It came to me suddenly that I didn’t know thing one about the Larimers, or the Mayhughs, for that matter.

I hadn’t even thought to ask Uncle Clive for the genealogical particulars, or Boomer, either.

I’d Googled the senator and Barbara, and their progeny to boot.

And I’d stopped there, as if there had been no previous generations. As if Mom and Dad and all of the rest of them had simply sprung into being one day, fully grown.

“Holy crap,” I muttered, stunned at the scope of my oversight, slamming the last yearbook shut.

Mavis started a little, behind her counter.

I took the four volumes back to her in a stack, thanked her and left.

I drove to the library next. It was about the size of Greer’s closet, but there was a computer allotted to public use. I waited, none too patiently, until the matron cruising for God-knows-what went offline and wandered away, then I grabbed the chair, bellied up to the keyboard and logged on.

There were a few newspaper pieces on the murders tucked away in various archives, and several chronicling my abduction. I’d seen them before, but I scanned them again. No mention of either Mom’s parents or Dad’s. I tried the senator’s site and read his biography, but he too seemed to have skipped childhood and simply appeared on the planet as an adult with a political agenda.

I printed out the whole batch, paid the librarian for the copies and got back in my car.

Boomer was in the cottage at the cemetery when I walked in. He was just opening one of those old-fashioned black lunch boxes, the kind with a thermos in the lid. He paused in the act of removing the wax paper wrapping from what looked like a ham and cheese on rye and studied me with polite uncertainty.

He started to rise, and I gestured for him to stay seated.

“Did you know the Larimers and the Mayhughs?” I asked, right out. “My grandparents, I mean?”

Boomer sagged a little. He’d been a fount of information all along, but now, all of a sudden, he’d dried up.

I waited.

Boomer finally relented, but with obvious reluctance.

“Evie and Clive, they was orphaned real young,” he said. “Come from Tucson or Phoenix originally, I think. Some folks named Wilkerson took them in as foster children, brought them here to Cactus Bend. The Wilkersons is gone now, of course. Been gone a long while.”

A bleak shadow fell over my heart. “What about the Mayhughs?”

Boomer wanted to look away, I could see that, but he held my gaze. I braced myself for yet another non-Hallmark moment.