He had trouble falling asleep. He kept hearing voices outside the bedroom window, women giggling and even a few girlish shrieks. He crossed the room in the dark and pulled back a corner of the heavy drapes to see a gaggle of middle-aged white women, their double chins lit by the candles they were holding. They were staring directly into Darren’s room. Naked except for his boxers, he quickly ducked back into the darkness of his hotel room, which apparently was a site of great interest on the town’s famed ghost walk. Another tour group came by forty-five minutes later. The same deal—candles outside his bedroom window, women staring gape-mouthed at the Cardinal Hotel, at Darren’s room in particular. Bored and unable to sleep, he pulled one of the hotel’s brochures from the nightstand and read about the Cardinal’s grisly past. He was startled to discover a whole page dedicated to the very room he was staying in, the Garden Suite, a room that also showed up in the other ghost-tour brochures fanned on his nightstand by hotel staff. Apparently, a Penelope Deschamps, née Penny Deckard, of Acadia Parish, Louisiana, shot herself with a pearl-handled derringer in this very room, heartbroken over the death of her husband and the loss of her favored slaves. Her ghost was said to reside in the famed Garden Suite, occasionally showing herself at the bedroom window to passersby. Darren hadn’t truly appreciated the breadth of Rosemary’s distaste for him until he remembered she’d arranged for him to stay in this very suite, knowing he wouldn’t get a lick of sleep. Jefferson billed itself as the most haunted town in Texas. There was no part of its past it wouldn’t turn over for a dollar; these ghost tours could go on all night. He made a dive for the minibar, seeking obliteration. He ate a tube of Pringles and drank two beers back to back, praying the alcohol and starch would knock him out. Sleep finally came on him like a black wave; it moved up his body until he felt a heavy comfort on his chest, felt his eyes give in to the weight of it. He dreamed of slaves and Indians, of the water on Caddo Lake, moss-choked cypress trees crowding him on all sides. He thought he saw Levi King behind this one; no, that one. The boy was hiding. He just had to catch him. He just had to move faster. But the water was heavy. His clothes were soaked through as he tried to navigate the swamp, the toes of his boots scraping the lake bed. And then he was back in the bayou in Lark, Randie standing on the shore watching him. She was leaning against a post oak tree, wearing that white coat and nothing else. Darren averted his eyes; even in the dream, he seemed to know he’d conjured her half naked, and he felt shame, hot and pink as his insides, flush through his entire body.