“Lots of other possibilities,” Tabitha said. “Cousins. Neighbors. Parents worked together. Parents were friends. Members of the same church. Fathers were in the same bowling league. Mothers on the same softball team.”

“Stop already,” I said, laughing, because it sounded as if she could have kept going for hours. “Small towns, I get it. But how do we learn if any of that is true?”

“No idea. And there’s something else, remember? There was bad blood between Ariella and Emily. And there’s the wild card of Cody. You said he acted very strangely in front of his friends when you mentioned Brown’s and Emily’s deaths. We need to understand that reaction better.”

She was right. We tossed around idea after idea for an hour, then started to get downright silly. When we started talking seriously about putting an advertisement in the newspaper for the killer, we knew it was time to call it quits.

“You know what?” Tabitha asked. “I think it’s time for a nap. Maybe we’ll wake up with some great ideas.”

I couldn’t think of the last time I’d taken a nap, but her yawn was contagious, and the previous late night combined with the morning’s ride was catching up with me. “Sounds like a good plan,” I said, and promised to text her straightaway if I thought of any ideas, good or bad. Unfortunately, when I woke up, what greeted me was a faceful of Eddie fur.

“Seriously?” I asked, then immediately regretted saying anything because when you wake up with an Eddie flopped over your neck and start talking, what you immediately get is cat hair in your mouth.

I did the pfff! pfff! thing a few times, setting Eddie hair to midair floating, then flung back the afghan Cousin Celeste had given me for Christmas, slid out from under Eddie, and jumped off the bed.

“Figured something out,” I told Eddie. “Aren’t you proud?”

My furry pal blinked at me. Didn’t say anything.

“About Warren,” I said. “Remember? He was on the bowling team for Gardner Insurance. Either he works there or he knows someone that does. And do you know who’s been doing some work for them?”

“Mrr,” Eddie said. Or sort of said, because it trailed off into a wide yawn.

“That’s right. Pam Fazio.”

My friend Pam, who’d not long ago sworn off doing any graphic design ever again the rest of her life because it reminded her too much of her corporate life, had recently come to the conclusion that she missed design. “Just a little, though,” she’d told me last summer. We’d been on the front steps of her eclectic retail store, and both of us had been savoring our morning coffee. “A couple of clients is all I want. And I get to pick who they are.”