“I can do it,” I said quietly.
“I said forget it,” Adam snapped. “We’re going home.”
“You go if you want. I’m swimming it.”
“Then put your money where your mouth is,” said Trey Matheson. “I don’t get wet for free.”
In the end, we bet four hundred dollars on the race. Four hundred dollars then was like forty thousand to me now. More. It was all I had in the world, every dollar saved from working minimum-wage jobs. But I risked it, because I believed in myself. But what happened afterward—
“Hey, Marshall!” calls a high-pitched voice. Not Adam’s …
I blink myself from my trance and see the river two hundred feet below the bluff, stretching north through clear sunlight, not cloaked in fog like that terrible night—
“Marshall!” Denny Allman calls, running along the fence on the bluff’s edge. “Come see! I found the truck! I found Dr. Buck’s truck!”
By the time Denny reaches me, panting like mad, I’ve come back to myself. He jams the shaded screen of his iPad Mini up to my face. A green sea of treetops glides past below the flying camera, as though shot by Stanley Kubrick.
“Is that a live shot?” I ask.
“No, the drone’s flying back on autopilot. My battery was low. This is recorded. There’s the truck! See it?”
Denny apparently put his drone into a hover over a local make-out and picnic spot north of town called Lafitte’s Den. The den is a geologic anomaly, a sandstone cave set low in the loess bluff, long said to have been the hideout of pirate Jean Lafitte while he evaded U.S. Navy ships pursuing him from New Orleans. No one has ever satisfactorily explained where Lafitte could have concealed his ships while he hid in the cave, and historians consider the story more legend than fact. As Denny’s drone descends toward the treetops on the screen, I see the rusted orange roof of Buck Ferris’s GMC pickup.
“That’s it,” I marvel. “You did it!”
Denny is beaming with pride. “Yep. I thought about flying down and looking into the windows, but the trees are pretty tight, and we’re at the limit of my range.”
“No, this is great. Don’t risk your drone.”
Staring at the abandoned truck parked in the dirt turnaround by Lafitte’s Den, I’m sure of only one thing: Buck wouldn’t have wasted five minutes digging at that natural homeless shelter. Thanks to the Lafitte legend, over the decades the earth in and around that sandstone cave has been ratholed like a block of cheese by an army of gomers with metal detectors, ten-year-olds with toy shovels, and housewives with garden spades. The most anyone has ever found there are arrow points and pottery shards, which can be picked up anywhere in or around Bienville after a heavy rain. No one in the past two hundred years has ever found a single gold piece of eight.
“Buck wouldn’t dig there,” Denny says, reading my mind. “There’s nothing at that cave except empty beer cans and used rubbers.”
This kid. “You’re right. Something’s wrong here.”
“But there is sandstone in the ground around the cave. Could falling on that have crushed Buck’s head like we saw?”
“I don’t think so. First, most of the ground is covered with dirt. Second, even the sandstone is so soft you can dig a hole in it with a car key. Third, the cave is deep but not high, so he couldn’t have fallen that far.”
“Unless he fell from the top of the bluff,” Denny points out.
“If that’s what happened, he’ll have multiple broken bones. Also, there should be traces of sandstone in Buck’s wound.”
“What are you gonna do?”
I look down into the boy’s expectant face. I always see his mother when I do that. Like a lot of guys, I slept with her a few times in high school. Dixie was a good person, but I knew even then that she would never get out of this town or even to college. “Do you want credit for finding Buck’s truck?”
Denny thinks about it for a few seconds. “That won’t make up for the sheriff finding out for sure it was me filming his morons on the river earlier.”
“Probably not. Somebody will find that truck in the next few hours, but the sooner the better, as far as making a murder case. How about an anonymous call?”
Denny nods.
“Okay, then. I’ll handle it.”
“How? There’s no pay phones anymore.”
With my burner phone, of course, I think. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay,” he says skeptically. “So what’s next?”
I start to ask him what he means, but I know. And I’m glad. Because though Denny’s only fourteen, he has a resource I can’t easily replace.
“I’ve got a feeling I know where Buck was really digging last night. And it wasn’t that cave.”
Denny’s eyes light up. “Where?”
“The new paper mill site, in the industrial park. I think we could use a little aerial surveillance out there. Check for signs of recent digging.”
“But you said they have the groundbreaking ceremony there today.”
I glance at my watch. “In an hour and a half. The time for an overflight is this afternoon. Can you meet me out there later if I call your mother and make sure it’s okay?”
“You bet your ass! I mean—no problem.”
“Thanks, Denny. You need a ride home?”
“Nah. I’m good. Going over to the depot for some food.”
“Okay.” I pat him on the shoulder and start back in the direction of the Flex, but he stops me by calling my name.
“What is it?” I ask, turning back.
“Are you okay?” he asks, looking genuinely worried.
“Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking about something that happened a long time ago.”
Denny Allman doesn’t look puzzled or even curious. He works his mouth around for a few seconds, then says, “Your brother?”
So he does know. “Yeah. Who told you about that?”
“My mom.”
Of course. “I figured.”
“She said it was the worst thing that ever happened in this town.”
That doesn’t surprise me. “That’s what it felt like, at the time. Actually, some pretty bad things have happened in this town since it was founded.”
Denny bites his bottom lip and looks at the ground. “Maybe one happened last night, huh?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. You get home and do your schoolwork. I’ll call your mom later on.”
Before I turn to go, the hornet humming of the drone sounds above us, and Denny’s DJI quad-rotor descends rapidly on autopilot, hovers for a few seconds, then slowly lands thirty yards away from us.
He grins proudly. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Pretty cool.”
AFTER LEAVING DENNY Allman near the old railroad depot, I walk back to the