“Then I guess it’s a good thing for you that strangling me didn’t work out.”

Jimmy Ray reached over and grabbed my hand, squeezed it just this side of pain. “I’m not fucking around, Eve,” he said. “I got some affection for ya. God knows why because you’ve been a thorn in my side more often than not. But that affection goes only so far.” He dropped my hand, gestured to his face. “You pull something like this again? Or something like what happened out at my place tonight? Your brother’ll be fishing bits of you out of the river. Tiny bits. And your mama can go fuck herself.” He held my gaze. “You understand?”

“Yes,” I said, because I did. I’d used up all my chips with Jimmy Ray. And he wasn’t the kind of guy to give you a loan. “I honestly don’t know what happened out there tonight. I wanted to talk to Matt, that’s all. He was messing around with Junie’s friend Izzy.”

“So you figured you’d sneak onto my land?” Jimmy Ray shook his head. “For someone who didn’t want to be strangled, you got some kind of death wish, Eve.”

I shrugged. “Sounds about right.” I straightened the towel across my lap. “You got any theories about Matt?”

“I got no fucking idea,” Jimmy Ray said. But the slight pause before he answered, the hiccups between his words, made me think he probably had at least a sneaking suspicion. “He sometimes cooked up meth in there, I know. We’ve moved on to heroin. Bigger market these days.” He spoke about his drug trade like he talked about the weather or what he’d had for dinner. Something ordinary, a given. “But Matt liked meth, for himself. Maybe he got sloppy. Blew himself to bits. He always was kind of a dumb fucker.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe somebody helped him along.”

Jimmy Ray looked at me again. I could feel his dark eyes burning into the side of my face. “Why? What’s the benefit in Matt being dead?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he knew something about what happened to Junie and Izzy. Maybe someone didn’t want him talking.”

Jimmy Ray flicked my leg with one hand. “Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but Matt wasn’t never gonna talk to you. And I seriously doubt he had any information about the murders anyway. That guy barely knew his ass from a hole in the ground.”

My head thunked back against the wall. “I have no idea then. About anything.” I paused, closed my eyes. “I keep trying to make sense of it. Why they died. What happened. What the point of it was.”

“Waste of your time, Eve. Like pissing into the wind. Trying to answer that question, the why of a thing like that’ll drive you round the bend. The why don’t matter.”

“Then what does?”

“The who. The person who held the knife. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

It didn’t escape me, how weird this conversation was. Jimmy Ray and I sitting here nursing our wounds and shooting the shit like we were old friends. Hell, maybe that’s what he thought we were. It reminded me, in the worst kind of way, of me and my mama. No matter how often I thought I was finally rid of her, somehow we always seemed to end up sitting across from each other again. Both she and Jimmy Ray had some kind of staying power, I’d give them that. “I still feel like you know more than you’re telling me,” I said, gathering my wet hair into a knot on top of my head.