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hope.” Irwin’s caterpillarlike gray eyebrows drew together.
    Molly’s wasn’t the only face that went tight. The Blackpool murders of last spring were still too vivid a memory.
    Michael’s iPhone suddenly emitted Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan’s version of “Pretty Woman.”
    â€œHullo—Dylan?”
    Dylan’s agitated voice was so loud it escaped past Michael’s ear. Molly leaned forward. So did Iris and Irwin. “Naomi said she’d be home, but she wasn’t. So I went round to Willie’s flat at the Oceanview—thought she might be there after all. I heard someone running down the back steps as I knocked at the door, so I tried the knob. That’s when I saw the lock was broken. The door opened right up. There’s no one here now, but the place is a mess. Someone turned it over and then took to their heels when they heard me.”
    â€œStay there, Dylan,” Michael told him. “I’ll be right with you.”
    â€œ We’ll be right with you,” corrected Molly.
    Dylan’s voice rose in panic. “I don’t know where Naomi is. She’s gone. She’s vanished.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    M ICHAEL AND M OLLY hurried from the car park behind the boarded-up station toward the Oceanview. He heard her boots pattering along just behind the thump of his—it wasn’t her fault he had a longer stride—and slowed his pace. “You were saying you saw Naomi at the church?”
    â€œYes,” she replied, “right after we left the Black Sea Pearl. You remember, I wanted to show Angela at the Style Shop how well my dress fit.”
    He smiled reminiscently at the “fit” of the dress.
    â€œI was turning into Pelican Lane,” Molly continued, “and I noticed several tourists taking photos of the church. Aleister would love that, since old Charles renovated the place. Typical Crowe, taking what was probably a very nice medieval building and ramming Georgian windows through the walls and raising the steeple until it’s out of proportion.”
    Michael’s eye strayed toward the foursquare steeple of St. Mary’s, or Calm Seas as it was known to Blackpoolers, after one of the most frequent prayers uttered there. The spire rose above the roofs of town like an exclamation point.
    â€œNaomi was sitting on the bench beneath the old yew tree, sketching the Crowe mausoleum. The row of columns can cast some interesting shadows. Although, judging by her Goth look, she was imagining the spooky stuff inside—coffins, cobwebs, a crypt.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t be Blackpool without the spooky stuff. Here we are.”
    The Oceanview apartment block was a slab-sided stucco building that clashed with every other structure in town. It had been erected by the town council in the 1950s, a decade not known for architectural sensitivity. But the inexpensive flats were homes, just as much as Thorne-Shower Mansion was home.
    Dylan’s anxious face peered over the concrete balcony that formed a gallery running in front of half a dozen doors. Michael and Molly raced up the steps toward him. With a wordless gesture of frustration, he led the way past the peeling paint into Willie’s flat.
    A short hallway, a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom and bathroom, all sparsely furnished and smelling of stale food and mildew—the tour took only a moment. Drawers were turned out, couch pillows upended, cabinet doors opened. Molly focused on the food-crusted dishes piled in the kitchen sink. “Yeah, it sure seems as if someone searched the place. Or vandalized it. But then, it wasn’t very neat to begin with, was it?”
    â€œI’ve never been inside before,” conceded Dylan. “Willie’s never struck me as a tidy sort, no, and Naomi’s got other things on her mind.”
    â€œYou mean her artwork?”
    â€œShe’s good at it, talks about working as an illustrator. But that cow