Darren raised his hands to show he had no cause to judge. He was still holding his newly purchased copy of the daguerreotype.

“Penelope Deschamps,” Marcus said. “One of only two known survivors of one of the worst steamboat crashes in this county’s history, the Magnolia. We’re talking before the war started, years before the Mittie Stephens, the crash everyone remembers. It was sixty-one died on that one, in 1872, but, ask me, the Magnolia was the more interesting in terms of history and influence on this county.” He offered Darren a glass of tea. He kept a pitcher of it in a minifridge in his back office, that and a pint of Chivas, he said, that could doctor up a glass of sweet tea real nice. Despite the morning he’d had, Darren accepted just the tea. When Marcus returned from his office, he was carrying the sweating glass of tea clouded with sugar and a chair for Darren.

Then he told a story.

The gist of it Darren already knew, Jefferson as the golden apple in Texas’s antebellum eye. A bustling economy made possible by slave labor and timber—always big in East Texas—but also by becoming something that no other Texas city save for Galveston on the coast had been able to accomplish by the middle of the nineteenth century: a first-class port city, made possible by steamboat travel through Caddo Lake and up the Cypress Bayou into the town center. Cotton and other plantation bounties out of Shreveport and New Orleans and towns farther north on the Mississippi—plus manufactured goods, fine linens and furniture for the newly wealthy—flowed into Jefferson across the murky water of Caddo Lake, requiring the relatively new technology of steamboat travel to contend with the thorny swamp culture, which for many years had no law enforcement agency dedicated to policing whatever went on behind the thicket of trees on the many islands that rose up on the water between the cypress forests and tangled patches of bluish-green lily pads floating like small cities. The islands had at one time been famous for concealing outlaws, some fleeing jailers from as far away as New York City, and any other folks who might not want to be found; they took refuge in these pockets of raw woods floating in the middle of the largest lake this side of the Mississippi. There were rumors of Indians on one of the islands, Caddos who for the most part lived in quiet peace but were known to knife any man who tried to ride a canoe up to their island. Darren remembered Margaret Goodfellow’s words: There are ways of hiding in plain sight.