“Did you ever tell Caddy we hooked up?” Ansley Cuthbert asked Quinn.

They’d stopped off on a county road between Providence and Carthage, a meandering logging road, skittering the edge of the National Forest. Ansley had told him where to go and where to stop, both of them not talking much since they left the sheriff’s office.

“Somehow, it never came up,” Quinn said, turning to Ansley as he sat behind the wheel, wondering what was so special about this stretch of road, five klicks from where they found Brandon’s body, eight from where they found the girl, and about twenty from the Hawkins property. “Did she know?”

Ansley shook her head, looking a lot different from the last time he’d seen her, drinking Coors down along Sarter Creek one summer evening, four-wheelers and trucks parked along the sandy bottom. He and Anna Lee had broken up for a few weeks—again—and he’d found some companionship with Ansley, going for a long ride out into the hills and Big Woods, listening to George Strait, drinking beer and fooling around in the back of his truck. That had been more than twenty years ago but somehow seemed like last week. Back then, Ansley had been a blonde, but now she had raven black hair, pale skin, and a sleeve tattoo on her left arm. Looking nice in a black-and-white-checked shirt and skinny black pants, hair done up like women used to wear back in the forties. A pinup in motion.

“Always knew you’d go back to Anna Lee,” she said. “I have to say, I’m kind of shocked y’all didn’t get married.”

“Yeah?” Quinn said, turning to her in the truck. “Me, too. Right up until the time she married Luke Stevens. And for a little while after.”

“Never goes quite the way you think it will when you’re a kid.”

“Nope.”

“We sure did have some fun that night,” Ansley said, smiling. “You were a wild man. Driving like you did.”

“We may have committed some violations.”

“I only recall two,” she said. “Damn. That was the summer before Brandon and all this mess.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “I always wondered why you dropped out and left Tibbehah.”

“Your friend getting murdered will motivate you to keep moving,” she said. “It was so damn horrible, Quinn. As bad as it gets.”

Quinn didn’t say anything. He figured her wanting to take a ride, telling him where to go, would be the start of something he couldn’t force. Lillie used to tell him the best way to get a witness talking was to shut your damn mouth and listen. He didn’t try to push her or fill the silences, only sat there behind the wheel, letting her mind take her back to November of 1997, months before Quinn’s graduation, right before she’d leave Tibbehah altogether and make a life in Memphis.