Whatever Bobo had expected, it wasn’t this. “What do you mean?” he said, floundering around in his thoughts to make sense of Smith’s question. His head felt thick as cotton wool, his grief making him slow and stupid. “She was working in Davy when I met her. She was a waitress at the Lone Star Steakhouse.”

“What did she tell you about her background?”

That was definitely an ominous turn of phrase, but Bobo said, “She told me her parents were dead and that her sister had thrown Aubrey out of the house when she’d turned eighteen . . . and she’d been fending for herself since then.”

“That’s what she had told her coworkers at the steakhouse, too. We talked to them briefly when you reported her missing. However, one of my deputies looked a little deeper after we got the call to come out here, since she’s the only missing person on our books. None of that is true.”

Bobo felt the shock clear down to his bones. “What are you saying?” Bobo asked. He looked at Fiji, whose face was locked down tight, for some enlightenment.

Fiji said, “Sheriff, are you saying that Aubrey kind of made herself up?”

“That’s right. Her name was Aubrey Hamilton, right enough,” Arthur Smith said. “But she’s got living parents. She’s got no sister. She does have a brother. And she’s been married before.”

“But I knew her,” Bobo said, feeling that if he said it often enough, it would erase what the sheriff was saying. “I saw her driver’s license. I met her by chance . . .” And then he remembered the two men who’d come into the pawnshop. He began to let a new idea sink into his brain. “I thought I knew her.”

“How did you make her acquaintance?” the sheriff asked.

“I love the Lone Star Steakhouse,” Bobo said. “I go there at least once every two, three weeks to have steak. I met her there.”

Olivia’s face flushed red with anger. “Son of a fucking bitch,” she snarled, and stomped away.

Bobo watched as the other townspeople gathered around her, and Olivia began to talk, her hands flying upward from time to time in outrage.

“Olivia has no problem at all believing that Aubrey was a liar,” Bobo murmured, the enormity of this revelation about the woman he’d loved beginning to sink in.

“I don’t, either,” said Fiji, almost in a whisper. She put her arm around him, awkwardly, and he could see the unhappiness in her, the unhappiness she felt on his behalf.

The rest of the Midnighters had clustered around Olivia. Even Madonna, who’d been glowering at the crowd while she sat in the pickup with the door open, came closer with Grady in her arms.