Annie didn’t have to ask what he meant by “careful.” She agreed it was a good idea. Jonas, after all, had never had a father who might have taught him about setting boundaries around young teenage girls. Annie left the Inn, but halfway down the hill, she remembered she’d forgotten to tell Kevin that Donna was still coming on Saturday. She supposed that it could wait. There was only so much bad news a person could handle in one day.

* * *

John was furious. Earl was grumpy. Lucy was defensive.

By the time Annie arrived, the three Lyons family members were sitting in John’s living room—John in his recliner, Earl in a wing chair, Lucy on one end of the love seat, her legs curled under her, her spine tipped slightly forward. All of them had their arms folded—the men, no doubt to block their anger; Lucy, as if she were trying to avoid an old-fashioned flogging. By the startled look on her face, Earl might have mentioned that if this were fifty years ago, that would have been a possibility.

“So,” Annie said as she stepped farther into the room, “what are we going to do about this little problem?”

“I took it down,” Lucy said.

“And as I told you,” John groused, “it was too late. For starters, you tagged Jonas, so all his friends saw it. It might even have been one of them who alerted the news feeds. Or someone who saw the ‘Vineyard’ tag and thought it was hilarious. I swear, everyone under twenty-five these days is too technology-smart and too common-sense-stupid.”

Annie sat in the wing chair opposite Earl. “I’ve never been good at deception,” she said, “but on the way over here, I tried to think of something we could post to deflect the spotlight—a way to shift the narrative.” It was a technique she’d often seen her ex-husband use, though she’d hidden her distress each time he’d boasted about it. The three generations now looked at her intently.

“I’m a cop, Annie,” John said. “It can’t be illegal.”

She shook her head. “Just a playful distraction.” She didn’t think that lying had become illegal, unless you were in court. She glanced at Earl. “I got the idea from something you said yesterday about the skull’s maybe being from an old Halloween prank. Or a kid’s toy, leftover from a party. So I thought, why not put those things together and come up with another post?”

The generations were silent for all of five seconds. Then Lucy asked, “Like what?”

“Like what if we posted a picture of a pumpkin carved up like a jack-o’-lantern and wrote: ‘Pranksters play early Halloween hoax on Martha’s Vineyard.’ Or something like that? Even though Halloween’s a long way off, I bet people would buy into the drama and believe it.”