“We could just stand back and watch,” Quinn said. “Might be interesting.”

Lillie gathered the box of boots in her arms and shook her head. “Damn, I wish it were that simple.”

Quinn watched her walk back to her Jeep and then circled his big truck back to the main road, night dispatch reporting a domestic dispute in Sugar Ditch. A man had threatened to kill his wife. Neighbors had gathered outside the home to watch. OK. Another night.

Quinn hit the light bar and the siren and rode off.

•   •   •

Diane Tull rode out to the Jericho Cemetery with Caddy Colson after closing up the Farm & Ranch that night. Caddy had started off by visiting Jamey Dixon’s grave every day, and then, when that became too painful, every week. She sometimes brought flowers, other times just scribbled notes or Bible verses, but always left with two fingers first pressed to her lips and then to the cold headstone. It was snowing just a bit when they got there, a few streetlamps shining on the flat land where Jericho people had been buried since the town’s founding.

Caddy used the flat of her hand to brush away snow on top of Dixon’s headstone and Diane put a hand on her shoulder and then walked down the rolling hill, the light growing dim, more of the headstones and markers now in shadows. But she could walk there blind, to the big headstone of Lori’s grandfather, who’d fought in World War II, and the other various markers of the Stillwell family. Lori’s was curved and simple, a basic inscription:

LORI ANN STILLWELL, MAY 9, 1963 TO JULY 4, 1977.

I will fear no evil as thou art with me.

Diane hadn’t been here in a long while, maybe not since she’d come back to Jericho. But seeing the dates, knowing that so much time had passed, that she wasn’t that smart-mouth kid anymore but a graying woman with two grown sons, seemed like a dream. It was all there, that funeral, when they’d all stood there on that flat of land. That stuttering, sweating preacher trying to search and grasp and not find one true word to make sense of what happened to her that summer. Diane just remembered feeling more sorry for him than anybody, him finally just shutting up, closing his eyes, and praying that Lori would find eternal life and peace and all that sort of thing. This was never an ordained thing or willed by God’s master plan. It was just horrible and the preacher knew enough not to say otherwise.

As Caddy had done for Dixon, she wiped away the snow from the top of the granite headstone and just hovered over where they’d buried Lori’s body. The ground was hard and cold and she tried to summon up some good thought, maybe a prayer or a song that she knew Lori would have appreciated. She should’ve brought flowers.

In her mind, she saw Lori smiling and laughing, sitting on that warm stone in the middle of the creek with fireworks cracking overhead, and Diane smiled, too. But the way her mind worked, it all faded to the face of the man who’d forced himself on her and Lori, and then, that not being enough, shot them down on that hill. That disfigured face and the way he spoke with certainty and a goddamn ownership of them both crowded the laughing Lori right out of her head. It always did.

Diane closed her eyes and told Lori she was sorry.

When she opened them again, it had started to snow much harder, falling crooked and cold on the hillside, as she walked back up to where Caddy now stood by the truck.

“Did it help?” Caddy said.

“Nope.”

“Me neither.”

“They’re not there,” Diane said. “I don’t know where they are, but they’re not in this place.”

“You know what I want?”

Diane opened the door to her truck and waited.

“I want to go to the bar and line up fifteen tequila shots end to end,” Caddy said. “I want to take any pill I can find on the bathroom floor and I want to wake up in about a week, if I wake up at all.”

“I don’t like that plan.”

“Me neither.”

The women climbed in the truck cab and Diane cranked the engine, the windshield wipers clearing the view as she turned out of the cemetery.

“I have a fine son,” Caddy said. “And good people who need help. That’s what I told Jamey. I told him he’d helped me find my strength.”

“I don’t know if it’s strength,” Diane said, “but I’m not scared at all. I changed my mind about wanting all this to go away. I want the light to shine on everything that happened. I want people to know about the man that was hung. How could anyone do that and say it was a gift for me? I never asked for anyone to be murdered. Those men left a dark stain on everything since.”

“There’s something you need to know,” Caddy said as they rode back toward The River, where she had left her old truck. “Quinn told me our father used to ride with those men. I’m ashamed of it. But I’m not surprised that’s where I came from.”

“You’re a great woman, Caddy.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not. But I’m trying like hell to be good.”

“I’m not afraid of those bikers,” Diane Tull said, taking the curves and turns, shining the headlights up onto that old barn church. “I’m not. Every night, I pray that they’ll come back for me.”

“Why?”

“I want to look them right in the eyes and tell ’em to eat shit.”

You know the worst part about being a goddamn train conductor at a shopping mall?” asked Quinn’s Uncle Van.

“Dodging shoppers in the food court?”

“No, sir,” Uncle Van said. “Hemorrhoids.”

“That kids’ train really jostle you that much?”

“It’s the sitting,” Uncle Van said. “I get paid two bucks a kid to ride them around from Sears, past the Victoria’s Secret, and then back down by the playground. You know by that Build-A-Bear workshop?”

“It’s been some time since I’ve been to the Tupelo Mall.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Uncle Van said, frying up a hamburger patty on the stove. “Bring Jason on by and I’ll let him ride for free.”

“That’s nice of you,” Quinn said. “Caddy said she had a trip planned.”

“That boy’s my kin,” Van said. “You ever hear me say anything about him being a little dark?”

“No, sir.”

“He looks just like your daddy after he’d go down to Panama City Beach and get himself a tan.”

Van slipped the burger into a bun and went to his refrigerator to crack open a Bud for him and one for Quinn. They both stood up in his kitchen as Van ate. He lived in a trailer in a little collection of trailers near Fate called Chance’s Bend. Van’s newest profession at the mall had gone on longer than most of his careers except maybe painting houses. There were a few years that he mainly made a living by trapping coyotes and collecting bounty from a federal grant.

“How’s your momma?”

“Fine,” Quinn said. “Been a little tight at the farm, with her and Caddy moving in. Momma’s house should be finished in a month.”

“Damn contractors tell you a month, you better plan on six,” Van said, taking a big bite, ketchup spilling on his white T-shirt. “That’s the way they work. I know ’cause I used to do that shit.”

Van was a fat man with a chubby face and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. He’d always reminded Quinn of a Buddha statue. He once saw one in a Chinese restaurant in Memphis as a kid and he remembered thinking at the time that his uncle had suddenly become famous.

Quinn sipped on the beer, not to be rude. He’d be riding on duty till 0600 and the roads were already getting slick.