Coach Eldridge’s wife, Linda, comes to the door wiping her hands on her apron. She’s got a friendly smile. “Hello, Samuel, what brings you over here?”

“I need to ask Boone about something.”

“He’s out in the garage. Let me call him in.”

“I’ll just go on out there. It won’t take but a minute.”

The garage has no room for a car. The floor is mostly taken up with sports equipment, some beyond repair. The rest of the area is crammed with cardboard boxes, broken furniture, and the usual house upkeep paraphernalia, like cans of leftover paint, a lawn mower, gardening tools, and sacks of cement and potting soil. There’s a rusted out heap of a car sitting in the driveway. Eldridge will have another flashy car before long, though, now that he sold the Harley.

Eldridge is staring at a shelf of paint cans. His left hand is on his hip, his right arm in a sling.

Linda calls from the kitchen door. “Boone, Samuel Craddock is here to see you.”

Eldridge turns around. Sporting a black eye, his face, mottled with purple and yellow bruises, is dripping with sweat. It’s about a hundred degrees in here. Eldridge played football for SMU, and has the physique of a ballplayer gone to seed—big hands, tree stump legs, thick neck, and a big gut. His short brown hair is shot through with gray.

His wife is an accountant for a construction outfit over in Bobtail, which is good because the coach in a small town doesn’t have much of a salary. Even with their two paychecks, there’s something shabby about the house.

“Boone, I heard about those guys jumping you,” I say. Since he can’t shake hands, I clap my hand on his left shoulder. He winces, so that shoulder must be bruised as well. “If you can spare the time, I’d like to ask you a couple of things.”

He looks surprised, but says, “Let’s go inside. It’s too hot out here.” As we pass through the kitchen, he says, “Linda, I can’t figure out which can has the trim paint in it. See if you can find the receipt. Maybe it’ll tell what the color is.”

Eldridge leads me into the family room. His teenage daughter is bent over the computer doing homework, and is happy to oblige him when he says she can leave it for later. I watch her leave, carrying the computer with her, and suddenly I remember what it was that I thought was off when I was at Lurleen’s the day Jack died. I need an explanation for it, and hope the explanation is a good one. I stick it in the back of my mind to take up with her.

After Eldridge’s daughter is gone, I point to his arm. “You have any idea who did that to you?”

He scratches his head with his free hand. “I didn’t see a thing. I expect it has to do with losing to Bobtail.”

“Has Jarrett Creek’s finest made any move to find out who did it? It’s an awful thing when a football game leads to violence like that.”

“I told James Harley to leave it alone. It just stirs people up. Nothing was broken. I’ll be okay. Now what can I do for you?”

I tell him I’m investigating Jack’s death.

He nods, like he’s impatient to get on with it. “I heard that. I don’t know what you think I might help you with, but shoot.”

I tell him about the two men I saw in the stands at the football game. “Somebody said they thought they could be scouting the team. You know anything about it?”

His expression is uneasy, and I wonder if something is going on under the radar with one of his players. “If that’s who they were, they didn’t come talk to me.”

“Would that be unusual?”

“It’s protocol for scouts to identify themselves to the coach, but it’s not unheard of for colleges to send scouts around without letting on, especially this early in the season.”

“You got any players you think are especially worth looking at?”

Eldridge keeps shifting in his seat. I expect his injuries still give him pain, despite his downplaying them. But people say he doesn’t like being put on the spot, the way he was after the loss to Bobtail. “I don’t like to say it; it’s just a rumor. But Dilly Bolton’s dad has been talking him up a good bit. Maybe he contacted somebody. That’s illegal, but it doesn’t keep people from sneaking behind my back and trying to get a leg up with the scouts.”

Dilly Bolton is one of the team’s two black players. He’s a senior, and I’ve never noticed him being anything special, but his daddy, Jess, has high ambitions for him. Jess hangs out with Gabe LoPresto a good bit, so I expect if he’d talked a college into sending someone to take a look, Gabe would have known about it.

“It seemed to me they were concentrating on the team. But can you think of any other reason for those fellows to be there?”

“How would I know?”

Linda comes back in with the receipt, happy to tell Eldridge she has found the name of the paint. Eldridge, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be all that thrilled. I don’t see how he’s going to do much painting, anyway, until his arm gets better.

He sees me to the door. “By the way,” I tell him, “the medical examiner has released Jack’s body, so I expect the funeral will be early next week.”

“Well, that’ll be an end to it,” Eldridge says.

“There won’t be a real end to it until whoever killed him is brought to justice,” I say.

Eldridge cocks his head. “You really think you’re ever going to find out who did it?”

“I’m sure going to try.”

In the evening I phone those who should know right away that Jack’s body has been released, not trusting Curtis to have the common decency to call them. Lurleen and Walter Dunn are stoic at the news, but Marybeth and Taylor cry. I offer to go spend the evening with Marybeth, but she surprises me by saying she’s going to come to Jarrett Creek and wait at the funeral home for the body’s arrival.

“You know, they’ll need to fix him up before you can see him.”

“I know that. But I want to be there when he comes home.”

When I call Woody, I mention what Marybeth plans to do, and he says he’ll go sit with her.