“This woman Tashi Coleman said the Taylor family has the original autopsy, the preliminary one done here,” Quinn said. “She says the original report says Brandon Tayler had died from a .38 bullet.”

“So?”

“Don’t you remember?” Quinn asked. “He was supposed to have walked into those woods with his Remington .308. The family also says they found Brandon about ten feet from his rifle.”

“Maybe the ‘.38’ is a typo,” Lillie said. “None of those Bundrens could spell worth a shit. That includes your little old honeybunny, Ophelia. She used to look over my shoulder in French class all the damn time and copy my answers.”

“Before you left, I moved everything my uncle had squirreled away in the house and the barn out to a climate-controlled unit in town,” he said. “There’s the initial incident report, when Brandon’s dad reported him missing, and two more follow-up reports after that. But most of what I know came from what I found online. Old newspaper stories.”

“Did you happen to see the name Hubie Phillips?”

Quinn shook his head.

“But you know who he is?” she said.

“Sure,” Quinn said. “He used to teach at Tibbehah High.”

“You know what happened to him?”

“I heard folks ran him out of town.”

“The whole damn county turned against him because they thought he’d been having an improper relationship with Brandon,” she said. “He was a good English teacher, taught a lot of mouth-breathers around here that speaking properly wasn’t a sin. You shoulda seen the man light up when someone used ain’t or went for a double negative. My God, I loved that man.”

“My uncle thought he had something to do with Brandon’s death?”

“In one way or another,” Lillie said. “He was a suspect before they found the body. People starting to whisper about how Brandon spent more time with him than he did his own family. And then there were the facts everyone else pretended weren’t real.”

“Like what?”

“Man in his forties, unmarried, who spent time up in Memphis taking on cultural pursuits.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I’m pretty sure Hubie Phillips was gay and that alone made him a suspect in whatever happened to Brandon Taylor. I mentioned it to Sheriff Beckett once and he got real angry with me. I think he felt bad about the association Phillips had with the case and the fact he’d been fired and had to leave Jericho in the middle of the night. Me and you were in school then. Don’t you recall, Quinn?”

“I recall there was something about a teacher,” Quinn said. “But I didn’t remember who it was.”