His breathing didn’t completely even out until he was back on Highway 59, coming into Jefferson from the west. To get to the Cardinal Hotel, he had to pass Rosemary King’s place on North Vale. The house was lit up, the former ballroom’s chandeliers twinkling in the front windows. There were people gathered around a dining-room table, Darren could see from the street. There was a Christmas tree done up in white lights and doves, and a line of cars in front of the house stretched a few blocks, nearly to the town square. Her grandson missing three days as of sundown tonight, and Rosemary King was having a dinner party. Darren couldn’t make sense of it. When he parked his truck in front of the hotel, he looked through the bug-crusted windshield to the sky, dusted with stars weak above the town’s lights, and wondered if they shone any brighter wherever Levi was, why he and this kid had crossed paths at all. There were probably tens of thousands of missing children in the country tonight; why’d he get the case of one who spray-painted the word nigger on an old man’s house? He tried to remember the boy was nine, again pictured himself at that age, hair pilled between cuttings, buckteeth filmed in some sugary substance, the times he’d acted out at his elementary school—stealing cash and candy from a teacher’s purse in the lounge, pulling fire alarms, calling his phys. ed. teacher a jackass—always asking the school principal to call his uncle William all the way in Huntsville, a whole county away, where he lived with Naomi and his real children (as Darren thought of his uncle’s new family) instead of Clayton. Anything to get William’s attention, to force the man to claim him again, to step in as the father figure he wanted most. Looking back, it was possible the worst thing he ever did as a kid was harden his heart to his uncle Clayton, the one who stayed behind, the one who never left him, the one who forgave him everything, even becoming a Texas Ranger like his estranged brother.