There was no one around to see me jump up while my foot was stuck through the aluminum frame of that chair, and no one to witness the stumble that followed. Nobody but me saw the long, rusty nail my cousin had been hiding in his hand all along. That was the last day I ever spoke to Abe. In that moment, I piled thousands of late-night giggles and whispered confidences and words of solace onto a funeral pyre, struck the match, and watched the fire burn.

My brother finished what was left of his warm scotch in a single swallow. Finally, he set his glass down on the table and pushed it aside. “Abe was twelve,” he said. “Twelve fucking years old. But he was a psychopath even then. So you tell me if you think our cousin could have attacked his father and left him for dead.”

SIXTEEN

My conversation with Doug stayed with me long after we loaded our glasses into the dishwasher and parted ways in the carpeted upstairs hall. Outside, the moon painted the street silver, and the house sounds dwindled to radiator clinks and the wind whispering at my window. My overactive mind was compounded by a headache and a hint of wooziness from the scotch, but that didn’t stop me from picking up my phone and scouring the Internet for mentions of Trey Hayes.

With the witness from the shop and Trey’s hat as evidence, my station had issued an Amber Alert. It included Trey’s picture, but until the sketch came back from Tim’s forensic artist, we had no image of Bram to share. Most of the news outlets had published a paragraph or two about Trey’s disappearance, along with phone numbers for Crime Stoppers and the New York State Police. It wasn’t enough. There was little chance Bram was going to parade the kid around town, and nobody but the shop owner and me knew what Trey’s abductor looked like. If we were going to find either of them, it would be through a yet-untapped witness or by the grace of exhaustive legwork.

I kept seeing Trey’s face alongside Abe’s, the way Abe looked at age twelve. Could Bram’s origin story really involve patricide? It wasn’t unheard of for children to commit heinous acts. In Britain, a fourteen-year-old killed her mother and sister with the help of an accomplice her same age. More recently, two thirteen-year-olds murdered a schoolgirl in Dublin. The idea of delving into the psychology of these crimes made me burrow deeper into my blankets.

Drawing the comforter up to my chin, I texted Tim. I wanted him to look for garden sheds in and around A-Bay, another prominent place from our mutual past that Bram might try to replicate now. Was I forcing correlations that didn’t exist? Maybe so. But I couldn’t afford not to turn over every stone.

* * *

The temperature plummeted overnight, and I woke up to frost-covered grass that crackled beneath my feet as I walked to my SUV. The roads were black and dusty-dry today, and the drive to downtown Swanton took less than five minutes.