“Girl, what are you doing here this morning?” Bex asked as I trudged into the station the next morning. “I thought you’d be sleeping off Gram-Gram’s shitshow at The Lookout.”

I’d intended to catch up on some sleep. Instead, I’d sprawled out on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the man on the other side of the plaster and studs. My room was marked by him now. I kept picturing him, bursting into my bedroom, fists closed and ready for a fight. The wall that he pushed me up against, almost shoving himself into me.

It felt like fate. Like it was something that had been written in the stars before either of us were gleams in anyone’s eyes. Destiny. Right.

Ask your dad.

Those words sent my guts to churning. I had a question for my father all right. And I was going to get an answer.

“Sheriff in?” I asked her, ignoring her question.

“In his office.” Bex nodded toward the shoebox my father called an office. My gaze slid to the conference room.

“Connelly’s out today,” she said, reading my mind.

Good. I had a feeling a little family drama was about to play out and I didn’t much care for any outsider audiences.

I headed for Dad’s office and nodded at Bubba, who was watching an epic fail video on YouTube and combing his mustache.

My father was hunting and pecking on his keyboard, his readers perched on the end of his nose.

“Mornin’ sunshine,” he said, taking in the bags under my eyes.

I closed the door and flopped down in the rickety chair in front of his desk. “How’s the Kendall investigation going?” I asked. You couldn’t just ask a direct question to my father. You had to ease him into talking. Get him used to the flow of words leaving his mouth. Warm him up with a topic he was comfortable with.

“Not a whole lot of new information. The blood on the sweater was hers, but they didn’t find any DNA evidence in or around Jonah’s house. Cadaver dogs didn’t catch a whiff of anything on the property either. So far Connelly’s comin’ up with squat on the speeding ticket. There’s nothing in that area that ties to Jonah Bodine, Sr.,” he recapped.

I nodded. Nothing new there. “Anything interesting come up in any of the new interviews?” I hated to think that Connelly had brought in the press and pissed off our entire town for nothing.

Dad’s mustache quirked. “Nope. Nothing new. Which didn’t please His Highness. He could’ve gotten the same info reading the old case files, but he seems to think we dropped the ball somewhere along the way and let the suspect get away with murder.”

He said it without malice. My dad was a peacemaker at heart, and even with an opinionated bigwig breathing down his neck, nothing much ruffled his feathers.

“What do you think about it all? Do you think Jonah did it?” I asked.

“What do you think?” He’d always done that. Ever since I announced that I was going to be a cop, he’d talk shop with me. He taught me to trust my instincts. There was only one area of my life that they’d let me down: Bowie.

I kicked back in the chair and thought it through. “I can’t see it. Maybe it’s because I grew up with his kids. Jonah Bodine was an asshole at times, but I don’t see murderer.”

“Then how’d he get that sweater?” Dad pressed, warming to the topic.

“Found it maybe. Hell, what if he didn’t even find it? What if Connie found it and worried he’d had something to do with it?”

“Why wouldn’t she destroy it? If she thought it was evidence, she and Jonah didn’t have the warmest relationship.”

I thought back to that night when a shadow-eyed, teenaged Bowie had walked into my living room with the rest of his siblings. I’d walked right on up to him and hugged him hard. I wanted to share my family with him. I wanted him to feel like he belonged somewhere safe.

“Blackmail?” I suggested. But that didn’t sit right either. “Proof maybe? In case he was accused?” We were missing too many pieces.

“What if it wasn’t murder?” Dad asked, picking up his mug of now cold coffee.

“An accident?” That seemed a hell of a lot more likely to me than Jonah Sr. running out and committing cold-blooded murder.

Dad’s shoulder hitched. “The man liked to drink. Occasionally he drove.”

I walked through it in my head. Callie leaving the lake, walking in the direction of town, of home. The roads were windy and dark. Someone could have hit her.

“Hit and run. Under the influence. The charges would have added up to some serious jail time.”

Dad nodded. “He was the primary breadwinner for a big family. They would have lost everything.”

“What did he do with the body?” I asked, considering. “Would he have driven the corpse of a teenage girl to New York state where he didn’t know every inch of the woods, every mountain road?” That didn’t make a lick of sense to me. He’d be too exposed.

“Let’s back up from this. Besides Jonah Bodine. There are two theories that everyone keeps comin’ back to,” Dad said, leaning back in his chair. “One.”

“That she harmed herself somehow,” I answered by rote. It was the official family line. The fact that there’d been no body was really what had punctured the faith in the theory. That and now a bloody sweater. “Judge and Mrs. Kendall still maintain that their daughter suffered from mental issues and hurt herself regularly.”

Dad’s head bobbed. “And two?”

“That there was a boy. He either ran off with her or he killed her,” I filled in.

“You ever see her with someone special?” Dad asked. We’d been through this on our own a few thousand times since Callie’s disappearance. I’d known her. And I wanted answers just like everyone else. But somewhere deep inside, I was scared that I had a key that would unlock everything. That I had forgotten something that would answer every question.

I shook my head. “No more than usual. She was sixteen. But didn’t seem overly interested in any boys, summertimers or otherwise.”

“Where was she when she wasn’t hanging out with y’all?” Dad asked.

I closed my eyes and opened up those mental files from that summer. I felt like the entire season was burned into my brain because of the disappearance, the investigations, the questions never answered. “Home. I assume. We weren’t close. Friendly, but not friends. She was older. A little reserved maybe?”

I thought about those sweaters, that sweater. Always, even in the August swelter.

“Did her parents ever have any proof that she was hurting herself?” I asked.

“Gave us the name of Callie’s therapist, as I recall,” my dad said, stroking a hand over his mustache.

I decided I’d take the case files home for another review over the next few days. Anything to keep my mind off the man next door.

“I hate having all these questions,” I admitted.

“The answers are there,” Dad said. “Maybe we haven’t asked the right questions yet.”

“Speaking of, I need to ask you something,” I said.

“If it’s why your grandmother is a hellion hell-bent on driving me insane, I don’t have an answer for you,” he told me, taking off his glasses and stuffing them in his shirt pocket. “Thank you again for taking care of her last night.”

“It’s about Bowie.”

I watched his face carefully looking for some hint of something. But my dad just looked perplexed.

“Is he all right?”

Genuine concern. Huh. Had Bowie been messing with me? Was this just another fake lead, a red herring, in the dissection of why Bowie Bodine didn’t want me?

“We had a…moment last night.”

“Ah, come on, Cass. You know I hate it when you and your sister talk about your ‘moments.’”

June spoke only in very clinical terms of her sex life. And I only mentioned things in front of Dad to annoy him.

“Anyway, after this moment he said we couldn’t have any more moments.”

Dad looked puzzled. “Why in the hell not? You two are perfect for each other.”

“He said to ask you.”

I waited a beat.

Dad’s brows furrowed and then his wispy eyebrows winged up his forehead. “Uh-oh.”

“Dad, what did you do?”