Was that true? Or was I remembering what Bram told me last year, in that godforsaken basement?

“You have a good memory,” I told Felicia, unimpressed by the irony of that. I knew it was unreasonable, but it irked me that I wasn’t the first investigator to speak with her. The date of her husband’s departure was on the tip of her tongue, and I needed to know whether she’d clung to it all these years or dug it up for Harmison’s sake.

I got my answer. “He left a week to the day before Crissy’s sixteenth birthday,” she said.

“And did you have any contact with Brett after that weekend?”

Felicia pursed her lips. “What was there to say? He made it clear he wasn’t going to help us financially. He owed money to half the town by the time he left, and I didn’t want to risk getting mixed up in that. I always hoped he’d get it together and come home—not to stay, but to be more involved with the kids, at least. Be a father to them. Abe was barely twelve when his dad took off, and Brett missed Crissy’s Sweet Sixteen and didn’t even call.”

She hadn’t answered my question, and her fencing act felt deliberate. “So no contact at all after the weekend? Not ever again?”

“Just the letter, and that was ages ago.”

I frowned. “What letter?”

“The letter about Abe. It came a few years after Brett left, right after Abe . . .”

Cut you.

Ran away.

Felicia could have said any number of things. I felt my blood pressure nudge upward as she studied me, but she stayed silent.

I asked about the letter.

“It said Abe had arrived in Philadelphia. There was no phone number, and no return address. No way at all for me to reach them. It felt like a slap in the face, Brett’s way of calling dibs on our son. I didn’t even know they’d been in touch all those years, but they must have been or Abe wouldn’t have known where to find him.”

I jogged my knee as I recalled what Mom said about the age of the bones not adding up. The letter seemed to prove Brett had left Swanton as planned. I knew for a fact his son ran off in 2002. If Abe met up with Brett in Philly, Brett couldn’t have died in Swanton years earlier. Did the forensic analyst get it wrong? It didn’t make any sense.

“When was the last time you actually saw Brett?” I asked. “You, Crissy, and Abe?”

Felicia tucked a wisp of long silver hair behind her ear, and her pinky snagged on her hoop earring. “Lord, how am I supposed to remember that? He didn’t visit regularly, as you know.”

I nodded. I did know. “I don’t suppose you still have that letter?”

I didn’t expect her to say yes. Felicia had moved on from her last home and the bad memories there, but within moments she was walking to a linen closet down the hall. She returned with a shoebox in hand, and when she lifted the lid, I saw it was crammed with family photos. A single letter, folded in thirds, lay right on top.