Two red bricks were positioned to either side of the head. The sheet had been folded back to rest on Dylan’s chin. “Why did you stop the sheet there?” Joel asked.

The mortician shot a quick, panicked glance at the deputies. Mayfield said, “The boy was in the water for a while, son.”

Joel didn’t move. He pointed at the bricks. “Why is his head like this?”

Mayfield let out a long sigh.

Clark said, “Don’t do this to yourself, Joel.”

“Fold it down.”

“Joel—”

“Fold it down.”

Mayfield gave Mr. Ortiz a little nod of assent. The sheet sighed as it was raised.

A wide wound to the neck exposing a dull mass of private flesh. Fibers of muscle, the severed cords of the vein and the artery. A dark cavity at the core, which even the whining lights above couldn’t penetrate.

Joel stared at the wound until the logic of his mind threatened to break down. He saw a hole that refused to be seen. He heard the whispers of dreams, the whisper of a voice hissing through static and doors:

imissedyou.

Joel noted every detail one final time. He nodded to Mr. Ortiz, to the police. He thanked them in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

Joel returned home to the silence of a house in grief. He brought inside the first of many flowers deposited on the porch. The lights all off inside, the tactless sun beaming through the open windows.

Joel could feel his mother asleep down the hall—he had loaded her down with enough Xanax and Ambien to knock out a horse. Darren stepped out from the kitchen.

“You were always good to him,” Darren said. “You always took care of him.”

Joel didn’t have the words to answer this.

“It was good of you to send him that money. I know it meant so much to him.”

“Money?”

“That two thousand you sent him, back over the summer, to get him some savings started. I saw him counting it in his room but I never told nothing to Paulette about it, of course. He said the two of you wanted to keep it private.” Darren caught himself, teetered on the edge of tears. “I took him to the bank to open his account and put in two thousand of my own money. Though I don’t guess he’ll be needing it now.”

The two men embraced for so long they forgot they were doing it. Darren held on for his own reasons. Joel was too preoccupied to manage the effort of letting go. A single fact tumbled and tumbled through his head.

He had never sent his brother a dime.

TUESDAY

THE HOUSE AT THE COAST

CLARK

They drove through a clutch of little towns that looked just like Bentley. The same cramped businesses and towering churches, the same empty streets and dangling stoplights. After leaving high school, Clark had spent a brief, ugly marriage in Waco, a hundred miles away. Since returning to Pettis County three years ago with a criminal justice diploma, she’d felt a quiet pride in knowing that she had become one of the guardians of her hometown, one of the quiet few who kept the fires lit. Bentley’s streets, its flat horizons, had comforted her upon her return in a way they never had in school. Had been blessedly familiar. Stable.