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be reminded of painful memories that were best left dead.
    I thought back to Danielle’s diary. What could I ask that would bring it up, yet not bring it up.
    “You know what this place could really use?” I said. “A dog.”
    I knew she’d had a dog when Danielle was alive. Thinking about a dog wouldn’t be as painful as thinking about her probably dead daughter.
    Which is why I was plenty surprised when she immediately burst into tears.
    I mean, really burst into tears. Even the Wi-Fi guy looked up from his work to give me a dirty look for making the sweet old lady cry. I shrugged. I didn’t know it would cause that reaction.
    “Oh, God, Mrs. G, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would upset you so much. I was just talking. I don’t need a dog. I’m so stupid.” The Wi-Fi guy nodded. I said to him, “Don’t you have work to do? Come on, Mrs. Greenwood. I’ll get you some water. Or tea, maybe. Do you like tea?” I took her arm. I had it in my head that old ladies liked tea.
    Finally, she started walking with me.
    She had calmed down by the time we reached the kitchen. I sat her down and started hunting for a kettle. I thought I knew how to make tea. You just poured the hot water over the tea bag.
    “I’m being silly,” she said. “We used to have a dog, a yellow Labrador, back when Danielle . . . she was the sweetest thing, and one day . . .” She brushed a tear from her cheek.
    I knew what was coming.
    “I found her out in the road, dead. She’d gotten out somehow and ran into the street. Cars go so fast here. She didn’t stand a chance. I blamed myself for not protecting her well enough, for not taking good enough care . . .”
    She sniffed, and I wondered if she really meant the dog, or if she meant Danielle. It must be hard for a mom as overprotective as she obviously was to have a child disappear. And Danielle was her only child too.
    “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Dogs get out sometimes. It happens. You can’t protect them all the time.”
    “I didn’t do enough. I used to complain about her. She probably never knew how much I loved her.”
    I found the kettle and hunted in the cabinet for tea bags. Clearly, if she’d gotten that upset when I asked her about the dog, I couldn’t ask her about Danielle. But what if the guitar player had killed Danielle? Maybe he was some kind of serial killer who’d killed lots of other girls too? Maybe he was still out there.
    Or maybe Danielle was alive.
    But I couldn’t ask Mrs. Greenwood. Besides, she’d probably never known about Zach. Obviously, Danielle was big on secrets.
    “You never got another dog?”
    “Oh, I didn’t think I could take care of it. A dog needs walking, and I was getting old.”
    “This would be a good place for a dog. Lots of wide-open space.”
    Lots of space to bury a dead body .
    But I was thinking it must be so lonely for her. She’d been a widow for as long as my mother had known her, and then, to have her daughter disappear and the dog die, all in one year. It must have been unbearable. I knew something about loneliness, knew what it was to sit in my room, checking my phone for texts that never came, logging on to Facebook to see other people’s statuses, happy statuses indicating their lives had gone on while mine hadn’t.
    Okay, this was depressing.
    I found the tea bags and closed the cabinet. It didn’t shut completely, overlapping slightly with the one beside it. I tried to lift it a bit, to see if that would help, then opened the other cabinet and closed them in the opposite order. That didn’t work either.
    “Oh, that’s been broken for years,” Mrs. Greenwood said.
    “I could fix it. I could get a new hinge. Do you have screwdrivers and things?”
    I wasn’t usually this helpful, but I remembered Mrs. Greenwood saying that Josh’s family owned the hardware store. And going there was an excuse to leave the house. I could ask Josh if he knew anything about the Red Fox Inn. Or Zach.
    “I