Chapter 40

AN OLD INDIANwoman answered the door to Hope’s apartment. She was even shorter than me, and peered out angrily from the crack in the door. When she saw Tox, she started to close it again. My boot was in the way.

“We’re lookin’ for Hope Stallwood.”

“What do you want? The drugs!” the woman howled. “The drugs, they ruin all of you! She’s not here. That whore! She took her drugs and she’s gone!”

Tox shoved the door open, almost knocking the woman over. We found ourselves in a tiny, filthy kitchen. My boots stuck to the linoleum.

“I’ll call the police!”

“We’re the police,” I said. “Sit down. Tell us where Hope went.”

“You’re the pimps! Pimps with the drugs! Rotten drug dealers! I’ll call the police!”

A young couple had appeared in the doorway to a short hall. I walked past them into a labyrinth of tight rooms divided into smaller rooms by hanging sheets. There were mattresses on the floor everywhere. Aluminum foil on the windows. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke and curry powder. A baby cried somewhere. I stepped on someone’s foot and apologized. The owner of the foot was sleeping and hardly noticed.

I didn’t know how people lived like this. Prisons were better. There was black mold on the bathroom ceiling that could have been an inch thick. My mind was rushing with crimes as I looked around the ground. Possession of heroin. Possession of marijuana. Child endangerment. Child neglect. Rental fraud. Underage drinking.

Tox pushed aside a pair of damp towels and found a filthy, bare mattress in the corner beneath a window.

“Hope Stallwood was here?” he asked the young couple, who’d started following us around the apartment like wary dogs. They nodded.

Hope was long gone, but she’d left a couple of things behind. A plastic container of hair ties, some underpants and clothes that reeked of body odor, a few old, stiff pairs of shoes. I picked up a magazine and let it fall open. Yachting Today. There were yachts circled in the For Sale section of the magazine, the pages indented with scrawled red pen.

“What’s this?” I showed Tox the circled boats. Was Hope lying here at night under the lamplight circling boats she dreamed of owning? Was it all fantasy, or was she actually making plans?

I held the paper close to my nose. She’d actually underlined some of the phone numbers for making inquiries. There were digits listed on the back page. I flipped forward a few pages and found a page was torn from the magazine. I ran my fingers along the ragged seam.

Tox and I realized what we were seeing at almost exactly the same moment. Goosebumps raced along my arms.

“We could call the magazine.” He took out his phone. “Confirm which boat is missing from the mag.”

“No,” I said. “I know which boat it is.”