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“You didn’t kill that girl. Did you.” Not a question.

Fuck the watchers. He goes to where she’s sitting and squats down beside her. “No. They think I did because I had a dream of where she was buried, but I didn’t kill her.”

DJ swipes an arm across her eyes. “Ma says I can’t come over your trailer anymore and you can’t pick me up at school anymore. She says they’ll either arrest you or you’ll go away. Are they going to arrest you?”

“They can’t because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Are you going away?”

“I have to. I don’t have a job and most people don’t want me here anymore.”

“I want you! What if Ma decides she wants Bobby for a boyfriend again? He can’t fix the car if it busts! I hate him, he sent me to my room once without my supper and Ma didn’t stop him!”

She begins to sob, and double fuck the watchers, Danny puts an arm around her and pulls her to him. Her face against his shirt is hot and wet but okay. More than okay.

“She won’t have Bob back,” he says. “She knows better.”

He has no idea if this is true, but hopes it is. He’s never met his predecessor, for all Danny knows he could be a skinny bespectacled accountant who gets a kick out of sending little girls to their rooms, but he imagines a big hulk with a crewcut and lots of tattoos. Someone a little girl could really be scared of.

“Take me with you,” DJ says against his shirt.

Danny laughs and gives her dark blond hair a scruff. “Then they’d arrest me for sure.”

She looks up at him and gives him a tentative smile. That’s when Althea Dumfries comes out of her trailer. “Let loose of that child!” she shouts. “Let loose of that child this minute or I’m calling the police!”

DJ shoots to her feet, tears still streaming down her face. “Go fuck yourself! GO FUCK YOURSELF, YOU FAT BITCH!”

Danny is horrified but also admiring. And even though he’s sure Darla Jean just bought herself a whole boatload of trouble, he can’t help thinking that he couldn’t have said it better himself.

47

Ella Davis didn’t think they made burgs like Cathcart anymore, even in dead-red central Kansas. It’s a dusty one-stoplight town about forty miles north of Manitou. There’s a Kwik Shop across from the rusty water tower (WELCOME TO CATHCART WHERE ALL LIVES MATTER is printed on the side). Davis buys herself an RC, and grabs a Plains Truth from the rack by the cash register. Danny Coughlin has made the front page, sandwiched between an ad for Royal Tires and one for the Discount Furniture Warehouse Where Every Day Is Sale Day. The headline reads SUSPECT CLAIMS “IT WAS ALL A DREAM.”

Davis cranks up the AC in her car and reads the story before heading down Main Street. It’s Peter Andersson’s byline (excepting local sports, Andersson seems to write all the Plains Truth stories), and Davis doesn’t think the New York Times will be calling him anytime soon. If Andersson’s intent was irony, he fell far short, achieving only a kind of lumbering skepticism. Perversely, it makes her want to believe Danny’s version. She tosses the miserable excuse for a newspaper behind her.

Plains Truth is on the street-level floor of a white-frame building halfway down Main Street. It’s squeezed between a Dollar Tree and a long defunct Western Auto. It needs paint. The boards are loose, the nails bleeding streaks of red rust. The door is locked. She cups her hands to peer through the window and sees one large cluttered room with an old desktop computer presiding over it like an ancient god. The chair in front of the computer looks new, but the rest of the furniture looks like it was picked up either at a yard sale or on a dump-picking safari. A long bulletin board is drifted deep with ad mock-ups and old copy, some of it yellowed and curling with age.

“Hello, hello, hello, are you Davis?”

She turns to behold a very tall young man, perhaps six-seven or -eight. He’s as skinny as a playing card. He’s also strikingly pale at a time of year when most Kansans have at least a touch of tan. A Hitlerian forelock of black hair hangs over one eye. He brushes it back and it flops back down.

“I am,” she says.

“Hold on, hold on, I’ll unlock.” He does so and they step in. She smells air freshener and beneath it, a ghost aroma of pot. “I was downstreet to see Ma. She’s got the diabetes. Lost a foot last year. Would you like a cold drink? I think there’s some in the—”

She holds up her bottle of RC.

“Oh. Right, right, okay, great. As for snacks, I’m afraid the cupboard is bare.” He laughs—titters, actually—and brushes away the forelock. It promptly falls back. “I’m sorry it’s so warm in here. The air conditioning’s on the fritz. Always something, isn’t it? We roll the rock, Sisyphus and all that.”

Davis has no idea what he’s talking about, but she realizes he’s scared to death. Good.

“I didn’t come here for snacks.”

“No, of course not. Coughlin, the story about Coughlin.”

“Two stories, it turns out.”

“Two, yes, right, okay. As I said on the phone, I thought I was getting information from someone on the inside of the investigation. A policeman. In fact he said that. KHP, he said.”