THEY SEARCHED the house anyway. Twenty rooms, including a library, a study, a sewing room, and a dining room large enough to double as a ballroom, as it did in the late 1800s when Rosemary King’s people settled in Jefferson. After Rosemary’s great-great-grandmother was widowed, she’d sold the family plantation in Louisiana, moved to Jefferson, and built the Cardinal, which became the centerpiece of the town’s sense of itself as the cosmopolitan capital of East Texas in the steamboat era. She became a grand dame of Jefferson society but never remarried and raised a daughter in the house that Rosemary King had lived in since she was born. The dining room had once hosted governors and bankers and plantation owners from as far away as Denton and Dallas. The house on North Vale Street was the largest in Marion County, Quinn said, and was a regular feature on the circuit of tours of historic homes and gardens in Jefferson. Once a year, Rosemary allowed the mayor and aldermen to hold parts of the town’s elaborate Civil War reenactments on her front lawn. She was, Quinn made it known, a very big deal around Jefferson.

She put no restrictions on the search, even silencing Roger when he’d tried to object. It was Mary who walked the sheriff and Darren through the house, as if they were regular guests whom it would be rude to leave wandering around the place looking for the facilities. Darren asked her if she’d ever met Mrs. King’s grandson Levi. She said, “Once,” speaking so softly that if Darren hadn’t seen her lips move, he might have thought he’d imagined the entire exchange. Though Quinn had gotten an “Afternoon, sir,” Mary avoided eye contact with Darren; he wondered if it pained her for him to see her in her maid’s uniform, a collared, ill-fitting, double-breasted dress that must have been a hand-me-down from the previous girl or maybe the one before that. Rosemary had said she’d never had a black guest in her home, so until today, Mary’s humiliation had been visible to white callers only and thus private in some way. Darren bearing witness to her servitude made it real, and she seemed to resent him for it.