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David nods as I read his own words back to him.

“What was that like?” I ask. “I talked to Bailey Foxglove. She said it fell to her to tell a family member that their loved ones were dead.”

“Carol Vosher,” David says automatically, nodding. “She was Jessica Beckley’s mother, grandmother to the baby.”

“Right.” I nod in confirmation. “You know everybody, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I mean . . .” David laces his fingers behind his head with a touch of pomposity. “When you’ve been covering everything from high school sports to the paving schedule for the county roads all by yourself for fifteen years, you get to know people. It used to be you had to know their phone numbers, too. We couldn’t tell Siri to dial for us. Back in the day, you had to be a walking directory.”

“So you were good with numbers?” Bristal chimes in.

“For sure,” David says, rocking his chair onto the back two legs. “It wasn’t like it is now. No offense, ladies. But people had to carry information in their heads back then, not their pockets.”

“Cool,” Bristal says. “What’s the phone number for the library?”

“555-763-2515,” David rattles off without even thinking. Bristal taps on her screen, then tilts the phone toward me so that I can see he’s right.

“How about the county courthouse?” I ask.

David gives us another correct number, then another, as Bristal interrogates him about a local pizza joint, the Methodist church, and finally the only bar in town. He easily provides the info, growing more confident with every answer. Bristal is setting him up perfectly, and we couldn’t have planned this better.

“That’s impressive,” I tell him, after he’s recited the directory of half the businesses in town. “Weird that you would’ve mistaken a two for a three when reporting on something as important as the missing from a natural disaster.”

The grin disappears, and all four legs of his chair come back down to the ground.

“Does the name Denise Halverson mean anything to you?” I ask.

“Halverson . . .” He taps his fingers against the table. “You sure you don’t mean Halbertson?”

“I’m sure,” I say. “See, I’ve got Bailey Foxglove’s journal from when she was taking the sheriff’s calls. I confirmed with her, and the last name is Halverson.”

It’s a small lie, but beads of sweat are forming on David’s forehead, and I’m not going to loosen the coils on this trap now that it’s sprung. I turn my phone so that he can see the pics of Bailey’s journal, scrolling through them and pausing on the name in question.

“Denise Halverson,” I repeat.

David clears his throat and glances around the room, which remains empty except for us. “You still aiming to be a journalist?” he asks me, and I nod. “You familiar with shield law?”

“Yes,” I say, reaching out to turn off my recording app.

“I’m not,” Bristal says. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a lot of things,” Swinton answers. “But in our case what’s relevant is that it protects journalists from having to reveal their sources.”

“So he can talk to me with the assurance that I won’t tell anyone where I got the information.”

“Neat trick,” Bristal says.

“Now,” I say as I lean forward. “Tell me about Denise Halverson.”

Fourteen

“She was a foster kid,” David says, leaning forward now, all the lines in his body tense. “Came to live with Erin Hendrix a few months before the tornado came through. She was kind of like a tornado herself, come to think of it. Didn’t tear down any buildings, but she left plenty of wreckage behind her, that’s for sure.”

“Wreckage how?” Bristal asks.

“Well . . .” David looks at Bristal, then back to me. “You know Erin, right?”

“Yeah, I know her,” I say. Erin Hendrix volunteers at the food pantry out of the Methodist church, and I’ve seen her sneak extra cookies into boxes when a minivan full of kids pulls up. Once, we got an entire truck full of oranges, and she’d driven an hour into the city to buy as many juicers as she could find. The church parking lot had smelled like citrus for days, and we’d all had sticky hands and cramped wrists. But there was fresh orange juice in every fridge in town, and she’d even boxed up the rinds and thrown them into fields for the birds.