“Full house,” Deputy Jones had said. “I had to cut him loose.” When Clark had taken a peek down the hall and found half of the station’s holding cells empty, Deputy Jones, looming at her elbow, had said only, “A few slept it off since then.”

The sheriff’s station was small, it was true, but still, to let Jason go when he’d been facing a slam dunk charge of attempted burglary—it was peculiar. Deputy Jones was not a lenient man.

Joel arrived at Rummy’s a few minutes after Clark, and before he noticed her, she took the opportunity to study him through the dull wall of smoke that thickened the room. She saw that Joel had corrected his teenage slouch. He now walked with an alert, entitled poise which she suspected had once been affected but was no longer. He looked cocky, careful, bored. He signaled to the barman without being spoken to.

Remarkable. How different this Joel was from the one she’d once dated. Tonight he seemed closer, indeed, to the Joel who appeared in the photographs that had arrived on Bentley’s doorsteps ten years ago. That had been a nasty prank: a half-dozen loose photos of a naked Joel Whitley had been found stuffed inside the town’s Sunday newspapers one weekend, hiding between the glossy Dillard’s ads and the new issue of Parade magazine. In those photos Joel had sneered at the camera, had wielded a heft in his hand more compelling than anything he’d shown to Clark in all their fumbling efforts at fucking.

Clark had been seventeen at the time, old enough to have seen plenty, but still the pictures had shocked her. Before her father unwittingly flapped open the paper across the breakfast table that morning, Clark could never have imagined that the shy little gentleman who always asked permission to take her hand could be this same cocky provocateur with a face as brash and snide as any pinup boy.

The phone had rung not ten minutes after Clark had seen the pictures: her neighbor Miss Lydia calling to tell Clark of the rumor—the very creditable rumor—that Joel had been arrested with another man for indecent exposure at the park that past Friday night. Miss Lydia had called Clark to warn her. Joel’s arrest—and these strange photographs everyone was finding—were all anyone could talk about.

Young Clark, to her credit, had pushed through her shock to ask Miss Lydia the smarter questions: who was this other man who had been with Joel at the park? Why had he not been arrested as well? Who had taken the photographs, xeroxed hundreds of copies, stuffed them in so many papers?

And sure enough, the sheriff’s department did indeed mount an investigation into the photographs but things rapidly went nowhere, as they often did in Bentley. Who cared? The town had always known there was something off about that Whitley boy—really, had Clark never suspected anything?

Her miserable year had come to a ghastly conclusion. Six weeks after the photos had spread through town, Clark’s brother, Troy, had left the little house he had shared with his girlfriend in Rockdale, an hour north of Bentley, to buy cigarettes and a case of beer at a Zippy Mart a few miles down the highway. He’d never made it. Somewhere between Troy’s gravel driveway and the gas station’s door he and his truck had apparently evaporated into the twilight.