Clark turned away from the dark Flats outside her window with a shudder. She rinsed out the glasses in the sink and told herself she didn’t see a pair of brilliant black iguana eyes out there, staring back at her from just across her fence.

Her phone buzzed again on the counter. She ignored it. All her fear had knocked loose a thought. Browder had even mentioned it: rifling through her brother’s file, Clark saw that none of Troy’s old teammates had been interviewed after his disappearance.

Something else occurred to her. It was in her own interview with the police ten years ago—an interview conducted, she remembered, at this very table—during which she had told a much younger Detective Mayfield that she had no idea where Troy had gone but that her brother might have said something about his plans to Joel Whitley.

Yes, that Joel Whitley, she had told the detectives. By the time of the interview it had be almost two months since Joel’s arrest but the sound of his name had still sent a tremor through the room. Joel and Troy had hung out on a few occasions over the summer, she’d explained to Detective Mayfield, usually on weekends when Troy was back in town.

And yet there was no mention of Joel in the notes of her interview. There was no mention of him anywhere in the report.

Was it a clerical error, she wondered, or another deliberate omission, just like the drug money?

“Mr. Boone asked that we keep that little detail out of the files.”

A heavy, painful memory fell unbidden into her mind and began unwrapping itself before she could stop it: late fall, midway through a chilly football season, a few weeks before everything started to come apart. Clark and Joel had never been better. Clark and her father had been a different story.

The old man had been out of work for weeks (again) living half in a bottle and pawning whatever he could carry out of the house. Clark had returned home from school one afternoon to find her father, chisel in hand, working to open the padlock she used to seal her bedroom shut against him. In a fury, Clark had wrenched her father away from the bedroom door and all but thrown him down the hall. She spotted the revolver he’d been using as a hammer a moment later.

She got out of the house before he could get his wits about him. At gossipy old Miss Lydia’s house a mile down the road she’d called Troy, had told him that he needed to come now, and then spent the last hours of the day in Miss Lydia’s kitchen, eating stale Fig Newtons and suffering through recorded episodes of The Price Is Right. “If you play them back you can guess the answers,” the lady had explained. No shit.

She saw her brother’s truck pass Miss Lydia’s windows just after dark. She set off after him on foot, the first few stars appearing above her, and when the coast sounded clear she made her way into the house just in time to find Troy emerging from their father’s room bearing an armload of empty bottles, a box of ammunition and the old revolver, his finger roguishly hooked around the trigger guard.