So my brother was going to Swanton to see my folks through this tragedy. He lived just forty minutes away, and he was their eldest child, but this bulletin didn’t sit right with me. I was the one who dealt in death and delinquents. If anyone was going to hold their hands through this awful experience, shouldn’t it be me?

“There’s absolutely no need for Doug to come,” said Mom. “If the police have questions, we can handle them ourselves.”

Her veiled uneasiness only served to strengthen my resolve. I couldn’t leave my parents to deal with a brutal discovery like this while I sat at Mac’s pretending everything was fine.

I glanced at my watch and calculated the time it would take to pick up my overnight bag and shoot Mac a text letting her know about my plans.

“I’ll be there in three hours,” I said as I restarted the engine. “What’s for dinner?”

SIX

A potluck gathering on the shores of Lake Champlain, where Felicia screamed at Brett across the picnic table.

Brett missing for days at a time while my aunt slammed cupboard doors in the kitchen.

Crissy flipping him the bird when he decided to play the responsible father and impose a curfew.

These visions plagued me as I made the familiar drive north along the St. Lawrence River, then east toward Swanton, Vermont.

When I thought about my uncle, it was mainly with indifference. Before he and Felicia separated, he sometimes brought us treats at odd hours, doling out warm cherry Cokes to the kids while he cracked open a beer from his ice-cold six-pack. He was also the dad who on more than one occasion had slept fully clothed on the porch swing, and who never missed a chance to chat up Crissy’s friends. Wading through my memories of him was a slog, but I did recall snatches of the summer of 1998. Had I known it would lead to murder, I’d have paid more attention.

Despite my apathetic feelings toward Uncle Brett, the news of his demise made me feel ill. My cousins thought he’d abandoned them, and that was bad enough; the idea that Brett could have been in Swanton all along was torture. Decomposition is never pretty, but a death in the woods meant Brett’s body had been picked apart by scavengers and insects. Exposed to the elements, his flesh would have burst open to purge its fluids in its haste to devolve into cartilage and bone. Nobody deserved to live with an image of their dad like that.

As I drove, sipping my afternoon coffee from a to-go cup, I evaluated what I knew so far. If the local forensic analyst was right about the age of the bones, Brett must have been killed shortly after he announced he was leaving Swanton. My mother’s confusion about the timeline was understandable. We’d all believed Brett left of his own volition, no longer willing or able to deal with his estranged wife. The realization that he’d been in town all along, rotting in the Missisquoi Refuge just a few miles from our house, was incomprehensible.