"I heard about Brandon," he said.
"Then you know why I'm here. Harold said you might have had trouble with him before. If you don't want to talk, I'll buy a coffee and leave."
Marcus looked down the aisle toward the manager's office. "He broke one of my ribs outside a bar. I filed a complaint. They told me there wasn't enough evidence."
"Who told you?"
"The letter had Sheriff Keller's signature."
"You still have it?"
Marcus nodded slowly. "I kept it. I don't know why."
"Maybe because you knew what happened."
Marcus stared at the shelf. "My dad told me not to make trouble. He said the Keller family would make sure I couldn't find work. I thought he was exaggerating. Then two places that had practically offered me jobs suddenly weren't hiring. Maybe that was coincidence. Maybe it wasn't. Doesn't much matter now."
Cole let the uncertainty stand. He did not need Marcus to prove every suspicion that afternoon. "If someone outside the county asked you to describe what happened, would you tell them?"
Marcus looked at him for a long moment. "Depends whether they'd listen."
"Fair answer."
Back at home, Cole sat with that sentence. Depends whether they'd listen. Lily had driven forty-five minutes to a county office and waited for someone to listen. Marcus had kept a dismissal letter for three years because nobody had. Ray had worked eleven years in a kitchen while trying not to see what would require him to speak. This was not an absence of testimony. It was a shortage of trustworthy places to put it.
He reached into a drawer beneath the kitchen counter and took out an old flip phone. The battery was weak, and it took a moment to wake, but the contacts were still there. One number belonged to a man named Dexter Shaw, whom everyone called Dex. He was sixty-one now, lived several hours away, and had ridden with Cole through years neither man discussed casually.
The phone rang twice.
"Well, I'll be damned," Dex said. "I thought you finally threw that thing in a lake."
"Good to hear your voice, too."
"You all right?"
Cole looked toward the photograph on the refrigerator. "I am. Somebody here might not be."
He told Dex about Lily, Brandon, and the sheriff. He kept the account plain and separated what he had witnessed from what he had been told. Dex listened without interrupting.
"You want us up there?" he asked when Cole finished.
"Not yet. I want you to know what's happening."
"And if it gets worse?"
"Then I may ask you to come, but not to threaten anybody. I won't turn this woman's life into a fight between two groups of men."
Dex was quiet. Then he said, "That's not the Cole I would've heard ten years ago."
"Ten years is a long time."
"It is," Dex agreed. "Call when you need me."