“No, like—” The first man lowered his voice; Joel would swear he’d heard him shiver. “I ain’t been right at night. I ain’t felt like this since our school days, since with Broadlock and all.”

“There’s a name that’s bad for your health.”

“But that voice, Phil—you heard it yourself.”

A lady cut in. “This ain’t nothing like back then. This here all starts with the mother. She teaches a boy she can move a man into her home without a lick of ceremony then how’s the boy supposed to know smart from hazardous? I ask you. It’s the breakdown of tradition is what it is.”

Joel refused to be baited. He strode out of the diner as the waitress brought the sandwich to his table.

Now he drove his ruined car up the highway and pulled onto the shoulder at the little stand of trees that sat two miles north of the football field. According to Bethany, it was here that the boys had hidden Jamal’s SUV before the game and dropped him off to retrieve it. Joel saw no reason to doubt her; the plan was so elaborate and superfluous it could only be invented by a group of teenage celebrities who had to make their own entertainment. The trees, just as Joel remembered, sat on the west side of the highway, opposite the eastern copper Flats, and were still packed in so tight together that from the road you’d never guess you could fit a car between them.

Ten years ago, back when he would meet Troy here, he had always seen the First Baptist Church’s steeple in his rearview mirror, watching him from back in town. Now, with the church gone, there was nothing on the horizon but the football field’s tall halogen field lights. They seemed to follow him wherever he went.

Joel wondered if they might not have been the steeples of this town’s true religion all along.

He eased over the shoulder and found the space on the western edge of the trees where, by the luck of nature, two shedding cedars had decided to grow a few extra feet apart from one another.

Joel climbed from the car and found himself back in the small clearing he remembered intimately from when he’d been Dylan’s age. Roughly ten yards long and five wide, the clearing was blanketed with strips of cedar bark, a few cigarette butts. Joel spotted a dark stain in a patch of dirt and realized with a start that this place might be the site of his brother’s murder—it was north of town, after all, in the direction Dylan had been last seen going, and God knew it was plenty private. But when Joel pressed his finger to the dark patch and brought them to his nose he found that the stain was only engine oil. Jamal’s SUV must have had a drip.

The scent brought on an overwhelming stab of nostalgia—Troy had always smelled of grease, sweat, welder’s smoke—and when the moment passed Joel realized he was in danger of losing his balance. He caught hold of a branch and awoke to the sound of his heart racing in his ears. He’d fallen asleep on his feet.