Uncle Clive was my mother’s older brother. He’d been around when the killings took place, and he could fill in a lot of gaps in my memory, bring me up to speed on my half brother, Geoff, who’d gone to prison at sixteen for second-degree murder.

“Okay,” I said.

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

THE CAFETERIA AT Sunset Villa wasn’t much, so we walked, my long-lost uncle and I, to a nearby Starbucks, with outside tables and misters to cool the customers. Even in April, it’s warm in Phoenix.

I didn’t think I could choke down anything—the whole scenario was an excuse to talk, after all—but Clive bought us both a cup of classic roast. Except for a few university students bent over textbooks and one doughy guy with piercings and vampire teeth—a poet or a serial killer or both—we had the place to ourselves.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Clive said, as he joined me under the shade of a green-and-white striped umbrella, setting down our cups. His black metal chair, which matched the black metal table, scraped on the patio stones as he drew it back to sit.

I didn’t answer. After twenty-three years, I didn’t know where to start.

It wasn’t that there was too much to say. It was that there wasn’t too much.

Tentatively, my mother’s big brother and only living sibling touched the back of my hand. “It’s okay,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that tears smarted, like acid, behind my eyeballs. “I used to carry you on my shoulders. Help you find Easter eggs. Do you remember?”

I shook my head. Nebulous memories were teasing the far borders of my mind, but I couldn’t seem to corner any of them long enough to take hold.

“We looked everywhere for you.” He spoke quietly, but a muscle bunched in his jaw as he took a sip of his coffee. “My God, it was bad enough, what happened to Evie and Ron, but when you went missing on top of it—”

Evie and Ron Mayhugh. My parents. My work-frazzled, distracted, waitress mother. My moody, chronically unemployed father. For a moment, I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye. It was an image I’d longed for, wracked my brains for, during many a sleepless night, and now, suddenly, there it was, a vivid little tableau branded on the inside of my forehead.

“How did you find Lillian?” I asked. The air seemed to pulse around both of us, as though charged, and there was a slow, dull thudding in my ears.

For a nanosecond, Clive looked confused. Of course, I thought. He’d known Lillian as Doris Blanchard. He made the leap quickly, though, and something eased in his face.