He was right, of course. “Possibly,” she said.

“And you remember it was me who came around looking for Troy back in the day,” Mayfield said. Clark nodded with a bemused smile—her first meeting with Investigator Mayfield years ago had not been a pleasant one. “Be honest now. Was all that business with your brother the reason you wanted to join up with the sheriff’s in the first place?”

“You mean did I spend three years in school so I could print off case notes from a missing person’s report?”

Mayfield shrugged. “Folks have done more for less.”

Clark considered this with an odd mixture of pain and frustration. She’d asked herself the same question many times since her return to Bentley and had yet to arrive at a convincing answer.

She only trusted herself enough to say, “Maybe. In some tricksy way.”

Mayfield seemed satisfied. “Well, you’ve got a good career ahead of you. You’re made for more than speeding tickets.”

Clark lit a cigarette. His praise felt coarser this afternoon than it had yesterday: appeasing, cheap. She couldn’t shake the feeling that his single-minded interest in Jamal Reynolds had an air of expediency to it, as if Mayfield weren’t looking for Dylan’s murderer but rather for the boy the town would most willingly believe fit the role. From their theories about the crime to Mayfield’s encouragement, everything today was coming just a little too easy.

“You know,” Mayfield added. “There was some things we kept out of your brother’s file.”

JOEL

Joel wasn’t certain how much more sympathy he could tolerate. Darren, with no little misgiving, had left town again that morning to work on his oil rig outside Corpus Christi—considering the tenuous state of the oil economy these days he could hardly be blamed for working when there was work. Joel had somehow dragged himself out of bed and tended to his mother, sat with her through endless courses of coffee and pity and fretful murmurs about the team’s new chances at the play-offs.

Mrs. Mason and Mrs. Malacek, his mother’s friends, had turned up an hour ago with casserole and cake and showed no signs of leaving anytime soon.

“It’s hard to believe what they’re saying,” Mrs. Malacek said, after sitting through another of Paulette’s long silences. “I’d have never thought the Reynolds boy had it in him.”

Joel and his mother both snapped to attention.

“You mean Jamal?” Paulette said.

The two ladies shook their heads. Mrs. Mason stifled a yawn before saying, “No alibi, apparently. The police went down to that house on the coast and—well. It seems the boys weren’t there after all.”

“What?” said Joel. His mind wrestled with the effects of the Xanax he’d sneaked into his mouth when the ladies arrived. “How can the cops be certain about that?”

Mrs. Malacek shook her head, not a strand of golden hair stirring. “My Peter won’t tell me another word about it, just that the alibis ain’t any good.”

“But Dylan and Kyler Thomas went to that house a dozen times this summer,” Paulette said. A cookie crumbled between her fingers. “They can’t seriously say—”