Chapter 14

14

It happened the next morning.

The juiciness of the previous day was replaced with a relentless sweatiness. The air felt like a sour kitchen sponge, the kind that's been sitting by the sink for a week and never really dried. The river air, which normally smelled fresh, had a tang to it that spoke of blooming biomes. A swampy, farty smell. Everywhere there was talk of the storm that was coming within a few days—one of those once-in-a-hundred-years kinds of storms that seem to happen every year.

The first tour group came ambling up the path toward us, phones up, recording the first sight of Morning House.

"Showtime!" Van said to me, giving a little jazz hands. "Welcome to Morning House! Come up this way. I'm Van, that's my actual name..."

The group followed him in clusters—the eager ones who were going to win the tour, the ones with children came next, and last were the people who were already narrating their videos. One person held back at the end. She wasn't dressed like a tourist. She had on a deep-blue shirtdress, a voluminous one that I would have loved to wear, except unlike her I would look like a demented toddler in it. She had the air of a casual professional, with a leather tote on her arm. She approached me.

"I'm here to meet Dr. Henson," she said. "I'm Makoto, the PhD student from Yale who's meeting her today."

"Sure," I said, unclipping my walkie-talkie from my cargo shorts. "I'll let her know."

I held it up to my mouth, tilting it just slightly sideways in a way I thought it might be done in an action movie, and called Dr. Henson.

I got nothing back.

By this point, I looked less like an action hero and more like that meme from Die Hard of the idiot who grabs the walkie-talkie and acts like he knows what he's doing and immediately gets killed.

"She knows I'm coming," she said. "Makoto Shimada. She said to take the first boat at Uncle Jim's River Cruises? She's going to show me some architectural drawings from the Morning House archive and walk me around? She's expecting me?"

I knew that tone—the one where you feel guilty for having to ask, but also annoyed for having to ask because you haven't done anything wrong, so everything is a question.

"I'll get her," I assured Makoto. I moved away a few steps to try again.

"Does anyone know where Dr. Henson is?" I asked into the walkie.

No reply at first, and then Liani said that she didn't know, then April, then Tom. Van sang a little bit of a song.

"I'll find her. I think she's just doing something." Like that meant anything. Everyone is doing something.

Van was taking his group up the main stairs, so I headed to the servants' staircase in the back and ran up to Dr. Henson's room. There was no answer to my knocking. I shuffled from foot to foot. The decision to open someone's door is a heavy one if it's someone you don't know that well, who is your boss. I tried the knob and found it was unlocked. I opened it a crack, called in, heard nothing. I inched it wider until I found myself in a large, sunny room. Whatever color it had been originally, it was now painted clean white, which made it feel enormous. There was a grand sleigh bed covered in a distinctly nonperiod bedspread patterned in sea-green swirls.

She was not in the room. There were two doors with large windows in them, each dressed in a light lace curtain. These opened onto a small private stone balcony. This was empty, as was the bathroom, which had two small windows that let in a creamy, soft light that would have brought any self-respecting influencer to their knees. As I came out, I identified a key problem—her walkie-talkie was charging on her desk. Her laptop was closed, with a pile of photocopied pages sitting next to it. There was a phone charger, but no phone. I texted her. I should have done that at the start. I saw the message was delivered, but nothing indicated it being read.

"Shit," I said out loud.

I left the room and went up to the third-floor hall, checking every room. I continued up to the fourth floor, to the top balcony. I looked out over the wide view of the river and the sky, all the islands around us. No Dr. Henson. We'd had some passing rain that morning, I guess, because there was a dry rectangle where her yoga mat must have been.

A clue, at least. Not a tremendously helpful one.

By this point, I was due to take a tour. I called down to April to explain what was happening—that they should hold the tours and do one every thirty minutes instead of twenty until I found where Dr. Henson was hiding.

I went down to the gift shop, where Riki was ringing up a sweatshirt and a bottle of dressing.

"I can't find Dr. Henson," I said. "And there's somebody from Yale waiting for her."

Riki looked at me, reading my face to find out why I thought this was her problem.

"I've looked for her everywhere," I said. "The whole house."

"Did you look outside ?"

"I've asked Liani and Tom."

Riki shrugged. "It's a mystery, I guess."

This was not a problem for the gift shop.

I wove through every room in the house again, including the basement. I even looked in the pool. I had worked up a sweat by this point. I found Makoto and updated her.

"I have to go back to New Haven tonight," she said. She sounded sad, not angry.

"I'll find her," I said with more confidence than I possessed. This was rapidly devolving into one of those customer service moments where the situation has escaped your control but it's your job to catch the flak. I decided I would not fail Makoto. I went everywhere—up and down the dock, checked with the ticket takers, the refreshment stand employees, the people who worked the boats. No one had seen her.

By this point, April was bouncing along in her Morning House fleece like a happy maroon bunny, bringing the next group inside.

"What's wrong?" she said. "You still can't find her?"

I shook my head.

"Did she go out on the Jet Ski to town?"

The Jet Ski.

I ran down the lawn toward the lagoon and the docks beyond. Liani saw me coming and frowned in concern.

"Do you know if she took the Jet Ski out? Or the boat or something?"

Liani unclipped her walkie-talkie from her pocket. (Unlike me, she looked amazing doing that. I made a mental note to study her technique.)

"Tom," she said, "are the Jet Ski and the boat here?"

After a moment's pause, he replied that they were.

"She can't be off island, then," she said. "Unless someone picked her up on a boat. But she wouldn't just leave if she had an appointment. She's not like that. Or she'd tell us."

Her eyes went wide, and she turned on her heel and went to the stone shed at the edge of the lagoon. She opened it up and vanished inside for a moment. When she emerged, the look on her face caused my insides to twist.

"The paddleboard," she said. "When I went in here earlier I noticed it was gone, but I didn't think about it. I thought Tom had it or something."

"Whose is it?"

"It's no one's. It's just part of the swimming supplies. I've never seen her use it, but it's gone...."

Liani stepped back inside, into the dark coolness of the lagoon shed, and I followed. It was a tiny space with no nooks to hide in. There were floats, noodles, a first aid kit, all of that. No paddleboard.

"And the oar is gone," she added. "Maybe she paddled to town? But the current here is too strong, and this is a shipping lane. I wouldn't paddle here. No one does. The board is for the lagoon."

Then I saw it happen—I watched Liani transform from Liani, a person who worked here with me and did basically the same job, to Liani, a first responder. She seemed to grow taller, like someone had inserted an extra vertebra into her spine. In one motion, she pulled off her Morning House shirt as she moved to the water. She took only a moment to unclip her walkie and pull off her shorts, so she was down to the one-piece red swimsuit. She jumped into the lagoon, feetfirst, causing the swans on the far side to flap in protest and make their way out. Tom saw this and ran his stiff, meaty run in our direction, removing his Morning House shirt as he moved.

I watched them make efficient sweeps of the lagoon, weaving their way back and forth to the edges, occasionally stopping to look up and around and signal that they'd seen nothing so far. When they reached the sides and had found nothing, they decided to do it again, this time swimming side by side to make sure nothing had been missed.

"She's not in there," Liani said, pulling herself out of the water and catching her breath. "She's not..."

Liani sat down on the ground and stretched her legs in front of her, bending toward her knees and gripping them hard. She took long, sucking breaths.

"She's not in there," Liani said, breathless and hoarse. "It's okay. She's not in there..."

She didn't cry, but her breath was jagged and she kept nodding, as if trying to convince herself that all was well. Tom climbed out and sat next to her on the ground and rubbed her leg.

"It's okay," he said.

"I know, I know..."

But this left us with a problem. Dr. Henson was missing.