“And if any of ’em bring it in here,” Mr. Jim said, “my hand gets a bit unsteady.”

“No one would have the guts to talk shit here,” Quinn said. “Not here or at the VFW. What this town likes more than anything is standing back in the shadows and pointing fingers and talking about things they don’t know a damn thing about.”

“Ain’t that always the way?” Luther said. “When I got home in ’72, nobody was on the Square with a marching band and the damn key to the city. People who ain’t been in it, been in the shit flying around them, can’t wrap their heads around it.”

“The worst of it,” Quinn said, “is them stringing this thing out. They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“You deserve better than this county,” Luther said. “I hate to say it. Jericho is my home. But hell, man, you know it’s true. I know why you come back, glad to be a part of it, but I hope you’ll find your own place. Somewhere that people deserve a good man.”

Mr. Jim turned on the clippers and worked to keep Quinn high and tight. The whole haircut took less than three minutes. Quinn got up, reaching for his wallet, and Mr. Jim said there was no charge.

“How come?”

“’Cause you’ll go broke keeping that hair that short,” he said. “You know now that you’re out of the service, you can grow it any way you like?”

Quinn grinned at the old man who’d been a friend to his uncle and to his father and had given him his very first haircut. He shook his liver-spotted hand. “I appreciate what works,” Quinn said.

“You don’t say . . .” Mr. Jim said.

“Shit,” Mr. Varner said. “I hadn’t cut my hair different since ’65.”

“These days, you got more hair in your ears than on top.”

“Don’t bother me none,” Mr. Varner said. “Just pleased every day to see that old sun come up and not be among the dirt people. I hadn’t forgotten what that goddamn twister did to my truck.”

Quinn nodded at Luther. He’d been with the old man, helping the poor down in Sugar Ditch, when it hit.

Quinn grabbed his hat and coat from the rack and made his way to the glass door.

“It’s good to see you, Quinn,” Mr. Jim said, cleaning off his clippers and dropping his comb into the Barbicide. “Let me know when you get the new election posters. I’ll post them bigger than shit in the front window.”

•   •   •

“Did you talk to him?” Hank Stillwell asked.

Stillwell had stopped by the Jericho Farm & Ranch that morning, sitting out on the loading dock while Diane arranged sacks of feed, topsoil, and mulch. Wouldn’t be long until the spring planting would start and people would be buying their seeds and small plants. Winter was tough. People didn’t buy much when it was cold.

“We rode out to the site,” Diane said. “I told the sheriff everything that I recalled. He knows everything I know.”

Stillwell nodded, breathing in deep and hard through his nose. “Thank God.”

“Did you want something or did you just stop by to talk?”

“I could use a new union suit.”

“Inside,” Diane said. “Go down the third aisle, with the work pants. They’re down there.”

“You got honey?”

“From Tibbehah bees.”

“I’ll get that, too,” he said. “Y’all got a bit of everything here, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I appreciate what you did,” Stillwell said. “I know it was painful. Reaching back into those memories, that time. But I feel we owe it to Lori. Don’t you? Her having no end to her story. No sense of knowing. Don’t you want to know? I can’t die and leave this earth without knowing why and who. I feel like my insides are done eaten away.”

“Go on in and see if we got that union suit,” Diane said. “I’ll meet you inside. I got to finish stacking all this shit.”

“You’re a tough woman, Diane Tull.”

“I’ll meet you inside, Hank.”

The store was nearly out of Diamond dog food, the premium, not the stuff for the pups or the old dogs. They were overstocked with topsoil and nearly out of manure, although most people around here scoured the cow fields for their own manure. Not buying your manure being kind of a point of pride for most folks who worked their own land.

Diane finished stacking the sacks on wooden pallets and checking the inventory. She needed some more wheat-straw bales and could do with some more sacks of corn for deer, people loving to get those animals close and captive, square and dead in their sights. Diane wore an old Sherpa coat with Marlboro Lights in one pocket and all her keys in the other. All the keys she owned: to her home, to her farm, the Farm & Ranch, to the cattle and chicken houses, feeling like it weighed a ton.

Stillwell lay down a small bottle of honey and an XL union suit, bright red with buttons down the front and an opener for the backside. Diane added the purchases to the register. “You mix this stuff in your coffee and tea and you won’t get allergies come spring,” she said.

“What do you think he’ll do?” he asked. “Sheriff Colson?”

“He said he’d look into things.”

“That don’t mean shit,” he said. “How long people been saying that? God damn.”

“Maybe,” Diane said. “But it’s more than we had. You said you’d talked to Sheriff Beckett five years ago and he told you the whole thing was done and gone. Quinn Colson is an altogether different man.”

Stillwell’s face looked drawn, maybe more drawn than when he was drunk and hollow and passed out on her porch swing or slumped down in the seat of his old car. She finished ringing him up, and after he handed back the change, she put his stuff in a sack and walked out with him to the loading dock. It was bright and cold. She could see her breath, and the cold air felt good on her face and down into her lungs. Everything kind of clean and new that morning.

“It ain’t right,” he said. “It ain’t fucking right. We got to make sense of things. Me and you.”

“You’re talking thirty-seven years ago.”

“You’re telling me that someone don’t know?” he said. “Someone saw something. Someone knows something. This county ain’t that big. Cowards keep shit to themselves.”

Diane put her hands in her coat pockets, feeling the keys deep on the right side. She gripped the heft of them and nodded to Stillwell, wanting the old man to just go the hell away. She’d done what she’d promised. What else did he want of her? She wished he’d just leave her the hell alone and let them both go back to living their own lives, down their own paths. She never invited him.

“Do you want to talk to Sheriff Colson?” Diane asked. “Maybe that would help you and him.”

“No, ma’am.”

“But what you told me,” she said. “Those are things he should know.”

“If there comes a time when that’s important,” he said, “I’ll do what’s needed.”

Diane lit up a cigarette and blew smoke into the crisp wind. “Can I ask you something?”

The old man spit and turned to her, waiting on the loading dock. A pickup truck turned in from the gates and drove up toward the Co-op. She wondered if Hank Stillwell had a job, had a woman, had anything in his wretched old life other than thinking about what happened to his daughter. It had seemed to become his main occupation, beyond any kind of obsession a normal person might have.

“What do you want to know?”

“Is it the truth you’re hoping to find?” Diane asked.

“Goddamn right.”

“Or is it what came later that bothers you?” Diane asked.

Stillwell swallowed hard, spit again, and seemed to stand up straighter. His breath came out in clouds as his face turned a bright shade of red. “I don’t study on that time much.”

“You don’t?” Diane said. “What happened doesn’t bother you?”

“Decisions were made and things were done,” Stillwell said. “People were upset. Things just got set in motion. I couldn’t stop it. Nothing I said could stop it.”

“It wasn’t right.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “It was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I never wanted that. Never.” Stillwell held the brown paper bag tight in his arms, hanging there on the loading dock, as a black woman crawled out of the pickup and asked if they had any collard greens. Diane smiled and yelled back for her to come on in, before turning back and whispering to Hank.