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seen her in person and, as I took her in, I instantly saw echoes of her sister. They had the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same mouth. Elsewhere, though, the differences were obvious. It wasn’t just the fact that Wendy was brunette, her hair cut short, styled slightly boyishly around her ears and jaw, or that she was overweight, her upper arms thick beneath a cardigan, her belly gathered under an oversized T-shirt like the folds of a curtain. It wasn’t her slightly old-fashioned glasses either, although all of those things added to the general picture. It was the way she carried herself, the sadness in her face, the way age and worry and sorrow clung to her, all of it evident even through the pixelated, jumpy quality of the video feed. She may have been five years younger than Lynda, but it was hard to believe it.
    She was sitting in a living room, photos on a mantelpiece behind her, one side of her face painted brighter by daylight coming through an unseen window. The first thing she did was to apologize in case the connection played up, telling me they’d been having problems with it for a couple of months, but I told her not to worry and gently steered the conversation around to the weeks leading up to her sister’s disappearance.
    I asked, ‘You never noticed anything out of the ordinary inher messages during the last few weeks before she vanished? I’ve managed to get hold of Lynda’s missing persons report, and have been through the messages myself – but maybe you got a sense from what she wrote that something was bothering her?’
    ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I really didn’t. Believe me, David, no one’s looked back through our conversations more times than me. I spent the first month after she went missing poring over every message, trying to find some hidden meaning in them.’
    I flicked back to notes I’d made earlier. ‘The last message that Lynda sent you read, “Love you so much, Wendy. You have always been the best sister anyone could have.” She sent you that the day before she vanished.’
    ‘I know what you’re going to say.’
    ‘It sounds like a goodbye.’
    ‘Right.’ Wendy paused, a sigh crackling in the microphone of her laptop. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally, her voice flat, a little sombre now. ‘I suppose, in retrospect, it was a goodbye. And maybe I should have seen it for what it was at the time – but it just never really occurred to me then.’
    ‘What do you mean, “seen it for what it was”?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said again, ‘it’s just that Lyn has never been terrific at showing her emotions. She’s like Mom used to be. Mom was brought up on the plains of North Dakota, freezing her butt off all winter, hunting for food, peeing in a hole in the ground. She was loving in her own way, but she was tough. My dad, he was different. I was more like him. Lyn and I, we loved each other, we really did. But we just expressed it differently. I’d tell her I loved her and missed her all the time; she’d tell me how a book she was reading reminded her of the house we’d grown up in. That was howshe expressed what she felt – these slightly abstract, throwaway comments. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t cold – far from it, actually; most of the time she was the life and soul of the party – it was just she was so rarely willing to let her guard down, even with me. If she felt she was being led somewhere she didn’t want to go, she’d stop dead.’
    The implication was that Korin was fun, she was good company, she was gregarious and open with her sister, and presumably others too – but only with regard to things she wanted to be open about. That wasn’t particularly abnormal: a lot of people were like that, especially missing people, because when they went missing, they did so having buried secrets no one ever knew they were keeping.
    ‘So what did you think when you received that message?’ I asked.
    ‘I was surprised, touched. You said