wondering: Is she still home? Are Imogen and I the only ones here?
I cautiously leave the bedroom. Imogen’s door is closed, the padlock on the new locking mechanism securely fastened, which tells me she’s not there in her room. Because she couldn’t lock it if she was inside.
The purpose of the lock: to keep me out. It seems like an innocuous enough thing, but at second glance, I wonder if it would as easily lock someone in as lock someone out.
I call out to Imogen as I make my way down the steps, just to be sure. Downstairs, her shoes and her backpack are gone, as is her jacket.
Will has left breakfast for me on the counter and an empty mug for coffee. I fill the coffee mug and take it and my crepes to the table to eat. Only there do I see that Will has left his book behind, the true crime novel. He’s finished it, I assume, and left it for me to read.
I reach for the book and slide it toward myself. But it isn’t the book that I’m thinking about. Not really. It’s the photograph inside, that of his former fiancée. I take the book into my hands, take a deep breath and leaf through the pages, expecting Erin’s photo to fall out.
When it doesn’t, I leaf through again, a second and a third time.
I set the book down. I look up and sigh.
Will has taken the photograph. He’s taken the photograph and left the book for me.
Where has Will put the photograph?
I can’t ask Will. To bring Erin up again would be in poor taste. I can’t possibly nag him over and over again about his dead fiancée. She was long gone before I arrived. But the fact that he hangs on to her photograph after all these years is hard to stomach.
Will grew up on the Atlantic coast, not far from where we now live. He transferred colleges during his sophomore and junior years, leaving the East Coast for a school in Chicago. Between Erin’s death and his stepfather’s, Will told me, he couldn’t stand to stay out east anymore. He had to leave. Shortly after he did, his mother married for the third time (far too soon, in Will’s opinion; she’s the kind of woman who can’t ever be alone) and moved south. His brother joined the Peace Corps and now lives in Cameroon. Then Alice died. Will doesn’t have family on the East Coast anymore.
Erin and Will were high school sweethearts. He never used that term when he told me about her because it was too sentimental, too endearing. But they were. High school sweethearts. Erin was nineteen when she died; he’d just turned twenty. They’d been together since they were fifteen and sixteen. The way Will tells it, Erin, home from college for Christmas break—Will went to community college those first two years—had been missing overnight by the time her body was found. She was supposed to pick him up at six for dinner, but she never showed. By six thirty Will was getting worried. Near seven, he called her parents, her friends in quick succession. No one knew where she was.
Around eight o’clock, Erin’s parents made a call to the police. But Erin had only been gone two hours at that point and the police weren’t quick to issue a search. It was winter. It had snowed and the roads were slick. Accidents were plenty. The police had their work cut out for them that night. In the meantime, the police suggested Will and her parents keep calling around, checking out any place Erin was liable to be—which was ridiculous since a winter weather warning had been issued, urging drivers to stay off the roads that night.
The route Erin often took to Will’s was hilly and meandering, covered in a thin layer of ice and snow that wrapped around a large pond. It was off the beaten path, a scenic route best avoided when the weather took a turn for the worse as it had that night.
But Erin was always foolhardy, not the type, according to Will, that you could tell what to do.
At just thirty-two degrees, the pond where they later found her hadn’t had a chance to freeze through. It couldn’t bear the weight of the car when Erin hit a patch of ice and went soaring off the road.
That night, Will looked everywhere for Erin. The gym, the library, the studio where she danced. He drove