The big question, of course, was who put him there.

* * *

Some towns announce themselves with fanfare, a gilded WELCOME sign boasting the date they were established. Sometimes there’s even a slogan—gateway to this, home of the that. Swanton trickled into view like a rivulet of rainwater after a storm. A hodgepodge of bungalows and farmhouses came first, some with three different types of siding, others showing century-old colors through fissures of peeling paint. Weeks past Halloween, ghosts fashioned from white sheeting still hung on bare bushes, yet two houses already paraded inflatable Santas, one dressed in camo, the other riding a Harley. The farm equipment retailer, the maple candy store, the coin wash and pizza parlor behind dunes of grass gone brown . . . they were all right where I left them. This was no spit-and-polish New England village leaking charm from every orifice, but it was mine.

I rolled into the driveway of my childhood home when the sun hung low in the pale orange sky. The place was a manor by Swanton standards, a fifties-era colonial on a double lot. There was a Thanksgiving wreath strapped to the door, retrieved from a basement storage box where I knew it resided with its Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Halloween counterparts. Dad’s car, freshly washed, sparkled in the asphalt driveway, which the hose had patterned in wavy fingers of ice.

They’d been busy, my parents. The innate need to distract themselves from the startling news of Brett’s death was apparent in the meal they cooked as well. I’d given them little notice about my decision to visit, but they’d prepared a big Sunday dinner of lasagna in a creamy white sauce with Dad’s famous Arctic roll, the sponge cake homemade, for dessert. When I looked at my parents and the feast they’d made so lovingly spread out before us, I felt my heart swell.

That joyful feeling was fleeting.

I inherited my father’s face, triangular in shape with full cheeks and a nose as perky as a comic strip character’s. Mom’s looks had always struck me as more feminine than my own, but now the high cheekbones and delicate lips I’d coveted gave her a skeletal appearance that troubled me to my core. Dad didn’t seem to be faring much better. Overall, his head—huge for his body and covered in bushy hair—looked whiter than usual. At some point he’d put on a paint-stained shirt to wash the car, and he hadn’t bothered to change for dinner. There was a beleaguered ennui to their collective mood that went beyond standard-issue sadness.

“This is good, Mom,” I said, reaching for a second helping. It was Carson who’d done the food prep in our relationship, and prior to that I’d lived on station pastries and white-bread PB&Js. My mother’s home-cooked meals were the stuff of my dreams.

She smiled at me as I ate. “How’s Tim?”

“He’s fine. I bumped into him yesterday, actually.” Though they had yet to meet him in person, my parents loved Tim. They conflated him with my survival on Tern Island, which was fine by me because that drew their attention away from the debacle with Carson. As I’d alluded to Gil, my parents weren’t fans of my job. While they supported my decision to leave my fiancé, especially after learning how he’d manipulated my state of weakness, I knew they’d been hoping he could talk me out of my senior investigator gig in A-Bay. Who could blame them? Within months of arriving in Upstate New York I’d been isolated on an island with a killer, had been attacked by a murder suspect, and had nearly drowned. Mom liked to joke she had to visit the hair salon weekly, so persistent was the gray I caused.