Leroy Page was right about one thing, Darren thought. Rosemary King seemed infinitely more concerned about the welfare of her son, Bill, than about the whereabouts of her nine-year-old grandson. But how Leroy knew this was itself a mystery. “How do you know Mrs. King?” Darren asked. The moss-draped, swamp-side hamlet of Hopetown seemed a world away from Rosemary’s Victorian colonial in town. “I mean, how did you even come to know her well enough to reach out for her help on this deal to put Hopetown into a private trust?”

“Oh, it was Rosemary who reached out to me,” Leroy said, eager to make that piece of it crystal clear. He set down his beer and started in on his bologna sandwich, talking with food in his mouth. “Like I said before, black people are the most forgiving people on earth.”

There was so much bitterness in the way he said it this time that Darren made a face, not understanding what the man was getting at, realizing that he didn’t actually understand Leroy at all. From the moment Darren had arrived in Hopetown, he’d looked into the man’s elderly black face and seen his own uncles, his grandparents and great-grands past; he’d seen Geneva Sweet and the black folks in Lark, and he’d seen Mack, the longtime family friend he was trying to save from prison. But he didn’t know Leroy Page, not really, and he definitely didn’t think the man was being straight with him now, hadn’t been since they met. He nodded toward the scratches on his hands. “How’d you get those?” he said.

Leroy looked down at his hands, then looked up at Darren in his pressed slacks and ironed shirt, the shiny badge pinned to his chest, and said with a tiny kernel of scorn he didn’t bother to hide, “I work with my hands, son.”

For the first time, Darren felt a profound dislike for the man. “It’s Ranger.”

Maybe it was the beer that was making him cranky. Sure as shit wasn’t enough alcohol in it to do anything but make Darren want to suck down something real. He cursed himself for not keeping a pint in his truck anymore. He repeated his advice to Leroy Page to think about getting a lawyer, and then he got the hell out of there, regretting the visit almost as soon as his boots hit the porch.