Right away, almost without warning, she starts to break down. I lead her to the same room where I interviewed Ruth Turner. She’s already smeared her makeup by the time we get there. I push a tissue box in her direction. She takes one, then another, and dabs at her eyes, trying her best to keep the morning’s work intact.

Laurna opens her mouth and her words come at me. Each is delivered on its own, a loose chain of what happened to her sister’s family.

“Lake Crescent.”

“Boat.”

“Accident.”

“All three drowned.”

“Hudson, Carrie and Ellie.”

“The Burbanks.”

“Ellie.”

“Never found.”

Laurna stops long enough to open her purse and take out a photograph. She slides it across the table. I look down, then we lock eyes.

“She’s a ringer for Sarah Wheaton,” I say.

“I think so. I think it is Ellie, Detective. My sister and my brother-in-law’s bodies were recovered a few days after the accident. The lake is deep. We were lucky we found them. I don’t think she’s down there. I think she’s here.”

She taps a pink nail against the border of the photograph.

“That’s her.”

“Like I said, it looks like her.”

“The detective told me after the autopsy, they had overdosed on drugs and were too stoned to save themselves. I disagree. They weren’t druggies.”

I feel for her. Family members are often clueless about what transpires between the times they see each other at family gatherings like Christmas, birthday parties, Fourth of July. What appears to be simply overindulging on alcohol on a holiday, might be a daily occurrence. I can see why Clallam County ruled it an accident. It was more than plausible. Couple with a hidden addiction drags their daughter down to the bottom of Lake Crescent, one of the deepest lakes in Washington. Over the past century, more than forty-five people have disappeared, presumably drowned, and are somewhere on the bottom of the lake.

“What do you think happened to them?”

Her gaze is now steely.

“My sister and her husband were murdered,” she says, her eyes firing at me.

“What makes you say that?”

“I found something. I told the detectives, they didn’t want to hear it. The case was closed. No one wants a story about a family dying in one of the area’s most beautiful tourist attractions. They just wanted to leave it be.”

I ask for details.

“Who do you think did it and what did you find, Ms. Volkmann?”

She takes a breath. “I think Ellie killed her parents.”

I can tell that saying those words are difficult for her. The betrayal of a daughter like that is rarely noted in the annals of crime. Matricide and patricide are almost always the work of a son.

“That’s a pretty big leap for a fifteen-year-old,” I say.