Darren thought about Margaret Goodfellow’s and her family’s homes on the lake. How did Leroy Page imagine they wouldn’t be razed along with everything else? He thought of the friendly trade of eggs and pecans, greens out of the garden, the offers of daily meals and fellowship, and he felt rather acutely a loss of something that he didn’t have a real claim to, hadn’t known existed twenty-four hours ago. The sale of Hopetown, its utter demolishment, seemed a spiritual impossibility. Could Texas, which left standing monuments to its own defeats and embarrassments, really destroy the history of Hopetown, a community that had thrived against all odds, even the arrival of the ABT?

He asked the girl behind the bar if she’d ever heard of the place. “Slave settlement, out on the northeast shore of the lake?”

She was in her twenties with thick black hair and skin as pale as moonstone and as luminescent too. But that was makeup, probably. Her nails were painted and too long for this line of work, but she was on display here, her small-town stage. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” she said with a faint smirk as if she thought Darren was putting her on and she liked proving she wasn’t a sucker. “My maw-maw used to talk about runaway slaves and ghosts on the water, but I never known one black person to live on the lake. They can’t swim,” she said, not so much missing who she was talking to as using him as proof. “You know.”

Greg, disappointed, shook his head as she moved on to another customer, wiping the countertop with a rag as she went. “There go my plans for the night,” he said, revealing he’d had designs on the girl, plans that had now soured. Of course, he took a second look at the girl’s cornbread-fed ass. “Maybe not.”

“No shame,” Darren said.

“Plumb out, I’m afraid.”

“Marnie’s boyfriend, Gil Thomason, was he involved in any of the harassment in Hopetown, the threats against Mr. Page and the Caddo Indians?”

“Of course. He’s HCIC out there. Head cracker in charge.”

“Jesus, Greg, keep your voice down.”