I felt no such compunction about what had happened with Tim—at least, not in the same way. Tim. His name sounded different now. He wasn’t just a fellow investigator. Tim was the man I’d confided in, whose back had been warm and hard against the palms of my hands. I touched my fingertips to the place where he’d nuzzled my neck just as, on the nightstand, my phone buzzed. Suze’s name was displayed on the screen.

“Robbie told me you interviewed Cheryl.” Upbeat pop music played in the background, and my head pounded along with the rhythm. Suze was at the studio. “Now do you believe me? Cheryl wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Through the gap between the motel curtains, I could see the peaks and towers of Boldt Castle on the horizon. Heart Island blended into the mainland behind it as if it were a peninsula and not a landmass all its own. I found the deception disconcerting. “You’re probably right,” I said, but I couldn’t disregard the picture Felicia had painted of Brett with a young girl in his car. That would make any woman angry, and Cheryl had been counting on Brett to complete her family. “You and Cheryl are close, yeah?”

“As far as mothers-in-law go, I hit the jackpot,” Suze said.

“And she never mentioned anything about dating Brett? You never asked about it?”

“No on both counts. Would you interrogate your husband’s mom about ex-boyfriends from twenty years ago?” She paused. “So did they date? I asked Robbie, but he doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to pry.”

“They did, for a few months before Brett made the decision to move. The thing is, he might have been dating someone else at the same time.”

“Brett sure got a lot of action for a dude his age—hey, I get it,” she said. “He was hot in an Owen Wilson kind of way, you know? Sweet but a little rough. How do you know there was someone else?”

I hadn’t noticed it before, but Suze spoke of my uncle with atypical fondness, considering she’d only met him a couple of times. “My aunt told me,” I said. “She saw them together at the drive-in the weekend Brett disappeared. And it gets worse. Apparently his woman on the side was underage.”

“Yikes,” Suze said without conviction. She sounded distracted. The background noise was picking up.

“Yeah. Anyway, now I’ve got to track down this rebel child. If you need me, I’ll be interviewing every female student who attended our school in 1998.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Hey, you were at the movies that night.” Suze had helped us look for Brett, if only half-heartedly. “Who’d you see there?”

“God, I don’t know, it was so long ago. Crissy and Abe, obviously. Oh, and the Boisselle twins.”

“Military haircuts, right?”

“Bad memories,” she said through a laugh. “The short one kissed like a slug. I saw Robbie, too, and that super tall friend of his—Mitch, I think? Want to know a secret?” Her voice dropped low. “I thought Robbie was cute even then. He had no idea I existed, but I sure as hell noticed him. There were lots of times like that. It’s weird, but sometimes he tells stories and I swear it’s like he’s pulling them straight from my own head.”