Daughter of Mine

Hazel arrives back at her apartment in Charlotte around midnight. She realizes that Skyler has left her backpack in the back seat, so she brings it upstairs as well. Hazel keeps thinking back to the investigation that Perry conducted after Libby’s disappearance. She blames herself for not asking him more questions at the time and recalls receiving a blank postcard from somewhere in Mexico during her college years. Hazel always assumed that it was secretly meant to tell her that Libby had made a new life for herself and was well. She tries to dismiss the past from her mind and falls asleep.

The next morning, Hazel sees her business partners Keira and Luke, arrive to their office on the first floor, below Hazel’s apartment. Keira and Luke are eager to hear the details of Hazel’s trip, but she doesn’t want to talk about her family. She promises to send them pictures of the house she inherited so they can assess its rehab possibilities. Hazel then tries calling Caden to let him know she has Skyler’s backpack. Jamie still hasn’t returned, so a babysitter answers the phone. She then tries talking to Gage, but he is distracted by the case of a missing teen.

By Tuesday afternoon, Hazel is back on her way to Mirror Lake. She doesn’t tell anyone she’s coming. She plans to call on Jamie’s mother, Sonny Varino. Sonny works as a maid at the Mirror Lake Motel and lives in a rundown cottage. She comes out to greet Hazel, and the two sit on the porch to chat. Sonny says she hasn’t seen her daughter for some time, though she doesn’t seem surprised that Jamie left Caden. She insinuates that this is a problem that all the Holt men have. “Wives, leaving the Holt men? […] Your mother, Audrey. God, I don’t even remember the name of Roy’s wife, that marriage was so quick” (138). She also says that Perry’s first wife was on the brink of walking out on him when she had her fatal bicycle accident.

After leaving Sonny’s, Hazel picks up some groceries and goes back to Perry’s house. When she enters, she feels the strange sensation that someone else has been inside during her absence, so she searches every room. She then has a quiet evening and falls asleep. At midnight, she’s awakened by the lights from the motion detectors outside. She thinks someone must be out there hiding in the shadows.

Hazel strides outdoors to see who might be watching her. She runs into Nico, who also saw the light from next door. He promised to keep an eye on the place, not realizing that Hazel had returned. She invites him inside. Hazel’s bedroom brings back memories of their high school romance. They both reveal they are still single, and they have sex. Hazel believes that their sexual encounters only ever happen during times of emotional stress and that the relationship won’t last. She concludes, “We didn’t work long-term because, I believed, we were both more interested in the secret. We loved the idea of the unknown, more than the known” (155). They fall asleep together, only to be awakened by the sound of smoke detectors going off. After investigating, Hazel assumes that the batteries are dead. Nico leaves because he must be at school early.

By six in the morning, Hazel has checked all the smoke alarms and finds that only one contains a battery. The rest have been removed. As she gets ready to leave for the store, Roy arrives at the house. He has been checking the mailbox for unpaid bills. Hazel belatedly realizes that she will need to take care of the utilities going forward. At the Country Store, Hazel gets more batteries. She also picks up some Private Property signs to keep gawkers away from the spot where the car was pulled from the lake. The boy behind the counter is unknown to her. When Nico walks in to purchase his morning coffee, he tells Hazel that the boy’s name is Levi and that he is one of Nico’s students.

Back at the house, Hazel installs the new batteries and goes outside to take pictures of the house for Keira. Then, she goes to work in her father’s office. One wall is decorated with five mismatched mirrors. Hazel finds them off-putting but turns her attention to Perry’s computer, gaining access to his email account and bank records. Both his savings and checking accounts contain very small balances. She notices that Perry had been withdrawing sums every month as his health declined. Hazel starts to wonder if this is the reason for her brothers’ hostility. “Did Gage and Caden already know? Had they checked the accounts immediately, and realized the truth? At the time of his death, our father had nothing left. Nothing but an old truck in the garage, and this house” (168).

As she works at the computer in the late morning, Hazel sees a flash of movement crossing the multiple mirrors on the wall. The town has experienced a rash of petty burglaries recently, and Hazel wonders if a thief is prowling outside. She discovers a boat trying to dock on her property. The two occupants are filming her home. She angrily confronts them with her Private Property sign and learns that they host a true crime YouTube channel called Water Hunters. Siblings Miles and Amber are interested in the two submerged vehicles in the lake. Amber says, “The police aren’t gonna go searching for a problem. They’ll pick it up after you find it for them. That’s it” (171). Her words spark Hazel’s secret fears that the local police, including her father, are more interested in covering up crimes than solving them.

After the Water Hunters leave, Hazel drives to Reflection Point to have lunch. While there, she encounters a retired detective named Pete, who seems pleased to see her, unlike everybody else in town. Pete knows all the local gossip. He is aware that Sonny drinks and does drugs and that one of the Holt boys is having an affair with a waitress named Felicity. At that moment, Al and Serena arrive for lunch. Al shows Pete the photo of a missing teen named Max Falkner, who has been gone for two days. After finishing her lunch, Hazel drives to Caden’s house to return Skyler’s backpack, hoping to find someone home. Nobody is there, so Hazel searches the backpack for a spare key.

Inside it, she finds an old photo of Caden and Gage with their mother that Jamie must have stumbled across while cleaning out the house on Sunday. Hazel pockets the photo, intending to put it back in the album at her own house when Caden and Skyler arrive. Caden is still angry and now suggests that Hazel must have said something to Jamie to make her want to leave. Before they get into a fight, Hazel drives back to her own house. There, she takes a good look at the photo. Audrey Holt and her boys are posed beside the first car that was dragged out of Mirror Lake.

Hazel is shaken by this discovery because it implicates her father in the disappearance of both his wives: “If there was a pattern, it was this: the cars of Perry Holt’s two wives had both ended up in Mirror Lake, and one way or another, both of them were gone” (185). Hazel is now convinced that Jamie recognized Audrey’s car in the photo, too, and this might have spooked her. Hazel tries to see Sonny again to press her for more information about her missing daughter. At Sonny’s house, Hazel finds nobody home. She then goes to Mirror Lake Motel, where Sonny works, but the clerk says the maid hasn’t been in that day.

At home that evening, Nico arrives with carry-out chicken. Hazel shows him the old photo and explains her theory about the reason for Jamie’s disappearance. Gage calls to invite Hazel to a family dinner the following night to make peace, and she accepts. Later that night, Hazel takes a bag of trash to the garbage bin and is surprised to see a collection of smoke alarm batteries inside. She concludes that someone got into the house and removed all the batteries the night she slept with Nico.

Alarmed, Hazel calls Gage to tell him about the break-in. He reassures her that the rash of burglaries was probably just high school pranksters because nothing valuable is ever taken. Hazel decides to check Perry’s landline for any incoming calls. She is shocked to find a message from Jamie two days earlier, asking Hazel to meet her at their private spot on the lake. This is an overlook called The Barrel. When Hazel arrives, Jamie isn’t there, but Hazel finds an instant camera lying on the ground, which she takes. A policeman shows up on the scene and seems suspicious that Hazel is lurking there after dark: “‘It’s not a safe place,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be out here alone.’ Which sounded suddenly like both a warning and a threat” (201).

The following morning, Hazel drives back to Sonny’s house to see if she knows Jamie’s whereabouts. Hazel finds Sonny dead, apparently from a fentanyl overdose. She was known to use drugs, and her death may have been accidental, but Hazel is shaken by the experience. She thinks, “All these mothers in Mirror Lake, never making it out of town. Hadn’t Sonny warned me of that, just a couple days ago?” (206).