“Of course. I was four when they died. Almost five.”

But did she?

Of course, she had images of a couple, but nothing concrete. There had been a backyard with an empty concrete fish pond and a battered picnic table and chairs. She remembered her mother—wasp-thin and dark-haired—lounging in short shorts, the end of her cigarette glowing beneath the drooping, shifting branches of a willow tree. Her father always seemed to be working in the garage, hammering noisily, and there had been a basement, right? Stairs twisting down to a dark, dank-smelling vestibule with a locked door . . . or had those images been dreams, conjured memories that had never really existed?

Her throat went dry.

“Do you remember your adoptive parents ever talking about visiting them?”

“No. They weren’t close . . .” Her voice faded as she glanced up at him. “You know all this.” They’d discussed it once or twice during their marriage.

“I don’t remember ever seeing any pictures of your biological parents.”

“It was before computers and camera phones and the like. Any pictures were lost. . . .” Or so she’d been told. She wanted to argue with Slade, and her stomach knotted at the thought. This whole new scenario, that her adoptive parents had lied to her, shook her to the core.

“But you know your parents’ names? Your name?”

“Yes. Mary and Michael Brown.”

“Common names.”

“Yeah, I know. But why would they lie? Mom and Dad—Nadine and Gene—what would they be hiding?”

“Maybe that’s what Cammie was trying to find out.”

“Oh, God,” she whispered, thinking about her sister. Cammie always did have a flair for the dramatic, an overactive imagination.

Slade tilted his head back, and she watched his throat move as he took another long pull from his bottle. “Maybe that was why she was killed.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense. It happened so long ago. . . .” She tried to pin down the facts, the details of her parents’ deaths. She’d been told that a plane crash had taken her parents’ lives. A day trip. Valerie and Camille had been left with a family friend when tragedy had struck and the plane had gone down. With both sets of grand-parents already dead, the small, grief-ridden family had to scramble to find a suitable home for the children. Valerie and Camille had been sent to St. Elsinore’s until the family could sort things out.

The end result had been placement with the Renards, as Nadine was a third cousin to Mary Brown, the only relative with the means or desire to take in a preschooler and an infant.

“Cammie didn’t tell you she was looking into your biological parents?”

“No.” Val shook her head.

“Why not?”