“This is my favorite part,” he says, pushing our boat around a corner. I open my eyes, and there, in the distance, is Cypress Stables. “Only six more weeks.”
The property is even more breathtaking from the water, that large, white farmhouse looming over acres of perfectly manicured grass. The rounded columns holding up its triple wraparound porches, the rocking chairs still dancing in the breeze. I watch them sway, back and forth, back and forth. I imagine myself walking down those magnificent wooden steps, walking toward the water, toward Daniel.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Detective Thomas’s words start to echo across the water, disturbing my perfect reverie.
What exactly is your connection to Aubrey Gravino?
I don’t have one. I don’t know Aubrey Gravino. I try to silence the sound, but for some reason, I can’t get it out of my head. I can’t get her out of my head. Her liner-smudged eyes and ashy brown hair. Her long, skinny arms. Her youthfully tan skin.
“From the moment I saw it, I wanted it,” Daniel says from behind me. But I barely register his words. I’m too focused on those rocking chairs, swaying back and forth in the wind. They’re empty now, but they weren’t always empty. There was a girl before. A tan, skinny girl rocking lazily against the column in her leather riding boots, sun-bleached and worn.
That’s my granddaughter. This land has been in our family for generations.
I remember Daniel waving. The uncrossing of the legs and the pulling down of the dress. The self-conscious way she dipped her head before waving back. The sudden emptiness of the porch. The rocking chair slowing to a halt.
She likes to come here sometimes after school. Do her homework on the porch.
Until two weeks ago, when she didn’t make it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I’m staring at a picture of Aubrey on my laptop, a picture I’ve never seen before. It’s a small image, slightly pixelated from me zooming in on her face, but clear enough to know for sure. It’s her.
She’s seated on the ground with her legs tucked under a white dress, those same leather riding boots hiked up to her knees, her hands resting on a perfectly manicured lawn of pristine green grass. It’s a family portrait, and she’s surrounded by her parents. Her grandparents. Her aunts and her uncles and her cousins. The image is framed with the same moss-draped oak trees I had envisioned framing the aisle of my wedding; in the background, those same white stairs I had imagined myself walking down, with my veil trailing behind me, are ascending to that giant wraparound porch. To those chairs that never seem to stop moving.
I lift a cardboard cup of coffee to my lips, my eyes still scanning the image. I’m on the official Cypress Stables website, reading about its owners. It really has been in the Gravino family for centuries—what started as a sugarcane farm built in 1787 had gradually transitioned into a horse farm, then eventually, an event venue. Seven generations of Gravinos had lived there, producing some of Louisiana’s best cane syrup. Once they realized they were sitting on such a desirable piece of land, they renovated the farmhouse and decorated the barn, the immaculately ornamented inside and meticulously pruned outside providing the perfect Louisiana backdrop for weddings, corporate events, and other celebrations.
I remember the vague familiarity of seeing Aubrey’s MISSING picture. That nagging feeling that I knew her, somehow. And now I know why. She was there the day we visited the Stables. She was there when we had toured the grounds, when we had booked the venue for our wedding. I had seen her. Daniel had seen her.
And now, she’s dead.
My eyes move from Aubrey’s face to the face of her parents. The parents I had seen on the news almost two weeks ago. Her father had been crying into his hands. Her mother had been pleading into the camera: We want our baby back. Next, I look at her grandmother. That same sweet woman struggling with that iPad, trying to calm my fabricated fears with promises of air-conditioners and bug spray. I imagine the fact that Aubrey Gravino came from a locally famous family was mentioned in the news at some point, but I hadn’t known that. After the discovery of her body, I had been deliberately avoiding the news. I had been driving around town with the radio turned off. And once her headshot was replaced by Lacey’s, that detail no longer mattered. The media had moved on. The world had moved on. Aubrey was just another vaguely familiar face lost in a sea of other faces. Of other missing girls just like her.
“Doctor Davis?”
I hear a knock and look up from my laptop, at Melissa peering at me from behind the cracked door. She’s in running shorts and a tank top, her hair pulled back into a bun, and a gym bag flung over one shoulder. It’s six thirty a.m., the sky outside my office just barely starting to morph from black to blue. There’s something inherently lonely about a morning spent awake when nobody else seems to be—being the one to turn on the coffee, the only car on an abandoned highway, arriving to an empty office building and flipping on the lights. I had been so engrossed in Aubrey’s image, so deafened by the absolute silence surrounding me, I hadn’t even heard her come in.