And Then Everything Unraveled by Jennifer Sturman Page A

and what she’d intended to do. Patience wasn’t the only sister whose name didn’t fit—T.K. was involved in so many causes that it was hard to keep track, and she was pretty zealous about them all.
    The obvious move would be to get in touch with Thad. He’d always insisted on knowing where T.K. was, in case anything urgent came up—he’d definitely have the itinerary for this last trip. He’d also probably have a good sense of what she wastrying to accomplish, since T.K. had funded the excursion through TrueTech.org, the company’s philanthropic arm.
    But I was hoping that if I kept a low profile where Thad was concerned, he’d forget about the whole training-me-to-take-over-the-business thing. And given that he was the first person to insist that T.K. was dead, reaching out to him was far more likely to result in another lecture about denial than anything remotely helpful.
    No, Thad was a nonstarter. But T.K. was enough of a public figure that there would be lots of information about her on the Internet, and some of it would have to be about recent events. So I pulled up a browser window and Googled T.K.’s name.
    And while I knew my mother was pretty famous, at least in tech circles, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
    On the screen was a long list of blue links, and each link led to an obituary.
    I felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the room. The text went blurry, and there was a ringing noise in my ears. Without conscious direction, my hand reached out to the mouse, and the browser closed, but the images still seemed to linger on the screen.
    No matter how confident a person is that she’s right and everyone else is wrong, Google returning several hundred links that seem to agree with all the people who are wrong isn’t themost comforting experience. If anything, it’s the sort of experience that can make a person hyperventilate.
    Which meant it was several minutes before I felt like I could breathe normally and face the computer again. But this time around I was more careful. I opened up a fresh browser window and went directly to TrueTech.org.
    T.K. believes in keeping overhead low, and this was particularly true for the company’s philanthropic activities—she always said she’d rather spend money on causes than fancy offices and staff. As a result, things like updating the Web site sometimes fell through the cracks, since nobody was paid to do it. And I was in luck—it looked like the site hadn’t been touched since my mother left. There was a link right off the home page to a page that was all about the Antarctica excursion, like it hadn’t even begun yet.
    The stated objectives were to “Document the impact of global warming on Antarctic ice shelves and explore other environmental occurrences in the area,” and the schedule called for the participants to meet up in Buenos Aires and catch a flight to Ushuaia, a port in Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of Argentina. From there, they would board a small ship called the Polar Star, which was supposed to sail down and around the western side of the Antarctic continent, stopping every so often to do whatever tests they had planned and returning via New Zealand. The entire trip was scheduled to take nineteen days.
    This was all still sort of vague, but at least I had more to work with. I made some notes in my otherwise-empty notebook, and then I went back to Google and typed in Polar Star. And that’s when things got seriously weird.
    According to the articles I found, the ship had sent its SOS signals on the morning of its seventh day out, from a point in the Amundsen Sea roughly between Thurston Island and Cape Dart. After that, it went radio silent. Meanwhile, the first rescuers arrived at the spot only an hour later and there was nothing at all to be seen, just like Thad said. The ship had vanished into thin air.
    But it turned out that it wasn’t easy for a ship to simply vanish, and especially not that