“So you understand what it took to build all this. Don’t seem right to piss it away. But ain’t nothing left for nobody else but me, I guess. I’m the last one. My girls stayed through high school, out to Jefferson, but they were done come college. Got one in Dallas, the other selling real estate up to Arkansas. She on me to sell all this, come live with her family in Little Rock. They got a pool, she said. What I’m gon’ do with a pool growing up next to that my whole life?” He pointed to the majesty of Caddo Lake, just a few yards out the kitchen window. It was past dusk now, and it was hard to tell the cypress trees from their gnarled shadows, what was real and what wasn’t. Again, Darren got a sudden image of Levi King out on that water, alone in a boat, just before sundown.

“What about the trailers, Mr. Page?” he said.

He remembered Gil Thomason’s shit-eating grin when he’d mentioned the name Leroy Page, and it niggled at him, the sense that he made a misstep back there. “You’ve had some trouble with the boy’s family out that way?”

“Ain’t had no problem with the boy’s grandfather. Lester Wayne. I rented him a few acres back in the eighties, when it was clear Hopetown was on the dying side of history. When it was just me and what’s left of Margaret and her people, Donald and Ray, Margaret’s sister and her kids. Some of her cousins.”

“You rent to them too?”

“Don’t charge nothing but a couple dollars a month, just to make the contract binding. My daughter Erika, she taught me that. But I won’t take no real money from the Caddos living here. This was all theirs to begin with, even before you and me, son. The Indians was here before the French, the Spanish, the English, and the Africans. You know what the Hasinai—that’s kind of like a tribe within a tribe, you feel me, them’s the Caddos what come from around here, north to Arkansas and down to Nacogdoches—anyway, you know what their word for ‘ally’ is? Tayshas. That’s right. Tayshas. Tejas. Texas. The people in my family have always looked out for the Indians. Just like they always looked out for us. Ally. That’s what we are. Friends. Family. I owe them my life.”

“The trailers, sir,” Darren said, wanting to control his first real interview on this case, feeling the town dynamics here might be at play when it came to Levi King’s disappearance. “And your relationship with the boy’s family?”