Gil nodded, scratching at his hairline, the thick tufts of loose curls just starting to go gray. He had on a loose pair of black Wranglers that were hanging on by a belt with a brick-size buckle that, if it were real silver, could have put a new paint job on the trailer, got it a new set of wheels. He was barefoot in the rocks and dirt around his home, as if he were afraid to go inside for his boots for fear the sheriff would scuttle in behind him. Whatever was in that trailer, for Gil Thomason, it was worth burning time that Levi King didn’t have. Darren looked up and saw a teenage girl standing in the front window. She had milky-white skin and eyes ringed in black, and she was wearing a leather jacket two sizes too big. She was staring at the whole scene, Gil and Marnie in front of the trailer door, the sheriff and the deputies, and Darren. They locked eyes, the girl and the Texas Ranger, and now he saw quite clearly that she was crying, had been for some time.

“This is some shit Rosemary King cooked up, trust me,” Gil said with the authority of a man who knows his way around a scam. “Take the boy, get the sheriff involved, and then get that judge she put on the bench to cook up some reason to poke around here, some reason to say we ain’t fit, and lickety-split, Marnie loses custody, and Rosemary don’t gotta pay no more child support.”

Sheriff Quinn shook his head. “Y’all the ones called about a missing boy.”

“He’s not missing,” Marnie said, her voice shrill and ice cold. “You go talk to that old bitch in Jefferson, and you bring me back my son.” Her voice cracked on the last word, cracked something in her wide open. Marnie started to cry, fat drops falling on the pink tank top, darkening the fabric to a deep blood red.

Briggs had been right: Hopetown was hard to find.

It was an unincorporated sliver of land tucked at the end of a one-lane dirt road so choked with vegetation—pines and pin oak shrubs, chickweed growing every which way—that anyone who didn’t know what was back here would give up and turn around within the first few yards. The only other way to access the tiny village was by boat, across the northern part of Caddo Lake. But the nearby lakeshore was lined with ancient bald cypress trees draped in Spanish moss the color of an old man’s whiskers, the trees’ knobby roots standing up out of the water like a line of troops keeping outsiders away. There were people living out here completely hidden from sight by both land and water. The air smelled of peat moss and dead fish and the damp, boggy soil at the shoreline.