Darren smiled bitterly, knowing he had already doubled down on the former and wasn’t ready for the latter. “There’s more to this, though,” he said.

He told Wilson of Rosemary King’s odd behavior, the attorney she’d had nearly attached to her hip from the time Darren had met her, which stopped all manner of questioning, including that involving Marion County’s latest mystery. He told Wilson about Monica Maldonado, the noises in the room, the run-in with Gaines, the lies, the notary who couldn’t find her, and the fact that she seemed to have completely disappeared. Wilson chuckled faintly at the end of it, as if he thought Darren were reaching for something else to do out there to avoid leaving town. “Thought you said things were good at home.”

“A woman who was at Rosemary King’s house was seen with the man who is somehow tangled up in the sale of Hopetown, where Leroy Page lives and Levi King went missing. Now that woman is also missing,” Darren said with a certainty he really didn’t have. Could he say for sure that the woman he saw with Sandler Gaines outside the Cardinal Hotel was Monica Maldonado? No, he couldn’t. But he was sure there was more to this story. “I find that worthy of further inquiry.”

“You already done what you could, Ranger. You brought it to the sheriff’s attention; beyond that, I can’t say that this is one for the Texas Rangers to take up. Stop wasting time and get out of Jefferson and get back where you belong.”

20.

20.

HE GOT properly drunk by way of a fifth of Jim Beam he’d picked up at a liquor store before heading to his room at the Cardinal Hotel, where he lay on top of the bloodred velvet duvet and ignored a dozen phone calls from Lisa, Clayton, Greg, even from Mack, for whom Darren theoretically had good news. The only person he didn’t hear from was his mother, but Bill King’s “confession” seemed to neutralize the threat there, and Darren felt he could breathe again, could sit in silence for five minutes in a row without being jolted by his terror of the .38 in his mother’s possession and its ability to ruin lives—his and Mack’s.

He thought about calling Randie again, but he stopped himself, tender and embarrassed over the possibility that he had gone too far on the phone call last night. She had to know now that he felt things for her, even if they had yet to be named. But what if she didn’t feel the same? The whole thing had created an ache where there wasn’t one before. He should have left her alone; they should have remained just two souls passing each other in this lifetime.

And something else was humming at the edge of his consciousness.