“Dad, Dad, please, listen to me.” She grabbed his thin hand, squeezed until he shut up and stared at her. “I need to ask you something important.”

He blinked: foggy eyes, the other hand scratching at the bedsheet.

“Dad, do you remember all that stuff Mom used to talk about back in the day? About the monster in the trench, and the dreams and—”

“Crazy as a fucking loon, that was her. Do you know how hard it was living with a woman who said the ghost of her first love would keep her company at night? A woman who always knew exactly where you’d been because her favorite man was always whispering things in her fucking ear? Fuck him, fuck her, fuck me.”

Clark frowned. “Her first love?”

“The boy on the team, the one ran off! She swore and swore, oh no, he ain’t run off, ‘he’s dead in a concrete box,’ whatever the fuck that is. ‘It’s why the catfish came to town,’ she said. ‘It came to drink his blood.’”

“Is that what it wants then?” Clark swallowed. “The...catfish—it wants blood?”

“Troy asked me the same goddamn questions right before you threw him out.” Her father grinned. “You really ran him through the wringer that night, you know. Poor boy hadn’t been able to sleep for a week when you went screaming at him like a banshee.”

She flinched away.

“You think I went deaf that evening you called him over?”

“Then what did you tell him?”

“I told him his mother was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

Clark stood, put a hand on her father’s arm. She said calmly, “You hit another soul in this home, you’ll be walking the street.”

What did Joel mean about the Garrett/Dylan connection being “dubious”? Everything about Garrett Mason—that giant boy who seemed to lurk at every edge of this investigation—was dubious.

A second message from Joel hadn’t arrived until ten minutes ago, when Clark was stuck in traffic, though she saw that the message was timestamped 3:25 p.m.—over five hours before. Clark suspected Joel had sent the message at a moment when both he and she had no service. She knew from long experience that messages could become trapped in limbo around Bentley.

It was a link to a news article. Clark felt her scalp prickle when she saw the headline.

STAR PLAYER’S WHEREABOUTS REMAIN
UNKNOWN.

There was her mother, looking happier than Clark had ever seen.

And there was her mother’s first love. Corwin Broadlock.

“Her favorite man was always whispering things in her fucking ear.”

She called Mayfield. It went to voice mail. She hung up, deliberated—she, like Joel, wondered if whatever force had been tormenting them all week might not have invented this little diversion to drag her miles from town—and rang a new number.

“Pettis County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Browder?” Clark said, crawling around a nasty wreck on the highway outside Houston.

“Clark? Oh Christ, Clark. Fuck me for drawing the squawk box tonight. I’ve got catastrophes every which way.”