He took everything out of the TV cabinet, lifted every cushion on the bench couch attached to the back wall. The bathroom turned up nothing either. As he tore apart her bedroom, a certainty started to take hold. The .38 wasn’t under the mattress. It wasn’t in the bureau by the door, nor was it under the carpet Darren ripped from the floor with his bare hands, staples tearing at his skin. It wasn’t in any of the battered shoeboxes she kept in her closet, though he did find pictures of his father he’d never seen before, faded photographs of Darren “Duke” Mathews when he was still in high school. He pocketed the Polaroids without thinking, his heart hammering away in his chest.

The gun was gone.

He remembered the space under the house and felt a shot of hope. She’d once hidden a case of toilet paper she’d stolen from her job beneath the floorboards. He should check behind the cheap latticework that ringed the underside of the trailer, the two and a half feet of crawl space between Bell’s home and the cold hard ground. He turned for the front door just as the beams from a pair of headlights swung through the trailer’s front window, throwing shadows against the back wall. He quickly leaped out of sight, pressing himself against the side of the wall and peering out of the window at an angle, expecting to see the boxy silhouette of his mother’s car. But no; it was the outline of a police squad car.

Darren’s first impulse was to make sure he didn’t get shot.

He came out with his badge in his left hand, his Maglite in his right, and his hands not so much up in the air as thrust out in front of him in total submission. He got all the way to the bottom of the steps before he could see the officer’s face. He was a sheriff’s deputy, one of the youngest Darren had ever seen, and though Darren’s badge was clearly visible, the deputy’s hand hovered over his service weapon. Darren stood firm in front of his mother’s trailer and gave his name and title. The deputy, a white kid with spiky black hair, said, “I know who you are.” And yet his hand was still inches from his pistol.

Darren played it calm, as if the two had bumped into each other at the post office instead of at the site of a potential B and E. “I know most of the men and women in the sheriff’s department up here. My family’s owned a place in Camilla for over a hundred years,” he said, making clear his local pedigree. “Guess you must be new.”

The kid didn’t smile, and his hand didn’t come off that gun either.