“You want to say grace or something?” Somers asked.

  Twelve minutes. Twelve goddamn minutes.

  “You got to take your part first. That’s what Brother Jeshua told me; the oldest and the strongest get their part first.”

  And that, as much as anything else Somers had heard, made him glad that John Oscar Walden was dead. “I already ate. That’s for you.”

  Clyde ate like a starving man, which he probably was. Once, when Somers had been a kid, he’d tried to mow the lawn. He’d purposefully ignored the fact that his parents hired out the job. Halfway through the job, the lawnmower had jinked left, up a berm, and gnashed its way through a line of rosebushes. This, the way Clyde, ate, was a little bit like that: a hell of a lot of chewing, a hell of a lot of mess. And Somers tried to focus on that thought, on mowing the lawn, and not on those twelve minutes. In twelve minutes, you could say just about anything. You could change anything.

  “I wasn’t going to steal that coffee,” Clyde said, goldfish crumbs flecking his upper lip. He chugged some of the protein shake. “I would have asked.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s real mad at me, isn’t he? Brother Jeshua got real mad like that sometimes.”

  “Hazard? No, he’s not mad at you.”

  Clyde paused, gap-mouthed, cheese danish wedged up against an eyetooth.

  “He’s mad as hell,” Somers amended. “But mostly at himself. You slept here last night?”

  “You said to stay in the room.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did. You need to use the bathroom.”

  His face almost as red as his hair, Clyde nodded. Somers jerked a thumb at the hall, and the skinny boy sprinted. Somers figured he had good reason.

  Hazard, carrying two cups of coffee, stomped across the linoleum.

  Twelve minutes.

  Let it go, Somers said. Let it go, or it’s going to kill you. And he forced himself to breathe, to stop, to think. You can trust him or not, but you better figure it out now. And he wished it were that simple.

  But he forced his voice to sound normal. “Judging by how fast the boy ran, I think you just about scared the piss out of him.”

  Hazard slammed down the cups, and coffee sloshed on the plastic tabletop.

  “He thinks you’re mad at him.”

  “Nobody in this whole fucking station thought to check in on him?”

  “We don’t get a lot of action around here. It was Sunday, the end of the day, and it was our case.”

  “Yeah, Somers. I know it was our case. I’m perfectly aware that it was our goddamn case.”

  Clyde came back to the room, but when he saw Hazard, he shrank down, slinking along the wall like a whipped dog.

  “Get over here,” Hazard snapped. “Drink your damn coffee.”

  Clyde jumped into the seat, snatched up the cup, and took a swallow. It burned his mouth; that much was obvious. He didn’t make a noise, though.

  “I promise he’s not angry at you,” Somers said. “He’s mad because he was here last night and forgot.”

  “I wasn’t the only one who forgot.”

  “No. Pretty much everybody did. Sorry about that, Clyde.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t mind, really.” Clyde scooped up a handful of danish and jammed it in his mouth; some of the cheese crusted the corner of his lip. “Room like that, there’s hardly anything to complain about.”

  Hazard opened his mouth, but Somers nudged him with his knee. “Oh yeah?”

  “Plenty of space. Lights make that nice humming noise. Warm and dry. When I got tired, I just stretched out and fell asleep. Almost as good as a bed.”

  “You don’t mind being alone?”

  “Oh, I’m used to it. Brother Jeshua always said that was the whole point of Sheol. Cut you off from the fellowship, he said. Like being excommunicated, I guess. But I always thought it was the wet. You can’t ever get comfortable when it’s wet, and it gets cold, and—” Clyde paused, a crumb of goldfish pinched between his fingers.

  “He’s dead. You can tell us, and he’s never going to learn about it.”

  “He’s dead now. He won’t always be dead, though.”

  “He’s dead for good, Clyde. He’s not coming back ever. I’m not saying that to be rude. I’m not trying to fight with you about faith. But I’m telling you plain and simple that John Walden was not the son of God, and he’s not coming back from the dead.”

  “He came to me in a dream last night,” Clyde said, voice pitched towards the linoleum.

  “It was just a dream,” Somers said. “You don’t have to be afraid of him.”

  “I’m not afraid. You know what he told me? He said, ‘If you fall, I will catch you.’ That’s what he said the night I met him. What do you think about that?”

  “Your mind is processing trauma,” Hazard said. “And dreams don’t mean anything. They’re like someone taking out the trash—all the crap that’s piled up in your brain, that’s when it gets dumped at the curb. That’s what you were experiencing: the leftover crap in your brain.”

  “You’re such a romantic,” Somers muttered.

  “I don’t know about trash in the brain,” Clyde said. “But I know dreams mean something. And that dream meant something. It meant he’s not gone. He’s still there. He’s watching over me, and that means he’ll come back.”

  “What did he do to you?” Hazard said. “What was Sheol? You’ve said that twice now. It was some kind of punishment, wasn’t it?”

  “It was just something we needed. A place to learn.”

  “Bullshit. What was it? You said you were down there for days. Did he give you food? Water? Did you have a toilet? Were you swimming in your own shit?”

  Clyde’s eyes cut towards the door, and he framed his face with his hands, as though to block Hazard from sight.

  “All right,” Somers said.

  “No, I want him to answer that question. What was this nasty latrine where your messiah shoved you? How often did he do it? How long—”

  “Detective Hazard.”

  Hazard balled his fists, and the purple slashed his cheekbones again, and his breath rose and fell like he was trying to lift something impossibly heavy. A mountain. Or maybe just his own past.

  “You’re still hungry?” Somers said.

  Clyde nodded.

  “How about Big Biscuit?”

  “What’s that?”

  Somers grinned. “You’re in for a treat.”

  Big Biscuit was a diner. It might have been just a diner, but like most small towns, Wahredua conferred special status on certain local eateries. In a small town, everyone knew the best grocery store, the best bakery, the best steakhouse, and the best place for breakfast. It was in this last category that Big Biscuit, with its red vinyl and its chrome foggy with fingerprints, really shone.

  The place had atmosphere. Nothing to do with the decorations, which were lousy black and white prints of pin-up girls and old cars and famous days in history as told by the Wahredua Courier. Some of the atmosphere just had to do with time. It accumulated. Like the decades of grease and good cooking that had turned the diner’s enormous griddle satin-slick, time left a patina. This place was full of memories: high school, especially, when Somers had been old enough to drive and young enough to eat whatever he wanted, when this had been the cool place to come, when he had been cool by virtue of coming here and this place had been cool by virtue of his coming here.

  For Hazard, it was a different story. Somers wasn’t sure entirely what Hazard’s relationship was to this place. The big, brooding man’s expression was usually difficult to read. Somers had gotten good at spotting anger—it was easy because Hazard was usually angry to some degree. But other emotions darted under Hazard’s perfect, pale complexion. Not happy, not necessarily—the emotions looked too whiplash, too helter-skelter. But strong. Strong like hitting a guardrail at sixty miles an hour.

  In contrast to the smells of burnt coffee and toner at the station, Big Biscuit smelled like, well, biscuits. And like butter. And like real maple syrup. And, yes, like coffee, but good and fresh and new. People chatted in the booths. Old men sat behind scrims of newspaper, their silhouettes traced against the ink. Clyde melted into his seat, and when he saw the amount of food the waitress brought him, his eyes about fell from his head.

  Once Clyde had really gotten going, Somers tugged at Hazard’s sleeve, and the two men retreated. They stood by one of the plate windows; outside April was viciously blue and green and white and pink. Somers tapped the glass with a knuckle; it was chilly but not cold, and it gave back a rumbling note in response. He shifted his hand and tapped again. The note was lighter this time, almost a chime.

  “What’d you drag me over here for?” Hazard said.

  Somers propped himself against the glass.

  “You know what they’re going to do with him?” Hazard said. “They’re going to shove him back in that interview room. If he’s lucky, they’ll dig up some clothes from the lost and found and they’ll let him take a shower and then they’ll stick him in the interview room.”

  “Maybe they’ll give him some case files to read if he gets bored. Maybe he’ll figure out where Kolosik used to work.”

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and say it, Ree?”

  “That’s not fair. He’s a good kid. He’s messed up. He’s royally fucked up if we’re being honest. But he shouldn’t have to sit in that box because he got mixed up with a cult and didn’t have the brains to get out.”

  “Nobody’s putting him in a box.”

  “That kid never had a chance.” Hazard paused. He was fighting with himself, and the fight was invisible except in the pauses, in the tightening of his jaw, in the sudden melting of those scarecrow eyes so that they looked like stones deep under well-water. “His parents fucked him. That cult fucked him. And now we’re fucking him.”

  “Technically, he fucked Kelley Jane.”

  “I knew it. I knew this was all one big joke to you.”

  Somers grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Ree, you want to take him home. That’s fine. Give him a place to sleep. Give him some clothes. Let the kid eat. I’m ok with all that.”

  Hazard didn’t jerk his arm free, but he was so tense that under Somers’s touch, his tendons felt like piano wire.

  “Am I right?”

  “It’s not his fault.”

  “So just say you want to watch out for him until social services can send somebody down here.”

  But the fight was still going on, and Somers realized, with one of those flashes of intuition that he couldn’t explain, that Hazard was fighting with something inside himself that even he didn’t understand. And it was a fight: a vicious, knock-down, dragged out fight, and it put hell in Hazard’s eyes, put deep, blue-black hell under his eyes, put hell in the razor-line of his lips.

  “I want to.”

  “All right.”

  Hazard let out a breath. His hand flexed as though it were stiff, and his fingers curled around Somers’s arm. He squeezed once, hard. Emery Hazard was just a plain old enigma. That’s all there was to it.

  “Want to bring in Kolosik again? See if we can get some answers out of him?”

  Hazard, shaking his head, said, “I want to see this million-dollar farm. That’s where those people claimed they spent the night before Walden was murdered. I bet they went back there. I’d like to talk to them and see if they can give us some more insight on Peyton and Britney.”

  “You think they did it?”

  “I think Peyton had a pretty good story worked out before we even saw her. If she inherits all her mom’s money, maybe Walden wasn’t going to let her go quite so easily. Maybe he tried to force her to stay. Peyton doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d give up easily.”

  “She doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d end up in a cult.”

  Hazard shrugged. “It takes all kinds.”

  “That might be the most open-minded thing you’ve ever said.”

  With a glare, Hazard added, “I also want to see if we can track down alibis for the others. I’d like more than just their word that they weren’t anywhere near the Walden house in the morning.”

  “They weren’t exactly cooperative last time we talked to them.”

  “So we bring them into the station and go at them harder. I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do: I’m not going to listen to their religious bullshit for another day.”

  “Or we could try something else.”

  “You want to see if we can get some dirt on them? That might work. If we can put Kelley Jane behind bars for a day or two, she might soften up. Some of them, the real believers, I don’t think jail time is going to scare them.”

  “No, dummy.” Somers pointed at Clyde, who was mopping up yolk with his biscuit, his cheeks already stuffed with food like a manic ginger chipmunk. “I’m talking about him.”

  HAZARD CLUTCHED THE INTERCEPTOR'S DOOR as they bounced down a gravel road. That description was generous; the gravel existed only in patches, the white stones shining in the April sunlight, intermittent among the thick stretches of weeds. The long stalks of grass hissed against the undercarriage; it made Hazard think of snakes, of open water, of the wind rising before a storm. Imagination was all a bunch of horseshit, but he’d found himself carrying a lot more horseshit ever since he’d partnered with Somers.

  Ahead of them, a split-rail fence and a cattle guard marked the edge of the property that Shirley Scheidt, whoever she was, had donated to John Oscar Walden’s community. One-point-seven million dollars. That was a hell of a lot of money. Shirley Scheidt, whoever she was, must have really liked Walden. And that thought prickled inside Hazard.

  “Why now?”

  Somers frowned as he guided the Interceptor across the cattle guard; the metal chimed under the tires. “What?”

  “Why are they in Wahredua now?”

  “Ask our secret weapon.”

  Hazard glanced at Clyde, who tucked his knees against his chest. Like that, with his ginger bird’s nest, he might have passed for thirteen.

  “We just came up about a month ago.”

  “Why did you come up?”

  “The Lord called us.”

  “On a landline?”

  “Don’t,” Somers said in a low voice.

  Clyde ignored the jab, however. “We’d been back in Branson for a few months, and the cops there were really laying into us. Not like you guys. I don’t mean that. But they didn’t want us down there, and they’d slice our tires and they’d knock out taillights. Anything, really. One of them, a young guy, he was always talking to Sister Hagar, and that made Brother Jeshua real mad. But we couldn’t do anything about it. And when things started getting really bad, Brother Jeshua said we were headed to our promised land, where nobody would hurt us again.”

  “And you came here?”

  “To the farm first. Then we moved into the house in town.”

  “Why?”

  “The farmhouse is all right, but the one in town is better.”

  Hazard thought of the 70s porn decor and mentally adjusted for what they were about to find. “So this is it. Your promised land.”

  Around them, wild prairie grasses choked the gravel road, but the first signs of cultivation appeared: the edges of cleared fields, and then the furrows of plowed earth, where Hazard guessed that planting was underway. Corn, most likely. In this part of the world, it felt like it was always corn.

  “Ignore him,” Somers said. “He’s still figuring out how he feels about our town.”

  “I’m not figuring anything out. I know exactly how I feel: it’s a shit heap.”

  “It’s green,” Clyde said.

  “That’s about the only thing it is.”

  “Be quiet,” Somers said. ‘You like the green? It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Clyde said. He was silent as the Interceptor rocked over the uneven path, and his chin bounced on his knees. “We lived in a cave down there. Brother Jeshua said it was the tomb, and he said he had arisen from a tomb once and he would rise again.” Again, his chin beat a tattoo on his knees. “You know what a basement smells like? That’s what it was like. But wet. It was dripping somewhere, and at first I was real scared every time I touched that stuff that grows on the walls. I didn’t show it. The girls were scared too, so I didn’t show it. I just thought—I don’t know. Doesn’t seem right, does it? Letting a girl know you’re scared?”

  “Some girls are pretty tough,” Somers said. “Detective Swinney, for example.”

  “I’m not saying they’re not tough. Sister Sarah, she’s tough. Real tough. Sister Hagar too, but she’s—I don’t know.”

  “She’s not tough?” Somers asked. He had slowed the Interceptor to a crawl, and Hazard spotted the farmhouse ahead; Somers was buying them time, trying to take advantage of Clyde’s sudden desire to speak.

  “She can be real pushy, you know? If Brother Jeshua and Sister Mary aren’t around, she’s always getting in your face, bossing you left and right. But one time Brother Jesse got real mad, and he whipped her butt, and she—well, she just took it.”

  “Did he hit her a lot?”

  “Just that once. But that’s how she was: tough right up until she wasn’t.”

  “Not Sister Sarah, though.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “No. We’d like to talk to her. Do you?”

  Clyde shook his head.

  “What would Sister Sarah do when someone hit her?”

  “Sister Sarah? Nobody ever put a finger on her.”

  “Because they were scared of her?” Hazard asked.

  Eyes huge, like Hazard was asking if people were scared of Santa Claus or Mother Theresa or a puppy dog, Clyde said, “They just wouldn’t. Nobody would. Not ever.”

  “Do you have any ideas where Sister Sarah might have gone?” Somers asked.

  “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to go with you. Can’t you just let me be? I told you everything you wanted. I won’t do nothing wrong, I promise. I won’t—” His face heated. “I won’t even do what you saw, I won’t even go near Sister Mary if you just let me go.”