Content Warning: This section discusses addiction and mental illness (and the social stigma surrounding these topics), death, and death by suicide.

The narrator offers to tell the reader a story with a terrible ending. In March 1980, two men kidnap factory owner Carl Fletcher from the driveway of his Middle Rock home. They throw him into the back of his own car and drive it to an undisclosed location an hour away. Carl’s pregnant wife, Ruth, only suspects that something is wrong when she calls Carl’s secretary and finds out that he never arrived at the polystyrene factory.

The case is escalated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) within 24 hours. The FBI agents exasperate Ruth and Carl’s mother, Phyllis, with questions, so they call in Carl’s cousin, a lawyer named Arthur Lindenblatt, to help. Arthur’s responses clue the FBI in to the Fletchers’ absurd wealth, which provides a motive for the kidnapping. Phyllis taps into her network of social organizations to launch a community search for Carl. The Fletchers’ neighbors, as well as the teachers of their two sons, gossip over the news, but no one manages to locate him.

Five days pass. Ruth lies awake in bed, wondering if superstition could have prevented their bad fortune.