But he had nothing else to go on, just a feeling that everyone in this little county excelled at obfuscation and misdirection. Marnie King and Gil Thomason, Rosemary and Sandler Gaines, Leroy Page, hell, even Margaret Goodfellow. Not nary a one of ’em will tell you a story straight, he thought. There was something shrouded about the place, like the grayish moss hanging on the cypress trees in Caddo Lake. It was impossible to untangle the truth, to follow a local’s response to a simple inquiry in a straight line. But he did believe Marnie King’s desperation. He did believe Dana’s tears about her brother. Even Bill King’s pleas for help felt as real to Darren as the same man’s history of racial vitriol and violence. Darren didn’t respect a one of them, wouldn’t cross the street to spit on Bill King, but he knew Bill and Marnie and Dana loved Levi King, and they wanted him home.

When he returned to his table, it was empty, the entrées barely touched. The herbed butter on his cheap steak had melted and was now running in a cloudy river toward the edge of his plate. Pools of grease had opened in Lisa’s bowl of étouffée, staining the accompanying white rice an acid orange. Darren was about to summon their server to ask where his fellow dinner guests had gone, find out how and why they’d fled so quickly, when he heard his wife’s voice float up from the street below him. “No,” she was saying, a hint of bass, of force, in her voice. “We are not doing this right now. We’re barely holding shit together as it is.” Darren glanced over the railing, saw Greg reach for his wife’s arm, and heard him call her name in a way that wasn’t so much possessive as petulant, as if he believed she owed him something. “We were just kids then anyway,” she said.

When Darren made it downstairs to the front steps of the restaurant, Lisa and Greg were no longer touching. In fact, they were no longer standing anywhere near each other. Greg gave him a limp pat on the back and said they’d talk soon and then walked off in the direction of the blue Ford Taurus he was driving. Lisa turned to Darren, reflections of the Christmas lights twinkling in her watery eyes. Her earlier fury with him was now drowned in whatever these tears were about. “Don’t hate me,” she said. He reached to embrace her, ready to absorb whatever she was about to say.

Lisa stood stiffly in his arms and lied to him. “I have to be in court tomorrow. We finally got a hearing in front of Judge Caselli, and I have to prep my team before we present oral arguments.”

“You’re leaving?” he said. “Now?”

“I have to.”