“What do you mean?” I said. “Another woman?”

“No. A girl.”

The room tilted. Next to Felicia, my mother’s face was stony.

Felicia said, “The weekend Brett was moving, the kids went to the movies.” She narrowed her eyes. “You were there. Abe and Crissy, too. Abe had just told me Brett quit his job and was moving away. I was very angry. Against my better judgment, I went looking for him.

“Russ Loming was always my first call,” she went on. “He told me he was meeting Brett at the drive-in. So after I dropped off the kids, I stayed. The place was crawling with people. It took half the movie for me to find him. He was parked back at the tree line near the picnic tables, as far away from the other cars as you could get. I was ready to give him hell, but when I got closer, I saw he wasn’t alone.” Felicia wrinkled her nose. “She was a high school girl, if I had to guess.”

“Christ,” I said. “What were they doing?”

“Talking. The girl looked upset. Brett put his hand on her shoulder. I think they kissed.”

What the hell? A second girlfriend meant another motive for Felicia to kill Brett. If this mystery girl knew her beau was headed out of Swanton, it might even mean another suspect. “What did the girl look like?” I asked. “Did you recognize her?”

Felicia shook her head. “She had dark hair, but I only got a glimpse of her face. If it was Cheryl, I’d have known it.”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I left. He was with a girl who was clearly underage, and she didn’t seem displeased about it. What was I supposed to do? Seeing him with her, someone who might have been the same age as his own daughter, made me realize we were better off without him. So I went home. And that was the last time I saw him.”

“That’s all she knows,” Mom said. “Isn’t it, Fee?”

“That’s all.”

“You should have told me this sooner,” I said.

“I didn’t think it mattered.”

“So what changed?”

Felicia twined her fingers with Mom’s and held on tight. “Your mother told me what you do. I knew you were an investigator, but I didn’t really understand what that meant. I didn’t consider how hard it must be to solve a crime nineteen years after it was committed. I hated him sometimes,” she said, “but I do want to know who did this. Crissy and Abe were deprived of so much as children. The least I can do is help them get some closure about their dad.”

Closure, I thought. Is that what Bram wants?

It was what I wanted, but I had a feeling closure was a long way off yet.

TWENTY-THREE

Dinner was an hour of awkward pauses and forced chuckles—in other words, sheer anguish. Afterward, I took another walk down the block, alone this time. I tried to channel the feeling I’d gotten so good at embracing in A-Bay—Come on, asshole, here I am—but the familiar sense that Bram was watching was ill-defined. He might well be close, but his focus was on Trey. And that terrified me.