Perfect Place EBOOK

Hour 1
4:10 p.m.

Cora Kincaid pressed the remote-access button clipped to her car’s visor to open the gate to her housing community. Sprawling mansions spread across the upscale community on Liars Island. With large lots, manicured yards, and hired staff to maintain all of it, Paradox Coves Estates was, contrary to its name, perfect.
Her house, a three-car-garage Tudor, was waiting for her in a cul-de-sac at the end of Perfect Place Drive.
Cora was glad to be home at the end of a long week. All she wanted was to spend some time with her daughter, Ellie, and husband, Sawyer. Maybe they would go to the beach or take the ferry to Seattle for a quick visit to the aquarium and dinner out.
She turned into the neighborhood and glanced in the rearview mirror, checking to see if anybody was following her in. One imperfect thing about her housing community was that other cars without access codes could follow behind those who did have them. That had happened before. Typically, however, they were friends or family of Cora's neighbors and not anyone untoward. But one couldn't be too careful.
Before turning right, toward her street, Cora checked for traffic. To her left, Ann Marie Collins was having groceries delivered. An Eco Landscaping truck was to her right, parked at the corner diagonally from Cora. A handful of landscapers were maintaining the residences' lawns and the common areas.
To Cora’s right the street was quiet. She was distracted when her cell phone rang.
The number popped up on the large center dashboard in her beloved Mercedes-Benz G-Class. She took pride in the SUV being the only dark-green vehicle in the neighborhood, a custom order and birthday gift from her husband the previous year.
Recognizing the number as one from her office, she clicked the Answer button on her steering wheel.
She was almost home, yet work was not letting her go.
"This is Cora."
"Hi, Cora. It's Bob." Dr. Robert Schneider was one of the psychiatrists she worked with at Compassion Counseling.
As a marriage and family counselor, Cora loved her job and coworkers. When some clients needed more than she could offer, she knew, when referring them to a psychiatrist in her office, that her clients were getting the best.
"Hi, Dr. Bob, it’s almost closing time. Why are you still there?"
She glanced at the dashboard clock: ten after four.
Ellie had arrived home from school forty minutes before, and the agreement she had with her husband, Sawyer, was that he closed his laptop precisely when Eleanor came in the door. That's when family time began. That’s what she taught at Compassion Counseling and what she practiced at home.
Dr. Bob chuckled. "That's why I'm calling. I'd like to catch the four-thirty ferry if I can. Miriam is meeting me in Seattle for drinks, dinner, and theater. But I have a client on my books, a Lisa Boynton, but she hasn't shown for her four o'clock appointment. I was wondering if she was chronically late and whether I should wait.”
Cora groaned. Convincing Lisa to see Dr. Bob had taken months, and she'd missed her first appointment.
Cora said, "No, she's typically on time. If she's not there by now, then she's not coming. I'll follow up with her on Monday. I knew she was nervous about seeing another provider, but I thought I'd managed to make her comfortable with it. I guess I overestimated my powers of persuasion. Or underestimated her fear. Thanks for waiting, Dr. Bob."
He said, "Maybe do one more appointment with her, and I'll come meet her. Try to make her more comfortable with the switch."
Cora said, "That would be wonderful. Now, go catch that ferry."
They exchanged quick goodbyes as Cora cruised toward her home.
A plain white delivery van, the kind with a high top and no windows on the sides, passed as it left her street. No company logo adorned the side, but vans like that were commonplace. Somewhere on Perfect Place Drive, someone had a package waiting on their doorstep if it hadn’t been put directly into their hands.
Typically, Cora didn’t pay attention to such service vehicles, but those white vans were a hot topic among the moms on Liars Island. Only the day before on the Islanders in the Know Facebook page, a poster Cora didn't know had gone on a rant about limiting access to those vans and even created a petition.
That was all born of a horrible story from Seattle in which a twelve-year-old was abducted from a park, never to be seen again and likely lost to the underworld of human trafficking. The only clue was a white delivery van last seen near the child. With Seattle being just a ferry ride away, the story had felt too close to home.
Over the past month, the majority of the posts in the group were about how the vans needed to be monitored when they came onto the island. The mommas did not like the free access and unaccountability the vans had. Many moms sincerely believed the vans were trolling neighborhoods for nefarious reasons, to kidnap children from Liars Island for human trafficking. Cora thought if anything criminal was going on, it was likely that porch pirates were waiting around to steal delivered packages. Yet the moms would get spun up by a few smartly worded posts, mostly written by people Cora didn't know, that pushed the fear button, and all hell would break loose… online.
Chuckling at the absurdity of it all, she waved to the unknowingly profiled van driver as he passed. The windows were tinted, and a person would have to strain to make out the driver, but Cora had no interest checking the person out. Statistically speaking, the odds of that van driving through her neighborhood with the intent to kidnap a child was insanely low.
Cora didn't take human trafficking lightly, and she didn't think bad things never happened on Liars Island. She just knew the hysteria of one mom could drive the other moms to the same heights. Logic and reason weren't a consideration in the conversation. A productive conversation about the concern, with solutions, couldn't be had due to all the emotions. That's what irritated Cora the most: the mob mentality that all vans and their drivers were bad until proven otherwise.
She pulled her Mercedes into her drive, deciding not to park inside the garage because she was going to take Ellie out for ice cream.
Exiting her vehicle with her purse and briefcase, she glanced at the rare blue and sunny sky. The spring weather was a perfect mid-seventies with the sun having followed a quick drizzle. The change in season was driving Cora's need to get outside and enjoy the sun. The winter had been long and full of gray skies common to the Pacific Northwest.
At the front door, Cora picked up a package leaning against her door. The white van had apparently delivered a box from Amazon.
If Cora were to guess, the contents were likely Ellie's much anticipated slime-making kit. Her eight-year-old had saved four weeks of chore money to buy it. Waiting the two days for its arrival had almost killed her.
Cora grabbed the box and tucked it under an arm, then keyed in the house code that unlocked the front door.
After stepping inside, she placed her bags and the box on the large foyer table and called out, "Hello, I'm home. Where are you two?"
The house was unusually quiet, considering Ellie was typically famished after arriving home from school, and Sawyer would usually be chatting with her about her day while making her a snack.
"Hello?"
She moved from the foyer to the hall that looked down to the kitchen. The room was empty. She stopped at the base of the stairs.
A noise in the hall at the top of the stairs drew her attention. Moments later, Sawyer came into sight. His curly hair was pushed off his forehead from hours of resting his forehead in his hand, which he tended to do when in thought. His glasses sat low on his nose, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, a pen behind one ear.
"Hello, love. You're home early." Tracking time was not Sawyer's strong suit as he had a tendency to get lost in his writing, and ever since he'd lost his personal assistant, he'd required built-in reminders such as alarm clocks. But he also needed reminders to set his alarm clocks, and Cora had forgotten to do that before she'd left this morning.
He continued, "You've beaten Ellie home. Hang on a sec, and I'll come down. We can wait outside together for the bus."
A cold wave of something foreign and unfamiliar washed over Cora—maybe fear.
"Sawyer, Ellie should be home by now. It’s after four." As she spoke, she backpedaled toward the door.
Sawyer shook his head. "But she hasn't come home. I've been waiting for her to come in. That's my cue to stop writing."
Cora took a deep breath. A logical explanation had to exist. Ellie was in the TV room. Or her room. Or talking with her friend next door. But she knew not to do that.
"Ellie!" Cora called.
Nothing. Waiting for a response was agony.
Cora jerked the door open and stepped outside. She looked up and down the quiet street. No movement. No cars coming home. No children outside playing. No Ellie.
She went back inside. "She's not out there."
Sawyer said, "I'll look up here—you down there. Then we'll call the school to see if the bus is running late."
Cora wondered what the likelihood of that was. Her heart raced.

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