Rationally, he understood why everyone shared Duane’s “case closed” mentality; Travis had confessed, after all, but somehow the pat way in which everyone just took Travis at his word, irked James. Travis’s gentle spirit was so contrary to such a deliberately heinous act, surely those who knew him should question it. Right, God?

Silence again.

“OK, Jimmy. Where to next?” he said aloud as he cranked the engine.

Earl Jackson.

James sped past the Pearce farm and minutes later, arrived at the Jackson acreage. A pristine late-model pickup sat in the snow-covered drive. Didn’t look as if the Jacksons had left the house since the last snowfall. There were no tire tracks trailing the truck and only a thin sheet of snow had settled beneath the chassis. He pulled onto the property and parked his old truck between the newer one and a plastic snowman that sat next to the side door of the house.

Earl Jackson was shoveling snow a short distance to the west in front of a freestanding garage that did not match the pre-fab house. “Can I help you?” he called as James hopped out of the truck.

“Oh, hey,” James called out as he approached Earl.

Behind him, the door to the house opened.

“You call for me?” a woman hollered.

James turned.

Mrs. Jackson was holding the door open with one hand and a swaddled baby in the other arm.

“No, sweetie, I got it,” her husband answered. “It’s cold out here. Go back inside.” He rested a hand on the handle of the snow shovel. Once his wife was safely behind the closed door, he started towards James. “What can I do for you?”

“Hey, my name is James Moore—”

“I know who you are. Figured you’d be bigger, considering your rep’.”

James suppressed a sigh. Popularity was a highly coveted commodity when he was a teen; now it was annoying, especially since he knew general consensus considered him as having abandoned the town. He’d’ve thought they would have forgotten him by now, put the rotting corpse of his glory days in the grave, but here was a man he’d never met—a man at least twenty years his junior—who recognized his name if not his face.

They reached each other and Earl rested his right hand on the shovel handle. “Earl Jackson.”

“I’m sorry. This’ll just take a minute of your time. I’m a friend of Travis Wexler.”

“If it’ll help you cut to the chase and get me back to work and outta this cold any sooner, Ed Beaujot called and said you might be dropping by. What do you need to know?”

Wow! He’d forgotten how fast news travelled in a town this size. Since Earl had put it so bluntly, James decided to cut right to the chase. “That night of the fire, did you see anything?”

“More than I wanted to.”

“What about Travis? Did you see him, or anybody else?”

Earl looked at him as if he was Chief Moron. He pointed south into the distance. “You see those trees way over there. Plus it was night. Real dark out here at night. No. Just the fire. That’s all I saw.”