The timestamp placed Iris outside my window at 2:14 a.m.

At 2:17, a second shape appeared near the hedge on the edge of the image.

I had initially mistaken it for a trash can.

A man in a dark jacket stepped briefly into view, looked toward Iris, and disappeared.

The camera was too far away to show his face.

His movement suggested that Iris was not alone.

I enlarged the footage, then stopped when the picture turned into a blur of gray pixels.

Guessing would not make those pixels more reliable.

I wrote down what I could actually see.

At 2:19, Iris removed a small envelope from the canvas case.

She looked at it before leaving, then returned it to the case.

The envelope was cream-colored and had a dark circle near the flap.

When I showed the still image to Luis, he stared at it for a long time.

“Margaret Bell used wax seals,” he said.

“You knew her?”

“My uncle repaired this house when I was a teenager.”

His voice changed when he added the next sentence.

“He told me never to take a job here after dark.”

Chapter 4: The Daughter Who Would Not Come Home

Iris did not appear at the library the next afternoon.

Instead, a young woman waited at a table near the nonfiction shelves.

She had short brown hair, a green canvas jacket, and the strained expression of somebody who had rehearsed an explanation until it no longer sounded true.

“Are you Weston Alcott?” she asked.

I nodded and introduced myself.

“I’m Leah Galloway.”

She was twenty-eight, older than I had imagined when Iris mentioned a daughter.

Leah glanced at the empty chair across from her.

“My mother isn’t coming.”

“Is she all right?”

“She says somebody followed her after she left your house.”

Leah placed a folded newspaper clipping on the table.

It reported the disappearance of a county records clerk named Mara Voss in 2008.

Mara was twenty-nine when she vanished after leaving work one rainy evening.

The article said her vehicle was found at an interstate rest area two days later.

The police found no evidence of a violent confrontation.

Her bank account remained untouched, and nobody had seen her since.

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked.

Leah pointed to the photograph accompanying the article.

The missing woman stood beside a familiar white-haired teacher.

“That’s Margaret Bell,” I said.

“She was the last person Mara called before disappearing.”

I read the article again.