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Hendrick of the New Hope Gospel Church, where my father and his wife and my three little sisters used to go every Sunday. By midafternoon, they'd pretty much shown the entire population of Pryor, except for maybe Faye.
    Mom looked up a couple of times, mostly when they showed Pryor. "It looks worse than I remember," she said. "Deader somehow."
    "It's hard for those little towns to survive," Curt said. "There are plenty of small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, even New York, like that."
    "Things were bad with Dwayne," Mom said. "But what really scared me was Willa growing up in that miserable place. I think if Dwayne and I had moved when I asked him to, I would have stuck with him. At least for a little while longer."
    "How did you end up here?" Pauline asked. "At the newspaper? Meeting Jack?"
    "I grabbed Willa one day," Mom said. "I packed some clothes and searched through the house for any money—spare change, anything. Dwayne drank pretty hard, so he was careless about money. I'd saved a few dollars over the weeks and I'd lifted a twenty from my father's wallet. I took all the money and put it in a sandwich bag and dragged Willa and my overnight bag to the bus station. I kept the twenty and handed the cashier all the rest and asked her for tickets to as far from Pryor as we could get. It took a few months of moving around before we ended up here."
    "That was very brave of you," Pauline said.
    Mom shrugged. "Brave and dumb," she said. "But it all worked out."
    By that point I'd seen the photograph of my father and the one of my sisters so often, I felt as though I knew them. I wished they'd show a picture of Trace so I'd get to "meet" my brother also, but they didn't mention him by name, or me. Just that Coffey had two older children and it was believed he might be en route to see one or both of them.
    "Do you know where Trace lives?" Pauline asked Mom.
    Mom shook her head. "Trace bounced around a lot," she said. "His mother. Budge and me. Foster care. The last I heard he was living with Budge's grandma, but he took off, or maybe she threw him out. That was maybe four years ago. Faye hasn't mentioned him since."
    I thought about the message board in our kitchen, where we all wrote down our schedules for the week. Tennis lessons. Lacrosse practices. Choir rehearsals. Study dates and trips to the mall. Every minute accounted for. Even Val's business trips were listed.
    "Maybe Dwayne heard from him," Pauline said. "Maybe Trace's in Ohio and that's why Dwayne drove there."
    "Assuming it was Dwayne," Curt said, "and not some poor guy who was driving around last night for a completely innocent reason."
    We sat there, playing cards, leafing through magazines, looking up at the TV more when there was a commercial than when there was news. Sometimes there'd be a reported sighting of Budge and Krissi, but the only one that had credence was the gas station in Ohio.
    A criminal psychologist came on to discuss why Budge had stabbed his family rather than shooting them. Assuming he had, of course—which we all did.
    "Stabbing is a more intimate way of killing," the psychologist said.
    Mom looked up from her cards and snorted. "That's such crap," she said. "Budge was terrified of guns. Probably the only person in the Texas panhandle who wouldn't touch one. His daddy died in a hunting accident when Budge was seven. Shotgun went off and blew his head to bits. Budge saw the whole thing."
    "That's horrible," Pauline said.
    "Most likely he was drunk," Mom said. "Probably never knew what hit him. Budge used to say his momma left before the body was cold. Budge's granny raised him. She had her share of shotguns, rifles, but Budge wouldn't go near them. Everyone teased him, so he got real good with a knife. Nothing intimate about it. He just didn't own a gun."
    "They have a lot of time to fill," Curt said. "Twenty-four-hour news. They interview any so-called expert they can find."
    "I'm glad Jack covers sports, then," Mom said. "Clean and easy. A