“They’ll be doing some DNA testing to confirm it,” he said, “but they found a pocketknife nearby. It was terribly rusted, but engraved with his first name. Felicia says she gave that knife to Brett on his twenty-fifth birthday, and that he never went anywhere without it. It could be that someone stole it, but since Brett’s been gone as long as he has, and nobody’s heard from him in years, well. There’s a good chance it’s him.”

I shook my head and tried to make sense of what I was hearing. “But Mom’s right,” I said. “Brett left Swanton in the nineties. He moved away. Didn’t he move away?”

“Well, that’s a bit tricky.”

“There’s nothing tricky about it. He did move away,” said Mom. “Snuck off like a thief in the night and abandoned his family for Philadelphia. You remember—Brett quit his job, told Felicia he was leaving, and was gone within forty-eight hours. He said he’d send money when he could, though of course he never did. So you see, Brett couldn’t have died twenty years ago. He was in Pennsylvania.”

“Here’s the trouble with that,” said Dad. “The police did some digging, and apparently when Brett buggered off, he positively vanished. They found no current ID, no tax returns. I don’t believe your aunt’s heard a peep from him since.”

“So the last time you actually saw Brett was . . .”

“1998,” said Dad.

“Late June,” added Mom.

I tapped my finger against my forehead. No doubt someone was performing an autopsy on what was left of Brett’s body, but if forensics had already called the crime two decades old, they must have been confident in their preliminary analysis. It was all so strange. “How did he die?” I asked. “Do they know?”

“That’s just it,” said my dad, and when he paused I heard Mom’s breath catch in her throat. “They think he was murdered, love.”

Hearing my father blurt that word in his chipper English accent hit me like a high-voltage jolt. I’d been sitting upright for the duration of the call, my spine hard as a crowbar, and when I leaned back against the driver’s seat, my back spasmed painfully. I felt like I’d woken up to discover a nightmare I was desperate to escape was real. I thought of the message I’d sent to Suze minutes ago, my petty worry she’d bring up my family. Word of Brett Skilton’s murder was about to descend on Swanton like a cold front, inexorable in its force. Before long we’d all be in the local news, rolling off a two-decade hiatus with a tale more sordid and sensational than ever before. A tectonic shift was taking place in our family, separating the then from the now.

A truck rumbled down the street and splashed my car with slop. The brown water on my windshield roused me from my trance. “Does Doug know?”

“We just told him,” Dad said. “He insists on coming, but he can’t get here for a couple of days.”