“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.”