“It’s a different world out here. I’ve seen seven-year-olds driving fifteen-foot bass boats. They put ’em in canoes out here soon as they can walk. Hell, the old-timers on Caddo like to talk about boating to school, trying to keep their homework dry. The water is just part of everything for folks on the lake.”

“Still, something could have happened to him out there.”

“Naw, we got an eyewitness says he got the boat home,” Quinn said as he glanced back at Deputy Briggs in the other squad car. “Neighbor out that way,” he said, pointing past the trailers and vans to that other Hopetown, the green valley and houses across the way. “He says he saw the boy locking up the boathouse. Didn’t see the boat itself but assumed he was just coming in for the night. Marnie and Gil wouldn’t let us inside that either, but you can see it’s locked.” He pointed toward an unpainted clapboard shed with a tin roof and a thick padlock looped through the handles on the door. Darren looked up. He saw no streetlights, no lamps affixed to any of the boathouses, no lighting of any kind. “He’s sure it was Levi King?”

“You wanna ask him yourself?”

Darren smelled horses again, heard the clop of hooves in the dirt. He knew there were three of them before he turned his head to see the posse on horseback. The first man was black and easily in his late seventies; the other two were younger and astride twin mustangs with coats the color of charcoal. They were Native—Texas Indians—one in his late teens and the other nearing forty, his skin leathered and bronze, his hands on the horse’s reins, communicating by tiny movements, gently holding his stallion in place. They were all armed, the men with a .45 revolver each and the teenager with a rifle hanging by a leather strap on his back. The black man looked at Darren and gave a nod and his name. “Leroy Page.”

6.

6.

THEY WERE from that other Hopetown.

The original residents, it turned out.

“Some kind of freedmen’s deal, black folks been living back there since after the Civil War,” Quinn said as they sat on an ornate sofa in Rosemary King’s sitting room, as the black maid had called it when she invited the sheriff and Darren to wait for Madame. They each had a cooling cup of tea in front of them, matching china cups on the gilded coffee table. Neither had touched the tea in the twenty minutes they’d been waiting to see Mrs. King.