Leroy Page pushed himself to standing and nodded at Darren. “You can tell the sheriff we ain’t turned up nothing yet. Sun’s setting soon. We’ll be back at it tomorrow.” He hollered for Ray, Donald’s son, to run the pecans up to his grandmother. “Tell her I’ll take a half dozen eggs for ’em.” Ray, who’d come running as soon as the older man called his name, took the paper bag and started cutting across a field, heading for a yellow house twenty or so yards from Mr. Page’s. There were no streets in this part of Hopetown, at least none that hadn’t been overgrown by time and wild grass, so there was nothing separating neighbor from neighbor back here; it was as if they all shared the same plot of land, were all one big family. In fact, Ray’s grandmother, a short, compact woman with a face bronzed and freckled with moles, came out on her front porch to receive the bag of pecans and hollered out to Mr. Page, “Eggs is gone, Leroy, Lou and her girls got ’em first, but I got a tray of red-corn pudding in the oven. We serving at six thirty if you want to eat with us tonight.” Mr. Page nodded in a noncommittal way, the gesture likely impossible for the woman to decipher at a distance. To Darren, he shook his head. “Margaret knows I can’t eat her corn pudding. The Pages, black folks in Hopetown, we took ours sweet. The red in her red-corn pudding is chopped habanero peppers, and I’ll be up all night if I take even a bite of that.” He shrugged. “I grow ’em but can’t eat ’em no more.”

Darren told Mr. Page that he needed to follow up on a few things, that he was here on official business. The old man nodded agreeably. “Come on in, then. I don’t stay out here after dark no more, least not without my pistol.”

They moved through the dim house, passing framed family photos on the walls, sepia prints in mahogany frames. Stacks of newspapers crowded the hallway, along with fishing equipment, paint supplies, and abandoned quilting projects, swatches stuffed in an oak secretary. In the kitchen, a radio sat atop the Frigidaire. A tinny Jessie Mae Hemphill blues was playing, the prayer of a country violin. Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved.

“And you’re sure, Mr. Page, that this is the boy you saw locking up the boat shed Friday evening?” Darren held out the school photo.

The old man hardly glanced at it. “I known that boy since he was a baby,” he said, pulling a Miller High Life from the fridge. He popped the top with an opener he kept on his key ring. “It was the King boy, sure as I’m standing here.”

“And what time was this?”