37.

Are you sure you’re okay?” Porter asked as we walked side by side through trees the color of burnt toast.

It was the second time he’d asked this question since we started walking. I knew I seemed too calm, and that was part of the reason Lot and Danny suspected I had something to do with Gemma’s disappearance. I’d never been one to externalize my emotions. I could play an emotional character because I saved my own, bottled them up and let them age like wine. Even after Miranda went missing, I had not freaked out. I hadn’t raged and cried and beaten my fists against the walls. I had shut down instead. I drank instead. I went home with men I barely knew instead.

“I’ll think about me once I know Gemma is safe,” I told Porter.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” he said in a gentle, probing voice that made me feel like I was being handled with kid gloves. Like he thought that any moment now I was going to break down and collapse into tears.

“Gemma wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for me,” I said. “She wouldn’t have been a target. She wouldn’t have been on that road. Yesterday I said some things to her that maybe I shouldn’t have said, and so she left. If I’d controlled my temper, everything would have been different.”

“You can’t think that way,” Porter said, cutting off my self-recrimination. “Sisters fight. It doesn’t mean you’re to blame.”

Yes. Normal sisters fought. They fought about sweaters borrowed without permission, and secret diaries violated. But Gemma and I weren’t your average sisters, and what was happening to us was a thousand miles from normal.

We walked in silence for a moment, keeping our eyes on our surroundings, though as far as I could tell there was nothing helpful to see. In the distance we could hear the rest of the search party members calling out, “Gemma! Gemma! Gemma!” on repeat. Porter kept trying to delve deeper into the woods, toward the voices, but I subtly steered us back in the direction I wanted to go.

“So,” I said, breaking the silence, “how did you come to be close with the Krons?”

Porter glanced at me, but I didn’t detect any caginess in his demeanor. “Soren was on set when Kron filmed that scene from A Stranger Comes to Town at the inn. We were the same age—nine or ten, I guess—and since we were the only kids on set, we started hanging out. Movie sets can be pretty boring if you don’t have a job to do.”

“Believe me, they can be boring even if you do. So you didn’t know Soren before that? You didn’t go to school together?”

“Jonas doesn’t believe in conventional education, and even if he did I doubt he would have found our local public schools up to his standards. Soren had a private tutor who lived with them, so technically I guess he was homeschooled. I think it was lonely for him, though, living in this mysterious red mansion on the hill. Most kids in town didn’t know what to make of him. He seemed like a different breed of human, so they avoided him, but not on purpose. Not maliciously.”

I nodded. “I can relate to that.” Like Soren, I hadn’t attended traditional school. I’d had on-set tutors. And I hadn’t had friends growing up. I’d had sisters, and I’d had costars, and every once in a while I made the mistake of thinking I’d made a real friend, only to discover I was being used for my money or my closet full of designer labels on loan, or so my faux BFF could meet the swoony boys who ran in my circle, most of them egomaniacal, floppy-haired monsters.

“So Soren didn’t have a lot of friends before you?” I asked.

“I don’t think he had any friends before me. Lucky for him, I wasn’t the most popular kid, either. You may find this hard to believe, but I was kind of a geek.” He flashed a smile at me.

“I have no idea how anyone could get that impression,” I said, smiling back, feeling the urge to lean over and kiss him. Not a fuck-me kiss, but a kiss for the hell of it. A kiss to say, I like you, that’s all. I resisted the impulse. The distraction. The feelings.

“And we had a lot in common,” Porter went on. “I was into movies, and Soren practically grew up on set.”

It was the segue I’d been waiting for. “Did Soren ever consider going into film, following in his father’s footsteps?”

“He made a few halfhearted attempts, but I don’t think Soren’s got the attention span for making movies. It’s a point of contention between him and Jonas, as you might have detected last night. Jonas wanted him to carry on the family legacy. Soren wrote and directed a few short films, but they’ve never seen the light of day, which is probably for the best.”

“Why is that?”

“Let’s just say Soren did not inherit Jonas’s gift for narrative. He’s not a storyteller. He can imitate someone else’s style, but he’s got none of his own.”

I studied Porter’s expression, his body language. Was he holding back? He didn’t seem to be. Maybe he didn’t know what happened between Soren and Maguire, the writer he’d supposedly plagiarized.

“So what does Soren do?” I asked.

Porter shrugged, burrowing his face down deeper in his scarf. “He’s helping organize the film festival this year. And he’s executive produced some projects that are in the works. Other than that, let’s see…he travels. He spends money. He has sex with exotic women on yachts. The usual wealthy-playboy stuff. It’s funny, the Krons have always been rich. Jonas grew up just as wealthy and privileged as Soren, but he became this brilliant auteur. He was always driven. It seems like some people are just born with the spark. Soren wishes he had it, but that’s not who he is.”

I sighed inwardly. If Soren didn’t have the attention span to make a decent short film, could he be ambitious enough to abduct a series of women over the course of fifteen years and get away with it?

Porter ducked under a branch, and then paused to look at me. “Is there a reason you’re asking so many questions about Soren?”

“I’ve always been curious about the Krons,” I said, shrugging like it didn’t matter to me either way if we changed the subject. “They’re Hollywood royalty, but no one actually knows that much about them. Except you,” I said, and kept walking in the direction I wanted to go. “What about Annika? Was Soren happy when she came to live with them?”

Porter hesitated a moment before responding. “He was thrilled to have her there at first. So was I.”

I looked at him. “At first?”

He nodded, frowning a little. “Annika was kind of a train wreck. Her life before she moved here had been unstable, but it didn’t necessarily get less erratic once she started working with Jonas. Debuting as the lead in one of Jonas’s films was a lot of pressure for someone that young. For anyone, actually. He’s hard on his actors. It was out of the frying pan and into the fire for her.”

Into the fire, indeed, I thought.

“I’m sure she was working through what happened with her mother, too,” I pointed out. “The suicide attempt, her mental illness…”

Porter’s eyes cut to me again, and this time lingered a little longer. “Not many people know about that,” he said after a pause. I ignored the subtle question in his tone. How do you know about that? “This is hearsay, but supposedly Annika had several breakdowns while shooting The Girl and the Wolf. She wanted to see a doctor, but Jonas was afraid they’d prescribe her medication that would flatten her and affect her performance. So instead of going on happy pills, she drank and did drugs to get through it. She kept her self-medicating secret, but Soren knew because…well, I shouldn’t say.”

“Because he was the one getting it for her,” I guessed, and Porter nodded, looking at the ground. I had played a bipolar character on a three-episode arc of medical drama, and had done some research about it to prepare. Drinking and hard drugs exacerbated bipolar disorder, as they did with most budding mental illnesses. Her use may have tipped her over the edge she was already teetering on.

“It wasn’t Soren’s finest moment,” Porter continued. “I would have tried to stop him, but he didn’t admit it to me until after Annika was already gone.” Porter reached into the pocket of his anorak and withdrew a balled-up pair of black gloves. He inserted his hands into them, squinting up at the sky, the denim-colored clouds looking heavier by the minute. “I wished I could have gotten to know her better, maybe at a different time in her life. She was a mess, but she had real talent. I’ll admit I had a little bit of a crush on her, along with every other guy in town. You’ve seen her picture, I’m sure.”

“She was stunning,” I said.

“She was,” he agreed, and smiled ruefully. “But she didn’t give me the time of day. Not surprising. Even the other actors she worked with couldn’t get close to her. As soon as a take was finished, Annika ignored them, went completely cold.”

My cheeks heated as I remembered doing this same thing, not because I was a snob or a bitch or any of the things I seemed to be, but because sometimes, after finishing a scene, all I felt was emptiness. I had nothing left to give to the people around me. I gave it all to the camera. Hearing about Annika, I felt a growing connection to her, even down to the fact that she hadn’t been allowed to take any medication to help mentally stabilize her. Desiree had done the same thing to me, while simultaneously loading Miranda up on prescription meds.

“So Annika didn’t have any close relationships with people on set? No friends or boyfriends?”

“The only guy I ever saw her pay any attention to besides Jonas was Niklas Larsen. Nik spoke Norwegian, but I think there was more to it than that. Something about him fascinated her. Maybe it was his lack of fascination with her. Unlike every other guy I saw, he didn’t try to get close to her. He didn’t want anything from her. He was too wrapped up in his own isolation. Keep in mind, I’m just speculating here. Oh—” he said, and stopped walking. “I guess we should head in another direction.”

“Why?”

He pointed into the distance. “There’s the fence for the sanctuary.” He checked his watch, his brow scrunched in worry. “I need to head back soon. The festival guests have probably started to arrive, and my staff is going to be overwhelmed.”

“You should go back,” I urged him. “Take care of things at the inn. I’ll be fine out here.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, shaking his head adamantly. “I’m not leaving you alone out here.”

“Do you really think whoever took Gemma is prowling the woods right now?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You could get lost.”

“Fine, but I’m not going back yet, and if you’re going to stay with me, then you need to do what I say and not try to stop me.”

“What are you planning on doing?” he asked, his eyes wary.

In answer, I started walking again, straight toward the sanctuary.