FIFTEEN

Tashi knew approaching Maggie Colson at the hospital again would be a major fuckup. She had to wait until she was off, away from Quinn, and not so guarded about talking. Making a run for Quinn at the El Dorado had been her biggest mistake since coming to Mississippi. She should have tried to validate what she’d learned, talk to Quinn when she had everything in order and not just some working theories. But with the money running out, her people in New York desperate for progress, and the need to push, she’d gone too far too fast. She and Jessica decided the best thing to do was to get Maggie back with the program, make her feel as important and part of the team as when they’d first met. Everything they wanted to know Maggie had answered. Every little detail about the summers of 1996 and 1997 came from her strong recollections. The magical summers full of endless nights, flickering fireflies, and kids making out behind the old stadium and down at Choctaw Lake. A wild, tangled teenage romance.

And now, if there was a connection to Quinn, she’d be their best bet.

It was Wednesday, weeks since they’d gone to Quinn with more questions about his time poaching on the Hawkins land and the fight they’d heard about from E. J. Royce. She decided to go at it alone, leaving Jessica at the county courthouse searching more records from the mid-1990s, Jessica already knowing the clerk’s favorite brand of cigarettes and love for Little Debbie snack cakes. Maggie Colson was their best bet, but she’d grown distant, evading phone calls, refusing to talk when they ran into her in town. Maggie wouldn’t even look her in the eye the last time she and Jessica had shown up at the hospital.

Tashi followed a long, winding road up to a little hamlet called Fate and then off onto County Road 380, deep into some newly planted loblolly pine (she’d learned about the local trees online to add color to the podcast), and into some cattle pastures and wide expanses of farmland. The locals called the place the old Beckett homestead even though the homesteaders and the last Beckett had died off. Quinn Colson had lived in the house for nearly a decade now, the same house where his uncle had taken his own life. Maggie and her son moved in after they married in June.

She knocked on the screen door, the main door open wide into a long, wide hallway, country music loud and coming deep from inside the home. Tashi didn’t know the song, something about Satin sheets to lie on, satin pillows to cry on . . .