“Goddamn it, Tate,” he says. “You have some strange logic in your world.”

“But it works.”

“Look, I gotta go,” he says.

“The file?”

“I’ll think about it,” he says, and breaks the connection.

The first person I want to talk to is Emma Green’s boyfriend. They weren’t living together, not yet, but according to her dad it was only a matter of time. Donovan Green isn’t a fan of the boyfriend, but only in the same way I wasn’t going to be a fan of my daughter’s first boyfriend when she was old enough to start dating. The boyfriend’s name is Rodney and he’s the same age as Emma and still lives with his parents. Donovan Green gave me the boy’s address, and I drive to his house and he’s home because he’s taken today off because of Emma’s disappearance. The house is a single-story A-frame from the seventies, the roof steep enough to slide down and break the sound barrier along the way before breaking your neck. The front yard is brown grass with lots of bare patches and a large pine tree in the middle of it all, big roots breaking out of the ground and sucking the moisture from all the nearby plants. The bell on the front door rings loudly and there are some shuffling sounds on the other side of the wooden door before a woman with almost white hair swings it open. She’s wearing a pair of shorts and a cream blouse and looks about as tired as the big pine tree out front. She adjusts her glasses and smiles at me and I tell her hello, and when she answers it’s obvious the woman is deaf, and I’m sure we’re not far away from a time where deaf will be considered an insult, and we start going with hearing impaired. She says hello and talks exactly the way people talk when they don’t know how they sound. I speak slowly and ask to speak to Rodney and she holds her finger up and taps her watch, telling me she’ll either be one minute or one hour and then disappears. Rodney comes to the door thirty seconds later. He’s a skinny kid with beer-colored eyes and black hair and his cheeks are flushed from the heat. He’s wearing jeans and his T-shirt is salmon pink and he looks well fed and tidy and not on drugs or wearing any dark eyeliner, and therefore I have no reason to immediately hate him. Except for the T-shirt, which hurts my eyes.

“I’m Rodney,” he says. “You’re here about Emma?”

“That’s right.”

“What are you? A reporter? I’m sick of reporters. I swear to God if you’re a reporter I’m going to kick your ass.”

I suddenly like him even more. “Her dad hired me. I’m a private investigator.”

“He hired you to talk to me? Why? He thinks I had something to do with her going missing?” he asks, his voice starting to raise. His right hand grips the door frame as if he has to stop himself from lunging at me.

“So you’re confident that’s what she is? Missing? That she hasn’t gone away for a few days?”

“Emma’s not like that. I recognize you, you know,” he says, “but I can’t tell where from.”

“I have one of those faces,” I answer. “And her dad doesn’t think you’ve done anything to hurt her. I’m here to help, to try and get her back.”

He relaxes his grip on the doorframe. “Is she dead?” he asks, and his question is so genuine that it really seems he has no idea one way or the other, but I’ve been fooled by grieving boyfriends before.

“Can I come in?”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you think so.”

“I hope not,” I say, giving Schroder’s answer from before.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Theo.”

“Theodore Tate?”

“Yeah,” I say, and for a second I look down.

“The man who . . .”

“That’s why I’m here,” I say. “It’s why her dad came to me. He knows I’m going to do what it takes to find her. That gives you two options. You can stand there and be pissed at me like you deserve to be before closing the door, or you can answer my questions and help me find Emma before it’s too late. What’s it going to be?”

He leads me inside to a living room that nobody could come to an agreement on how to decorate. I sit down in a chair that tries to swallow me. Rodney’s mother carries out a tray with a teapot on it and three cups. She sits on the couch next to Rodney and pours me a cup, then points to the milk. I can’t stand tea and nod at the milk figuring it will help dilute the problem. There’s a light on the wall above the door that I figure must flash when somebody rings the doorbell. The mother signs something to Rodney, and he signs something back, and I feel like an outsider.

“Mum recognizes you too,” he says.

He doesn’t say it in an accusing tone and his mother doesn’t sign it in any aggressive way. I don’t apologize because it’s not why I’m here. His mum nods, not hearing us but knowing what’s being said. I look at her. “I’m here to find her,” I say, and she nods and smiles.

I turn back to Rodney. “How long have you been dating Emma?”

“About four months.”

“How’d you meet?”

“School. I’ve known her for years. She was off from school last year for some time because of—well, you know why, and when she came back we just kind of started talking. I was in an accident when I was a kid and Mum got pretty hurt and Dad didn’t make it, and we spoke about her accident and my accident and we found out how we were both going to university this year, and then we found out we were both taking psychology. We’re in the same psych class. It’s weird. I mean, I’ve always seen her around at school, just never, you know, just never thought she was my type.”

“Your type?”

“Yeah. Any girl who talks to me is my type, which pretty much narrowed it down to Emma and nobody else in the world.”

“You share many classes with her now?”

“Just psychology.”

“Anybody at university giving her a hard time? Anybody creeping her out?”

“Not that she mentioned, and I think she would have. We haven’t been there long yet—I mean, this is only our second week of the term. Plus a bunch of classes have been canceled because some of the students have been passing out from the heat.”

“You sure nobody was making her uncomfortable?” I ask.

“Pretty sure.”

“Did you see her on the day she disappeared?”

He shakes his head. His mother has made him a cup of tea and placed it on the coffee table ahead of him and he stares at it untouched, as if he’s too scared to drink in case Emma’s fortune is at the bottom and the news is bad. “Sunday night I went around to her flat and we hung out for a few hours.”

“Hung out?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he finally picks up the cup of tea. He holds it in front of his mouth but still doesn’t drink from it, but it shields his lips so his mum can’t see what he’s saying. “Hung out,” he says. “In her bedroom.” He takes a sip and puts the cup down. His mum looks over at me, smiles, and rolls her eyes. I smile back. “I got home about eleven,” he says, “then went to class the following morning only to find class was canceled because of the heat. We swapped a few texts during the day and she had to go to work, then that was it. We weren’t planning on meeting up Monday night at all. Yesterday she wasn’t answering my calls so I spoke to her flatmate who thought Emma was with me. Her boss was calling, looking for her too. I knew it was weird and I was worried, but not worried enough to call the police because bad things like that only happen to other people, right?”

“If only that were true,” I say.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. So I called her parents. Then they rang everybody they knew and then the police and the police don’t even think anything bad has happened.”

I don’t tell him that’s not the case.

“Was she enjoying her job?” I ask.

“Who enjoys their job?”

“What about any old boyfriends?”

“I’m her first boyfriend,” he says.

I take a sip of the tea trying to be polite. It tastes exactly how I knew it would. The mother smiles at me and nobody says or signs anything for about ten seconds and in that time I try to get a read on Rodney, knowing full well my reads in the past have been way off the mark. Could this kid have killed Emma and dumped her somewhere?