I’m appalled. It isn’t that he didn’t talk about murder back then, or that I haven’t considered it lately myself. But a gun is one thing. Weighted is something else. Weighted means tying something heavy to a body and pushing it overboard. Weighted means premeditated.

I wish I could see his eyes to know if he’s serious, but the sliver of moon isn’t cooperating just then. “You’re saying my father shot her, then made sure the body would never surface? That is sick, Jack.” Turning, I start back toward the dock.

“Still running away?” he calls in a taunt that stops my flight.

He’s right. I whip back, needing this discussion. “He wouldn’t kill her. He loved her.”

“Lovers kill. They kill all the time.”

“I didn’t say they were lovers. I said he loved her. There’s a difference.”

“You don’t think they had sex?”

“Maybe before they were married, but not after. I remember us all together—cookouts, boat rides, even just sitting here on the beach. There were no secret looks, no sneaking off.”

“No? I remember my father barely talking to yours and your mother barely talking to mine. I remember your father touching my mother’s hand. I remember her touching his arm. Did they touch their own spouses? Ever?”

They did. Of course, they did.

At least, I think they did. Suddenly, though, as I struggle to see it, I’m not sure. “No?” I ask, wondering if I had missed something there.

But my indecision is short-lived. Of the other, I am entirely sure. “My father didn’t kill her. He was as frantic as any of us looking for her that night on the beach.”

“Sure he was,” Jack says. His head is lowered, eyes on his foot as his heel drills a hole in the sand. “He was afraid she’d wash up with a bullet in her head.”

The image makes me flinch, it’s that vivid. “And where was the blood? The boat was clean.”

His head comes up, eyes on mine. “Boats can be washed. Or maybe he pushed her into the water and shot her there. That’d really be clean.”

“You are sick.” I’m about to turn and walk—not run—walk away, when he holds up a conciliatory hand.

“Okay. Maybe it wasn’t that. But put yourself in my shoes. I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure out where she went and why. So forget family. Think business. She founded a company. She loved it more than anything on earth. There’s no way she would deliberately walk away from that, even if it was going downhill—especially if it was going downhill.”