Darren had been directed to the unit where longer-term patients were housed. He went past cheaply framed paintings of bluebonnets and dogwood trees, the heels of his ostrich boots clicking on the vaguely sticky tiled floor—the sound like the peeling of a bandage off skin, over and over again—and finally found Mr. Page’s room near the third nurses’ station from the elevator. Mr. Page shared the room with a white man in his forties who was eating something out of a Whataburger bag and talking on his cell phone. He did a double take when he saw Darren and the badge but otherwise could not be distracted from his food or his phone. Behind a gauzy curtain on the other side of the room, Mr. Page was asleep, or at least his eyes were closed. His body seemed to be twitching of its own accord, and the black woman sitting on a stool next to his bed had a hand laid across his body, pinning his arms at his sides. She turned when Darren stepped inside what counted for a private room at this small hospital. He saw the resemblance immediately—the same deep hickory skin tone, reddish in parts, hair black with a loose curl pattern and thick, bow-shaped lips. Mr. Page’s were dry and crusted with some white substance at the corners; hers were painted a deep pink that had faded and left her lips looking cracked and bleeding. She glanced at Darren, taking in the hat and the badge, the whole Ranger uniform, and then she went back to watching her father with great intensity, as if she could see through flesh and bone to where he was hurting, as if she could kiss the pain away with the force of her caring. “Erika,” Darren said, because that’s what Margaret had called her when he’d eaten at her home. This was Leroy’s younger daughter. Along with the yeasty odor of damp skin where Leroy had sweat through his blue hospital gown, Darren smelled pipe tobacco.

He turned and realized he hadn’t seen Margaret in a back corner of the room. It seemed the tobacco had cured her tawny skin, so much was the scent a part of her; he hadn’t noticed it in her house, but it struck him full on now. It was sweet, this smell, like baked cherries and damp tree bark, and Darren found it vaguely comforting, though he noticed Erika cutting her eyes at the spectacle of Margaret Goodfellow, red-and-blue shawl over her shoulders, head lowered as she murmured hushed words, almost breathing them into her own chest. She was praying fervently but privately.

“I don’t think Daddy would want you here.” Erika was looking at Margaret, but she was talking to Darren. “You think he’s a killer.”

“Why’s he shaking like that?”