DEPUTY BRYAN BRIGGS met Darren near the courthouse, or, rather, he stood at the corner of Polk and Austin waving his arms like a rodeo clown, as if he thought Darren might miss the county courthouse right in front of him, as if Darren were a foreigner who couldn’t read street signs. Briggs looked to be in his twenties, though his belly had leaped forward a few decades. He had the paunch and posture of an older man, despite his boyish face, the plain eagerness in his features. He was white, which for law enforcement in Marion County, Texas, nearly went without saying. He watched, hands on his hips, as Darren parked his Chevy truck in a spot along Polk Street downtown, next to a mural of an ancient steamboat called the Mittie Stephens. They were only a block from Big Cypress Bayou, once the main source of travel and trade in and out of Jefferson—a town named after the nation’s third president and at one time one of the largest cities in the state. The bayou was a broad waterway that fed into Caddo Lake, about eighteen miles to the east, which itself was an old trade route across the border to Louisiana. In the old days, steamboats from Shreveport and New Orleans came through the lake and into the then port city of Jefferson. It’s part of what gave the town its peculiar culture, heavily influenced by French settlers from Louisiana. Its town square looked like a shrunken-down French Quarter—colonial and Queen Anne buildings with second-story galleries bordered in intricate wrought iron—but without its sense of humor or even the tiniest hint of debauchery; the city square was like a courtesan who’d found Jesus. There was something pinched about Jefferson, not so much buttoned up as hemmed in, a sense of propriety in its genteel appearance—the quaint red-brick streets downtown and the perfectly manicured residential gardens—that made the city look like it was trying too hard, like it had something to hide.

It was a town that time had passed by.