“You were right about human nature, Gunner—apparently anyone is capable of murder. But you were wrong about something else: There are still secrets in a small town. Agnes here has a little secret she’s been keeping for years: It seems Victoria Braden is her daughter.”

“What? Agnes—is that true?”

“It’s true,” Nick said. “She’s got the birth certificate and the adoption papers to prove it. Apparently she wanted to give her daughter a better life than she had, so she forged a whole new ancestry for her. She turned little ‘Beulah’ into a bona fide Virginia blue blood—the kind of woman who might catch the eye of a U.S. senator.”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“Not entirely. I visited Victoria Braden; I managed to get a sample of her hair and I ran a DNA test to determine her haplogroup.”

“What’s that?”

“Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child. It never changes, but random mutations occur over time—mutations that are specific to certain people groups. There might be a mutation that only Native Americans possess—so if I test your DNA and I find that mutation, I know that somewhere in your ancestry there was a female of Native American descent. Victoria Braden’s haplogroup showed a mixed ancestry—not the simple Indo-European descent you’d expect. I knew Victoria wasn’t what she claimed to be; this just explains it.”

“But how could Victoria keep this a secret for all these years?”

“I’m not sure she even knows.” Nick looked at Agnes. “Have you ever told her, Agnes? Does Victoria know that you’re her real mom?”

“Told her just the other day,” Agnes whispered. “When she came to visit Endor—when she came home.”

Gunner sat down beside the old woman. “Agnes—how could you carry this burden all by yourself all these years? How could you keep it a secret?”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t easy,” Nick said. “I have a feeling three different men were about to uncover that little secret over the years. That’s why you killed them, isn’t it, Agnes—to keep your daughter’s real identity a secret?”

No response.

“What about Alena’s father? That was a little different, wasn’t it?”

“It was that dog of his,” she mumbled. “He could find the graves.”

“That’s why you had to kill Marge too—you thought she found all the graves at the Patriot Center, and you were afraid she might find even more. Are there more, Agnes? How many more?”

She didn’t reply.