The man delivering her daughter's car wanted to know if Leah could sign on his phone.
He held it out through the office window. The screen was cracked across the signature box, and a bead of sweat slipped off his wrist onto the sill.
“It's not the same one,” Leah said.
“What?”
“The car you called about. You said blue.”
Behind him, on a trailer with two empty spaces, Kit's yellow hatchback leaned over one crushed front wheel. The passenger-side mirror hung by its wiring. A stripe of pale dirt ran from the headlight along the door, ending below the little white heron Kit had painted beside the handle. Leah had told her the paint would destroy the resale value.
Kit had told her nobody buying a car with a hundred and eighty thousand miles expected it to come with an investment portfolio.
“Yellow,” the driver said. “That's what I said.”
Leah looked at his phone. There was a name above the signature box, but it wasn't Kit's.
“Who gave it to you?”
“Man in Port Ash.”
“What man?”
He pulled the phone back. “Everything's on there.”
Nell came out of the office carrying a paper cup with a fly in it. She tipped it into the strip of struggling grass beside the building, shook the cup, and stopped looking at it when she saw the trailer.
“Oh,” she said.
The driver glanced from one of them to the other. He was a broad red-faced man in his late fifties, with a soft towel tucked through his belt and a visor advertising a feed store. He had moved a damaged car. He had not agreed to deliver whatever was happening now.
“Nobody told me anything was wrong with the paperwork.”
“Nothing's wrong with your paperwork,” Nell said. “Give me the phone.”
Leah stepped off the porch into the glare. It was four in the afternoon, the kind of August heat that made the parked trucks smell used even after they had been cleaned. Out on the county road, a family in an enormous motor home waited for a break in traffic, towing a tiny car that seemed embarrassed by the arrangement.
Kit's windshield was whole. No blood on the dash that Leah could see. The driver's door had opened; somebody had shut it on a fold of the seat belt. A loose sneaker lay sideways in the footwell.
She reached up and touched the little painted bird.
“She wasn't in it when I collected it,” the driver said behind her.
Leah turned.
“Who wasn't?”
He raised a hand. “Whoever you're asking about. Car was parked in a gravel lot. Guy had the title, signed the release, paid the transport. It wasn't an accident pickup.”
“Did you see a girl?”
“No, ma'am.”
She hated him for the ma'am. It was something he had not said before he knew she was frightened.
Nell finished signing. “Can you get it off where it is?”
“Got to use the winch. That wheel won't roll.”
“Leah,” Nell said. “Come out of his way.”
She had worked with Nell for eleven years. Nell could tell her to come out of the way without making it sound like a kindness. Leah moved.
While the driver lowered his ramps, she called Kit. The last thing in their message thread was a photograph Leah had sent of a box of Christmas ornaments. Under it she had written, Do you want these or not? She had meant, Are you coming for Christmas? Kit had answered the question she had asked. Keep them.
That had been in December.
Now the call rang long enough for Leah to imagine it ringing in a purse, on a kitchen counter, in grass somewhere beside the road. Kit's recorded voice said, “If it's work, text me. If it's my mother, I saw it.”
It was an old joke. Leah had laughed when she first heard it.
“Your car's here,” she said after the beep. “At the yard. Call me.”
She called again immediately, so Kit would know it mattered.
The driver got the hatchback onto the gravel. Up close the damage was less disastrous than it had looked on the trailer, which was almost worse: a wreck just small enough for somebody to get out of it and do something else stupid. The wheel had folded backward. One airbag had blown, its cloth sagging like an emptied flour sack. The other had not. The passenger seat was full of receipts, a black sweatshirt and a plastic case of earplugs.
“Keys in the cup holder,” the driver said. “I've got a photograph of the condition at collection, if you want it.”
“Send it to our number,” Nell said.
He went back to raise his ramps. Leah opened the driver's door.
The smell was Kit's. Coffee, warm upholstery, the peach hand lotion she had used since high school. A half-eaten bag of pretzels had spilled beneath the seat. Leah bent down for the sneaker, because one shoe on the floor made her think of things she could not afford to think about.
She saw the scratches beneath the steering column.
Three of them. Short, parallel, fresh enough to be pale in the black plastic.
Her hand stayed around the shoe.
For several seconds the yard was too loud. The driver's hydraulic pump, a screen door slamming somewhere, Nell telling a customer on the phone that no, she could not make the state trooper release his van. Leah heard everything separately.
She had once put three scratches beneath the wheel of a gray sedan because she had lost the key tag and Walt did not want to drive the wrong car away from a bank.
It had become a stupid joke. Their version of a monogram.
She hadn't seen the mark in years. It still brought back the smell of that sedan, hot vinyl and Walt's cigarettes, more quickly than she wanted.
Then she set Kit's shoe on the seat and opened the glove compartment.
The registration fell against her knee. Under the manual was a photograph printed on ordinary glossy paper. Kit stood beside an older man in front of a low green building. She wore the red cap she had bought at a county fair in July, the one Leah knew about only because a woman who still followed Kit online had shown her the picture. Kit had one hand up as if warning the photographer to stop. She was laughing.
The man beside her wore a pale shirt open over a T-shirt. He had gray hair now. Less of it, particularly at the temples. He had put on weight around his face. But the way he held his head, tipped toward Kit as if she had said something worth hearing, was exactly the same.
Leah sat back against the open door.
Walt Dane.
“What is it?” Nell asked.
Leah turned the photograph over. An address had been written on the back. Under it, in block capitals:
LARK. FRIDAY. NINE.
She had been twenty-four the last time somebody booked Lark for a Friday morning. The same age Kit was now.
“Leah.”
“I know him.”
Nell waited. Leah could feel the waiting.
“From a long time ago.”
“Okay. Where's Kit?”
“I don't know.”
Saying that aloud broke something. Leah got to her feet too fast and hit her shoulder against the door frame. The pain was clean, almost helpful. She called Kit again. Nothing.
“Have you got Devon Hale's number?” she asked.
“Probably. Why?”
“He works with her.”
“I know who he is.”
Nell went into the office. Leah followed, carrying the picture face down. The little room was hot despite the air conditioner. A customer had dropped off a box of zucchini that morning, and they sat on the counter beside the business cards, quietly making work for everybody. Nell found the number in the old invoice system. Devon had paid for a tow the previous fall. Leah remembered. She had charged him half. Later, when she called him about Kit's plan, she had mentioned the discount without meaning to.
He answered over a hammering noise.
“Devon? It's Leah Mercer.”
The noise stopped. “Seriously?”
“Have you seen Kit?”
“No.”
“When did you last—”
“If you're calling to ask me something about her, call her.”
“Her car's been brought to my yard. It's wrecked.”
For the first time, he was quiet.
“Is she okay?”
“That's what I'm asking.”
“I haven't seen her since Monday. We were supposed to move gear yesterday. She texted that something came up.”
“Did she say what?”
“No. I asked. She said she'd be here tomorrow for her shift.”
“Where's here?”
“Bayline. The festival.”
Leah wrote it down though she knew where the festival was. “Has she mentioned an older man? Walt?”
“No. Look, what's happened?”
“I don't know yet.”
“If you find her, tell her—” He stopped. “Just tell her to call me.”
“I will.”
He hung up. Leah looked at the note she had written. Bayline, as if it were a place on another continent instead of twenty minutes down the shore.
Nell had her own phone out. “Hospital?”
“No.”
“I wasn't asking if you felt like it.”
“She's in a photograph. Recent. With a man I know.”
“Then call the man.”
Leah turned the photograph over on the desk. Nell leaned down to look.
“Is he her father?”
“No.”
“All right.” Nell straightened. She had a way of accepting an answer while leaving all the questions in the room. “You want me to call the sheriff?”
Leah looked at the three words on the back of the photograph. A name, a day, an hour. Nobody had threatened Kit. Nobody had asked for money. In the picture Kit was laughing. She might be standing beside him now, laughing at this.
The thought should have relieved her. Instead it made her want to tear the paper in half.
“Give me a little time.”
Nell watched her take the keys to the white pickup from the hook.
“How little?”
“I'll call you.”
“That's not a time.”
Leah paused at the door. The office wall held a photograph of Kit at ten, grinning through the gap where a tooth had been. In the picture Leah was kneeling beside her, one arm around the child's middle. They were outside the first Mercer Roadside building. A rented shed, a used truck, a blue sign Leah had painted herself. She had thought of it as the beginning.
Nell picked up the phone when it rang. “Mercer Roadside. Yes, we can do that. What's your location?”
The work kept happening. Somebody needed help at an exit, and somebody else had to go.
Leah went outside and climbed into the pickup. Before she started it, she called Kit once more.
This time she said, “I'm going to see Walt.”
She waited, as if her daughter might hear that and pick up.