When Crissy found me on her front steps, her face opened up in surprise. “Hey, cuz,” she said. “Slumming?”

I managed a smile. “Hardly. This is some location.” I gestured at the lake, visible through the windows behind her. “You made a great choice with this place. Got a sec?”

Crissy bit her lower lip and said, “I’m getting ready for work.”

“I was hoping we could talk. Just for a minute.”

Her eyes hardened as she looked me over, spending a smidge too long on my scar. “Okay,” she said dispassionately, and I was in.

Crissy was the type of girl who’d always longed to become an adult. I’d heard Felicia warn her to be careful, but boys were Crissy’s paper dolls, and she took pleasure in bending them to her whims. Crissy was cool, commanding, and pretty. I had a vague recollection of her confessing her goal in life was to be a model girlfriend, the kind that made men drool and brag to their friends. She would have been about twelve.

The woman who stood before me now was almost unrecognizable. Her pert nose and sharply arched eyebrows reigned eternal, but paired with pasty skin and a bouffant blond hairstyle, they made me think of Malibu Barbie on a bender. The weight she’d gained over the years had somehow settled in her chest, which verged on the obscene. She was dressed in a white T-shirt with a deep V-neck and donut-patterned pajama pants, and her living-room-slash-kitchen smelled of cheap perfume and instant coffee. Crissy held a mug but didn’t offer one to me. Didn’t offer me a seat, either.

“How are you?” Cold water from my wet hair trickled down my neck as I lingered by the door. “And the boys, they must be—what—seven and nine now?”

“Eight and ten.”

“Time flies.” Behind my cousin, I could see the makings of a school lunch on the kitchen counter. “I brought them something. Must have just missed them, huh?” I handed her the bag in my hand, heavy with the weight of two boxes of maple sugar candy. She dropped it on the coffee table without a second glance.

“Crissy,” I said, “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

There was no embrace between us. She didn’t clasp my hands, and I didn’t tip my forehead to meet hers. All Crissy did was open her mouth enough so I could see her tongue stud glinting silver, and rearrange her lips into a wry smirk. That mouth was what I’d dreaded most about seeing my cousin, the way it pitched upward on one side and made her look so sanctimonious. Brett had that same smile.

She walked to the couch and plopped down with a sigh. Her home was a mishmash of cheap furniture and frayed rugs, but the frames that held her boys’ school photos looked new, maybe even pricey. There were no pictures of their father, I noticed, nor of her brother or Aunt Fee.

“This must be exciting for you,” Crissy said. “A murder, right here in Swanton.”