But friends covered for each other, helped hide bodies. What if one of the three had been the father of Monroe’s baby and he had snapped? And then he’d called his buddies to come clean up the mess. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. “Was he handsome? Henry, that is.”

“Um.” Mia looked up like she was trying to pull up his picture in her mind. Edie huffed and shuffled in her seat. “I guess?”

“Could he have been the older man Monroe was seeing?”

“What?” This time it was Edie who was taken off guard.

Mia’s eyes slipped to her mother’s face. “There’s been talk that Monroe was seeing someone other than Asher.”

“No, that can’t be.” Edie crossed her arms over her chest. “Those two only had eyes for each other that summer.”

“You think?”

That wasn’t the impression they’d been given. Izzy heard her own doubt reflected in Mia’s voice.

“I thought she was bad news at first, God’s truth.” Edie nodded. “But I’d never seen that boy like that before.”

And that was more in line with what Lacey had said. Maybe Monroe had seemed interested at first, to hook Asher, but had gotten bored once the newness had worn off.

“So. I was out of it?” Mia got them back on track, and Izzy guessed her thought process hadn’t seemed much different from Izzy’s. They knew all of this. “When Earl brought us back here.”

“Lacey wasn’t much better, still had blood on her,” Edie said. “But she was somewhat coherent.”

“What did she say?” Mia asked.

The ghost of Edie’s earlier assertion hung in the air. Earl Bishop was a good man.

On an exhale, Edie put her tea down and then sat back against her chair. “She said she didn’t know how Earl had gotten there so fast.”

“To the lighthouse?” Mia clarified.

Edie nodded. “She’d run to tell her parents, but on the way back, Earl was already at the meadow. She kept asking me how he’d gotten there so fast.”

Mia chewed on her bottom lip, and Izzy kept her mouth shut, not wanting to draw attention to herself.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Edie finally said. “He could have been out on patrol. Received the call on his walkie-talkie.”

“I don’t remember when he showed up,” Mia said. “And Jimmy was there?”

“She didn’t say anything about him.”

“You know he was there, though, right?”

Edie shrugged. “That’s what people said.”

Mia leaned forward, her forearms on her thighs. “What was the talk afterward? What did everyone think happened? Not what they told investigators, but what did they really think?”

“Don’t you mind that,” Edie said, her eyes shifting to Izzy once more. So very aware of a stranger in her presence.