“Really? How do you happen to have that?” Drue asked.

“A fan sold it to me,” Vera said, her eyes glittering with excitement. “He bought it from a local antique dealer, who bought it along with a box of books at a yard sale after Colleen’s parents died, back in early 1980.”

She opened the yearbook and began flipping through pages of black-and-white photographs. “What’s your father’s name, Drue? Is he still living?”

“He’s very much alive. His name is Brice Campbell.”

Vera looked up sharply. “The lawyer? The man on all the billboards and bus benches?”

Drue winced. “Yes.”

Vera began leafing through the yearbook pages, stopping when she reached the page she was searching for. “Campbell,” she said, dragging a finger down the rows of photographs. “Campbell.”

She stabbed a photo with her finger. “Here he is,” she said triumphantly, holding up the yearbook. “Brice Campbell.”

Drue knelt on the floor beside the recliner and stared down at her father’s senior class picture. William “Brice” Campbell. JV baseball, V baseball, wrestling, Key Club, said the caption under the photo.

The boys of the class of 1968 were mostly a clean-cut group, and Brice was no different. His short blond hair was neatly combed and side-parted, and he was clean-shaven. Like the other boys, he wore a dress shirt, narrow striped tie and a familiar smirk that suggested he knew more than he should.

The surprise was that her father had signed his class photo, scrawling his name and PIRATES 4EVER across his own face.

“Looks like your father knew Colleen,” Vera said. She flipped back toward the front of the yearbook, to signature pages filled with inscriptions of dozens and dozens of Colleen Hicks’s classmates.

“He didn’t sign anyplace else in the yearbook,” Vera commented. “I’ve cross-referenced all the names of all her friends who wrote inscriptions, and I certainly would have remembered if I’d seen Brice Campbell’s name on my list.”

“You made a list of everybody who signed her yearbook?” Drue asked, at once fascinated and repelled by the older woman’s obsessive knowledge.

“Now you think I’m crazy,” Vera said, closing the book and setting it aside.

“Oh no, I don’t think that at all.”

“Well, everybody else does, including my sister and my nieces,” Vera said. “Not that I give a tinker’s damn. The fact is, I’m the last known person who saw Colleen Hicks alive. I don’t take that responsibility lightly.”

“I think that’s a good thing,” Drue said, choosing her words carefully. “If somebody I cared about disappeared, I’d want somebody to find out the truth. If it were my mother, say, instead of Colleen, I’d make it my business to find out what had happened.”

“There you go,” Vera said approvingly. “So you do understand.”

“I think so,” Drue said. “Would you mind talking to me, about Colleen? And about that day she disappeared?”