours they’d spent setting up the cottage together. She sat on the edge of the bed and flipped to the next entry.

May 18

Day four, and the cottage is beginning to feel more like home. It’s nice to have a place that’s more than a crash pad above a garage, but at least my place at the Becketts’ was completely mine. Here, it’s pretty clear that I’m staying in someone else’s house, just a temporary caretaker. But today I was inspired after a meeting with one of Evan’s new sellers. Evan told the client that houses sell fastest when a buyer can look at a property and imagine it as theirs, which is easiest when rooms are stripped bare. So long, family photos. Goodbye, tchotchkes. After taking thorough photos of every surface, I took the liberty of packing away every visible piece of evidence that Mrs. Gondelman is the actual owner of the cottage. Upon her eventual return, I’ll put every last knickknack back into place, but for now, it’s sufficiently generic for me to pretend that it’s truly mine. I’m trying to decide whether to be bold enough to install curtains over the front windows. Tonight while I was watching TV after dinner, I could have sworn that I saw movement inside a car that had been parked across the street for at least twenty minutes. I got so freaked out that I even pretended to be shutting things down for the night, turning off all the lights and going to the bedroom, only to crawl across the living room(yes, I realize how crazy this sounds) to peek out the window. The car didn’t budge, and the street was too dark to see whether anyone was actually inside, or if my eyes had been playing tricks on me. I hid in the bedroom for an hour before checking again. By then, the car was gone. It was a white (I think) pickup truck, but those are everywhere out here. Anyway, note to self: shop for opaque curtains that I can install and uninstall without Mrs. Gondelman being any the wiser upon her return.

Lindsay turned her head and looked through the bedroom door into the cottage living room. She remembered Hope telling her about the shopping trip to IKEA for the cheapest “good” curtains she’d been able to find in her online research. She boasted that she had managed to install the rods herself with nothing but a chair, a hammer, and a screwdriver, then hung the drapes “high and wide,” the way they tell you to do it on all the DIY shows. She had even texted before-and-after photographs to show off her handiwork. It was one of their lengthier communications since the move, and felt much more like their usual and frequent back-and-forths.

But she’d said nothing about a white pickup. Lindsay rose from the bed, walked to the front of the house, and drew the dark gray cotton curtains closed before reading on.

June 6

Treated myself to a haircut at a chichi salon today. Cost three times more than Tammy’s trims back home—oops, I mean in Hopewell, because this is home now, this is home now, this is home now (sigh)—but the accompanying scalp massage was heaven, and the blowout made me tempted to open an Instagram account just so I could take a hundred selfies with perfect hair and plenty of wardrobe changes.

Unfortunately, the little bounce in my well-coiffed step vanishedoutside the salon. I saw a man across the street parked in—guess what? A white pickup truck—and he was definitely looking toward the salon. That probably wouldn’t have freaked me out by itself, but the guy definitely looked familiar. It’s always an infuriating feeling when someone or something looks familiar. It would probably be annoying for anyone, like your memory is betraying you, like you feel like the answer is right at the tip of your brain but keeps getting lost. But forme? I don’t know if he looks familiar because I saw him on the street last week, or because he looks like an actor in some movie I saw once, or because... 15+ years ago? If I see something that feels familiar and can’t pull up the connection, it turns into yet another reminder that I don’t really know who I am. Or who Iwas, at least. And can I know who Hope is today if I don’t know who she was— Ugh, see I’m doing it. Fifteen years later, and I’m calling Hope—ME!!!—a third personshe.

OK, just took some deep breaths to calm down. Anyway, white-pickup-truck guy: parallel parked at a crowded curb, so I couldn’t get his plate. But the fear factor is apparently getting to me. Went to Rowdy Hall for dinner. Ate my weight in ham and Swiss while I worked the crossword. When I realized how late it was when it was time to leave, I asked poor Joe to walk me to my car. He probably thought I was crazy. My eyes darted toward every passing car, searching for the white pickup. So... yoo-hoo, if someone finds my body chopped to bits in the woods, look for a handsome dark-haired man who I may or may not know from either the recent or distant past, who drives a white pickup.

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