“Come on, Caddy,” he said. “Jesus. Don’t make me sit here and spell it out. I like you. I like you a whole hell of a lot. Does it matter how any of this started? All that matters now is I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you. I don’t care about Daddy or his damn friends or the age difference. I want you, Caddy.”

“Hold on,” Caddy said, sitting up straight, blood pulsing in her temple. “How this all started? What in the hell does that mean? Did you come up to Tibbehah County to spy on me?”

Bentley didn’t say anything for a long while, his eyes dropping like he just might tear up. When he finally did speak, he reached out for her hand again. “I’ll tell you,” Bentley said. “I’ll tell you every dirty little detail. But please, please know one thing. I love you. One doesn’t have a thing to do with the other.”

Caddy pulled back her hand, setting it in her lap, listening.

*   *   *

“E.J. Royce is dead?” Hubie Phillips asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“What a shame,” Mr. Phillips said. “I didn’t see it in the news.”

“Tibbehah County sometimes doesn’t make the Memphis news.”

“Unless there’s a shoot-out with some bank robbers out at the Booby Trap,” he said, smiling.

“Yes, sir,” Quinn said. “That made national news. Only it’s called Vienna’s Place after Johnny Stagg went to jail. Really classed the place up.”

Quinn, Tashi, and Mr. Phillips sat in his living room, with its dark wood paneling and blue shag carpet, a thousand pictures on the wall of Phillips’s time back in Tibbehah, his aging mother at church, his students working on the yearbook, down at Choctaw Lake waterskiing. And several awards from his time as a teacher, both in Jericho and later in Memphis. A sliver of light split the room from a pair of thick baby blue drapes, the air smelling musty and pent up, like the inside of an old trunk. Mr. Phillips sat with his legs crossed in a hard wooden chair as he spoke, looking much older than Quinn recalled, with thin white skin and receding white hair. He had on a neat blue button-down shirt with faded jeans and white sneakers without socks.

“We’re having a hard time finding Ansley Cuthbert,” Quinn said. “We were hoping you kept in touch with her.”

“Ansley?” he said. “Oh, Lord, no. I haven’t heard from her since I left Jericho. Does she have something to do with Brandon Taylor? Now, that little girl was trouble. So fast.”

Quinn kept on looking around the room, the endless pictures and framed movie posters: Intruder in the Dust, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cookie’s Fortune.