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the quilt beside her to check locations. Phil had apparently been exploring options as far away as the Avalon Peninsula to the east and the Great Northern Peninsula to the west. No bookings had been yet made, but at least as of a week ago, Phil had still been planning their camping trip.
    Frustrated, she checked his Internet search history and was surprised to discover it had been cleared. She knew people who cleared their search history every hour, but they were paranoid people living in dangerous places, exploring information that could get them killed. Had Phil brought his paranoia home with him, which was entirely possible, or had he wanted to erase his trail for a reason?
    She knew that cyber detectives could still find the footprints he was trying to erase, but she had no such skill. Her vision blurred with fatigue and her eyelids threatened to close. Pouring herself another glass of wine, she set aside the laptop in favour of Phil’s cellphone.
    This time the password was easy to crack — the same boy, who even after a year obviously loomed larger in Phil’s thoughts than his own family. Phil had never talked about him. He had simply thrust his body aside and raced to the children who were still waiting. Cowering. Hoping. It had been a long night.
    The cellphone was synced to the laptop, so she ignored the emails and went directly to the history of his phone calls. Besides the calls and texts from herself and from Sheri, three texts stood out. Two received, one sent. All dated three days ago, just before she’d stopped hearing from him.
    All to or from Jason Maloney.
    She read the first, which was an invitation from Jason to get together for a beer. The next was from Phil asking when and where. The third named the place, a bar that Amanda remembered passing on the way into Grand Falls. Seven o’clock in the evening, three days ago.
    Funny that Jason never mentioned a word of this.
    She was tempted to drop by the bar to find out whether the two had actually met and whether any of their conversation had been overheard. But the pillows and the silky duvet drew her down into them, and she found she couldn’t budge. Not a single muscle obeyed her. So she slipped naked between the cool cotton sheets and fell asleep.

Chapter Four
    T uesday dawned blustery and cold, reminding Newfoundland that summer was an elusive and fickle partner in the yearly dance of seasons. On the western coast, a deluge battered the seaside coves, but inland in Deer Lake, it was reduced to a chilly drizzle.
    The kind of weather Corporal Chris Tymko hated. As a boy from the prairies, he was used to endless summer days of wide-open blue sky punctuated by fierce thunderstorms that rolled across the flat lands like a freight train. In his previous posting up north, he’d learned to cope with violent, changeable storms and long months of darkness and snow, but Newfoundland seemed on the collision course between massive celestial forces. Humid warmth from the south and gales from the Arctic swirled over the knobby outcrop of rock, dumping snow, rain, and sleet, sometimes all at once.
    Roads could turn slick in an instant, hurling cars into ditches and knocking power out for miles. Chris arrived at the Deer Lake detachment early for his morning shift, hoping to use the extra minutes to check for news on Phil Cousins before the duties of the day began. Thoughts of Phil had intruded on his sleep several times during the night, and although there had been no reassuring phone call from Jason Maloney that morning, Chris hoped for some information in the routine police chatter. Not knowing Jason very well, he didn’t know whether the man would afford him the courtesy of a phone call, especially after the argument they’d had. Jason was a local Newfoundlander from Corner Brook, and he’d been known to use his connections and credibility to hog the upper hand in an investigation. But Chris figured that on his own home turf of