“I’ve never felt so useless,” the doctor said softly. “My parents are so proud of me for being so educated, but what use are my degrees now? I know nothing about how to search for someone in the bush. Nik and the others, they’re out there looking for her and I’m sitting in here safe and warm and doing nothing to help.”

“You’re helping by speaking to me.” Will was worried about Dominic’s mental state. As far as he knew, Dominic de Souza had no other family in town. He’d only taken up the position as the town’s GP a year earlier, after the previous doctor retired. “I have one more question.”

Head still hanging low and his hair falling forward, the doctor took off his glasses and said, “What?” It was a soft, jagged, broken statement.

“How long have you and Miriama been going out?” Will tried to keep his tone bland, not wanting to trigger the other man’s volatile emotions. “Was she going out with anyone else before you?”

“We had our ­three-­month anniversary a week ago. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, but it took me more than half a year to work up the guts to approach ­her—­I mean, she was so young. I still can’t believe she’s only nineteen and a half now, she’s so strong, knows exactly what she wants.”

The other man put his glasses back on. “Six more months, I said to her at lunch. Then she’ll be twenty and I won’t feel like such a ­cradle-­robber.” Shoving his hands through his hair again, he got up and began to pace around the room. “She said no the first two times I asked her out, but I decided to try again a few months ago. When she said yes, I thought I was dreaming.”

Stopping by his desk, he stared out the window. “I think she was going out with someone before me, but I don’t know who. I’m pretty sure it was a man outside the ­Cove—­she used to disappear for whole weekends and come back all smiley. But they must’ve broken ­up… And she finally saw me.”

Will left the clinic soon afterward, stopping outside to make a call to Pastor Mark. “Dr. de Souza,” he said, “could do with someone sitting with him.”

As he’d expected, the elderly man was ready to help at once.

After making sure the pastor had a way to get to the clinic, Will drove to the fire station under a sky that had thickened with gray while he’d been with ­Dominic—­what little sunlight that got through was weak. He found Matilda pouring mugs of hot coffee for the volunteers who’d come in for a break. One look at their faces and he knew the news wasn’t good.

Matilda gave him a trembling smile when he stopped by the coffee station. “They haven’t found anything,” she said, and the words were hopeful.

Will understood why she was happy, but he couldn’t agree with her. Especially not with rain forecast for this afternoon. If Miriama was lying hurt somewhere, the cold and wet could push her body dangerously close to fatal exposure.

Going to check the map someone had pinned to the wall next to the whiteboard, he ran his eyes over the areas marked with double Xs, meaning they’d been searched twice. “Has anyone gone out here?” He directed the question at an experienced hunter who lived outside of town, tapping his finger on an area that wasn’t anywhere near where Miriama had been seen, but that was a favorite hangout for the town’s younger people.

There was a faint possibility that Miriama had met up with a friend and headed that way for a short period, only for something to go wrong. Bad enough that her friend hadn’t reported it. He knew he was reaching, but they had to be sure.

The hunter looked at the spot Will had indicated, nodded. “Yeah, we should check it out. Might be she got drunk and is just sleeping it off there.” He said the words loud enough to reach Matilda, and Will realized the heavily bearded male was trying to comfort the woman.

But after the volunteers got back in their vehicles and headed out toward their target locations, Matilda shook her head. “Miriama wouldn’t do that. My girl doesn’t drink that ­way—­I always used to worry she’d get bored and be drawn into the drugs and drinking, like so many of the kids in this town, but Miriama, she’s always had big dreams.”

Taking a seat, her hands tight around a mug of coffee, Matilda kept on talking. “Half the time as a child, she had her head in the clouds, dreaming of all the places she wanted to see in the world. She even kept a little notebook full of pictures she’d cut out of old ­magazines—­the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, ­Uluru…”

Matilda’s smile was fierce with belief, with hope. “I still have that notebook. I’m going to put it in her bag as a surprise when she leaves Golden Cove for the internship. My girl has so much ­talent—­it’ll take her all over the world, to every one of those places in her little notebook.”

Will sat down on a hard plastic chair beside Matilda. “I need to ask you some questions.”

Wild eyes, a face going white under the brown of her skin.

“I don’t know anything,” he said at once. “But while Nik leads the search, I want to check other avenues. Just in case.”

Matilda shoved her untouched mug of coffee into Will’s hands. “I make good coffee.”

He took a sip to keep things as normal as he could before he began to speak. “Here’s the thing, Matilda,” he said quietly. “Miriama is a beautiful young woman, and while we like to think of our country as a safe place in comparison to the rest of the world, we have our predators.”

He’d been worried his plain speaking would further rattle Matilda, but she squared her shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. “You’re taking this seriously,” she said. “You’re not treating her like a stupid ­nineteen-­year-­old who couldn’t be bothered to tell her auntie she was taking off.”

“That’s not the girl I know.” Will maintained the eye contact. “I know she ran away as a child, but she had her reasons.”

Matilda’s hands fisted in her lap. “My fault,” she said. “But the sweet girl’s never blamed me for it. She’s always had such aroha in her heart.”

“How friendly would Miriama be toward a stranger?” he asked, staying away from the topic of locals for now. “I’ve seen Cove residents pick up hitchhikers without thinking twice about it. And most people around here are used to helping ­tourists—­would she?”

Matilda nodded slowly. “A normal tourist who came into the café or maybe stopped her on the main street,” she said, “yes, Miriama would help.”

Will nodded and took another drink to show Matilda he was listening, that he was present. He’d had to ask, but he wasn’t truly concerned about the tourist angle; had any strangers been spotted in town, Will would’ve been told within an hour of Miriama’s disappearance. The locals liked the money the tourists brought in, but they also never forgot that these were outsiders.

Mrs. Keith would’ve definitely noticed an unfamiliar vehicle. But, to be safe, he’d also check with the bus that came through Golden Cove twice a day, in case they’d dropped off a passenger in town. He wasn’t expecting a positive answer. The bus stop was in the middle of town, right in front of the tourist ­center—­a new face would’ve been noticed and welcomed, especially with everyone having been rumbling about how few tourists they’d had recently, with the weather so changeable.