Caddy headed back from the parking lot, through the admission gate and straight to the bathrooms behind the bleachers. She needed to clear her head before going back to her momma and Bentley, composing herself before she went back to the stands, with all those nosy goddamn folks sitting around them. She walked up to one of the sinks set against the concrete wall and turned on the faucet, staring at herself in the mirror, the PA system outside playing the Migos for their hype music. Walk it, like I talk it . . . Caddy knowing damn well what it was like to be Boom, sliding off the rails and rolling into that fuzzy fucking abyss, trying to find the walls as the earth kept on tilting on you.

She reached down and splashed some water on her face. Glad to see a different face there without all the blonde hair and makeup from years before. Just a plain, thin face and straight, freckled nose, elfin ears, and a few more lines under her eyes. She still had the nasty scar on her temple, a thin white line running into her sun-bleached hair where a man at a club had had too damn much to drink and knocked her off the stage with a bottle of Bud Light. She touched the scar with her fingers, still feeling the blow twelve years later.

“Hello?” a woman asked.

Caddy turned off the faucet, looked in the mirror again, and saw Tashi Coleman coming in from outside. She wasn’t carrying the microphone this time, just a purse thrown over her shoulder, some kind of T-shirt with a flowered Mexican skull—Day of the Dead. Her long black hair worn loose and stringy down her back.

“Not right now, Tashi,” Caddy said. “OK?”

“I just need you for a moment.”

“That’s always what you say. Just a moment. But you always want much more, don’t you? You want me to break down and tell you my brother was a teenage sociopath and my uncle was just another corrupt redneck sheriff. I know we have to amuse the shit out of you down here, Tashi Coleman. But today, I don’t have time to entertain.”

“I saw what happened out there,” Tashi said. “I’m sorry.”

“So what?” Caddy said. “Boom got drunk. Nobody cried. Nobody got hurt. Not even the makings of a country song. Just another night in Tibbehah County. How about we don’t make such a damn big deal of it? It’s nobody’s business but his own.”

“I don’t care about that,” Tashi said. “I just had two very important questions about the time Brandon Taylor died. If you could just answer those, I swear to God I will leave you alone for good. We think we might know whose body they found last month out at the Penningtons’ place.”

“Oh yeah?” Caddy said. “Did Quinn shoot her, too?”