Darren nodded. He liked Quinn, felt the guy was shooting straight with him, and the sheriff didn’t appear at all resentful of Darren’s presence in his county. “Bill King seems to put this on Gil,” he said, “thinks Marnie’s boyfriend might have done something to the boy or put Levi in danger in some way. Folks is all kinds of hot right now. Hell, I got two kids at home, and I’d have torn this county limb from limb looking for ’em if they were gone. There’s something wrong about Thomason for sure, straight trouble. But so far there’s no sign of any foul play, nothing like that. The boy just up and disappeared.”

He’d left his house in the afternoon, Quinn said. His older sister—the girl in the trailer window—had let Levi take out their granddaddy’s boat, even though they both knew Marnie wouldn’t have allowed it. The boat hadn’t been touched much since Marnie’s father died sometime in the fall, and no one was taking any real care of it. But Dana King had a boyfriend over and wanted some privacy. She told Levi to stay gone for a few hours. The boy got himself all the way to Karnack on the other side of Caddo Lake—a body of water so big, Darren came to understand, that parts of it had names unto themselves, as did the handful of islands—some several miles long—that rose up among the water lilies and moss-draped cypress trees. Quinn, who kept a map of the lake in his cruiser, spread it over the hood of the car. He ran his hairy pointer finger across the inlet called Clinton Lake, past Goat Island, and through the bay of Carter Lake to the west, where Levi had spent most of the afternoon at a friend’s house, playing video games. The boy, CT, was the first person Dana called when her brother wasn’t home by dark. Darren took a closer look at the map. Even on paper, Caddo Lake was bigger than he’d imagined. It looked like a beast with a fire-breathing head to the north—the bayous and creeks shooting from its mouth resembling a forked tongue and flames—and a body so massive it claimed parts of Louisiana. It was a gnarled inland sea, wholly untamed. Darren looked out past the boathouses to Hopetown’s craggy shore. Only a skilled sailor could navigate the fortress of bald cypress, the tree roots—or knees, as they were called—like billy clubs sticking out of the water. Caddo Lake was both majestic and macabre. “That’s a long distance for a nine-year-old in a shoddy boat.”