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so she did. We had a little memorial service because like I said, there wasn’t anything to bury.”
    I could envision DeAnn Cosgrove as a brokenhearted little girl, lost and grieving, while the grown-ups around her, preoccupied with their own difficulties, walked away from hers and moved on.
    “But you didn’t give up, did you.”
    “No,” DeAnn agreed. “Never. I loved him too much. I couldn’t.”
    And you still haven’t, I thought.
    “I miss him every single day,” DeAnn added. “I wish he could meet his grandkids—so he could tell them the same kinds of stories he used to tell me. I wouldn’t tell him they were silly, though. I’d want them to believe everything he said.”
    “Where’s your mother these days?” I asked.
    “Once my father was declared dead and the insurance money finally came through, she and Jack, her new husband, bought a place up in Leavenworth,” she said. “Just outside Leavenworth,” she added. “I guess I shouldn’t call Jack a new husband. He’s been around for a long time. They celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary next year. That’s fifteen years longer than she was married to Daddy.”
    So Mrs. Cosgrove hadn’t spent much time waiting around for her missing husband to show up or playing the grieving widow. If they’d finally gone to the formality of having her former husband officially declared dead, it seemed to me as though someone in the world of officialdom should have noticed the transaction and removed Anthony Cosgrove’s name from the list of officially missing persons.
    DeAnn apparently read my mind about her mother’s unseemly matrimonial haste. “Mom and Jack got married in January of the following year,” she said. “I don’t like the man much—never have. He’s an overbearing jerk. And we had our issues, especially when I was a teenager. That’s why I ended up living with my grandmother—my father’s mother—down in Kent most of the time I was in high school. But by then there was money coming in from Social Security, so it didn’t seem like I was a burden.”
    “But you said there was insurance?”
    DeAnn nodded. “Quite a bit,” she said. “Some of it was group insurance and the rest of it was stuff Daddy owned. There was one smaller policy that was just for me. Donnie and I used that to make the down payment on this house.”
    Insurance proceeds are often the motivator in homicide cases, but not in this one. A payout accompanied by a seven-year delay seemed unlikely, but it was still worth checking into.
    “What’s your mother’s name?” I asked.
    “Lawrence,” DeAnn answered. “Carol Lawrence. And her husband is Jack. Like I said, they live up in Leavenworth now. If you want to talk to them, I can get you the phone number, but I don’t see that it’ll do much good. I doubt they could tell you any more about what happened than I can.”
    I made a note of their names anyway. I didn’t bother taking down the phone number. I knew if I needed to reach them I’d be able to locate Jack and Carol Lawrence’s phone number—listed or not.
    I was about to put my notebook away, but then I looked at DeAnn Cosgrove and could see she wasn’t done talking. Maybe after years of not talking about it, she was ready.
    “Anything else you can tell me about your dad?” I asked.
    “I was always surprised that he went fishing that weekend,” she said. “As far as I know, he hadn’t ever gone before. He didn’t even like fish that much. What he liked were airplanes. He loved airplanes.”
    “You mean as a hobby?”
    “As in every way. That’s what he did, you see. He worked for Boeing, too, designing airplanes. I’m not really sure what he did there. I wish now I’d been older so I could have known which planes he worked on and what he did. Maybe I’ve ridden on one of the ones he helped design.”
    “You probably have,” I said.
    “I hope so,” she replied. I put the notebook in my jacket pocket. “So what happens now?” she