“Deputy!” Avina exclaimed, ushering him and his associate into the house. Then her eyes shifted to Stiles’s black-and-blue face. “Good Lord, what’s going on?” Hubert and Jessie came out into the hall just then. Ida stayed seated. Jim stayed asleep.

“What were all those gunshots, deputy?” Hubert asked before noticing that each man carried a shotgun. “What is this? Are we under siege?”

“You could say that,” Charlie nodded. He looked at George. “We need to talk to you, Mr. Bailey. It’s important.”

The old man recognized the beaten-up Stiles from that night at the diner. He knew what this would be about. “Come to the dining room,” he said softly. Then, to the rest of them, he warned, “Don’t nobody open that door again, you hear me? Nobody!”

They followed him down the hall and into the dining room, where he turned to them with a look of resignation. “You know, don’t you?”

Stiles nodded. “Who you are . . . but not which one.”

Bailey sat down at the table wearily. “A long time ago,” he told them, “my name was Sebastian Danner. I take it you’ve met my brother, Nathan.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bean said. “We thought he was you.”

“A lot of people used to confuse us,” he told them. His face was etched darkly with the remembrance, but the words flowed nonetheless. They had been held inside too long. “But we weren’t nothing alike. Not inside, where it counts. There was always something wrong about Nate. Something bad. You know, the happiest day of my life was when he left here. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, not me, not our parents. He just left. And mind you, they didn’t say so, but they breathed a great sigh of relief as well. It was like a weight had left our shoulders, freeing us. Well, our father got sick not long after that and died the next year and Mother the year after that. But Nathan didn’t come back for either funeral. He may not have known about it, but I doubt it would’ve changed anything. He was just like that. I finally convinced myself to get on with my life, that Nate was dead. And in a way, I guess I was right.