As Crissy turned her back on us to fiddle with the coffee maker’s on-switch, Tim winked at me. Playing the ingénue with witnesses was his specialty, not mine, but it was an effective method for gaining trust. I took his visible pride in me as a compliment.

“Shit,” Crissy hissed, glaring at the machine. “This thing is total crap; it’s always hit or miss.”

“Here,” Tim said, “let me try.”

Crissy’s expression was dubious, but she stepped aside. Before long Tim had drained the water, removed the back panel, and fished a hunk of debris from a clogged valve using one of Crissy’s fake jewel-encrusted bobby pins. “I like to watch those shows about how stuff is made,” he explained sheepishly as he worked. “These are pretty simple contraptions; only a couple of things ever go wrong. There. Try it now.”

Crissy refilled the reservoir, and moments later the room smelled of freshly brewed dark roast.

“I won’t make you talk about Brett if you don’t want to,” Tim said. “What I’d actually like to ask about is your disappearance.”

This seemed to surprise her. “Well, then, you’re out of luck because in case you hadn’t heard, I was unconscious.”

“You were unconscious when you were found. What about before that?”

“You snuck out of the house, right?” I said.

“So?”

“So what happened to you that night might be connected to what happened to Brett. Crissy,” I said, “you and your dad went missing the same weekend, and you were found in the woods close to where the police found him. That has to mean something.”

My cousin looked away.

“Did Brett have something to do with what happened to you?”

She hit me with a titanium stare. “You mean, did my own father leave me in the woods to die?”

“That was a poor choice of words. Shana didn’t mean to imply that,” said Tim. “We just need to rule it out.”

We hadn’t discussed how we were going to work the interview, but when Tim undermined me to mollify my cousin, I felt us slip seamlessly into a routine that felt right for the situation. Crissy nodded. Fine. Go on.

Tim said, “How were things at home back then? I understand your mom had some problems.”

“Still does.”

“Was it worse that summer? For her?” He paused. “For you?”

We were sitting around a desk now. It must have belonged to a sales agent once, but its sole purpose at the moment seemed to be collecting dust. Tim laid a hand on its gritty surface and waited. He would never touch a female witness, not even to comfort someone in pain. Small-town officers weren’t immune to sexual assault charges, and Tim had been well trained, but the act of physically reaching out to Crissy was enough to eke out some trust. She drew a breath, released it with a shudder, and met his patient gaze.

“You have no idea what it was like,” Crissy said. “The things she tried to convince us of. The stuff she had me believing. There was this time when the AC guy came to repair our system, and she told us she was scared he’d set it up to pump toxic air into the house. It made no sense—what possible reason could he have for wanting to hurt us?—but she refused to turn it on. Temps were in the 90s for weeks that fall. I thought we were all going to suffocate.”