“Well,” Caddy said. “If y’all spoke to Quinn and he can’t help you, I sure can’t. I mean, I was just a kid when Brandon got lost. That was a lifetime ago. I was only fifteen.”

“Did you know him?” Jessica said.

“Not very well.”

“But you went to the same school?” Tashi asked. “In the same class.”

Caddy looked at them both and nodded. It was kind of a solemn nod, Caddy with pursed lips like she was contemplating the whole thing. “Y’all want to get out of this heat?” she said. “My office has AC and we can get something to drink.”

They followed her up the wooden steps of a nearby trailer, basic white and industrial-looking, and headed inside. There was a Latina moving some files from a table into some large boxes. Caddy whispered something to her and she disappeared out the front door. Caddy walked over to a mini fridge and pulled out three Cokes and set them by a half-dozen chairs set in a semicircle. Little pamphlets for AA waited on the seats.

“Yeah, I knew Brandon Taylor,” she said. “But we weren’t close friends or anything like that.”

Tashi asked if she minded them continuing to record and Caddy shook her head, popping the top of her Coke and leaning toward the women with her elbows across her thighs. She was flushed with sun and sweaty. A simple silver cross on a thin chain dangled from Caddy’s neck.

“What do you recall about him?” Jessica said. “We spent some time with his sister Shaina this morning. But she was very young when he disappeared. Most of her memories were just of him being the big brother. We want to know all about him from people who knew him best.”

“Lot more folks knew him better than me,” Caddy said. “He was kind of an odd kid. He kept to himself. About the only thing I recall is he drove this cool old truck. A black Chevy Apache . . . Did y’all really come all the way from New York to talk about Brandon?”

“We did,” Tashi said. “The Taylor family has never been satisfied about what happened to him.”

“And how long do y’all plan to stay?”

Tashi looked to Jessica and shrugged. “As long as it takes.”

Jessica shrugged. “Pretty much.”

“That’s something,” Caddy said. “I thought people had forgotten all about Brandon. It was a really big deal when it happened. We had news people here when he went missing, always hanging out at the high school or on the town square. But when they found him and learned he killed himself, they pretty much packed up and went home.”

“I understand your brother got lost in those same woods,” Tashi said. “A few years before Brandon.”