Tashi and Jessica had spent the last four days at the offices of the Tibbehah County Monitor, relegated to a back storeroom with light wood paneling and faded green carpet, relying on Betty Jo Mize, the newspaper’s owner and managing editor, to bring them clip files. Betty Jo was a nice woman, somewhere between sixty and eighty, with a lot of teased brown hair and half-glasses she kept on a chain around her neck. She’d slip them up to her nose with her left hand when double-checking something, the right hand usually busy with an extra-long cigarette. Tashi wondered about the safety of a lit cigarette in a big room stacked floor to ceiling with paper files and oversized ledgers of past editions.

“Glad to meet some young reporters who understand everything isn’t on the internet,” Betty Jo said. “Computers have done nothing but make the world even dumber. I swear to God, I don’t think some folks can wipe their ass without first Googling how to do it.”

“Is this all you could find on Quinn Colson?” Tashi asked.

“I only have clips from when he was a boy,” Betty Jo said, ashing her cigarette into an empty coffee mug, looking over Tashi’s shoulder, staring down at her notes. “There might be a few items from when he was in the Army. I’m pretty sure we ran a photo of him and Miss Jean when he became a Ranger. Maybe some small items about him getting injured over there in Iraq.”

Tashi thanked her and pulled out the hand-cut newspaper clippings from a small manila envelope. They were musty and brittle in her hands, the back room smelling like that library smell of old books and ancient paper. The clippings went back to 1990, one headline so large she had to unfold it several times across the desk. It read COUNTRY BOY DID SURVIVE. A story from the Associated Press and a column by Betty Jo Mize, looking pretty much the same in the photo from almost thirty years ago as she did now. Same glasses around her neck. Same hairstyle. Only the extra-long cigarette was missing.

“How’s it coming?” Tashi asked Jessica after Betty Jo had left them alone.

“This is the fourth box on Hamp Beckett,” Jessica said. “Reading up on some big Wild West shoot-out at a pizza parlor on the Square. This was ’79. A guy shot two employees and one deputy while trying to rob the place. Looks like Sheriff Beckett and E. J. Royce took care of the rest. Another one from the early nineties about a big pot bust out in the county with that guy Heath Pritchard I told you about. It says here it was one of the biggest marijuana hauls in Mississippi history.”