“I didn’t want her to leave here poor. Go to college and have everyone know she came from nothing. I wanted her to have a leg up, the way we never did. That way she’d have had a fighting chance at something better. And it was going fine, just like I planned. But then Izzy took a liking to Matt. I was the one who introduced them. Can you believe that shit? I was talking to Matt in front of the laundromat, and Izzy wandered by, stopped to say hi to me.” He shook his head. “You have no idea how many times I’ve gone over it. Over it and over it on nights I can’t sleep. How that one thing, that one stupid thing, ruined it all.”

“I think you’re the one who ruined it all.” My voice was cold and hard and didn’t sound like me at all. Or at least not the me my daughter would have recognized.

“I didn’t mean to,” Cal said again, and my hand tingled with the urge to punch him. “It was all such a huge clusterfuck. I was over at Matt’s, sorting drugs and counting money, and Izzy barged right into his trailer. She’s lucky she even made it that far, hitched a ride out on the highway.” He shook his head. “I thought maybe it was still okay. She was young, maybe she didn’t even know what she was seeing. But her mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide and all I could think about was her telling Junie and Junie telling you and everything falling apart. I’d lose my job. Land would be so pissed I’d gone behind his back that he’d push for criminal charges. It would all be ruined. I talked to Izzy. Told her how important it was to keep quiet. And how I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about her and Matt, either. We’d do each other a favor.”

“And she went along with it?”

Cal nodded. “Yeah. But I could tell it wasn’t going to hold. I talked to her a few times around town, and she hinted about wanting to tell Junie. I knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep it a secret forever. She didn’t have it in her. I think she liked the idea of having something she could use to hurt Junie with. You know how teenage girls can be, petty and jealous. She’d talked a few times about how she thought her dad liked Junie more than her. Someday when she was feeling slighted it was going to come bursting out of her, a way to take Junie down a peg.”

“Because Junie idolized you,” I said, voice flat. “Thought you were her perfect Uncle Cal.”

Cal breathed in a watery sob. “All Izzy had to do was keep her mouth shut. That’s all she had to do.”

“And she wasn’t going to, so you decided to kill her.”

“No,” Cal said, fierce. “No. I only wanted to talk to her. I texted her on a burner phone. Asked her to meet me at the park.”