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Sharon and Emma, having tea with the headmistress. He remembered their hostess had worn an unfashionable dress. In sharp contrast to Emma’s shockingly short pleated skirt and formfitting V-neck sweater, the dress was ankle-length, covered with tiny Victorian flowers amid twining vines. In fact, it was Emma’s alterations of the college’s dress code—what the headmistress labeled subversive—that was the subject of the conference over tea, scones, and clotted cream. Jackhad been proud of how his daughter stood up for her rights, though both the headmistress and Sharon had been scandalized. Inevitably, his gaze was magnetized to one of the sofas where Emma had sat, ankles primly crossed, hands in her lap, staring at a spot somewhere over the headmistress’s left shoulder, her expression for once solemn as an adult’s. She spoke respectfully when asked for an explanation, throughout seemed contrite. But this, Jack suspected, was merely a ploy to end the inquisition. Tomorrow, he was willing to bet, she would show up in class as outrageously dressed as before. The memory made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. From the moment the limo had entered the gates of Langley Fields, he was plunged into the past, and now he knew there was no escape.
    He was about to turn away when his eye was caught by a slight rippling of the window drapes. His escort cleared his throat and Jack put up a hand. Quickly crossing the room, he pulled aside the drape. The window was firmly shut, but there came to him the hint of a smell: mascara, makeup, something Emma had used on her face. Behind him, he heard a whisper. Burnished light seemed to fall on the narrow space between the window and the drape. A shadow moved, a whisper like wind through a field of grass. Was it his daughter’s voice?
    A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “Emma?” he said under his breath. “Are you here? Where are you?”
    Nothing. The smell had vanished. He stood for a moment, lost in time, feeling like an idiot. Why can’t you face it? he told himself. She’s gone. But he knew why. During the six months while Sharon was popping pills behind his back, while she and Jeff were finding shadowed corners to couple in, while his marriage was falling apart, he’d spent every minute of his spare time trying to piece together the hours before Emma’s death. The truth was, he hardly slept, using the nighttime hours to prowl, run down leads, talk to snitches. Emma’s cell phone, crushed in the accident, was no help, but he got a friend at the phone company to pull her records. He worked the list of numbers, buildingcharts of her friends and acquaintances, but always the nodes and connectors circled back on themselves, like a snake eating its tail. He laboriously read the transcripts of her text messages for the previous two weeks, the longest the phone company kept such things. He scoured the hard drive of her laptop, looking for suspicious e-mails, links to Internet chat rooms, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous Web sites. It was like the dark side of the moon in there, the hard disk was clean of such ubiquitous detritus. If this had been a spy novel, he’d suspect it had been purged, but Emma was no spy and this wasn’t a novel. He spent hours with Alli Carson, braced the faculty and staff at the school. He interviewed every neighbor of the school’s in an ever-widening circle until even he understood he’d exhausted all possibilities. He’d run down all Emma’s girlfriends until the father of one had taken out a restraining order on him. He’d followed every possible lead, even ones that appeared improbable. For his tireless and often frenzied efforts, he’d come up with nothing. After six months, he was no closer to finding out what had frightened his daughter so thoroughly. She’d always been something of a fearless creature. Not reckless, so far as he knew—though he’d finally had to admit to himself that he’d known Emma not at all. The bitter truth,