Nobody Reported Her Missing

The photograph in the county archive shows eight people standing under the canopy of the old Willow Hollow depot. The negative sleeve in the same file says frame 2 submitted. The picture the newspaper ran on September 18, 1999 shows seven, and the caption under it says, in three words, as photographed.Wren Harper is a forensic photographer. She spent twelve years in the State Police lab and came home to run her late father's investigation office with the only other person in it, a former deputy named Nate Cole. The state archives has sent them a question about one picture. It should take a week.Then Wren does what she does with every photograph, which is to look first at what is not in it. Eight people became seven in four minutes. The clock over the ticket window reads 5:41 in the first frame and 5:45 in the second. Nobody in the line moved. Nobody stepped over to fill the space, and in a photograph, people always fill the space.The woman who is missing from the second frame signed the depot's visitors' register at 4:50 that afternoon, in her own hand, with her full name. The page she signed was cut out of the book with a blade. She wrote home for six years after that, and the handwriting on the last two envelopes does not match the handwriting inside them.Nobody reported her missing, in twenty-seven years, because every record there is says she left on her own. Wren has spent her whole working life believing that a record is either right or wrong. What she is about to find out is that a record can be made.Wren and Nate have been partners for four years and are good at exactly one thing, which is other people's evidence. What they are not good at is asking each other questions. There is something he has never told her about that yard and that night, and it has been sitting in every room they have ever worked in together.Nobody Reported Her Missing is the third Harper & Cole Investigations novel, a small-town cold case about a paper trail, two people who are careful with each other, and the difference between a record that is wrong and a record that was made.