“That would have been Leroy’s way of honoring his ancestors, the ones who were saved by Margaret Goodfellow’s people. His way of making sure, like he told me, the Caddos would have a home where they always should have been, in this stretch of East Texas. He would have made Rosemary promise that was part of the deal.”

“But you think Gaines is trying to get his hands on the land?”

“Yes,” Darren said. “He admitted he tried to buy it and got outbid.”

Marcus sucked his teeth and stood suddenly. He walked to the windows at the front of the store, looked out toward the railroad tracks. “It’s a shame, really, to lose all that history to lakeside housing.”

Darren shook his head. It no longer rang true to him. “So he builds vacation housing and people spend, what, sixty, seventy thousand dollars to live by the water and go into town to look for ghosts? There has to be some bigger attraction.” He pictured the steamboat replica docked out on Cypress Bayou. What had the brochure said? Come see Jefferson’s newest attraction, something like that. He saw the brochure again in his mind, the cheap photography. There had been a couple smiling, toasting before a sunset on Cypress Bayou. But there had also been images of blackjack tables, roulette wheels. Darren stood too now.

“Before, you said something about casinos,” he said.

“Just rumors,” Marcus said. “Like I said, folks have floated all kinds of ideas about drawing people back to Jefferson from Dallas or Shreveport, something besides historical tourism. But I never put any stock in that one in particular. Gambling’s been illegal in Texas for as long as I can remember.”

“Right,” Darren said. Unless.

22.

22.