He threw up his hands to show he was backing off and glanced over his shoulder in search of the bourbon, his tongue already burning in anticipation of it. Then, as offhand as he could, he turned to Gaines and said flatly, “Why did you lie to me about renting one of the rooms next door to yours at the Cardinal?”

Rosemary looked up right away, the flush in her neck deepening.

“Room two-oh-seven was occupied by another guest, a woman,” Darren said. “Not, as you told me, by you. And yet you had a key.”

“I believe we discussed all of this in the wee hours of this morning, when you burst in like a crazed man, half naked, chasing ghosts and phantom noises and the like. The story is as simple as it is unremarkable. I met a lady, we had a dalliance, she left when the transaction was complete. That is all. That she let me hold on to her room key may be testament to my generosity.”

Was Darren missing something or was Gaines insinuating that the woman was a prostitute? He thought of his drive past Rosemary’s house the last night, of seeing the lit chandeliers inside, the sense of grandeur and old money. “What would a hooker, a call girl, even, be doing inside your house, Ms. King?” he asked. Then he looked at Gaines. “I saw you two leaving together.” Rosemary set down her phone.

“If this has nothing to do with Levi, I’d like you to leave,” she said.

The sheriff arrived before the bourbon.

He was still in uniform and out of breath, as if he’d run straight from his office. He put his hands on his hips and looked around the table like a harried mother who’d walked in on a mess and was unsure which child to scold first. Darren made a show of rising to leave. He would go before he had to watch a local sheriff embarrass himself by dressing down a Texas Ranger in public. But he used the presence of the sheriff to put a little heat under his next question to Sandler Gaines. “And the commotion I heard in the room next to yours last night?”

Gaines looked at the sheriff and then at Darren with an affected expression of befuddlement. “What commotion?” he said. “You saw the room. If it was goings-on like you say there was, there’d have been show of a struggle, wouldn’t it?”

Darren noted that it was Gaines who used the word struggle.