“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, well, whatever,” Horace said.

I nodded my regrets and attempted to stand up. I was a bit shaky on my feet.

“I hope you’re not thinking of getting behind the wheel of a car,” Horace said.

“I should be okay,” I said. “I’ll stop for a coffee or something on the way.”

“You look so tired even coffee may not help,” he said, the first time since I’d come here that he sounded at all conciliatory.

“I need to get back home, see my boy. I can pull over and grab a few winks if I have to,” I said.

From the top of the stairs, Gretchen said, “How old is your son? He looks about three in that picture with your wife.”

I watched as she descended, slowly coming into view. She seemed to have pulled herself together in the last couple of minutes. “He’s four,” I said. “His name is Ethan.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Five years.”

“How’s it going to help your son if you fall asleep at the wheel and go into a ditch?”

I knew she was right. “I may find a place to stay,” I said.

Gretchen pointed to the couch, where Horace still sat. “You’d be more than welcome to stay here.”

The couch, with its bright crocheted pillows, suddenly looked very inviting.

“I don’t want to put you out,” I said.

“Please,” she said.

I nodded gratefully. “I’ll be gone first thing in the morning.”

Horace, his brow furrowed, had his face screwed up tight. “So if you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “if your wife is going around saying she’s Jan Richler but she’s not, then who the hell is she?”

The question had already been forming in my mind, but I’d been trying to ignore it.

Horace wasn’t done. “And how could she do that to our little girl? Take her name from her? Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

Sunday morning, the Duckworths’ clock radio went off at 6:30.

The detective didn’t move. He didn’t hear the newscaster say that it was going to be a cloudy day, or that it was only going to be in the high 70s, or that it might rain on Monday.

But Maureen Duckworth heard everything because she was already awake, and had been for some time. A nightmare-another one involving their nineteen-year-old son, Trevor, who was traveling around Europe with his girlfriend, Trish, and hadn’t phoned or sent them an email or anything in two days, which was typical of him, never giving a thought to how much his mother worried-woke her around four. In this dream, her son had decided to go bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower, except somehow while he was on the way down he was attacked by flying monkeys.

She knew there were a lot of things that could happen to a kid away from home, but had to admit this particular scenario was unlikely. She persuaded herself that this nightmare held no special meaning, that it wasn’t an omen, that it was nothing more than a stupid, ridiculous dream. Having done that, she might normally have gotten back to sleep, had her husband’s snoring not been almost loud enough to shake the windows.

She gave Barry a shove so that he’d roll off his back and onto his side, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. It was like sleeping next to a chain saw.

She twisted in the earplugs she kept next to her bed for just such emergencies, but they were about as effective as heading out naked in a snowstorm with nothing on but lip balm.

She had, in fact, been staring at the clock radio when it read 6:29, and was counting down the seconds in her head, waiting for it to come on. She was off by only two seconds.

She’d gotten Barry to try those strips that stick to the top of the nose, supposedly open up the nasal passages, but they didn’t do anything. Then she bought him some anti-snoring capsules he could take just before going to bed, but they struck out as well.

What she really thought would help would be if he lost a little weight. Which was why she’d been serving him fruits and granola at breakfast, packing him a lunch with plenty of carrot sticks, and cutting back on fried foods and butter at dinner.

She got out of bed and collected dirty clothes in the room. The clothes she’d taken off the night before, the slacks and shirt Barry had tossed off after coming in late from work. He’d put in an extra-long day, looking for this woman who went missing at the roller-coaster park.

She looked at the slacks. What was that on them? Was that ice cream? Mixed in with some kind of pie?

“Barry,” she said. He didn’t move. “Barry,” she said, a little louder so she could be heard over the snoring.

She walked around to his side of the bed and touched his shoulder.

He snorted, opened his eyes. He blinked a couple of times, heard the radio.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I didn’t even hear that come on.”

“I did,” Maureen said. “You sure you have to go in today?”

He moved his head sideways on the pillow. “I want to see if that release we put out last night turned up anything.”

“You want to tell me what this is?” she said, holding the stained trousers a few inches from his nose.

He squinted. “I was working vice undercover. Had to get a hand job in the line of duty.”

“You wish. That’s ice cream, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Where’d you have ice cream?”

“The missing woman? I went to see her boss. You’ve seen that Bertram Heating and Cooling truck?”

“Yeah.”

“Him. His wife got me some pie.”

“With ice cream.”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of pie?”

“Apple.”

Maureen Duckworth nodded, as if she suddenly understood. “I’d eat apple pie for breakfast if we had it.”

“What do we have?”

“You’re getting fruit and some fiber,” she said.

“You know torture’s not allowed now, right? New regime and all.”

The phone rang.

Maureen didn’t react. The phone could ring anytime, day or night, around here. “I’ll get it,” she said. She picked up the receiver on her side of the bed. “Hello… Yeah, hi… No, don’t worry about it, I was already up… Sure, he’s here… We’re just bringing in the hoist to get him out of bed.”

She held out the phone. Barry leaned across the bed to grab it.

“Duckworth,” he said.

“Hey, Detective. You got a pen?”

Barry grabbed the pen and paper that were always sitting by the phone. He wrote down a name and a number, made a couple of notes. “Great, thanks,” he said and hung up.

Maureen looked at him expectantly.

“We got something,” he said.

Duckworth waited until he was showered and dressed and had a cup of coffee in his hand before he dialed the number from the phone in the kitchen.

Someone picked up after two rings. “Ted’s,” a man said.

“Is this Ted Brehl?” Duckworth asked.

“That’s right.”

“Did I pronounce that right?”

“Like the letters for the blind, right.”

“This is Detective Barry Duckworth, Promise Falls police. You called in about half an hour ago?”

“Yeah. I saw that thing on the news last night. When I got up this morning, came in to open the store, I thought maybe I should give you a call.”

“Where’s your store?”

“Up by Lake George? On 87?”

“I know the area. Real pretty up there.”

Maureen put a bowl of granola, topped with bananas and strawberries, in front of her husband.

“Yeah, so, I saw that woman.”

“Jan Harwood.”

“Yeah, she was in here.”

“When was that?”

“Friday. Like, must have been around five?”

“Five in the afternoon?”

“That’s right. She came in to buy some water and iced tea.”

“Was she alone?”

“She came into the store alone, but she was with a man, her husband, I guess. He was out in the car.” Ted Brehl’s description of it matched the vehicle owned by David Harwood.

“So they just stopped to buy some drinks and then left?”

“No, they sat out there for quite a while, talking. I looked out a couple of times. I looked out again around five-thirty, and they were gone.”