I scan her eyes. I think she might be right. I replay things I heard and saw. I think about how Sarah touched her brother, so tenderly. Too tenderly, I remember thinking. I remember the yelling that Ruth reported hearing the night after the memorial and how she told him to go back to bed. And how he leaned in to whisper in her ear. Something else struck me as odd: The first time I saw Joshua he was wearing the Miller beer T-shirt, and the next time she was wearing it.

But if that is Ellie, where is Sarah Wheaton?

I ask Laurna if I can duplicate her niece’s note, and she follows me to the copy room. While the old machine flashes to copy, I make plans to drive out to the Wheaton place.

“Are you staying in town?”

“At the Seaport Inn,” she says. “My husband and I. Hans thinks I’m being silly about all of this. Out of my mind, he repeated all the way here from Wenatchee. You don’t think I am, do you, Detective?”

I don’t know.

“Grief is powerful,” I tell her. “I also know sincerity when I see it. I’ll check it out. I’ll call you at the Seaport.”

She grasps my hand and squeezes. “Thank you. I wouldn’t bother you if I wasn’t so sure. My sister and her husband weren’t perfect, though they did the best they could.”

“No one’s perfect, but how do you mean?”

“Hudson was super strict. Wouldn’t let Ellie date. Talk to boys. Grounded her when he caught her. Carrie just let that happen. I guess she didn’t want for her daughter what she’d had for herself. She was pregnant when they married. She was seventeen when she had Ellie. Hudson was the other half of the equation, of course, but he really put the blame on her.”

Thirty-Three

After Laurna departs, I do what everyone does when they want to find out more about a potential date, a neighbor, or a teenage girl with a serious hatred for her parents. I track Ellie’s digital footprints on Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok.

I couldn’t get into her TikTok, but the other social media usual suspects are an easy enough pathway to find more information.