Colette was never sure when her father was in the present. His mind was like a little boat in a rolling ocean of time, gaining sight of the horizon on each wave crest, then losing it down between disorienting walls of water.

“Do you miss her?”

“Yes,” he said, taking another gulp. “Now and always.” A look of alarm crossed his face for a moment like the shadow of a crow’s wing, and he put the cup down on the porch floor. “I wish she’d hurry back.”

Just then Bucky Tyler’s long car pulled up in front of the porch. He got out, dressed in a white shirt and white jeans, wearing sunglasses, and came up on the porch. The old man stared at him blankly. Bucky swatted him on the knee, then looked at Colette.

“I guess you heard about your ex?”

She nodded, trying to look through the glasses. She saw he was close to panic, his smile a sick grimace. “He’s nearly dead.” She said it like the cold fact it was.

He shook his head and leaned against a porch column. “That coon-ass sheriff thinks somebody tried to kill him.”

She got up and went into the kitchen, hearing him follow over the creaking floorboards. At the range, she poured another cup of coffee into an ironstone mug, and he came up behind her. She wanted some sort of sign that would tell her what she needed to know. He looked out of the kitchen window, and she could tell it was a hollow act. “Did that sheriff call here?” he asked casually, the way he might ask whether she’d put gas in her car that morning.

“No.”

“If he does, and he asks you what time I got here last night, what will you tell him?”

She looked at Bucky Tyler, at his hard shoulders and wavy blond hair. He was close enough for her to smell the heat of him, and he was washed and flavored with a touch of cologne. Nice clothes, nice, worried mouth, empty eyes. “I’ll tell him you got here on time,” she said, waiting.

He looked at her long, a slow smile sliding across his teeth, and then came what she was waiting for. He put a hand on her buttock and squeezed slowly. She smiled back and handed him the cup of coffee before walking toward the porch. And now she knew.

*   *   *