Phillips, her best friend. She lives on West Highland Drive. Married to a dentist.”
Emily knew who Dr. Dan Phillips was. He’d taken over Dr. Cassidy’s dental practice—the one that had seen half of Cherrystone through their first cavities in grade school to the trauma of impacted wisdom teeth in college. Cherrystone was more than a six-degrees-of-separation type of town, she thought. More like three degrees. Emily seized on Samantha’s name because she never heard it mentioned before. When Mitch gave Deputy Howard a list of those with the tightest bonds to his missing wife, Sammy’s name hadn’t been among them.
Emily’s eyes landed on the photo of Mandy that the women from the county clerk’s office had brought in for a missing persons poster they’d made. She wondered when the photo had been taken.
“When are you coming back?” she asked.
“Tonight. We’re leaving PV tonight. First flight we could get seats on. Alaska Airlines through LAX.”
“All right. We’re doing everything we can to find her. I want you and Mr. Layton to come to my office when you get back home.”
Hillary Layton finally lost her fractured composure and started to cry. “Sheriff, do you think she sent us away because she wanted to leave Mitch? Or maybe…you know, something really bad happened to her.”
Emily had worked missing persons cases in Seattle. She knew that the first hours were crucial, and in the absence of any reason for Amanda to flee, chances were that she was either abducted or injured somewhere. Or dead. Few people went missing longer than a day without one of those reasons accounting for their disappearance.
Yet to the mother on the phone, hope was essential just then.
“Hillary, please, don’t think the worst. Right now, we have to turn every stone. We need to focus our energies on finding your daughter. That’s what we’re doing. We’re rolling on this at one hundred miles an hour.”
Hillary stopped crying. “Thank you, Sheriff. My husband and I will see you tomorrow.”
Emily hung up and picked up the photo. She felt a small surge of hope. If Mitch Crawford was, in fact, involved with Mandy’s disappearance, then he’d made his first mistake. He’d lied when he said he didn’t know exactly where to reach his in-laws. Even if there was some reason that he didn’t know which timeshare unit they’d been sent to, he surely could have tracked them with a call to the resort company’s customer service center. After all, Mr. and Mrs. Layton were using his resort points for their stay.
It was a stupid lapse, all right, but it made Emily smile.
There was also the matter of Sammy Phillips, Mandy’s closest friend, another oversight on Mitch’s part. He’d never mentioned her.
The Phillips residence was everything Mitch Crawford’s house could never be. It wasn’t in a gated community, with the pretentious accoutrements of a wannabe estate. It was grand and authentic, a vintage home decked out in holiday finery that was subtle and respectful for the season. The two-story white colonial had an oversize gilded eucalyptus wreath on each of the double doors. Tiny faux candlelights were set in each of the fourteen windows on the street side of the house.
It was dusk when Emily arrived. She parked on the street, slick with melted snow. She’d never been inside the house; however, she knew its history. No matter how long the Phillipses would live there, Cherrystone old-timers would always call it the Justin House. It was named for Herbert Justin, a banker who’d had it built and lived there with his wife, Matilda, until he died at eighty-one and she was shuttled off to a rest home in Portland to be near her kids.
It was sold three weeks after the old lady was sent packing “for her own good.”
Samantha Phillips was a stunning blonde with green eyes. She stood in the doorway as Emily made her way up the steps, wrapping her arms around her black-cashmere-clad torso and shuddered at the cool air.
“Come inside, it’s getting a little more than brisk out here again,” Samantha said, looking out across the sky, which was dark with the threat of rain or snow.
Emily followed her into the two-story entryway, across blue Persian rugs with a pile so deep that it nearly sucked the heels off her shoes. Samantha had a teapot on a tray with some of the delicate rolled cookies that Emily knew were krumkake, the same that her mother had made for the holidays. The room was dominated by a ten-foot-tall tree that, by fragrance alone, indicated that it was a real Balsam fir.
“I see you’re Norwegian,” she said, looking at the cookies.
A warm smile came over Samantha’s face. “The krumkake. Have one, please. My great-grandmother’s family was from Oslo, and these cookies are about the only Norwegian tradition that I have.” Samantha motioned for Emily to sit. They faced each other in matching mohair love seats, obviously real and perfectly at home in the grand old house, stuffed with tasteful antiques and paintings.
“Your home is lovely,” Emily said, taking it all in.
“Thank you, but I take no credit for it. My husband had the guts to buy it when we really didn’t have the money. We do now, of course,” she said, catching herself in a flutter of weakness that she didn’t like to share with strangers. “The practice is thriving, I mean.”
There was a kind of awkwardness in the air. Emily knew that Samantha was chattering on to fill up as much time as possible, so as not to have to talk about what was really on her mind.
“I voted for you,” Samantha said, as odd a non sequitur as Emily had ever heard.
Emily smiled graciously. “Thank you. I appreciate your vote. We need to talk about Mandy, Samantha. This is very important. Her mother tells me that you’re her best friend. Is that right?”
Samantha poured tea, a cup for each of them. She motioned to the sugar. Emily declined.
“We knew each other in college,” Samantha said, swirling sugar into the steaming amber liquid. “We were freshman roommates. We were that strange pairing of girls that actually clicked. Most of the girls who were paired off with high school friends ended up hating each other by Christmas. Not us.”
“You’re not from here, are you?” Emily asked, already knowing the answer. She knew everyone with deep roots in Cherrystone, because she had them herself.
She shook her head, and Emily noticed for the first time that the diamonds on Samantha Phillips’s earlobes had to be at least two carats each.
“No, but I’m here because of Mandy. I was out here visiting her and Mitch, and I met Dan at a party.”
“Did you know Mitch well?”
“Well enough to hate him, if that’s what you want to know.”
Emily set down her cup. “How come?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I hated him because Mandy could have done so much better. She always dated decent guys in school. Mitch was such a jerk. He never let her do anything that went against whatever he thought best. It was like the second she married him, I had to make appointments to see her.”
“So he’s controlling,” Emily said. “But what else? Was he abusive?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “I mean, he didn’t hit her. I know she’d never put up with that and I know she would have told me.”
Emily searched Samantha’s worried eyes. “You’re holding back on something.”
“I know you’re here for some big revelation, something that will give you a clue about what happened to her, where she might be. I just can’t help you.”
“Was she happy?”
“She hadn’t been for a long time, but when she became pregnant, Mandy changed. She seemed to be her old self again. There was some joy in her voice. She’d wanted to have a baby for so long, but Mitch kept telling her the time wasn’t