So how was it that he loved her the way he did? How had she become as necessary to his life as oxygen? He opened his second bag of potato chips. The world was full of mysteries, he supposed, and the human heart—his human heart—had turned out to be one of them.

  As Ethan was pondering it all, a red Ford pulled alongside him in the left-hand lane. For a mile or two, the truck stayed there, matching its speed to the Ram’s. Ethan, finally glancing over to ID the incompetent driver, saw a man pointing and gesturing at him in some kind of wild pantomime.

  What the hell? Ethan thought.

  The man finally made a comprehensible motion: Roll down your window.

  Ethan did, and the man screamed across the dotted line at him, “Your tire!”

  Startled, Ethan realized that the steering wheel was vibrating, and the Ram was pulling to the right.

  Another flat. Furious, he took the next exit off the highway.

  Chapter

  83

  After saying goodbye to Foster Barnes, AnnieLee had wasted no time catching a ride to Fort Smith, Arkansas. But that was where her hitching luck had run out—not that she would have expected anything different from a state that’d ground her up and spit her out the way it did.

  No siree, there was no place like home.

  She’d walked east along Grand Avenue toward the university, hoping to find a college kid heading out of town for the weekend. But she’d waited for three hours now, and it was getting dark.

  “Driven to insanity,” she sang softly, “driven to the edge…”

  Paying for another motel room would nearly clean her out, and anyway, she was determined to keep going. She started walking again. She felt rattled, jumpy; she had felt this way ever since she crossed the state line. She couldn’t tell if the tightness in her chest came from anticipation or dread. Probably it was both.

  Hearing the low hum of traffic from I-540 up ahead, she broke into a light jog. It was never a good idea to hitch at night, but right now she didn’t even care. Whatever she had to do—beg, hitch, or crawl the whole way on her hands and knees—she’d do it.

  Vengeance was one hell of a motivator.

  Twenty minutes later, AnnieLee was scrambling up the embankment to the interstate. Cars rushed past as she stood on the gravel shoulder, forcing a smile no one would be able to see in the darkness.

  When a woman in an old white Pontiac finally pulled over, AnnieLee got in and let herself be scolded for hitchhiking, for being out alone at night, for not having a proper coat, and for every other wrong choice the woman seemed to think she’d made in her life. AnnieLee just nodded gratefully, promising she would start going to church and turn herself around, and two hours later she got dropped off on a rural road barely twenty miles from her final destination.

  She fingered Foster’s money in her pocket. He’d said If it means you can take a cab…

  But there weren’t any cabs in the boondocks, or at least not any that she knew how to call on a phone she didn’t even have. And so she put out her thumb again. She hoped a kind and decent stranger would stop for her. In a place so small that everyone seemed to know everyone else, she just needed a person who wouldn’t recognize her. Someone who’d believe her name was Katie—or even AnnieLee Keyes.

  She walked along the side of the road, sticking out her thumb whenever she heard a car approaching. After an hour or so, a battered Chevy passed by and screeched to a halt twenty yards in front of her. She ran up to meet it.

  When the man—he was around her age, and alone—pushed the passenger door open, AnnieLee felt a humid cloud of beery air spill out and surround her.

  She’d never seen him before, and this was such a relief that she overlooked the fact that he’d been drinking, and that she’d just promised that nice old lady that she wouldn’t ever take a ride from a random man again. She got in. She was so damn close to where she needed to be, and she didn’t know when the next car would stop, and already it felt like she was in enemy territory. She needed to keep moving.

  “I thought you were a deer at first,” he said. Then he laughed. “Shoot, woulda hit ya and turned you into steaks.”

  “Not a deer,” AnnieLee said. She looked down at the empty beer cans in the cup holders. “You’re going to keep us between the ditches, right?” she asked, buckling in. She pulled the man’s coat out from behind her back and tucked it down by her feet.

  “Pretty sure I can do that,” he said.

  “I hope so,” AnnieLee said. “I’ve had enough near-death experiences for the week,” she added, but she said it so quietly that he didn’t hear her.

  “Where you aiming to get?” he asked.

  One of his headlights was out, and the other was dim and yellow. “A bit outside Jasper,” she said. “On the way to Rock Springs.”

  “You from the hills?” he asked.

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see that he was looking closely at her. “I am.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve been gone a long time.”

  “Welcome back, then,” he said. “You party?”

  “Not so much,” she said.

  “Too bad.”

  He was quiet after that; he seemed to be concentrating on driving. AnnieLee sat as close to the door as she could get, with the window cracked to bring in fresh air. She wasn’t worried about him running off the road anymore. But she couldn’t say the same about what the next few hours would hold. Could she get this half-drunk hillbilly to take her right up to the door? Would the house be dark? Would anyone be home? Could she find the rifle that used to be hidden underneath the front porch?

  She was trying to imagine what might happen next when she felt the pressure of a hand on her leg.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, she thought. Not this shit again.

  “You feel tense,” he said.

  She pushed his hand away. “Don’t,” she said.

  He laughed. “Oh, don’t be such a prude,” he said. “I’m just being friendly. Let’s go have a drink. I know a spot a little ways up the road. I think you’ll like me. My name’s Wade. What’s yours?”

  AnnieLee felt her arms go cold. “I think you’d better just let me out.”

  “Are you crazy? It’s the middle of nowhere.” Wade sounded disappointed in her.

  He drove with both hands on the wheel for a while. But eventually the right one found its way to her leg again. She watched it moving up toward her crotch, and for a minute she just sat there, frozen and horrified. Where was her gun when she needed it?

  Suddenly she remembered her pepper spray, and she reached into her pocket. But somehow the little tube was gone.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  “What, babe?” Wade said.

  He ran his finger along the inner seam of her sweatpants. It tickled. And it made AnnieLee feel like she was going to vomit.

  “Get your hand off of me, or else,” she said.

  “Or else what?” he asked. When he looked at her, he didn’t seem drunk anymore. He seemed focused and dangerous.

  AnnieLee’s mind had gone numb, but her body clicked into gear without it. She reached down, grabbed Wade’s coat, and clutched it to her chest. When the car slowed to make the next curve in the road, AnnieLee threw open the door. She didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. She flung herself out, holding the coat to cushion her fall. She landed with a horrific thud on the pavement and then rolled down into a ditch.

  She lay there, panting, as the sound of the car engine faded. Her head was an explosion of pain and her vision was going in and out. But she gritted her teeth and tried to get up on her hands and knees. She didn’t think she’d broken anything, but every part of her hurt.

  She crawled a little ways, unsure if she should try to make it back up to the road or drag herself into the woods like a wounded deer. Which was less dangerous? It felt impossible to think, and it was getting harder and harder to keep her eyes open. The world was spinning way too fast suddenly. She felt like she needed to lie down. She saw a flash of light and looked up toward the road.

  She held her breath so she wouldn’t cry out in pain. Was someone coming to help her? She squinted through the dark.

  It was Wade, picking his way down the hill.

  “No,” she whispered. And then she blacked out.

  Chapter

  84

  Ethan woke stiff and sore after five hours of fitful sleep in a convenience store parking lot thirty miles east of the Texas border. It was cold inside the cab and chilly outside, too, though he knew it’d get plenty warm once the sun got a little higher in the sky. He slipped on his boots and stumbled into the shop, where he bought himself a coffee, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a microwavable egg sandwich. After filling up the tank, he was back on the road.

  Despite the flat tires, he was making good time. When Ruthanna called to check in, Ethan told her that he’d be in Arkansas before the day was out.

  “And then what?” she asked. “Maya spent hours yesterday trying to find AnnieLee online—her hometown, her high school—and she didn’t come up with anything. It’s like she doesn’t even exist.”

  Though this wasn’t the news he’d hoped for, it wasn’t exactly what he’d call surprising.

  “So how’re you going to find her?” Ruthanna demanded. “Drive around the state calling her name out the window? Light a fire and send up smoke signals?”

  “Eight hundred square miles,” he said. “That’s all I gotta cover.”

  “What?” Ruthanna said.

  There was a cop up ahead, and Ethan slowed down a little. “The county she’s from, Caster—that’s how big it is. But that was a joke. I don’t have to drive the whole thing. She grew up in the woods, right next to a creek that drains into the Little Buffalo River. I’ll find her.”

  “Hang on,” Ruthanna said.

  He could hear her tapping something into her phone, and a minute or two later she came back on.

  “Caster’s nothing but woods and creeks!” she exclaimed. “Ethan, this is never going to work.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said stubbornly. “Someone’s going to know her, Ruthanna, and that someone’s going to tell me where she is.”

  “Call me the instant you have news,” she said.

  “I will,” he said.

  By 4 p.m., he’d found a run-down-looking shack with a flickering Budweiser sign in the window that called itself the Reel ’em Inn. Though Caster County was dry, its neighbor, Boone, could serve liquor starting at breakfast time.

  The bar was smoky and dimly lit, and over the sound of a TV football game, Ethan could hear Hank Williams singing about how lonesome he was. Ethan parked himself on an empty stool and ordered a pint of what the window advertised. Even though he could tell by the beer’s wet dog smell that the tap hoses hadn’t been cleaned recently, if ever, he still felt his shoulders relax as he took the first sip. He let himself get halfway down the pint before he asked the bartender if he’d ever heard of a girl named AnnieLee Keyes.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said.

  A bearded geezer down at the end of the bar snorted. “That’s because we don’t get no women in here,” he said. “Used to, but it’s too much of a dump now.”

  “You hate it so much, Bucky, go someplace else,” the bartender said.

  Bucky spun around on his stool. “Nowhere else to go, bro.”

  Ethan pulled up a picture of AnnieLee on his phone. “This is what she looks like. She grew up around here.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No,” Ethan said. “Definitely not.”

  The bartender looked down at the screen and then up at Ethan. “She run off on you?”

  Ethan hesitated. “Yeah.”

  The bartender poured a shot of Jack Daniel’s and set it in front of Ethan. “Women are more trouble than they’re worth,” he said. “That’s why none of us are home with the ones we got.”

  “Damn straight,” the geezer called.

  “Shut up. Yours is dead,” the bartender said.

  Ethan knocked the shot back and set the glass down on the sticky bar. “Thanks, man,” he said. He put the phone back in his pocket. “I guess you’d remember a girl like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I would,” the bartender said. “A girl as pretty as that, though? She’s not here—I can tell you that much. She’d get the hell out as soon as she could, and she wouldn’t never come back.”

  Chapter

  85

  Ethan spent the night lying on the bench seat of the truck, barely sleeping, and in the morning he began his search in earnest, driving from one tiny, run-down town to another in search of someone who could tell him what he needed to know. Trees and meadows were on every side; he rarely even passed another car.

  The countryside was wild and beautiful, but the abandoned buildings crumbling at the corners of empty crossroads seemed almost haunted. A hundred years ago, these little places had been thriving; now, most of them seemed long since dead.

  In a place called Bensonville, Ethan passed a shuttered butcher shop with a hand-painted sign advertising turtle and coon meat. Next to it might’ve once been a hair salon. Now it was nothing but an empty room with a dusty tiled floor.

  There were no cars parked along the main street, but down at the end of the block, Ethan saw someone sitting on a bench. As he drove closer, he saw that it was an old man dressed in a pair of faded Carhartt overalls. For all Ethan knew, he was the only inhabitant of the whole town, and he looked like he was waiting for a bus that was never going to come.

  Ethan pulled over and rolled down the window. “Morning,” he said. “Are you familiar with the Keyes family?”

  The old man looked at him for a long time before he spoke. “I know some Lockes,” he said, and then gave a great guffawing laugh.

  Ethan hated puns. “Thanks for your time,” he said. He drove away without bothering to show the man the picture.

  Half an hour later, he came upon a much bigger town. It was almost picturesque, with flowers planted in old whiskey barrels along the main drag, and the Little Buffalo—the river he was aiming for—was running along the north side of the road. Ethan saw an antiques shop, a Christian bookstore, a pawnbroker, two motels, and a café with a blue-and-white-striped awning.

  Ethan figured he’d kill two birds with one stone by going into the café, where he could eat breakfast and ask a question or two.

  The woman who waited on him was young and fine-featured, with lively green eyes. Ethan tried to be friendly, but other than taking his order, she barely acknowledged his existence. Twenty minutes later, she brought him a plate of undercooked pancakes and overcooked bacon and was refilling his coffee mug for the third time when he said, “I wonder if I could ask you something.”

  She wiped a drop of coffee off the table with the corner of her apron. “I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.

  Ethan was taken aback. “Seeing as how we’ve said less than twenty words to each other, it’d be pretty presumptuous of me to ask you out,” he said. “And honestly, I think it’s pretty presumptuous of you to assume that I want to.”

  She cracked a smile at that, the first friendly one he’d seen on her face. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s kind of a reflex.”

  Ethan dropped a sugar cube into the bitter brew. He didn’t suppose being a pretty girl in the only café for a hundred miles was the easiest job in the world. “I just wanted to ask you if you’d ever heard of AnnieLee Keyes,” he said. “She’s a singer.”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of her,” the girl said. “Dark night, bright future,” she sang. “Like the phoenix from the ashes, I shall rise again…”

  “You’ve got a great voice,” Ethan said. It was high and clear, with a faint vibrato. “And I’m not hitting on you, either.”

  “Sure, sure, I believe you,” the girl said. It was unclear whether or not she meant it.

  “Have you ever seen her?” Ethan asked. He brought out his phone and showed her a picture he’d taken of AnnieLee backstage. Her hair was messy, her cheeks pink and sweaty from the spotlight. She looked tired and gorgeous and radiant.

  The waitress leaned in, and then she frowned a little.

  “What is it?” Ethan asked.

  “That’s what she looks like? Do you have any more pictures of her?” the girl asked.

  “Swipe left,” he said.

  Ethan watched as the girl thumbed through his photos of AnnieLee onstage, backstage, and in the passenger seat of the van. The girl was squinting at first, and then she began to lightly shake her head. After another moment a smile broke over her face. And pretty soon she started laughing. “No shit,” she was saying. “No freaking shit.”

  “Why are you laughing? What’s so funny?” Ethan asked.

  “That’s not AnnieLee Keyes,” she said. “That’s Rose McCord.” She swiped to see a few more pictures. “Yeah, she looks real good. I liked her better with her natural hair, though.”

  Ethan felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. He shoved his plate away and looked up at the waitress. “What color is her real hair?” he asked. Immediately he wished he could take the question back, because the answer didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that AnnieLee—or Rose McCord, or whoever the hell she was—hadn’t just been unforthcoming about her past. She’d been lying about everything.

  “Caramel blond, I guess you’d call it,” the waitress said. “It was real long, real pretty.”

  Ethan clenched his fists under the table. He was pissed and embarrassed that he hadn’t known the actual name of the woman he loved, but he struggled to keep his emotions in check; he had to remember that she was in danger. “Do you know where Ann—where Rose used to live?” he asked.