Free The Red House by Emily Winslow Page A

her private messages, but this was enough to tell me that this was for real. Whether this ‘Patrick Bell’ who contacted her is genuine or a scam, she believed that she’d found Sebastian. She’d come to me with genuine good news. I’d treated her terribly.
    The theories that had swirled in my head seemed bizarre to me now. Imogen had said that she was going to ask me for a lift. I, foolishly, stupidly, idiotically, had speculated that she’d dangled that possibility in the same breath as taking it back only to bolster a lie. Had she said tonight? I think she’d said tonight. Without me to drive, what would she do? Get dropped off by a taxi, left alone to meet a stranger? Or, worse, ask Patrick Bell to pick her up?
    I opened Google Maps. The house name and town were sufficient to find her old home. The map pinpointed it within a non-specific stretch of green, but the satellite photo showed the house and its colourful neighbours, separated by lawns or field and reached only by a meandering dirtroad. It’s isolated. I wiped my damp forehead with my sleeve.
    I couldn’t be privy to the private messages and emails that Patrick Bell and Imogen had shared off the message board, but the man’s proofs must have been convincing. Still, Imogen had left enough information around the web that anyone could put together a fairly reasonable version of Seb’s life, especially as filtered through a small child’s faulty memory.
I’m proof enough of that, aren’t I? I let her descriptions seep so deeply into me that they surfaced as my own.
    Part of me hesitated.
    Could that really be true, though
? We haven’t known each other for so long that I should have forgotten her telling me her brother’s nickname for the college’s bronze horse.
How can I have remembered the name itself but not the larger discussion that had included it?
    I shook it off. That wasn’t urgent. The meeting with Patrick Bell could be.
    I Googled around some more. Lots of Patrick Bells online, though none I could pinpoint as him. I tried his username from Reunions. It appeared nowhere else.
    There are a lot of reasons why someone would create a burner account instead of using an existing profile. Some of those reasons are benign; others aren’t.
    I wished that she’d arranged to meet him in a public place, or that I’d insisted on going with her. I punched the mattress. Patrick Bell could be anyone. Even if he was Seb, that doesn’t mean that he should be trusted.
He has to earn that.
    I locked our hotel room and headed down to the car.
Whoever Patrick Bell is
, I decided,
Imogen and I will meet him together
. Imogen’s childhood home was only half an hour away.
     
    It’s still bright out when I get there, summer bright, giving the illusion of late afternoon well into evening. I find the turning onto the dirt road, but the vista isn’t what the satellite photo promised me.
    The half-dozen houses that I’d seen from above aren’t here. I check my position; I look in all directions. The billboard for
affordable and comfortable village life coming soon
gives me a clue: the original houses have been recently razed.
    I picture Imogen’s face, crumpled with disappointment, but maybe it’s better like this. Maybe the small but uncountable changes since her childhood would have hurt worse than this enforced fresh start.
    I pull over and get out. There are only two buildings left, one red and one white. I’m unsure of my place and can’t tell which of the original ones they are. I’d expected to identify them all in relation to one another, not in absolute on an otherwise empty expanse. I don’t think one of those is Meadow View; wouldn’t it have been to the right of where I drove in? But I can’t be sure. A siren-sound pulls my attention, and I feel suddenly worried, suddenly guilty.
Police? Ambulance?
My body tenses.
    Has something happened to Imogen? Has she come to this changed place, this near-deserted place, and been threatened? Was she