“Hey.” Tim lifted his hands. “There’s a lot to unpack here, a lot of history between you two. I know this isn’t easy, Crissy, but we need to know exactly what happened that night. If Felicia locked you in your room, how’d you end up high on meth in the woods?”

Crissy’s eyes shot to the right, and I thought, My God. Had Bram been abandoned by his sister, too?

“I had to go,” she said weakly. “I couldn’t stay in that house one more fucking minute. I snuck out the window and went to meet Brett on Hook Road.”

“That’s gotta be three or four miles,” I said. “And you walked it?”

She nodded.

“What happened when you got there?” asked Tim.

“He never came. I waited and waited for him, but he never showed up. Next thing I know, I’m in a hospital room.”

Tim leaned forward. “Do you remember anything else? About what happened out there, or the drugs that were found in your system?”

She shook her head.

My eyes grazed Tim’s. “Crissy,” he said. “All these years, what did you think happened to your father?”

She flexed her fingers around her mug. “I thought he left without us. That’s what I believed, and that’s what I told Abe later on. I thought Brett was a selfish bastard who left us both behind, and sometimes?” She swallowed hard. “Sometimes I think he deserved to die.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

She’s lying.”

“You think?” said Tim.

I wanted to give Crissy the benefit of the doubt. Like Uncle Brett, she was a lot more nuanced than I’d realized, but Mac’s comment about the killer having years to hone their act had made an impression on me. “I don’t buy that she can’t remember what happened that night. She resisted talking about it for all this time when she could have given everyone more information. I think she’s still covering something up.”

I felt punchy and on edge, would have given a kidney for a strong drink, but it was early afternoon and I was having a hard enough time unraveling these two cases sober. What I needed more than anything was to debrief with Tim, so I drove to the field again. Leaned back in the driver’s seat, and watched the tree line like a hawk.

“If Crissy really wasn’t involved in Brett’s death,” I said, “why not tell us everything right now?”

“Could she be trying to protect someone?”

“Not Brett. It’s too late for that.”

I took out my phone, pulled up the e-mail that came in after I left Cheryl’s, and passed the device to Tim. “The chief of police up here, guy by the name of Fraser Harmison, let me sneak a peek at Crissy’s file. The officer who filed the report confirmed she sustained a blow to the head and said her short-term memory appeared to be compromised. What Crissy’s describing isn’t temporary memory loss, though; it’s full-blown amnesia. A meth high can last twelve to twenty-four hours, more if you binge, but I don’t see how it could wipe out her memory.”