“Yes.”

“So you know that thirty years ago her father’s brother and Erik’s best bud disappeared off the same stretch of beach that Erik’s dig fronted. Erik was found unconscious from a knock on the head. Due to retrograde amnesia he never regained his memories of that day.”

“Yes.”

“She would have known the story from her family. I think when Erik showed back up in the Bay that she would have wanted to talk to him. But she didn’t mention that.” He stopped at Sourdough at the bottom of the hill and turned left, crossing Spit where it became East Bay. He pushed the trip meter until it registered zero and continued down the road. “Her parents know something, too. You were there, you saw their reactions to Berglund’s death.”

Wy thought of Kimberley, weeping silently over the sink in her kitchen. “I don’t know, Liam. I think there might be something else going on there.”

“She lied to me about knowing where Erik was living,” he said flatly.

Liam could forgive a lot, but seldom a lie. And he had liked young Ms. Petroff, so the betrayal stung all the more. And he had liked Erik Berglund, too, which only added to his determination to find out what had happened to him. “Just… talk to her before you slap the cuffs on her, okay?”

They took two wrong turns before Wy spotted a street sign leaning up against a telephone pole. The white letters on the green sign were faded but legible. “Mainsail Avenue,” Wy said, pointing.

Liam turned left and immediately the road went from a two-lane paved blacktop to a one-lane, continuous buffalo wallow. Liam wasn’t prepared for the first dip and bounced both of them off the roof of the cab. “I’m guessing not a borough-maintained road,” Wy said, grabbing the handle and hanging on for dear life. “This is worse than that goat track that leads to the judge’s house.”

He slowed down to a crawl, which helped a little. The trees overgrew the road to where their branches whapped the pickup’s rear views hard enough to move them so far out of alignment that he couldn’t see behind him. Not that he could have anyway. It was as if the sun had set three hours early.

Mainsail Avenue was fairly straight for about half a mile, when it ended in a cross street called Reefpoint, so marked by another faded sign, and saw their first house, followed by six more equally spaced along the road that stretched an equal distance either side of Mainsail. “One-acre lots, you think?”

“Looks like,” Wy said.

“And fighting the vegetation back every minute of every day. Noon is probably the only time these people see daylight.”

Reefpoint climbed to Halyard, where another six houses were carefully spaced out along its length. Halyard climbed higher, with a switchback thrown in, and ended at Turnbuckle. “What were the roads that Sybilla said led to Crow’s Nest?”

“Telltale, then Backstay,” Wy said. “She called it an aerie. I think we’re good if we just keep going up.”