“Ah, you’re right, good eye.” Izzy looked down at her own notebook, a line digging into the otherwise smooth skin between her brows. “This one’s November.”

“We need January.” Mia pulled half the stack closer. “Or mid to late December.”

“Yup.” Izzy didn’t quite roll her eyes at the obvious statement, but it was there in her voice.

Mia ignored it, her gaze tracing over the swooping scrawl until she found what she was looking for. There. January. Twist would have been on the island then.

“Got it,” Mia said.

“When was it that you saw him outside the station?”

The way Izzy asked the question was casual, almost like it was an afterthought.

“Late October? Maybe. Sometime in the fall.”

Izzy’s lips pinched and then relaxed, a quick flash of an emotion gone before it caught fully. “Maybe I’ll try to find the one around that time.”

“If it’s there,” Mia said, off-balance. The man’s face had already begun disintegrating in her memory, the distinct features blurring. They’d been fresh in that moment of shock, of seeing him pale and bloated, of recognizing him when she shouldn’t have. But the nose, the slope of his forehead, his jawline—it had all faded along with the adrenaline.

Now, she just remembered being cold, pulling her jacket tighter, keeping her eyes on the indistinct figure that stayed a shadow until the headlights had swept across his face. They’d locked eyes across the street that first time.

The way fear had slipped into her bloodstream, though, that she remembered well. The animal instinct that said run before her brain could question why. Something about him had set off her alarms.

Mia pressed her thumb against the thin skin of her temple, running it in circles along the hard edge of bone. It was then Mama set a mug of tea at her elbow.

Nodding her thanks, Mia curled her fingers around the thick cup and blew on the steam. “Did you ever talk to him, Mama?”

“The reporter?” Mama’s back was already to them while she scrubbed at a pan in the sink, her shoulders hunched. “Saw him a couple times.”

Izzy looked up from the pages she’d been flipping through but didn’t interrupt.

“Sammy said he was poking around the lighthouse,” Mia prodded.

The pan clattered against the metal drying rack, the sound loud and abrupt. “Might have been.”

“Anywhere else he was looking around?” Mia asked.

“Mm-hmm.” Mama plunged her hands back in the soapy water. “Went up to the Bell mansion a bunch of times.”

The Bell mansion. The lighthouse. These were the dots lining up into a shape, one Mia could see but didn’t want to. Mama must have seen it as well.

It keeps coming back to that summer, doesn’t it?

“Is the mansion empty now?”

This time a bowl rattled against the pan. “Nope.”