Because of Darren, Bill King would likely never leave prison. It was no less than what he deserved, considering the murder for which he’d never served any time. And yet Darren still felt the lie in it, the liberties he’d taken that meant he had to look Levi in the face and say, “No, son, he’s not coming home.”

Levi bit his lip and kicked a toe in the dirt, confused and hurt.

“Just like Keisha and Jarrod Washington’s daddy ain’t coming home.”

“Who?”

“Ask your mama to look it up for you,” Darren said, trying to be matter-of-fact about the information and not willfully cruel. Levi’s life was a precarious one. Like a toy ball tottering on a wire fence, he could fall either way. They’d have to be careful with him, his family. “Or, better yet, write your daddy a letter and ask him about it. If he’s changed like he says he has, he’ll tell you the truth.” As he continued his walk out of Hopetown, he heard drums in the distance, the wail of Donald’s guitar, could picture Margaret and her family dancing in the rain.

In the end, the only federal case to come out of Marion County that December was the investigation into the conspiracy to commit fraud by Rosemary King and Sandler Gaines, the latter of whom skipped town shortly after the boy had been found. Rosemary, Roger by her side, held a press conference on the manicured lawn of her Victorian colonial and called the whole thing “hogwash.”

Monica Maldonado’s rental car was found abandoned on a farm road halfway to Longview, but there was nothing to suggest she hadn’t parked it there herself and simply walked off—no physical sign that anyone but her and a rental-car employee had ever been inside the vehicle. She had, as Rosemary predicted, simply disappeared, and though Sheriff Quinn had come around to seeing the foulness at the center of the thing, without a body, he couldn’t do anything but open a missing-person case with his department and wait for something to change.