The disk turned out to be a gold mine. Duke seemed to be in every third picture. Unfortunately, Lombard was in most of them too, right beside his father, smiling his unctuous, fox-in-the-henhouse smile. Gibson found a couple of shots that he could crop and moved them to his hard drive. Just to be sure, though, he went back through the CDs one more time. His perseverance paid off with a photo that captured Duke the way Gibson liked to remember him—on the back porch at Pamsrest, beer in hand, grin on his face, holding court, and spinning what you could tell was one tall political tale. His audience hanging on his every word.

Gibson looked at it a long time. He missed that version of his father. He missed being able to think about Duke without bitterness, without his mind leaping to the basement—that miserable, god-awful basement where Duke stepped away from his life, stepped away from his son. It had been easier when he had Lombard to blame. When he thought Lombard had betrayed Duke and not the other way around. That had been wishful thinking. Duke Vaughn was nothing but a criminal, and rather than face the consequences, he’d gone down into the basement. It was his life, his decision to make, and Duke had made it, thinking only of himself. That was the truth, and there was nothing else to be said. Even if there had been, there was no one left to whom Gibson cared to say it.

The sad truth was, Gibson had believed in Duke blindly, and his life had been in free fall ever since. It was a terrible sensation, and he wanted it to be over. There was an old joke—it’s not the fall that kills you but the abrupt stop. Well, a lucky few survived the impact, didn’t they? Gibson would take his chances with the unforgiving ground. Anything was better than this, the series of rash, ill-considered decisions he’d made at the mercy of his high-velocity swan dive. There had been days since the end of his marriage when Gibson thought he understood Duke’s choice. Understood, but not forgave. He couldn’t imagine doing that to his daughter. To any child.

He forced himself to close the photo file, but first he made a copy. For better days . . . if they ever came. He was about to eject the disk when he spotted a thumbnail image that sparked a memory. He opened it to see a photograph of himself: He couldn’t have been more than ten, and he stood in front of a small fountain, holding, at arm’s length, an enormous bullfrog out to the camera. Like the frog was radioactive. The bullfrog just hung there, legs dangling indignantly, like a celebrity who’d been dragged into posing for pictures with a pushy fan.