Beyond the reception area was a row of pay phones, each partitioned by finger-smudged panels and each with a small cubby underneath that was filled with various items: gum wrappers, smashed paper cups that were flaking curls of wax, and, in one, a tiny plastic doll the size of Darren’s pinkie. Only the last phone “booth” held a Marion County phone directory. Darren opened the business listings starting with the letter M. He ran his long fingers down the names, searching through the businesses twice before accepting that it wasn’t there. No listing for the historical society. But his finger stopped on the spot just above where Marion County Texas Historical Society should have been. He actually smiled at the familiar name, at the jaunty moniker the man had chosen for his enterprise: MARCUS ALDRICH’S TRUTH AND TREASURES. His uncle Clayton’s old college friend with a PhD in history was still, as Clayton would say, messing around in an old, dead town, wasting his talent and time.

Maybe not, Darren thought.

The storefront was on East Austin Street, past the Jefferson General Store, which sold everything from moonshine jelly to locally made maple syrup to cowboy-boot galoshes to dixie-flag bikinis; it was on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the middle of a row of antiques shops that had Lone Star flags flying out front and rusted neon soda signs stacked near their front doors, which were outlined in Christmas lights seemingly blinking in time to the rhythm of the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Because of Him” on speakers inside each store.

Marcus’s shop was not so festively adorned.

He was early with a Kwanzaa kinara in the front window, each red, black, and green candle dry and dusty, as they’d certainly been sitting out since last December, and there were a few yellowing photos tacked to the windows, paintings of the lake and drawings of Caddo Indians, plus early photographic images of slaves, a group gathered in front of a small cabin, their skin scarred, bones gnarled at their joints, but other than that, the storefront and the store itself appeared nearly empty. Darren removed his hat to press his face against the window. Inside, he saw an open cardboard box of books, a table with a calculator, pad, and pencil, but no register, no proprietor, no sign of life at all.

But the door was unlocked.

It smelled of mothballs and incense when Darren stepped inside. There was an air-conditioning unit shaking in one of the windows near the back of the store, though the word store seemed not so much to describe Marcus Aldrich’s Truth and Treasures as openly mock it. There were more photographs inside, laid out on the long table in no discernible order. They were each encased in a plastic sleeve with a tiny colored sticker in the corner, circles of green, yellow, blue. Darren ran his fingers through the stack of pictures like he was splaying out cards in a saloon. His eyes stopped on a queen: a woman in a daguerreotype was wearing a familiar ruffled white dress, cinched as tight at the waist as it was at her throat, so it appeared these body parts measured the same. He saw black eyes, felt, when he looked at her tight-lipped smile, the same bolt of panic he had when she’d stood over his bed. Although without a derringer in her hand, this was the same woman. A ghost or a dream, who knew, though he couldn’t bring himself to believe the former.