“That this whole town is a lie,” Marcus said, belching with a heat that seemed to gas him forward. “Perpetuating and profiteering off a fraud—the fiction of bloodless prosperity, an antebellum life of civility and grace—while conveniently forgetting the lives that made this town possible. Let me ask you this, son. On any of the ghost tours in town, they got a stop for the slaves that were killed on plantations in town, the men who were lynched? Hell naw,” Marcus said, answering his own question. “It’s all white ladies in distress, roaming halls, wrenching their hands over spurned lovers or losing their slaves.”

“Penelope Deschamps.”

“Your girl,” Marcus said teasingly, as if Darren were a fanboy who’d bought a much hyped baseball card instead of a photo of a slave mistress. Darren didn’t know why he’d done it other than being unnerved by what he’d seen in his room, wanting to make sense of it by holding something tangible.

“So what’s the deal with Rosemary King and Sandler Gaines?” Darren said, switching subjects and getting to the real reason he’d come by this morning.

“You talking ’bout ol’ boy rolled that glorified duck boat into town?”

“The Jeffersonian, yes.”

“Huckster,” Marcus said, blowing on his coffee before taking another sip.

“He’s got a development company out of Longview. Seems legit.”

“You have any idea how many men have come through here believing they could return Jefferson to its former glory or at least try to tap into its tourism industry with a surefire moneymaker? Outlet malls, racetracks, bingo halls, casinos, amusement parks, you name it and somebody’s tried it.”

“Gaines seems to be in the pocket of Rosemary King, or she’s in his, can’t quite figure which,” Darren said. “Maybe she’s someone who can finally make things happen.”

“She is queen bee around these parts.”

“So what’s this Marion County Texas Historical Society she’s running?”

Marcus tilted his head and made a face. “Never heard of it.”

“You sure?”

“We got the Jefferson Historical Society, the Historic Jefferson Foundation, and the Marion County Historical Commission—could you mean one of them?”

“No,” Darren said, pushing back a little in the chair he was sitting in. He felt the coffee burn in his stomach, felt flushed throughout his whole torso. Had he gotten it wrong?

“This is Rosemary’s deal?”

“The Marion County Texas Historical Society is supposed to be buying up Hopetown, out on the lake—”

“I know exactly where it is,” Marcus said, a grave expression on his face. “I wrote my dissertation on freedmen’s communities in the state of Texas. Hopetown is part of a larger historical story of what black freedom looks like.”