Greg liked Mr. Page for the homicide.

A homicide that Darren had to remind him hadn’t been established.

“Three days, no one’s seen or heard from the kid, and you said yourself the grandmother doesn’t know where he is. But what we do know, by his own admission, is that Leroy Page was the last one to see the kid Friday night.”

“A weird admission if you killed the kid.”

“Or genius,” Greg said. “Make himself seem honest and cooperative.”

Darren remembered being brusquely escorted out of the old man’s house this evening when he’d asked to search the place. Cooperative is not the word he would use to describe Leroy Page. “What’s the motive?” Darren said, attempting but coming up short at making this all seem absurd. He shivered to think how casually he’d contemplated the kid’s demise himself. He glanced at his face in the red-tinsel-framed mirror behind the bar. Either the mirror was warped or the bourbon was moving at light speed because the man he saw was grotesque to him: skin the color of tree bark on a dying oak, ashy and gray, and a hunch in his shoulders that had settled in he didn’t know when. He hadn’t been himself since the thing with Mack had fucked with his lens on the world, making him unsure when he was on the side of right and when he was dead wrong.

You’re losing yourself, son, he heard his uncle William say. Don’t let anybody steal your grace.

But why, he wanted to ask, is the weight of grace always on us?

“Do you know somebody left dog shit on Mr. Page’s doorstep?”

“The kid?”

“It’s bigger than Levi, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Do you know a man broke into Margaret Goodfellow’s home, stood over her bed in the middle of the night, and threatened to rape her? An eighty-year-old woman? Do you know somebody shot through the stables? Lucky they didn’t kill the old man’s horses. They broke into his boathouse, stole a two-hundred-dollar motor.”

“And all this started after the election?” It fit a pattern of racial violence that had emerged over the past few weeks, Darren thought, like a ghostly relative in a daguerreotype who had always been there but was now impossible to ignore.

“That’s coincidental, not causal, in this case.”

“Thought you don’t believe in coincidence,” Darren said. He nodded to the bartender for another drink, even though Greg wasn’t through his first beer.

“This all jumped off when Page decided to sell the land.”

“Who’s he selling to?”

“Some developer out of Longview, man named Sandler Gaines.”

“Developer?” Darren said. He grabbed a notepad from his front pocket and wrote it down. “What, he’ll tear it all down and build lakefront condos?”

“Who knows?”