We’d met the Joyces that morning for the first time. We’d driven down the long, winding driveway leading between wide, fenced-in fields, following the excellent directions Lizzie had sent to our laptop.

The house at the end of the driveway was very large and very beautiful, but it wasn’t pretentious. It was a house for people who worked hard. The Latina who’d answered the door had been wearing nice pants and a blouse, not any kind of uniform, and she’d referred to her boss as “Lizzie,” not “Ms. Joyce.” Since every day on a ranch or farm is a working day, I hadn’t been surprised to see that the big house felt pretty empty, and the only glimpses I caught of other people had been distant ones. As the housekeeper led us through the house, I’d seen a Jeep coming up one of the tracks that ran between the huge fields at the rear of the house.

Lizzie Joyce and her sister, Kate, had been waiting in the gun room. I was sure they called it the den or the family room, or something else to indicate it was where they gathered to watch television and play board games, or whatever really rich people did with their evenings when they lived way the hell out in the sticks. But to me, it was the gun room. There were weapons and animal heads all over, and the décor was supposed to imply this was a rustic hunting lodge. Since the house had been built by the Joyce grandfather, it reflected his taste, I guessed, but they could have changed it if they’d objected. He’d been dead for a while.

Lizzie Joyce looked like the pictures I’d seen of her, but the impression was strictly practical. She was a working woman. Her sister, Kate, called Katie, was a scaled-down version of her big sister: shorter, younger, less seasoned. But she seemed just as confident and hard. Maybe being brought up with gobs of money did that to you.

The gun room had a wall of French doors leading out onto a wide brick porch. There were urns that would be filled with flowers in the spring, but it wasn’t time yet. The temperatures still dipped below freezing sometimes at night. I noticed that the Joyces had left their rocking chairs outside during the winter, and I wondered what it would be like to sit out on the roofed brick porch in the morning in the summer, drinking coffee and looking out over all that land.

The Jeep came to a stop at the foot of the gentle slope leading up to the back porch, and two men climbed out and came in.

“Harper, this is the manager of RJ Ranch, Chip Moseley. And this is our brother, Drexell.”

Tolliver and I shook hands with the men.