He shook his head as his hands dropped back to his side, back, she noted with a tremor, near the gun on his hip. “I was twenty, scraping pennies. I’d just killed the most important man in town, and there was twenty-five thousand dollars in a box next to his body. Who’d have believed me? Maybe I panicked, maybe I did the only sensible thing, but I buried him and his money in the gully, then sent his car into the river.”

“Louella …” Maggie began.

“I didn’t know she’d followed me. I guess she knew Morgan better than anyone and understood he’d never let me marry Joyce. I didn’t know she’d watched everything from the woods. Maybe if I had, things would’ve been different. It seemed she never really came out of the shock of losing her husband; now I understand better. She’d seen it all—then, for some reason of her own, she’d dug out the cash box and hidden it in the house. I guess she was protecting me all these years.”

“And Joyce?”

“She never knew.” Stan shook his head and tugged at the collar of his shirt as if it were too tight. “I never told her. You have to understand. I love Joyce. I’ve loved her since she was a girl. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her if I could. If I’d told her everything, everything he’d threatened to do and what had happened, she might have thought—she might not have believed it was an accident. I couldn’t have lived with that. For years I’ve done everything I could to make up for what happened in that gully. I dedicated myself to the law, to the town. I’ve been the best father, the best husband, I know how to be.”

He picked up the color snapshot and crushed it in his hand. “That damn picture. Damn ring. I was so wired up I didn’t notice I’d lost it until days afterward. My grandfather’s ring.” He rubbed a hand over his temple. “Ten years later it’s dug up with Morgan. Do you know how I felt when I learned that Joyce had identified it as her father’s? She knew,” he said passionately. “She knew it was mine, but she stood behind me. She never questioned me, and when I told her everything, she never doubted me. All these years—I’ve lived with it all these years.”

“You don’t have to live with it anymore.” Maggie spoke calmly, though her heart was in her throat. He was strung so tight she couldn’t gauge when he might snap or what he might do. “People respect you, know you. Louella saw everything. She’d testify.”