“That necklace got our daughter killed. It’s the reason Sienna is dead.” He is pacing now, in long strides perpendicular to the couches, back and forth across the carpet. “I will shout about that thing in the town square if I have to. I won’t shut up until they find who did this to our daughter.”

His wife frowns. “We don’t know she’s dead because of the necklace.”

He stops abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous. That necklace is a clue. Sienna always said that necklace was going to make her famous, and it did, didn’t it? Our daughter is famous, but it’s because she’s dead. Because she was murdered.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “What necklace, and how did she connect it to Skeleton Bob? Because there are thousands of people on the lake every summer. It could have come off a skier’s neck last decade, or somebody could have flung it out of a car ten minutes ago.”

“Because of Jeremy—he’s the diver who found the car. He took the necklace from the car and hung it around his neck. He wore it like some kind of trophy. But Sienna saw the engraving on the back, and she traced it to here, to the lake. That’s when he told her what really happened.”

I sit very still, a freezing cold finger climbing my spine. How many necklaces are there in the world? Billions, probably. But a necklace she could trace to Lake Crosby? What are the odds?

“What did the necklace look like?”

My voice sounds all wrong. Too high, quivering in my skull like an airplane going down because surely, surely they’re not talking about the same necklace.

“A dog tag with the town’s coordinates,” Mrs. Sterling says, and her words leach to the lining of my stomach. “You know. The intersection of longitude and latitude smack in the center of the lake. It was gold.”

Not just gold. Solid, weighty twenty-four-karat gold. Only the best for Diana’s boys.

Fresh tears are brimming in Mrs. Sterling’s eyes, and she buries her face in her hands. “I just can’t believe this is happening. We made it through childhood without her choking on a marble. She didn’t get shot up at school or die in some fiery crash when she got her license. Every time we reached this big milestone in her life, I thought, whew, we made it through another phase alive.” She looks up, her cheeks slick with tears. “And now this. How did this happen? Mrs. Keller, do you have children?”

I shake my head, try not to throw up. “No.”

“Well, be glad. Being a parent is a constant worry. It never goes away, ever. Not even when they’re grown and gone. It’s the burden of being a mother.”