“Why don’t you just tell the sheriff, the FBI, that you’re planning to sell?” Darren said, his old legal training never too far from his mind. “If you’re planning to sell and get out of this place soon, leaving behind all the mess with the white folks down in the trailers, there’d be no motive to harm Levi King.”

“The FBI?”

“This is serious, Leroy. Folks want to make an example of you. It’s more than just the sheriff’s department in this thing now. Just tell them you have a deal to sell the land to Sandler Gaines, and it might shift the investigation.”

The old man opened the fridge and pulled out another Miller High Life. He offered a golden sweating bottle of it to Darren, who hesitated and then refused. “Never heard of him,” Leroy said, popping the top of the beer. His hands were dry and ashy since he’d come in off the water, and Darren noticed scratches on them that he hadn’t seen before. They were at least two, three days old.

“Sandler Gaines, the real estate developer. The man buying Hopetown.”

“I’ve sold my land to a trust, something Rosemary King put together with some preservation society she’s on the board of. The Marion County Texas Historical Society, something like that. This is a sacred site for the Caddo Indians, and it will stay that way. Rosemary made me that promise.”

Darren shook his head; too many contradictory pieces of information coming at him fast, like he’d walked into a swarm of horseflies. He needed to see clearly, to make sense of what he’d just heard. “So in this deal with Rosemary and her trust, she’s essentially going to force her grandson, his mother, and his sister off the land? Just kick them out with no place to go?”

“Oh, them people ain’t kin to her,” Leroy said. “The only one in all this that Rosemary gives a damn about is her boy.”

“Levi?”

Leroy shook his head. “Bill, her son.”

Darren gave in and asked Leroy to go ahead and give him one of those beers. He watched the old man lift the bottle opener from where it hung on a string by the Frigidaire and noticed a bent, cream-colored business card that was taped to the wall next to it. It was, Darren could just make out, a card from a law firm. So the old man had contacted a lawyer after all. He thought to comment on it but liked the idea that the old man maybe didn’t realize he’d seen it.