“Come on,” Darren said. “I know you better than that.”

Greg grew silent for a moment. “Look, about last night—”

Darren stopped him before he had to hear his wife’s name come out of Greg’s mouth. And, anyway, the thought of Lisa gave him an idea.

“Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene.”

“Never heard of them,” Lisa said.

“They’re out of Alexandria, Virginia, no other offices that I could find.”

His wife sighed. He’d caught her in the hallway of the civil courthouse in Houston and nearly everything around her echoed through the phone. The click of high heels, the ding of an arriving elevator, the voices of court staff and attorneys, and the weight of Lisa’s annoyance about this phone call. But some part of Darren couldn’t help noting that she was exactly where she’d said she would be this morning, that maybe her abrupt departure last night hadn’t been a lie.

“What is this about, Darren?”

“It has to do with this case,” he said. “Kind of.”

“I have to be back in court in like ten minutes.”

“I just want to know what kind of business they’re in, the firm’s bread and butter. I had a hard time finding anything concrete online. And away from my Lexis account, I’m kind of stuck trying to understand what they do.”

“So I’m your secretary now?” There was something playful in her tone, a reach toward a repair of whatever had been broken and weird between them last night. “Give me a second,” she said, and he pictured her sitting down on a bench in the hallway. “Actually, let me look into it, and I’ll call you right back.”

Darren was in the Marion County Hospital parking lot, leaning against his truck. The air was as cool as it had been since he’d arrived in Jefferson, but still strangely damp and humid, an affront to the large bells and red and green ribbon the hospital had affixed to the light fixtures in the parking lot. They were only a few weeks out from Christmas now, a time when he would normally be in Camilla. But nothing about Marion County said home to him. It was zydeco where he wanted blues. It was boudin where he wanted hot links. It was swampy cypress trees where he wanted pines, which always made him think of the holidays at home, even in the dead of summer. He was ready to get out of this county, but something had rooted his boots in place, some bits in this story that didn’t add up, that played like Russian nesting dolls—open one mystery and find another and another and another and another.