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By Root 665 0

room but kept the walls as they’d been ten years ago. There were posters for the U.S. Army BE ALL YOU CAN BE, Rangers LEADING THE WAY, and a black-and-white of Tishiro Mifune from Yojimbo over a small bookshelf filled with all five of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Walden, A Book of Five Rings, Huck Finn, and a volume on Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. He’d nailed up ninja throwing stars and a bowstave, and all of the belts he’d earned as a kid taking tae kwon do. Everything hung on the wall leading him on the path to becoming a modern warrior. He’d wanted to be a Ranger since first seeing the film Darby’s Rangers on late-night television during one of his father’s rare long appearances. He became obsessed when he found some Ranger literature at the recruiter’s office. The idea of a Ranger having to volunteer four times for service seemed ideal. He was prepared to volunteer for whatever was thrown at him, his teenage self traveling about a million miles an hour, fearless, but not really understanding what fear meant.

“I’d forgotten how intense you used to be,” Lillie said, lifting one of the five boxes his uncle had left on a bed with a thin bedspread. She used a pocketknife to slit the tape, finding rows of manila files crammed inside, snapping the knife closed and back into the pocket of her wide-legged pants. The light was white and harsh through the curtains, and Quinn closed them, standing over Lillie’s shoulder, his mother still in the kitchen cleaning up with some other women, Jason down for a nap.

Boom had disappeared an hour ago. No one saw him leave.

A prom picture of him and Anna Lee in a gilded frame stood on the bookshelf. Quinn looked stiff and posed in a rented tux, red flower on his chest, hands around Anna Lee’s waist. While flipping through the files, Lillie said, “Damn, y’all look like kids.”

“What do we have?”

“These are just tax records,” she said. “Looks like he saved every damn receipt for the last five years. I don’t know. You can look if you want. We probably need a CPA to go through all this. Maybe something he wanted you to see.”

Quinn hefted up another box, this one containing fistfuls of family photographs going back maybe a hundred years, people from his family at the turn of the damn century, standing grim-faced in front of churches and sitting in rocking chairs holding rifles. “Yep, that’s your people all right,” Lillie said. “Look at that guy, he looks just like you. Same serious scowl, the way he’s holding that weapon. Run for the hills.”

Quinn flipped through a few pictures, photos of his mom and dad. Several of Quinn with his uncle, fishing, hunting. Quinn with the first big buck he’d killed, the one that won his second prize in the state for young hunters. The damn thing’s head still hung over the mantel in the family room. He placed the photos back in the box, Lillie losing faith that any of this crap meant anything, lying back on the old bed in the room clogged with two sewing machines and unused exercise equipment. She flipped through a big wad of photos, Quinn noticing the way the silk top had hitched up on her stomach a bit, the tautness of her stomach as she shifted.

He turned away and reached for a fourth box.

“Y’all okay in there?” his mother yelled.

“Yep,” Quinn said, slicing into the fourth, finding more rows and rows of tightly stacked manila files, expecting to see more stuff for the tax man but pulling out the first file and clearly seeing typed-up copies of crime reports. Each folder label noted the case. “Lillie?”

Lillie moved off the bed, leaving the old photos spread out.

She got near him, everything in the room so cluttered that it was hard to breathe. She was about his same height, and Quinn felt her pressed against his shoulder, breathing hard, and then setting down on one knee to shuffle through the piles. She split the files in two stacks and told him to start reading. She sat down Indian-style, flipping through the first file, and within seconds it was on the floor and she was on to the next.

Jean brought them