The number was disconnected.
Of course it was.
I tried it twice because the first time I assumed I'd misdialed, which was generous of me given that I had literally just received a call from it thirty seconds prior. The second time I got the same three-note rejection tone and a recording that sounded like it had been made in 1994 and never updated out of spite.
I put my phone face-down on the counter and ate a piece of almond cake standing up, which is the only rational response to a situation you don't have a folder for.
The voice had been a woman's. Calm. The kind of calm that isn't relaxed but is instead the result of significant practice. She'd said I think you and I have something in common like she was commenting on us both owning the same brand of rain boots.
I thought about Carla Venn on the porch of the blue house.
Then I thought about how many women in Dunhaven had brown hair and coats and the general demeanor of someone collecting data.
Then I ate another piece of cake.
My laptop was on the kitchen table where Marcus had left it eleven days ago, still open to a browser tab showing a comparison of outboard motors that he had never finished reading. I sat down, moved the tab without closing it because closing it felt like something I wasn't ready to name, and opened a new window.
Carla Venn, Dunhaven.
Nothing useful. A name that common in a town this size turned up a Facebook profile for a woman who was clearly sixty years older than the person I'd seen, and a LinkedIn for someone in pharmaceutical sales in Ohio.
Carla Venn, Arden Street.
Still nothing.
I tried: women widowed multiple times unexplained circumstances coastal Maine.
The internet provided me with three true crime forums, a Reddit thread that mentioned Dunhaven specifically, and a Wikipedia article about a nineteenth century woman in Cornwall who had outlived seven husbands and been tried for witchcraft.
The Reddit thread mentioned Dunhaven specifically.
I clicked it.
The post was eight months old, username throwaway-style, titled anyone else looking into the Calloway thing. It had forty-two comments. I read all of them with the particular out-of-body focus of a person reading about themselves in the third person on the internet at eleven in the morning.
Most of it was the usual. Speculation. Someone who claimed to be a former Dunhaven resident who had gone to school with Glen. A long comment from someone called PrairieWatcher99 about ley lines, which I skimmed and then felt bad about skimming because what if.
Near the bottom, a comment from an account called simply cv_research:
Not a coincidence. Pattern goes back further than three. Anyone with direct Calloway access please DM.
Posted four months ago. Fourteen upvotes. No replies visible.
CV.
Carla Venn.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I made a third cup of coffee and called my sister, which is what I do when I want to talk to someone who will tell me I'm being irrational in a loving enough way that I can dismiss it cleanly.
Deanna picked up on the first ring, which meant she had been waiting.
"I need you to look someone up," I said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Carla Venn. V-E-N-N. She moved to Dunhaven last month, Arden Street, brown hair, has a notebook and no apparent reason to be in a town this small."
Keyboard sounds. Deanna worked in insurance and had the kind of database access that she was technically not supposed to use for personal favors, which she did constantly and without apparent guilt.
"There's a Carla Venn in the system," she said. "Previous address, Burlington, Vermont. Before that, a town called Hesswick, New Hampshire." A pause. "Meredith."
"What."
"Hesswick. You know what happened in Hesswick."
I did not know what happened in Hesswick.
"Tell me what happened in Hesswick, Dee."
"The Farrow case. 2017. Man named Owen Farrow disappeared from a lake house. His wife was the only one there. No body. No evidence. She was widowed twice before that." Another pause, longer. "She moved away after. Nobody ever charged her."
The cake foil on my counter crinkled by itself.
There was no draft. I had checked the windows after the kettle incident. Both were shut.
"What was the wife's name," I said.
More keyboard. "Selin Farrow. Born Selin Marsh."
I put my coffee down very carefully.
Marsh.
Declan Marsh had been assigned to my case two days after Marcus disappeared. He had driven in from outside Dunhaven. He had parked crooked and carried gas station coffee and had the handwriting of a person who had too many thoughts and not enough patience for spacing.
Selin Marsh.
It could be nothing. Marsh was not an uncommon name. The coincidence was the kind of thing that felt significant at eleven in the morning after four hours of sleep and two and a half pieces of almond cake and a phone call from a disconnected number.
It also felt like the specific shape of something I should write down.
"Dee," I said. "Does it say where Selin Farrow went after Hesswick?"
"No forwarding address in the system. She just." Deanna stopped. "She just stops, basically. After 2017 there's almost nothing."
People don't just stop. They move, they file taxes, they get parking tickets and library cards and their names end up attached to something. A person who stops is a person who has worked at stopping.
Or a person who changed their name.
The stove light flickered twice. Not the single slow pulse I had come to interpret as whatever passed for the thing's version of a greeting. Twice, fast, like a warning.
Which I was not going to read into.
I was absolutely reading into it.
"Thank you," I said to Deanna. "Don't tell anyone I asked."
"Meredith, I want you to hear me when I say that I am very worried about you and also this situation is genuinely alarming and you should consider leaving Dunhaven for a while and coming to stay with me."
"I love you," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"I know." I hung up.
Senator barked outside. Once.
I looked at the door.
Then I looked at my notes, three names on the back of a grocery receipt: Carla Venn. Declan Marsh. Selin Marsh, gone.
Somewhere in this town a detective was building a case against me.
Somewhere on Arden Street a woman in a coat knew things before they were said.
And something in my house was flickering lights in a pattern that felt, if I was being completely honest with myself, a lot like it was trying to tell me to pay attention.
I was paying attention.
I just had no idea what I was paying attention to yet.