He turned and caught her looking down at the tips of her shoes, cheap boots with peeling pleather. “They lied to the sheriff. That whole mess about them waiting up all night? Bullshit. They were out to Jefferson or Marshall or wherever the hell and didn’t come home until two in the morning, drunk off their asses, both of them. Took till sunrise for Mama to sober up and understand Levi was gone. By then I’d already called Rosemary. So I knew he wasn’t there.”

And Rosemary must have been the one to call Bill.

Hence his letter to the governor Sunday.

“This is my fault,” Dana said, tears forming, making black rivers of her drugstore mascara and a shallow pool of pain where they landed in the hollow of her throat. “I sent him on the water. I gave him the boat key. And when my company left…” It was such a strange, formal word coming from a girl in cheap boots and raccoon eyes. Darren felt a pity that shamed him. She was trying so hard to get this right, to get this man with a badge to see past the tiny trailer, the messiness of her mother and her boyfriend, to get this black man not to look at her and see white trash. He respected the fact that she was smart enough to wait until Marnie and Gil were gone to tell the truth.

“When my friend left, I was the one who waited, watching as it grew dark,” she said. And here she grabbed him by the arm, startling him with a grip as strong and desperate as her mother’s, and pulled him toward a small rectangular window above the trailer’s kitchen sink. There was a clear view of the boat shed; Quinn’s deputies had confirmed the boat was there. “And I’m telling you the old man is lying. I woulda seen something.”

“But you admit you missed seeing your brother returning the boat.”

“Mr.…Ranger, I didn’t see anybody. Not Levi. Not Leroy Page on patrol.”

“Is it possible you missed Mr. Page?”

“Missed a black man on a horse with a forty-five on his hip? Around here”— she tried to say this next part gently, not wanting to offend Darren—“that’s not the kind of thing goes unnoticed. When Mr. Page and them Indians do their patrol, soon as you hear the clip of those horses, folks in the trailers come sit out on their front steps with their own weapons showing. Been known to pop a few warning shots. You can’t miss it when they get started.” She looked down at her hands, chipped black polish, nails bitten and torn. “Leroy is lying, got to be.”

13.

13.