“Whatever.”

“Alton, I’m warning you, you better get back here!”

“My eggs are icky!” said the twin still at the table.

Dwayne spun around, put one hand on the father’s throat, drove him down sideways and slammed his head onto the bench. The man’s arm swept across the table, knocking coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon all over himself and the floor. His eyes were wide with fear as he struggled for breath. He batted pitifully at Dwayne’s arm, roped with muscle, pinning the man like a steel beam. The boy at the table watched, speechless and horrified.

Dwayne said, “I was going to have a word with your boys, but my girl here says it’s your fault they act like a couple of fucking wild animals. You need to teach them how to behave when they’re out.”

She was on her feet. “We need to go,” she said.

TWENTY-TWO

“When was this again?” Barry Duckworth asked.

Gina tried to think. “Around the beginning of last week? Maybe Monday or Tuesday? Wait, not this past week, but the week before.”

“I’m not saying you have to do this now,” the detective said, getting a whiff of pizza dough baking in the oven, “but if I needed you to find the receipt for that night, do you think you could?”

“Probably,” she said. “Mr. Harwood usually pays with a credit card.”

“Okay, that’s good. Because at some point I may need to know exactly when this happened.” Duckworth was already thinking about Gina on a witness stand, how a defense attorney would slice her up like-well, that pizza he thought he could smell cooking-if she couldn’t remember when the incident took place.

“So Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are pretty regular customers at your restaurant here?”

Gina hesitated. “Regular? Maybe every three weeks or so. Once a month? I really wonder if I’ve done the right thing.”

“About what?”

“About calling the police. I think maybe I shouldn’t have done this.”

Duckworth reached across the restaurant table, covered with a white cloth, and patted her hand. “You did the right thing.”

“I didn’t even see it on the news at first, but my son, who works here in the kitchen, he saw it, and he said, ‘Hey, isn’t that those people who come in here once in a while?’ So he showed me the story on the TV station’s website, and I saw that it was Mrs. Harwood, and that’s when I remembered what had happened here that night. But now that I’ve called the police, I think I may have done a terrible thing.”

“That’s not true,” the detective said.

“I don’t want to get Mr. Harwood in trouble. I’m sure he’d never do anything to hurt his wife. He’s a very nice man.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“And he always leaves a fair tip. Not, you know, huge, but just about right. I hope you’re not going to tell him that I spoke to you.”

“We always do our best to be discreet,” Duckworth said, promising nothing.

“But my son, he said I should call you. So that’s what I did.”

“Tell me what the Harwoods are usually like when they’re here.”

“Usually, they’re very happy,” she said. “I try not to listen in on my customers. People want to have their private conversations. But you can tell when a couple are having a bad evening, even if you can’t hear exactly what they are saying. It’s how they lean back in their chairs, or they don’t look at each other.”

“Body language,” Duckworth said.

Gina nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, that’s it. But the last time they were here, forget about the body language. I could hear what they were saying. Well, at least what she was saying.”

“And what was that?”

“They’d been talking about something that couldn’t have been good, because they both looked very upset. And I was coming over to the table, and that was when she said to him something like ‘You’d be happy if something happened to me.’”

“Those were her words?”

“It might have been different. Maybe she said he’d be happy if she was dead. Or he was rid of her. Something like that.”

“Did you hear Mr. Harwood say anything like that to her?”

“Not really, but maybe that was what he said to her just before she got so upset. Maybe he told her he wished she was dead. That’s what I was thinking.”

“But you didn’t actually hear him say that?” Duckworth asked, making notes.

Gina thought. “No, but she was very upset. She got up from the table and they left without having the rest of their dinner.”

Duckworth sniffed the air. “I can’t imagine leaving here without eating.”

Gina smiled broadly. “Would you like a slice of my special pizza?”

Duckworth smiled back. “I guess it would be rude to say no, wouldn’t it?”

When he got back into his car, after an astonishing slice of cheese-and-portobello-mushroom pizza, Duckworth made a couple of calls.

The first was to his wife. “Hey,” he said. “Just called to see what was going on.”

“Not much,” Maureen said.

“No emails or anything?”

“He’s five or six hours ahead, so he has to be up by now.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“Don’t worry. Just do your thing. Did you eat the salad I packed you?”

“I won’t lie. I’m still a little hungry.”

“Tomorrow I’ll put in a banana.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.”

The second call was to see whether Leanne Kowalski had come home. He didn’t call her husband-he didn’t want to get into a discussion with him right now-but he knew he’d be able to find out what he needed to know by calling headquarters.

She had not come home.

The detective felt it was time to step up efforts where she was concerned. Someone needed to be working exclusively on that while he worked the Harwood disappearance, and they’d need to compare notes several times through the day to see where the two cases intersected, assuming they did. He put in a call to the Promise Falls police headquarters to see what could be done on that front.

Duckworth was thinking he might need to take a drive up to Lake George before the day was over, but there was at least one other stop he wanted to make first.

Along the way, he thought about how this was coming together:

David Harwood called the police to tell them his wife had gone missing during a trip to Five Mountains. But there was no record of her entering the park. Tickets to get him and his son in were purchased online, but there was no ticket for his wife.

This is what trips them up. They try to save a few bucks and end up in jail for the rest of their lives.

You think they’re too smart to make a mistake that dumb. And then you think about that bozo who helped bomb the World Trade Center back in 1993, gets caught when he’s trying to get his deposit back on the rental truck that carried the explosives.

The surveillance cameras at the amusement park failed to turn up any images of Jan Harwood. Not conclusive, Duckworth thought, but not a very good sign for Mr. Harwood. They’d have to go over the images more thoroughly. They’d have to be sure.

David Harwood’s story that his wife was suicidal wasn’t passing the sniff test. No one he’d spoken to so far shared his assessment of Jan Harwood’s mental state. Most damning of all-Harwood’s tale that his wife had been to see her doctor about her depression, and Dr. Samuels’s report that she’d never shown up.

Now, Gina’s story about Jan Harwood telling her husband he’d be pleased if she weren’t in the picture anymore-what the hell was that about?

And the Lake George trip. David Harwood hadn’t mentioned anything about that. A witness had put Jan Harwood in Lake George the night before she disappeared. The store owner, Ted Brehl, reported that Jan had said she didn’t know where she was headed, that her husband was planning some sort of surprise. And her boss, Ernie Bertram, had backed this up, saying that Jan was headed on some sort of “mysterious” trip with her husband Friday.