Sofia leaned forward. She wasn’t going to argue. Her discussions with James were always full of opposing truths. She was thinking about Pánfilo de Narváez. He had been asking the wrong questions. He had been worrying about gold when he should’ve been worrying about Cortez. James was right — you could tease morals out of anything if you had a mind to.
She touched James’s book with her fingertips, searching for something yielding in his eyes. The smudgy dove was above them, taking flight before a lavender sky. The coffee shop had gotten quiet, it seemed.
James rested his hand on his book and pulled it away from her, out of her reach. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to get back to my reading now.”
“Eight months,” Reeve answered.
Three interviews in, Sofia already felt experienced, on home turf in this interrogation room. Her subject was wearing a canary shirt and a beige sport coat, and looked nowhere near perspiring.
“Why here?”
Sofia looked Reeve in the face and waited for his answer. He seemed intrigued by his surroundings and by Sofia herself, like this interview was a life experience he was gaining.
“I was ready to get away from things, away from the city — well, if Jacksonville is a city, which compared to Lower Grove it is.”
“What about Idaho, some place like that?”
“In hindsight I did insufficient research.”
“But why here?”
Reeve adjusted the collar of his coat. He made no move to take it off. His legs were crossed and he folded his hands atop his knee.
“My family used to vacation over in Labelle, when I was a little guy,” he said. “This one-story motel with a pool. Next door was a field full of donkeys. My dad would grill. I guess I have a positive association with this area.” Reeve cleared his throat. “I drove over there a couple weeks ago. Motel’s still there; no sign of the donkeys.”
“What do you do, that you can move to the economic middle of nowhere?”
“I was a pretty good businessman in my day,” Reeve said.
“Past tense.”
“I built up a chain of high-end health clubs, nine of them. Took fifteen years. When the time was right I sold them. I had commercials on TV and billboards and everything.”
“And now you don’t have to work?”
“Not if I live somewhere like this.”
“I see,” said Sofia.
Reeve was intending to convey openness and full cooperation. His act seemed too flawless.
“Do you have any experience with the spiritually adept?” Sofia asked him.
“Actually I do. By marriage,” said Reeve. “My ex-wife’s aunt was a medium in St. Augustine. People used to fly in to see her. Some of them came once a year, like a checkup.”
“But you never sat with her?”
“She wouldn’t do family.”
“You could go see her now. She’s not family anymore.”
Reeve frowned, not unhappily. “You could do it. You could give me a reading.”
“No, I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not? My wife’s aunt made pretty good dough.”
“I don’t think I’m nosy enough.”
Now Reeve chuckled. “Work from home. Cash business.”
“Your ex-wife’s aunt,” Sofia said. “She’s mostly an actress. Not to say she doesn’t have a talent, but she put herself in show business.”
Reeve uncrossed his legs. He regarded Sofia wryly. “What about this here?” he said. “You’re in business.”
“This is pro bono. I’m not getting paid and I’m not taking advantage of anyone.”
Reeve thought a second, picking something off his sleeve, and when he spoke again Sofia couldn’t hear him. There was another sound in her ears. She was being flooded with exactly what she needed to know and not a thing more, the knowledge filling her abundant and organized. She felt like her mind was being held at the bottom of a fast-moving river, but it had all the air it could use. The feeling was serene yet bracing. It had nothing to do with her body, asked no physical effort, nor even surrender.
Barn Renfro had made a bad investment, sure enough, an illegal one. He’d been planning on selling a bunch of the boats at his shop and slipping away, going into hiding. Barn’s debt had nothing to do with Reeve, but it was the reason Barn had a loaded gun in arm’s reach when Reeve came over in search of his dog. Sofia had all this intelligence and she didn’t feel a bit strained, just very awake. She was breathing easily. She wasn’t losing any time. It was all here before her, like a light had been switched on in a dark room.
Reeve lived on the opposite side of the lake from Barn, which was the reason he was being questioned. He was Barn’s only neighbor and his alibi, according to Uncle Tunsil, was nothing special. Sofia saw why. Reeve had been carrying on a feud with Barn since the day he’d moved in, a feud he hadn’t mentioned to Sofia’s uncle. There’d been a dispute over the property line, and Reeve was hoping the paperwork from that dispute was buried by now. Reeve was not pleased to be attending this interview. He was not being open. Like so many, like his wife’s aunt, he was a great actor.
When it became clear that Reeve was going to win the property dispute, Barn had cut down a pair of sprawling live oaks that, in another forty-eight hours, would’ve belonged to Reeve. Reeve had called the county once about Barn dumping his shop waste in the lake, and after that Barn had begun dumping everything in there — even grass clippings and bacon grease. Now there were no fish in the lake and the live oaks were history. Barn had called the fire marshal when Reeve’s family had visited and were roasting marshmallows in the backyard. Reeve’s young nephew had wandered over to Barn’s side of the lake early one morning, curiously examining all the dry-docked boats, and Barn had come around the corner with a filet knife in his hand, telling the boy exactly what happened to people who got caught sneaking around where they didn’t belong.
And then there was Reeve’s dog. The animal liked to wander. He’d never destroyed Barn’s property or even growled at him, but Barn hated the dog. A couple times he’d yelled across the lake for Reeve to come and get his goddamn mutt before he carted him off to the pound. The day of Barn’s death the dog had gone missing. That’s why Reeve had gone over to the shop. He’d surprised the fear-racked Barn, who’d stayed awake the whole night before on alert against his creditors, and who had been subsisting on pork rinds and beer. Reeve had been prepared for a confrontation. He had begun, in the hour before he’d strode around the mucky lake, to consider the prospect that Barn had killed his dog, that his pet was dead by the hand of this stupid backwoods grease monkey, this man who was a scourge of Reeve’s well-earned early retirement. If Barn had pushed the feud to a new height, Reeve would need to push back or be less than a man.
Barn could’ve killed the dog or he could’ve driven him out to the middle of nowhere and left him. Reeve had been breathing raggedly when he’d barged into the dim shop out of the blaring sun and stopped short at the gathering sight of Barn pointing a gun at him. He couldn’t even see Barn’s face, except the bulging, bloodshot eyes. Then the barrel of the gun was advancing, Barn’s fingers squeezed fat around the handle, his face coming into focus, merciless but full of something like, it seemed to Reeve, relief. Reeve could smell the man when he came close, could almost make out the curses and oaths he was reciting.