Margot Brennan parked the Accord at the curb and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel. The Lake Shore Drive house rose against the late morning sky, gray stone softened by ivy, the bay windows catching light in pale rectangles. A UPS truck lumbered past. Somewhere down the block a dog barked twice and stopped.
She had not been inside Elena Calder's house in six years. She had not seen Elena in four. And now Elena was a name on a missing persons flyer tacked to the community board at the 19th District, and Margot was the only journalist in Chicago who had ever bothered to spell it correctly on a first pass.
The front door opened before she reached the steps.
Lourdes Pina stood in the doorway wearing a black wool coat over a lavender house dress, reading glasses pushed up into silver-streaked hair. She smelled faintly of bergamot and the particular staleness of a house that had not been aired in days.
"You look like your mother at your age," Lourdes said. "Same mouth. Same trouble following."
"Good to see you too, Lou."
"Come in. Coffee is already a disgrace. I made it too strong."
Margot stepped into the foyer. The house had the held-breath quality of a place waiting for someone to come home. A pair of Elena's boots sat by the door, caked with dried clay. Margot recognized them from a studio visit years ago, when Elena had been in the middle of a glaze experiment and the air in her workspace had tasted of mineral and metal.
Lourdes led her into the kitchen and poured two mugs from a carafe that looked like it had been brewing for an hour. The coffee was indeed a disgrace, bitter and overextracted, but Margot drank.
"Tell me what you know," Margot said.
"What I know," Lourdes said, settling into a chair, "is that Elena Calder has been missing for five days, and that I was called by your mother on Tuesday afternoon because your mother is a worrier and I am a consultant, and consultants get paid to worry with documentation. What I know is that Elena last spoke to her half-sister Greta on Friday evening. What I know is that Elena's assistant, a young woman named Sasha Kiernan, has not answered her cell phone since Saturday morning. What I know is that Elena's father, Tobias Calder, received a text on Sunday that said only the word 'sorry,' and that Elena has not been seen since."
Margot wrote nothing down. She would remember this.
"Tell me about Elena's week," she said. "The week before she vanished."
Lourdes took a slow sip of her coffee. Her eyes were steady, the eyes of a woman who had walked into enough rooms where bad news lived.
"Monday she taught a private lesson in the morning," Lourdes said. "A woman from the Gold Coast who makes very ugly planters and pays very well. Tuesday she was at the gallery on Franklin, doing inventory. Wednesday she came here to the house to pick up mail and stayed for an hour. Thursday she was here again in the afternoon, and I was here because your mother had asked me to be here, and we had tea. She was quiet. Quieter than usual. I asked her if she was sleeping. She said she was sleeping fine, but her hands were not steady when she held the cup. I noticed that. I notice hands."
"What did she talk about?"
"The weather. The price of clay. A commission she had turned down. She did not mention her father. She did not mention Greta. She did not mention the assistant, and that surprised me, because the assistant is usually all Elena talks about, in that quiet way she has of mentioning someone a dozen times without ever saying why."
Margot nodded. She knew that way. Elena had always been a person who referred to the people she loved by indirection.
"Did she seem afraid?"
Lourdes considered this. "She seemed like a person waiting for something. Not afraid, exactly. Watchful. The way you stand near a window when you hear a noise outside that might be nothing."
"And Friday?"
"Friday she was supposed to meet Greta for dinner at a place on Division, but she canceled. She texted her sister at four in the afternoon and said she had a migraine. Greta did not believe her. Greta called me at seven to ask if Elena was with me. I said no. Greta said, in that voice she has, 'I see.' And then she hung up."
Lourdes set her mug down with a small ceramic click.
"Saturday morning the assistant, Sasha, came to the house at nine. I know this because Elena had given her a key. Sasha let herself in. Elena was not here. Elena's coat was on the hook by the door. Elena's phone was on the kitchen counter. Elena's car was in the garage. Sasha called me at nine-fifteen in a state. I came over. We waited until noon. Then we called the police."
Margot exhaled slowly. "The police said what?"
"The police said adults are allowed to be absent. The police said Elena had a history of depression and was probably with a friend. The police said they would open a file but that there was nothing actionable yet. The police were polite and useless."
"And you called my mother."
"And I called your mother, because your mother is the only person who has ever successfully organized me, and because your mother said you were back in town and might want to look into this, and because Margot, I have been doing missing persons work for twenty-two years and this has the texture of something wrong."
Margot set her mug down. The kitchen smelled of old coffee and lemon polish and a trace of the bergamot Lourdes wore.
"Where is Greta now?"
"Upstairs. She flew in from Copenhagen on Wednesday. She has been staying in the guest room. She has been very composed. She has been very polite. She has been asking me questions about the assistant that I do not intend to answer."
Margot looked up. "What kind of questions?"
"The kind of questions a person asks when they are building a story. Where does Sasha live. Does Sasha have a key to the house. Has Sasha ever stayed overnight. Did Sasha and Elena quarrel. Did Sasha ever borrow money. Did Sasha ever leave the state."
Margot felt something tighten behind her ribs.
"And what did you tell her?"
"I told her I was not her source."
Margot stood. "I'll talk to her now."
Lourdes watched her for a moment. "You know she has money coming. You know Elena's father is not well. You know Greta is the only heir."
"I know."
"And you know that a half-sister is not the same as a sister, and that Elena and Greta were raised in different countries, and that Elena once told me, in this kitchen, that her sister made her feel like a guest in her own life."
"I remember."
"Then go easy on her. She is grieving in her own way. Or she is something else. I have not decided which."
Margot climbed the stairs. The carpet on the second floor was a deep blue, slightly worn at the edges. A framed photograph hung at the landing: Elena at perhaps sixteen, holding a piece of greenware, looking at the camera with the particular stillness of a person who has been asked to smile but has declined.
The guest room door was open. Greta Lindqvist sat at a small writing desk by the window, her back to the door, a cup of tea cooling beside a leather notebook. She was wearing a cream cashmere sweater and dark trousers and shoes that probably cost more than Margot's monthly rent. Her hair was the color of pale honey and cut with a precision that looked architectural.
She did not turn when Margot knocked on the frame.
"Ms. Lindqvist."
"I know who you are," Greta said, still facing the window. Her voice was low, faintly accented on the long vowels, each word set down like a small stone on a flat surface. "Margot Brennan. Freelance. You wrote the piece on the lakefront redevelopment in 2019. You were kinder to the alderman than he deserved."
Margot stepped into the room. "You've read my work."
"I read everything that touches my family. You would be surprised how little there is. Elena prefers it that way."
Greta turned then. Her face was composed in the way expensive faces are composed, every feature held in its correct position. Her eyes were the same gray-green as Elena's but colder, the color of lake water before it freezes.
"Please sit," Greta said, gesturing to the edge of the bed. "You have come to ask about Friday."
"Among other things."
"Yes. Among other things. People always have other things." She lifted her tea, found it cold, set it down again. "I will tell you what I can. I will not tell you things that do not exist."
Margot sat. The bedspread smelled of lavender sachets.
"Tell me about your last conversation with Elena."
"It was Thursday evening, not Friday. She called me at eight. She sounded tired. I asked if she was well. She said she was fine. I asked if she was taking her medication. She said yes. I asked if she was painting. She said no, she was working at the gallery. I asked if Sasha was helping her. She said Sasha was always helping her. I told her I missed her. She said she missed me too. Then there was a silence, and she said, 'Greta, if anything ever happens to me, I want you to know that the studio pieces are yours.' I told her that was a morbid thing to say. She laughed, and we hung up."
Margot felt the room tilt, just slightly, the way a boat tilts when a wave passes under it.
"What did you understand her to mean?"
"I understood her to mean that she had been working on a series, and that she wanted me to have it. Elena has always been precise about objects. She does not say things she does not mean."
"Did you think it was strange?"
"Everything about Elena is strange to me. I am her half-sister. We share a father. We did not share a childhood. I have spent my adult life trying to understand a person who was raised in a different country, in a different climate, by a different mother. When Elena says strange things, I have learned to write them down."
Margot studied her. Greta's hands were folded in her lap. Her nails were bare, cut short.
"Where were you on Saturday?"
"I was in Copenhagen. I have a gallery opening on the seventeenth. I was preparing for it. I can show you the shipping manifests, the emails with my framer, the dinner reservation I made at midday for two. I can show you anything you like."
"And Sunday?"
"Sunday I flew to Chicago. I landed at nine in the evening. I took a car directly here. I have the receipt."
"And the text your father received?"
Greta's composure flickered for a half second. It was the first human thing Margot had seen in her face.
"My father received a text on Sunday morning at seven-fifteen. The word 'sorry.' No signature. He assumed it was Elena. He has not been able to reach her since. He is not a well man, Ms. Brennan. He did not need this."
Margot let the silence hold for a count of three.
"What do you think happened to your sister?"
Greta looked at her steadily. "I think my sister has been unhappy for a long time, and that unhappy people do unpredictable things, and that this is either a tragedy of her own making or a tragedy someone else has made for her. I do not know which. I intend to find out."
"And the assistant?"
Greta's expression did not change. "I do not wish to speak about the assistant."
"Why not?"
"Because the assistant has not returned my calls, and I find that impolite, and because I do not have kind things to say about people who are impolite."
Margot stood. "I'd like to speak with Sasha Kiernan."
"I imagine you would."
"Do you have her number?"
"I do. I will not give it to you. But you will not need it. She is listed in the gallery directory. Her extension is four. You may call the main line and ask to be transferred, but she will not pick up. She has not picked up for anyone in five days."
Margot nodded. "Thank you for your time."
Greta rose. "Ms. Brennan. One thing."
"Yes."
"If you find my sister, call me before you call the police. I would like to be the one to tell my father."
Margot met her eyes. The lake-water gray held steady.
"I'll keep that in mind," Margot said, and she left the room.
Downstairs, Lourdes was waiting in the foyer with her coat on.
"Walk with me," Lourdes said. "I need air."
They stepped out onto the porch. The bay was visible between the houses, a flat sheet of pewter. A jogger passed, breathing hard, earbuds in.
"Greta is lying about something," Margot said.
"Yes," Lourdes said.
"The assistant?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where Sasha is?"
"I know where Sasha was on Sunday evening. She was at a bus station on the West Side. I have a friend who saw her."
Margot turned. "Why didn't you say that inside?"
"Because Greta was listening. Because Greta is always listening. And because, Margot, if Sasha Kiernan is running, she is running from something. And I would like to know what before we find her."
They walked past the boathouses, the planks silvered with salt, a heron hunched on a piling like a comma misplaced in the water. Lourdes lit a cigarette, cupping it against the wind. The smoke tasted of menthol and something older, the tobacco her father used to smoke in their apartment in Washington Heights.
"She started in March," Lourdes said. "Elena."
Margot waited.
"Five days before she disappeared. Five days exactly. I have it written down."
Margot heard the scratch of the match being shaken out, then the paper crumpling.
"We were supposed to have coffee on a Wednesday. Our standing date, second Wednesday of every month, since she came back from Copenhagen. I picked the place. Always the same place, that Thai place on Atlantic, the one with the plastic chairs."
Margot walked in step, her shoulder brushing Lourdes' arm. The bay smelled of diesel and brine.
"Wednesday morning, she texts. Changes it to the place on Court Street, the one with the courtyard. I say fine. I don't think about it."
Lourdes exhaled. The smoke went sideways, fraying.
"Thursday, she calls me. Not texts. Calls. This is Elena, she never calls. She says she can't do the weekend thing. What weekend thing? There was no weekend thing. I say, Elena, what weekend thing? She says, never mind, forget I said anything, forget I called."
Margot stopped walking. Lourdes took two more steps before she noticed, turned back.
"You forgot she called?"
"I didn't forget. I thought she was having an episode. You know what she is."
The word "episode" sat between them like a dropped glass. Margot picked it up gently, set it aside.
"Go on."
"Saturday, she texts again. Says she needs to talk. Says it's important. We meet at the courtyard place. She orders soup and doesn't eat it. She looks, Margot, she looked like someone had pulled a string out of her."
"A string?"
"In her back. Like she was standing but something underneath had let go. I asked her what was wrong. She said, 'I need you to do something for me and I need you not to ask why.'"
Lourdes stopped. She flicked ash into a puddle. The ash turned black, then gray.
"What did she ask?"
"A bag. A small bag. She said she had one mostly packed at her place and she was going to add a few things, and she wanted me to take it. Leave it in my garage. Don't open it. Don't ask what was in it. Don't tell anyone."
Margot felt the air shift. The temperature dropped, or she thought it did.
"Did you?"
"I took the bag. I left it in the garage. I did not open it. I have not opened it. It is still there."
"Five days?"
"Five days."
Margot started walking again. The heron lifted, beat its wings twice, settled on the next piling.
"Why didn't you tell me this when I first called?"
"Because you were calling about Greta. And then you were calling about Greta some more. And I didn't think it mattered yet. I thought Elena was being Elena. I thought the bag was the bag, a thing she might need if she had to go somewhere, and I thought maybe she had a man, or a woman, or a fight with her father, or any of the hundred reasons a person packs a bag and then unpacks it in her mind."
Lourdes' voice thinned. The gravel in it went up a register.
"I didn't think she was gone."
Margot let the silence hold. They passed a man in a slicker walking a small dog with a red bandana. The dog stopped to sniff a post. The man waited. Margot thought of waiting, of how much of her life had been spent standing in doorways.
"There's more," Lourdes said.
"Of course there is."
"She wanted encrypted calls. She said it to me, and she said it to Whitlock."
"Whitlock the curer?"
"Don't call him that."
"Sorry. Whitlock."
"He doesn't cure anyone. He tends. There's a difference."
"Lourdes."
"Encrypted calls. Signal. Or something like it. She had an app on her phone, one of those apps that make the number look like a different number. She showed me how to use it, twice, and she made me practice in front of her."
Margot pictured it. Elena's hands, smaller than Lourdes', smaller than Margot's own. Elena's fingers, clay-stained even after washing. Elena demonstrating an app with the patience of someone who had once taught ceramics to children.
"Why?"
"She said her phone had been tapped. She said someone was in her messages. She didn't say who."
"Did you believe her?"
Lourdes looked at her. The cigarette had burned down to the filter. She let it drop, stepped on it with the toe of her sneaker.
"Margot. I am a retired detective. I have seen tapped phones. I have seen people who were sure their phones were tapped. Elena was not sure. Elena was certain. There is a difference."
"And?"
"And I asked her if she wanted me to call someone. She said no. She said calling someone would make it worse. She said, 'Lourdes, if I told you who, you would not sleep.'"
Margot felt the hair on her arms lift. The bay wind, she told herself. The bay wind and nothing else.
"Who?"
"I don't know. I asked. She wouldn't say."
"But you have a guess."
Lourdes started walking again, faster now. Margot matched her stride.
"I have five guesses. Four of them are bad. One of them is worse."
"Tell me one."
"No."
"Lourdes."
"Not here. Not on the street. Come to my house. I'll make coffee. I'll show you the bag."
Margot considered refusing. She considered demanding. She considered the way a story begins to feel when the first thread is pulled and the whole cloth moves.
"Okay," she said.
They walked the rest of the way in something close to silence. The bay grew darker. A gull passed overhead, its cry a short, bent wire.
Lourdes' house was a clapboard two-flat with a screened porch and a garage that backed onto an alley. The garage door was padlocked. Lourdes unlocked it with a key on a ring shaped like a hand.
Inside, the air smelled of gasoline and old cardboard. A lawnmower. A stack of paint cans. In the corner, behind a plastic bin labeled HALLOWEEN, a duffel bag. Navy. L.L.Bean. The zipper pulled halfway across.
Margot knelt. The bag was heavier than it looked.
"I didn't open it," Lourdes said.
"I know."
"But I lifted it. Five days ago. It was heavier then."
Margot looked up. Lourdes was standing in the garage doorway, backlit, her face unreadable.
"Someone has been in here?"
"The padlock was closed when I came home Sunday. I always check. Old habit. It was closed Monday morning. It was closed Monday afternoon when I went in for the rake."
"And now?"
"It is still closed. Whoever came in did not use the lock. Or they knew how to lock it without leaving marks."
Margot stood. She did not touch the zipper. She looked at Lourdes.
"We are going to call the police."
"We are not."
"Lourdes."
"Not yet. If we call the police now, Greta will know in an hour. Greta knows everyone. Greta knows the precinct captain on Court Street. We call, we lose."
"Lose what?"
"The bag. The chance to see what was in it. The chance to find Elena before whoever is looking for her does."
Margot thought about Whitlock. She thought about Greta's lake-water eyes. She thought about Sasha Kiernan, possibly at a bus station on Sunday evening, possibly running, possibly running toward something.
"Open it," Margot said.
"Not here. Inside."
They carried the bag between them, Lourdes at one handle, Margot at the other. The zipper caught on the garage doorframe. Lourdes freed it with a thumbnail.
In the kitchen, Lourdes set the bag on the table. The table was oak, scarred, the kind of table that had seen a hundred interrogations and twice as many meals. Margot unzipped the bag.
Inside, folded neat: two shirts, gray. A pair of jeans. Socks. A toothbrush, still in the package. A passport, American. A small notebook with a black cover. And, at the bottom, wrapped in a kitchen towel, a clay figure.
Margot lifted the figure out. It was small enough to fit in a palm. A woman, faceless, arms folded across her chest. The clay was unglazed, pale, the color of bone.
"Her work?" Margot said.
"Her work," Lourdes said.
Margot turned the figure over. On the bottom, scratched into the clay with a pin, three letters: E. C. M.
"Elena Calder," Margot said.
"With an M," Lourdes said.
"Who is M?"
"I don't know. She never had a middle name she used. Elena's full name on her birth certificate is Elena Calder Morgan. Her mother dropped the Morgan. So did her father. So did Elena."
Margot set the figure down. She opened the notebook. The pages were lined. The handwriting was small, slanted left, the words of someone trying to take up less space than they had been given.
The first entry was dated March 3.
"I have seen the letters," the entry read. "They are not from him. They are from someone who knows. I will not say who. I will not write who. If this is found, I am sorry."
Margot turned the page.
"The gallery is the place. I am sure now. Greta knows. She has always known. I am going to get proof before I say it out loud. Then I will go."
Margot closed the notebook. The kitchen was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. A car passed outside, tires hissing on wet asphalt.
"She was going to run," Margot said.
"Yes," Lourdes said.
"And someone knew."
"Yes."
Margot picked up the clay figure again. The faceless woman stared at the ceiling. The three letters on the bottom seemed to pulse in the low light.
"We don't call the police," Margot said.
"Not yet," Lourdes said.
"We find Sasha."
"Sasha will know who M is."
"And if Sasha is running, she is running from the same thing."
"Yes."
Margot set the figure back in the bag. She zipped the bag. She looked at Lourdes across the oak table.
"Then we find Sasha first," Margot said.
Outside, the bay had gone the color of ink.
ot pulled into the alley behind Elena's building at quarter past six. The rain had stopped, but the brick walls still wept, dark streaks running down to the cobblestones. Lourdes sat beside her in the passenger seat, a laptop bag on her lap, a thermos of black coffee wedged in the cup holder.
"You didn't call ahead," Lourdes said.
"She's not home," Margot said. "She's been gone five days. I'm not worried about manners."
Lourdes made a small sound in her throat, not quite agreement, not quite warning. Margot killed the engine. The silence that followed was the particular silence of a place waiting, the way an empty theater holds the shape of a performance even after the audience has gone.
They took the back stairs. Margot had a key, a copy she had never returned from the spring she had housesat while Elena was in Vermont. The lock turned without resistance. The door opened onto the hallway and the smell of clay and lavender and something faintly chemical, the ghost of whatever glaze Elena had been working with last.
The apartment was exactly as Elena had left it. A cup on the drying rack. A skirt draped over the back of a chair. The studio corner with the wheel and the shelves of bisqued pieces. Margot had the disorienting sense of entering a diorama, a room preserved under glass.
Lourres went straight to the desk. Margot drifted toward the kitchen. On the counter, beside the coffeemaker, a small leather notebook lay open to a grocery list. Eggs. Oyster mushrooms. The rye flour from the place on Atlantic. A single underlined word at the bottom: Tuesday.
Margot opened Elena's laptop where it sat charging beside the desk. The password was the same one she had always used, the street number of the house in Michigan where Elena had grown up, followed by the year of her grandmother's death. Margot had once teased her about it. Some people choose passwords they can remember. You choose ones you cannot forget. Elena had looked at her for a long moment and said, Yes, that is the point.
The desktop filled the screen. Margot opened the calendar. The week of Elena's disappearance was laid out in Elena's tidy block letters. Monday through Wednesday, a series of ordinary entries: glazing schedule, dentist appointment, a birthday lunch with a former studio mate. Thursday, the day she vanished, was different.
Two entries.
The first read: 11:00 PM - call M.
Margot stared at it. Below it, a second entry, time-stamped 11:47 PM, simply: cancelled.
Someone, or Elena herself, had cancelled the eleven o'clock call with M forty-seven minutes after it was supposed to happen. Margot checked the call log on the laptop's connected phone app. The call had never been placed. Eleven o'clock had come and gone, and the phone had never dialed out.
"Why would she cancel a call she never made," Margot said.
Lourdes looked up from the desk drawer she was searching. "Maybe she made it from the landline."
"Elena doesn't have a landline."
"Then she made it in person."
Margot thought of the notebook entry. The letters. The gallery. Greta knows. She had always known. I am going to get proof before I say it out loud. Then I will go.
"Who is M," Margot said.
"Your guess is as good as mine right now," Lourdes said. She set a stack of mail on the desk. "Look at this. She was getting catalogues from the auction house in Copenhagen. Three in two weeks. Greta's gallery."
Margot opened the top envelope. Inside, a glossy card for an upcoming exhibition titled North Sea South Sea. Greta Lindqvist, curator. The dates were future, months away. Elena's name appeared nowhere in the printed program, but a yellow sticky note clung to the back of the card in Elena's slanted hand: Is any of this mine?
Lourdes held up a second piece of mail. A padded envelope, international postage, postmarked a week before Elena vanished. Margot slit it with her thumbnail. Inside was a sheaf of photocopied documents, perhaps fifteen pages, paper-clipped together with a handwritten note on the top page.
Margot, if anything happens to me, these are copies. The originals are with Tobias. I love you. I am sorry.
Margot's mouth went dry.
"Read it," Lourdes said.
"I am reading it."
"Out loud."
Margot read. The note was longer than the single page suggested, continued onto a second sheet in smaller writing. Elena described a pattern of financial manipulation that stretched back years, money routed through the gallery's accounts in ways she had only recently begun to understand. A property in Maine Elena had believed was hers, a small cabin her mother had left her, was in Greta's name, had always been in Greta's name, the deed transferred through a trust Elena had never been told existed. There were invoices for sales of Elena's work that Elena had never been paid for. There were tax filings that did not match the records Elena had been shown.
At the bottom of the second page, a single underlined line: M is the only one who will believe me.
"Margot," Lourdes said quietly.
"I know."
"She was going to run to someone. Someone she trusted."
Margot set the papers down. She stood. The apartment felt smaller than it had a moment ago, the air thicker. She walked to the front window and looked out at the street. The porch light was off. The street was quiet.
"The camera," Margot said. "She has a camera on the porch. The little black one."
Lourdes came to stand beside her. "Where is the feed?"
"Her phone. Or the cloud."
Margot returned to the laptop. She opened the app for the porch camera. A grid of thumbnails appeared, dated and time-stamped. She scrolled back to the night of Elena's disappearance.
The thumbnails for Thursday were there, the evening clear, the porch visible in the amber glow of the streetlight. A neighbor walking a dog at nine. A delivery driver at quarter past. Elena herself at ten-thirty, returning from somewhere, her coat damp, her hair pulled back, her face half-turned to the camera as she reached for the door.
Then, at 1:47 AM, the thumbnails stopped.
Margot clicked on the slot. The screen went blue. A small notification appeared at the top of the window. File error. Recording interrupted. She clicked again. The same blue screen. She scrolled forward. Every slot after 1:47 AM, through dawn, through morning, through the moment Margot had arrived five days ago with Lourdes and a search warrant she had never needed to use, was the same flat blue.
"The camera glitched," Margot said.
"When," Lourdes said.
"At one forty-seven in the morning."
"And the footage after that."
"Gone."
Lourdes set her coffee down on the desk. "Cameras don't just glitch. Not like that. Not for six hours."
"No," Margot said. "They don't."
She pulled out her phone and dialed the camera's support line. After a long menu tree, a young man with a Midwestern accent picked up and asked for her model number. She read it from the base of the unit. He put her on hold. She listened to an instrumental version of a song she could not name. When he came back, his voice had changed.
"Ma'am, it looks like the unit received a firmware reset command at one forty-seven AM on the seventeenth. That's a manual command sent from inside the app. Whoever logged into the account initiated the reset."
"From where," Margot said.
He put her on hold again. When he returned, he sounded tired.
"The IP trace shows a connection originating from inside the residence at the time of the reset. Someone inside the apartment turned the camera off."
Margot thanked him and hung up. The apartment felt different now. The diorama quality was gone. What had looked like preservation now looked like staging.
"She turned it off," Margot said.
"Or someone did," Lourdes said. "While she was in the room."
Margot walked back to the porch window. She looked at the place on the doorframe where the camera was mounted, the small black lens aimed at the threshold. Below the lens, a shadow on the paint she had never noticed before. A scuff. The kind a shoulder might leave.
"She wasn't alone," Margot said. "At one forty-seven in the morning, she wasn't alone."
"Or she wasn't."
Margot turned from the window. Lourdes was standing very still, the thermos forgotten in her hand.
"Either she let someone in and then she wasn't seen leaving," Margot said. "Or she left on her own and turned the camera off so we wouldn't see her go."
"Which is it," Lourdes said.
"I don't know."
Margot looked at the laptop, at the blue squares where the footage should have been, at the cancelled entry on Elena's calendar, at the note in Elena's handwriting on the desk. The letters. The gallery. Greta knows. M is the only one who will believe me. Margot is the only one who will believe me.
The M had never been a stranger. The M had been her all along.
Outside, the bay had gone the color of ink, and somewhere in the city a clock struck the hour, and the sound came through the window like a finger tapping once on glass.