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bed. She’d turned the phone this way and that, trying to make sense of the mess on the ground. That’s all she saw of the body.
    After he got up to get them both a glass of water, she continued to thumb back and forth through the handful of other pictures on his phone. She saw none of her, none of their time in Waco, none of anything that might even make sense to her. It was all gone, deleted. Instead, there were images of cliff walls out in the desert where you could barely make out faded Indian paintings; a few more of ghost towns whose names no one remembered anymore; some of cracked earth circled over by big black birds in ugly skies.
    And that damn body. All of Chris’s pictures were of dead places and things: memories and remains and ruins where people had once been and were no longer. By the time he came back with their glasses, she had put the phone on the bed and pretended to go to sleep.
    •   •   •
    She’d had a bad dream of her own last night, one where she was sitting on this very porch listening to a dying radio beneath a snapshot sky. She had tuned in to her favorite show,
Dark Stars
, hosted by a psychic who’d once been famous for solving murders and disappearances but now helped people connect with their dead relatives . . . with their ghosts. In her dream a voice had called in sounding just like her—in fact it was her—wanting to know what had become of Melissa Bristow. Rumor was, she’d gotten lost, disappeared in some oil field or ghosttown that no one could find anymore. But Melissa had been right there, with a mouthful of dust, screaming at the radio, at herself.
    I’m right here.
But she wasn’t, not really.
She
was the ghost, haunting herself and Chris and the empty spaces between them.
    She’d woken up cold and afraid and gasping, wanting and needing Chris and putting a hand out for him to feel his warmth and maybe his heartbeat, only to find his side of the bed empty. Instead, he’d been across the room, hunched in front of their laptop, his face hard angles in the screen’s glare . . .
investigating
.
    Afterward, she’d struggled to find sleep, still angry. At him, at Murfee, at herself. The living she could compete with, fight against. She’d done it her whole life, so much like her daddy in more ways than she’d ever admit, who always fought for everything. But those things in his pictures? Ghosts and shadows and emptiness?
    She didn’t even know where to begin. It was like her horrible dream and this house with its bad roof and its old books and this backyard with its lights and green grass—she was trapped inside one of Chris’s pictures, a picture of someone and something that didn’t exist anymore. But before she’d closed her eyes again, dropping into a sleep free of dead things, she’d imagined or dreamed, or just hoped, that Chris had climbed back in into bed with her and that she had reached out for him. Just to brush her fingers over him, to make sure he was real.

5
    CALEB

    T here are so many stories about Phantly Roy Bean Jr., the infamous Hanging Judge Roy Bean—the self-proclaimed “Law West of the Pecos”—that it’s hard to sort the truth from the fiction. It’s hard to see the real man standing in the long shadow of one that may never have existed at all.
    In eighth grade we had to write a paper about a famous Texan, and everyone thought I would write about Judge Bean. After all, my father is the new “Law West of the Pecos”—I read it all the time in the
Murfee Daily
, and that’s how the
NBC Nightly News
once referred to him. He’s a modern Roy Bean, always wearing either his custom Half-Breed hat or a Stetson; colorful and famous and outspoken, so much so that he’s been nicknamed the Judge. He’s even originally from Pecos. His family was once famous there.
    In Murfee, he’s more than the sheriff. He’s larger than life. He is judge, jury, and executioner.
    •   •   •
    I almost wrote my paper on Gene