He’d left fourteen years ago, the day after Christmas. Until that moment, Mike and Carol (yep, the parents’ names on The Brady Bunch) had been together since high school, staying faithful all through college, even though Mike had gone to the University of Michigan while Carol went to Barnard in New York City. They got married a week after they had both graduated. They had three children in two years: the twin girls, then Patrick. There were no more children after that, and Grace and Caitlin had often speculated on how their parents had managed to find a Church-approved method of birth control that actually worked.

Then there was that day after Christmas when Mike called the family together, told them that he was leaving to be with Angela Hernandez, a widow who had three children of her own. He left with one bag of clothes, plus his golf clubs. Caitlin and Grace had just turned eleven, and they had opposite reactions to the sudden decampment. Caitlin had made a silent list of what needed to be done, dedicating herself to helping her mother and her siblings get through the ordeal. Grace had gotten mad, at one point sneaking out of their house late at night and bicycling to their dad’s new home to throw rocks through their windows. That was why Carol blamed her ex-husband for all of Grace’s outbursts and bad relationships, in particular any relationship she had with a man older than she was. Truth was, there’d been a few, but Caitlin, as much as she blamed her father for many things, tended to think that Grace’s personality had been formed long before the Christmas when their father had left home.

Caitlin went to the motel’s window and stared out into the half-empty parking lot. A gull skimmed by, just a few feet above a parked Suburban. It reminded her she was in a seaside town. Just two days earlier, Grace had been alive here, maybe falling for another man. Bill’s son, Harry, of all people. And it had been Harry who found her body. How was he not a suspect? He must have been at least somewhat upset at Grace and her role as his father’s mistress. Mistress. The word almost made Caitlin laugh out loud. But that was what her sister had been, right? Nothing more than a mistress to a man old enough to be her father. And she’d gotten killed because of it, despite the detective’s asking questions as though there might have been some other motive for Grace’s death. The whole thing was lurid, and she hadn’t been surprised to see the news vans gathering outside of the police station earlier.

She began to have a conversation in her head with Grace, something she’d done her entire life. Can you believe it? You were murdered.