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I let out an ugly, involuntary sound, like the beginning of a moan, and cut it off abruptly.
“They’ll say he’s a murderer. And they’ll come after us. You think all this surmising and talking and examination will stop at our boy? If the world decides that Simon did something to Nina, you and I will be picked apart. They always blame the parents. What kind of horror-story parents raise a boy who’s capable of killing his girlfriend?”
I felt a sudden strong urge to vomit. I pressed my fingers to my mouth, and Rory continued, more placatingly.
“I still think Nina will come home. I don’t know where that girl got to; maybe disappearing like this is her way of punishing Simon for some imagined injury. Like you said before. And when she thinks he’s suffered enough she’ll come home. But by then, if we don’t do something, it might be too late. Simon’s reputation will be trash. And if she doesn’t come home...” Rory shook his head. “Police feel the pressure from public opinion, maybe they charge him. And a jury is chosen from the kind of numbskulls who read this online crap and think it’s the truth. I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”
“You’ll be caught,” I said. “Someone will trace the IP address and they’ll figure out who you are, and then everything will be so much worse.”
His face took on that expression he wears when he thinks I’m being stupid.
“Jamie, these guys have been doing this for a long time. They know what they’re doing. They use incredibly sophisticated methods to make sure that the trail is as confused as possible. They have overseas bot farms that will feed the algorithms in exactly the way we need them to, to make sure that it’s our content that comes out on top. And you know what? Maybe the FBI could figure out who’s doing this, if they took the time to look, though I doubt it. But why would they bother? There are millions of internet trolls out there every day doing exactly this shit for nothing but kicks and clicks. No one’s going to pay particular attention to one more.” Rory reached back to the desk and picked up the glass of wine I’d brought for him. He took a long sip and narrowed his eyes. ‘Besides,” he said, “you watch. We won’t have to do much. All we have to do is get these people started, and then it will run itself. They’re going to take over.”
He was so sure of himself, and I couldn’t find it in me to argue with him. I didn’t want to, because he was absolutely right. He was defending our son, even if he was doing it by throwing Leanne Fraser under a bus. His screen still showed that twisted still of Leanne’s face. He—or his PR company—had gotten this so right, framing the narrative as Simon and Nina, gorgeous and in love, versus gray-faced, middle-aged, tense Leanne. There were people who would run with this, who would love to run with it. Men who hated women, and there were plenty of them. Women who hated women; there were enough of them too. They would see a young man under attack and they would be eager to flip the script. They would go into Leanne’s life and they would rip it apart. What would that do to her, with her daughter already missing? And did I care enough about that to try to stop him? If I had to decide between giving Simon a chance at a normal life and protecting Leanne Fraser from emotional distress, was there even an argument?
Rory was reading my mind, it seemed.
“You owe her nothing, Jamie. You’ve never been close. And she and her daughter are going to destroy our son. Our boy, who’s done nothing wrong. His life might be over, right here. And when Nina comes home, none of this will matter. Nina will move back in with her parents and the chatter will fade away.”
A hundred images flashed through my brain in what felt like a fraction of a second. Simon, his soft baby hand holding tight to my hand. Toddler Simon, trying so seriously to stack his blocks. Simon at eight (or was it older?) flushed with pride when he won a race at school and trying not to show how much it mattered to him. Simon following Rory around like a lost puppy, wanting his attention and never getting enough of it. I was his mother. I really didn’t have a choice.
“I can help,” I said.
“How?”
I took a deep breath and a deeper swallow from my wineglass. “We should have some sock puppet accounts set up that I can run. I can respond to and boost the video posts. I know social media. You don’t. I know how people talk to each other.”
He smiled at me fiercely, like we’d just won something. Maybe we had. Everything was going to hell, but at least we were a team.
“I should go and check on Simon,” I said.
“Leave Simon to me,” Rory said. “I’ll talk to him as soon as I’ve finished here. And I’ll call the PR firm. Get those accounts set up.”
We looked at each other for the longest moment, and in other circumstances I might have smiled. I felt closer to him than I had in a very long time. I had to remind myself that the crisis with Simon might make us a team for a while, but it wouldn’t change anything else. And I was fine with that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Leanne
After the press conference Andy and I went straight home to the inn. I was tired. My legs were weak, like I’d been hiking all day. Andy was being careful around me, like he expected me to fall apart at any moment. That was far enough from our usual dynamic that it made me realize, again, that I needed to pull myself together. It was beginning to hit me just how much work we had to do. The first thing I did when we got home was to call Lucy Palmer’s mother, Selena, and ask her if she could pick Grace up after school and bring her to basketball practice and then to their home for a couple of hours. Lucy was Grace’s best friend, and her mother was a nice woman. I figured Grace would be better off with them while we were trying to get things organized for the search. The phone call was more difficult than I expected. Selena was kind and supportive, but of course she asked questions, and it was hard to keep it together. I learned what I’m sure many frightened parents had learned before me. Explaining things to other people and dealing with their reactions forces you to deal with the enormity of the situation. I got off the phone and started making toasted sandwiches for me and for Andy. It was a relief to realize again that we didn’t have any strangers in the house upstairs, that I wouldn’t have to get up in the morning and deal with breakfasts or changeovers or any of the rest of it.
Andy was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open.
“There’s a website that could be helpful,” he said. “I was searching earlier and I found it. Look—it’s a kind of guide for the families of missing persons, put together by an advocacy group. It has some information about how to organize physical searches, as well as other steps you can take.”
I came over to stand beside him, and we started reading through some of the suggested steps. The guide was big on cooperation with the police. It emphasized the importance of not stepping on toes, being careful not to do anything that would jeopardize an investigation, which made me feel guilty and impatient at the same time. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken into Stowe. Maybe we should have given a heads-up to Matthew Wright about what we were going to say at the press conference. On the other hand, Nina was our daughter. We couldn’t just sit around and wait for things to happen. We needed to take action. We were smart, capable people, and it was too much to ask that we switch off our brains and put away our abilities and do nothing while our daughter was missing. Andy scrolled down the page and we read more. The guide had suggestions about how to get information out to the public, including localized options like posters and billboards, and also social media.
“We need to get on all of this,” I said. “As soon as possible. We need posters, and to get on local radio, and we need to start posting to social media. The press conference was a start, but not enough. If there’s anyone in the world who knows something or saw something, we need to make sure they know that Nina is missing.”
Andy was nodding. “We’re going to need help. I’ll call Craig and Sofia, and you should call any other family or friends you think will help. We should break down all of this work into chunks that we can parcel out.”
Andy’s parents were dead, and Craig was his only brother. I had no siblings, my mother had been dead for a long time, and my father was still living in New Jersey. We hadn’t been in touch in years. Not since Nina was a little girl. There was no point in calling him. Would he come to Vermont if he knew his granddaughter was missing? I doubted it. He’d come up with some excuse. Claim that Claire, his wife, was in the hospital, or some other equally serious reason why he couldn’t make it. And I’d have to make the right noises back and pretend I believed him. I didn’t have time for all that. I had no other family, so I started by calling Nina’s friends from school: Beth Ann Corbett and Julie Bradley. Beth Ann started crying when I told her. She was away, vacationing with college friends, and hadn’t heard anything about Nina going missing. She and Nina hadn’t seen much of each other since high school. I ended that call as soon as I could. Julie Bradley was much more helpful. She said she’d come over, and that she’d bring her mom, Delores, and her brother, Isaac. Andy called Craig and Sofia, and they promised they’d be over as soon as they could. I called Alice Marsden too. She used to be a teacher at the school. She taught both my girls, and though we’re not friends, exactly, we’re friendly, and she’s smart and sensible and I thought she would be helpful. Andy thought we should hold off on calling anyone else until we were a bit more organized, and I realized I didn’t really have friends I wanted to call. I’ve never thought of myself as a lonely person, but I’m not particularly social either. The situation was forcing me to realize that maybe I’d been more isolated than I realized. I hadn’t gone for coffee with other parents after school drop-off for years. I’d never joined a book club. We weren’t the kind of family that invited people over for dinner, or a barbeque in the summer. I’d never felt like that was a bad thing. We were happy in our own company. But Nina’s disappearance and our need for help made me realize just how cut off from other people we had become. That was mostly my fault, I think. Andy had had lots of friends when we’d gotten married, but slowly he’d stopped seeing most of them. Was that because I had never wanted to go along? Or was it something that would have happened anyway?
While we waited, Andy and I prepared. He lit a fire in the inn’s living room. I made coffee and sandwiches. Delores and Julie arrived first. Delores had dyed her hair since I had last seen her. It was platinum blond, and she wore navy eyeliner that had smudged. She gave me a one-armed hug like she meant it and pressed a frozen casserole into my hands.
“I don’t know why I brought this,” she said. “Except that’s what people do in a crisis, don’t they?”
“Isaac is at work,” Julie said, “but he wants to help. He said to just think of jobs for him to do and he’ll do them. No problem.”
