Stagg flipped a peppermint into his mouth, crunching it with his back teeth.

Diane noticed the old truck following her not two seconds after leaving the Jericho Farm & Ranch. Not that a beat-up white Chevy was strange, but it was clear to her the driver had been waiting. He’d been parked on the gravel, westbound on Cotton Road, and after she drove east, he made a U-turn and kept on her truck real close. She’d promised that these bastards wouldn’t spook her any. She’d decided just to pretend they weren’t even there unless they got too close and she’d call the sheriff to get them off her ass. She headed on to the town square, following up and around, and then spit out the other side of Cotton Road, toward Highway 45, following it past where the old Hollywood Video had been and the Dollar Store, coming up into the lot of the Piggly Wiggly. The storm had torn the ever-living shit out of the Pig, the metal roof of the store sucked into the tornado and most of the goods either taken or given away.

But now, it looked like the same old Pig that had been there since the late sixties. Diane parked in the lot, saw the white Chevy roll past her, up and around the lot, and park back toward the Shell station.

Diane would not let the bastards scare her or change her routine. She wanted to pick up some beef cuts, potatoes, and vegetables for a stew. If someone wanted to make something of it, she had a fully loaded .38 Taurus in her handbag.

Despite all the repairs to the roof and the foundation, not much had changed inside the Pig. They had the same old registers, the same manager’s box perched above the gumball machines, and a little café where they served fried chicken and biscuits. Diane started off in the produce, getting some red potatoes, carrots, onions, and some celery. She wished they had a good bakery in town, tired of all this crummy, tasteless white stuff they kept. She’d never made bread herself, but maybe she needed to learn.

Diane looked over her shoulder, not seeing anyone or anything, and kept on heading over to dairy. She loaded a jug of milk and butter into her cart. The speakers above her were as new as the ceiling, but the manager still played the same music, that soft elevator stuff of not-so-recent hits, an instrumental of Kenny and Dolly’s “Islands in the Stream.”

The butcher shop was along the far back wall and she searched through the plastic-wrapped packages for something cheap, but not too tough, that she could leave simmering in a Crock-Pot. A woman at her church once told her you could leave an old shoe in a Crock-Pot and make it soft. But that wasn’t altogether true. The meat was the base for everything and you might as well spend a little extra.

“Y’all having steaks tonight?” said a man behind her.

She turned to see a short, odd, crummy little guy in thin Liberty overalls wearing a trucker hat. He was somewhere in his seventies and had a nose that looked like a rhubarb.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “do I know you?”

“E. J. Royce,” the man said, smiling.

“Mr. Royce,” she said. “I apologize.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “It’s been a while. I switched over the Co-op on account of it being closer to my house.”

“So I see,” she said. Royce had on a Tibbehah County Co-op trucker’s cap.

“How your boys?”

“Moved away.”

“How old are they?”

Diane told him, and she placed the package of stew meat in her cart and started to turn away. “Good seeing you.”

“And your momma?”

“Not well,” she said. “She has Alzheimer’s.”

Royce edged his cart gently in front of Diane’s, cutting her off, the old man smiling, face chapped and worn. His flannel shirt so thin, it didn’t look like it could stand another washing. “Listen,” he said, “Miss Tull.”

Diane stared at the man. The music above them playing more instrumentals, “Always On My Mind” sounding as syrupy-sweet as possible. She backed away the cart but studied the old man’s face and the eager look in his faded blue eyes. “Did you just follow me?”

“Me?” he said. “No, ma’am. I just came in here to get me some of them Hungry-Man dinners. I swear to you, you don’t need to cook nothing. They make a hell of roast beef and potatoes. But their chicken and gravy is just like something your grandmomma might make.”

“Do you drive an old beat-up Chevy truck?”

“Ma’am,” Royce said, “I don’t want to take much of your time. I just seen you in here and thought to myself, ‘Yep, that’s Diane Tull.’ I was just talking about you the other day with some old buddies. You know, I used to be in law enforcement. I proudly retired after twenty-five years of commitment to this county.”

“What do you want?”

Royce removed his hat, showing he didn’t have hair except on the sides, and scratched his bald head. He didn’t have anything in his cart. She moved back her cart another few inches, wanting to get away but at the same time curious about why Royce was following her. A bearded young man on a motorcycle. And now this old coot. Maybe she just attracted the crazy folks like those bugs to her porch light.

He slid the hat back on his head, leaned his forearms on the cart’s basket, and looked in either direction. “I hear you gotten curious about some things might have happened after y’all had all that trouble.”

Diane Tull looked at Royce right in his cataracted eyes. “What of it.”

“Don’t blame you,” he said. “You may not recall, but me and Sheriff Beckett were the first ones who got to you, after you walked a spell out on Jericho Road. That trucker seen you all bloody and called it in on his CB.”

“I remember.”

Royce nodded, all serious. “God help y’all for what you girls went through.”

“I just came here to make some stew,” she said. “I don’t need anyone laying their hands on me in the meat aisle. I don’t think Jesus makes visits to the Piggly Wiggly.”

“I just think you need to be more appreciative to those who took care of your troubles.”

“Come again?”

“You don’t need to embarrass the folks who looked out for you and Miss Stillwell when y’all needed them,” he said. “You weren’t in no shape to be put through a trial. Things got done that needed to be done.”

“I can’t believe it,” Diane said. “I can’t fucking believe it. You’ve followed me into town to tell me to shut my mouth about y’all hanging an innocent man.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Royce said. “You were nearly dead when they found you, bled-out.”

“I saw the man who did it,” she said. “I saw him six weeks after y’all hung that poor man from the big oak.”

Royce nodded, backing his cart away, showing a path for Diane to follow if she wished. He thumbed at his nose and said, “I think you’re misremembering some things. I think you need to know what was done was in y’all’s best interest.”

“Says who?” Diane said. “I never asked for any of that.”

A fat man on a scooter zipped down the aisle past them, cart loaded down with cookies, white bread, Little Debbie snack pies, and two liters of Diet Dr Pepper. “Good seeing you, ma’am,” Royce said, raising his voice a little, nodding.

“You need to stay away from me.”

“I’m just the messenger, ma’am,” he said. “Some fine folks did the right thing. Don’t go dragging names through the mud. Thank the Lord we had people in this county had the sand.”

Royce rolled the cart away, heading down the cereal aisle to the tune of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”