Quinn smiled and nodded, knowing what that meant. She felt a pang of guilt for bringing all this into his life so soon after they got married. She watched as he walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed a can of Coors. “Join me outside for a moment?”

“I was just about to set the table.”

“Let’s let that chicken cool,” he said, giving her a wink. He walked over to the kitchen table where Jessica was sitting with her half-full glass of water and dropped the manila folder right in front of her.

Jessica looked up at Quinn but didn’t say anything. The folder within an inch of her right hand.

“Let us know when you’re ready for supper,” he said. “Might take a moment for me to finish this beer.”

Maggie followed him out onto the porch. Quinn lifted the beer to his lips, looking out onto the rolling land. Boom was sitting on the tailgate of his truck, talking to Brandon, and Hondo had hopped up beside him.

“What’s in that file?” Maggie asked.

“Damn-near everything,” Quinn said. “Is Caddy still coming to supper?”

Maggie nodded, watching Quinn’s face in the darkness of the porch. She walked over and cut on the multicolored lights that he had never managed to take down from last Christmas, saying he liked the way they looked no matter the time of year.

“You think she could recognize Bentley Vandeven’s daddy, even twenty years back?” he asked. “I heard that man always keeps a whiskey glass nearby. No matter what he’s doing.”

*   *   *

Fannie was on the Natchez Trace south of Tibbehah County, out in the cold and the dark, smoking cigarillos and staring out at the big mounds where the Choctaws used to honor their dead. Only two cars had passed in the thirty minutes she’d been there, hands in the deep pockets of her red Burberry cashmere coat, thinking back on that cemetery where they buried Ray, the city of the dead down in Metairie. All those marble crypts and angel statues watching as they settled him into a mausoleum with the rest of his old Italian family. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, getting turned around on the way, the place like a beautiful fucking maze.