He also couldn’t remember if he’d called Randie or if he’d dreamed it, but he’d told her everything, had confessed to thinking he might just turn in his badge over all this, that he didn’t entirely know anymore who or what he was fighting for or how to do it without breaking the very laws he’d sworn to uphold. And he’d told her he’d like to see her again. A dream. God, he hoped that was just a dream, that he hadn’t revealed himself so completely to a woman he hardly knew. He felt bricked in by his drinking, could only see the few inches in front of him, could only remember waking up.

But the papers were there.

The information on the parole-board members and his notes about Sandler Gaines were scattered across the velvet duvet, which he’d slept on top of, curled into himself, boots still on his feet. He read them all by the light of day, poured what little was left of the Jim Beam down the bathroom sink so he wouldn’t be tempted. It was so easy to be good at dawn, to swear you’d never touch another drop. Then he took a cold shower and waited until he thought cafés in town were open, until he thought he could get a warm bun and a coffee away from the Cardinal Hotel, until he thought Marcus Aldrich was inside his shop.

“So you’ve lived here, what, twenty, twenty-five years?” he said as he handed Marcus a takeaway cup of black coffee. He’d bet that he didn’t go in for the morning fuss of creams and syrups but then watched as Marcus poured six sugar packets from a stash in his office into the cup and stirred it with the eraser end of a pencil.

“Thirty,” he said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “Moved here to work on my dissertation, what was supposed to be just a few months, met a girl, fell in love, and never left. Argued my dissertation on a twenty-four-hour turnaround and then came back to Jefferson and moved in with Betty.” He was wearing another Hawaiian-style shirt, banana yellow with red hibiscus flowers all over it. And he hadn’t shaved.

“Betty?”

“My ex. She runs the Dogwood Inn over on Bonham, one of dozens of B-and-Bs in Marion County. I mean, we both ran it while I was working on the book. We shared a love of Jefferson, but for different reasons, it soon became clear, and what can I say, the marriage couldn’t survive two different views on history.”

“What was yours?”