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“In that case, you need to be my friend,” he says to Alex. “Jack and I are a package deal so you’re my friend now. Okay?”

Alex looks him up and down, taking her time before she answers. “Yes.”

“Sweet.” He holds out his fist for a bump. “No hard feelings?”

“Is that even possible?” she asks, her mouth going up in a teasing smile I haven’t seen before, her gaze directed at his crotch.

Park howls with laughter, clapping a hand down on Alex’s shoulder to keep from rolling off the rocks. “It took a while, if you really want to know. I was out of commission. And there was much weeping. All the girls you see here were devastated. Back in business now, though,” he adds, tipping her a wink as he finishes off a beer.

He suddenly seems to realize he has his hand on her and he lets go quickly. “Sorry,” he says. “And sorry about those asshole tweakers saying Com . . . you know, saying his name like it was no big deal. A joke or something.”

She nods, accepting the apology. “His name means nothing to me.”

“Really?” Branley’s friend Lila pokes her head out from her sleeping bag, her short blond hair sticking out in spikes. “Because I couldn’t even handle that.”

Alex shrugs, a slow rolling movement like a cat unfurling in the sun. “It means nothing to me because it’s already been handled.”

Lila nods, the words resonating with her.

“I heard his face was beaten in so bad they found teeth down his throat,” a freshman pipes up, his eyes bright with drink.

“No, man,” a buddy corrects him. “He chewed off his own lips ’cause he was left there to starve. Needed teeth for that.”

“That’s all bullshit,” someone else says. “It was a clean execution. Head shot.”

I feel Alex’s hand tense in mine as they keep going, a demented Greek chorus rising up from the fires around us, echoing bits of urban legend that have grown and coalesced, spawning off each other in a town that has so little ugliness to celebrate that the story can’t possibly be dark enough to penetrate the truth.

“None of those things are true,” Alex says calmly, her words stopping the spray of myth around us. Everyone looks to her, myself included, our faces like little children around the campfire, ready for our story.

“He was drunk,” she says slowly. “Incapacitated by a blow to the head.” Her words, always careful, come even more cautiously than usual.

“I heard it was his own baseball bat, that he used it to prop the screen door and whoever did it hit him upside the head with it,” the freshman says before his buddy smacks him into silence.

“That’s possible,” Alex acknowledges, and he smacks his friend back. “They put him in one of his own kitchen chairs and bent him forward, chest resting on his own lap. There were a hammer and nails lying out because he was working on the porch railing. They wrapped his arms under his chair and drove nails through the palms, up through the seat to hold him in place.”

“Then what?” Lila asks.

“Then he woke up, I imagine,” Alex says, and the boys start laughing until Lila kicks at them from under her sleeping bag.

“I mean what killed him, then?” she asks. “You said he wasn’t left to starve and you don’t die from being nailed into a chair, no matter how bad it hurts.”

Alex watches everyone carefully and I squeeze her hand. “You really want to know?” she asks.

“Yes,” everyone says in unison, Alex’s story the first sermon this place has heard in a long time.

“He was stabbed in the back with a screwdriver, puncturing one of his lungs.”

“Holy shit,” Park says.

“I heard there were two chairs,” the freshman adds. “Like someone sat across from him. They sat there and watched him die.”

“That is actually true,” Alex says.

“Fuck him, anyway,” Lila says. “He deserved it.”

“That’s why nobody tried too hard to find out who killed him,” the freshman says, eager to contribute. “Everybody knew it was Comstock who killed that girl; they just couldn’t prove it ’cause the animals got to her and all the evidence was contaminated.”

He says contaminated very carefully, drunk tongue enunciating syllables, then plows on. “My mom went to school with Comstock, said he was a nasty son of a bitch. She said he dated this one girl for a while but she broke up with him real fast, said he got off on hurting her, you know? Mom wasn’t surprised at all when they questioned him after that girl turned up dead. Had him up at the station for hours, asked him all kinds of stuff but couldn’t hold him because they didn’t have any proof.”