Page 13 of Find Me

“Maybe East Hampton wasn’t far enough.”

“What does that mean?”

“To get the fresh start she was looking for.”

And then she realized what he was saying. It wasn’t far enough from Lindsay. It wasn’t enough of the “space” she had asked for. All those one-sided text conversations. He was saying that maybe Hope had gotten a $2,000 advance from Evan Hunter and decided to make a clean break. The puppy finally wanted to grow up.

“There’s no way she just took off like that,” she said. “When I looked through the bedroom window, I could see all of her journals still on the bookshelf—years of them. Remember that horrible game your sister brought over for game night?” In Lindsay’s view, it wasn’t even a game. It was a box of cards containing lists of stupid questions they all had to answer, but they were allowed to use one lie per card.

“You said it didn’t count as a game because there were no winners or losers, and you’re the most competitive person on the planet.”

“And proudly so, but that’s beside the point.What’s the one thing you’d grab if your house was on fire?I said my backup hard drive, and Hope said her journals.” The doctors suggested that Hope start journaling about a month after the accident, because they noticed a prominent callus on the left side of her middle finger, a so-called writer’s bump. Sure enough, it turned out that Hope was the kind of person who could pour words onto a page. It was during her very first journal entry that she decided to adopt the name Hope so she’d at least have a name other than Jane Doe. “She’s obsessive about them,” Lindsay said. “Have I ever told you why?”

Scott shook his head.

“She has these recurring nightmares where she wakes up with amnesia again. After years of developing a life and some kind of identity, it all suddenly disappears—poof, into thin air. She keeps those journals so she can never lose a sense of herself again. Think about that. There’s no way she would leave without them.Ever.”

“Unless—and I’m playing devil’s advocate here—unless she really did want to start all over again from scratch. How many times did she tell you that she wished no one knew about her memory loss? She could go somewhere a lot cheaper than the Hamptons and leave everything about Hopewell in the rearview mirror. She could even pick a new name. It’s not like she ever made the other one official.” The roll of her eyes did not stop him from completing his point. “Look at it this way: if you didn’t know Hope, and all you heard was that she suddenly moved to a new town with a fake backstory, and ran off with a cash advance and a rug, what would you think?”

Lindsay could see the logic of his argument. The Becketts, Miriam, Lindsay’s father... they all helped out Hope as an extension of Lindsay. Lindsay was probably the only person who had made affirmative efforts to check on her after she moved, and Hope had signaled that even that was too much.

“Except I do know Hope,” she said.

“Or . . . you know the person Hope pretended to be around you to make you happy. Maybe she wants to be someone else.”

The subject of Hope was never a comfortable one in their relationship, so she forced herself to take a few breaths to consider Scott’s perspective as he reached across the table to stroke her wrist with his thumb. Something about the feeling of his strong hands against her skin always calmed her down.

“Look. It seems to me that it’s the bloodstain that’s really scaring you. Don’t you know some magic lawyer trick to find out whatever the police know?”

Lindsay was somewhere between a decent-plus to hotshot-minus defense attorney, meaning she was far better than the average lawyer. But like her father, Scott seemed to perceive her as one of those mythical television criminal lawyers who could simply show up in a power suit and red lipstick, toting a giant handbag, and TCB—take care of business. Real life didn’t work that way, at least not for Lindsay.

“No, I don’t even have a client to be a lawyer for. Until the government uses its powers against someone, there’s no action to fight. Basically, this Decker guy can be as lazy and apathetic as he wants, and there’s nothing I can do.”

“Okay. But you always say there’s formal law, and there’s the way things actually work. If you think this detective is holding out on you, how do you get to the heart of that?”

He already knew the answer. So did she. She stepped outside and called her father.

11

Sunday, June 20, 10:12 a.m.

Lindsay eyed her Nespresso machine impatiently as her father filled her in on what he had been able to learn from Detective Decker.

“He seems like a decent guy,” he said, speaking up over the whine coming from her kitchen counter. “For what it’s worth, I got the impression the neighbor called him over there to play matchmaker.”

“Maybe, but trust me, Dad, even without Scott in the picture, neither of us was interested. He basically threw me off his property yesterday, and he’s ghosted me ever since.”

“He wasn’t exactly a sieve with me, either, but I did get the basics. They ran the blood sample through CODIS. As you suspected, they did get a hit. A big one, at least at first glance. The sample is connected to a string of killings committed in Wichita, Kansas, by a serial killer called the College Hill Strangler.”

She nearly dropped the cup she’d been lifting toward her lips. She knew Decker was hiding something, but aserial killer? She pulled her laptop from her briefcase, opened it on the kitchen island, and typed in “College Hill Strangler.”

At the other end of the line, her father was employing what she calledhis cop voice. She was used to her father speaking quickly but casually. But now his words came slowly, in crisp, authoritative sentences.

As her father spoke, she scrolled through her screen of search results. Booking photographs of a defendant named William Summer. To her eye he looked more like a high school vice principal than a mass murderer. Photos of him as a younger man, around the time he would have killed his first victims. Black hair, and small, close-set eyes. Oddly handsome, but also menacing.

“The blood belongs to a serial killer, and he told me it was a dead end?” Lindsay said incredulously. “If the guy’s free by now, he could have left the Midwest and come up here.” A quick skim of a true crime website included the wordshogtie,strangle, andtorture. She tasted last night’s Barbaresco at the back of her throat.

“Like I said, it looks bad at first glance. But the actual killer, William Summer, is still in prison. The DNA hit wasn’t to him; it was to unidentified blood found at one of the crime scenes. The victim’s name was Janice Beale.”

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