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overhanging hills. “Anyway, I figure Clayton must have walked all the way from that shack of his to Jessup Creek. That old Pontiac was sitting there with the hood up. I guess he’d been working on it from time to time.” He bent forward, picked a burr from his trousers. “Remember that old Chevy you had, Roy?”
    “I remember it.”
    “And that old Ford of your brother’s.”
    I saw it parked beside the hedge, Archie behind the wheel, looking scared as I pulled up beside him.
    “Ratty old thing, Archie’s car,” Lonnie added. “With those old torn-up seats.”
    “I didn’t realize you ever looked at it that closely,” I said.
    Lonnie shrugged. “Well, it was parked out behind my daddy’s office for quite a while.”
    Parked for several weeks, I knew, my father refusing even to go to the sheriff’s office to reclaim it, determined to let the old Ford rot where it stood rather than do what he had to do to get it back, I ain’t asking Porterfield for that car. You go get it if you want it so bad.
    “Whatever happened to it?” I asked now.
    “Daddy give it away, I guess. He sure wouldn’t have been caught dead in an old wreck like that. He drives a Lincoln Town Car now. Where’d your daddy find that old wreck anyway?”
    “He didn’t,” I said.
    “Your daddy didn’t buy it?”
    “No, Archie did. He saved up and bought it.”
    “Worked at the hardware store, didn’t he? And you worked at Clark’s Drugs in Kingdom City.” He slapped dust from the shoulders of his uniform. “Soda jerk.”
    I nodded. “You have a good memory, Lonnie.”
    “Got it from my daddy, I guess,” Lonnie said. He drew a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face. “Well, now for the hard part.” He returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “Got to go up to Lila’s place.”
    “Lila’s place? Why?”
    “Because Clayton lived on her land. And with himnot having any family and all, Lila probably knows as much as anybody about him.” He considered the lowering sun. “I figure we can still get back to town before nightfall. That’s my plan anyway.”
    We wasted no time on the road that twined upward into the surrounding hills. As we drove, the distance lengthened between farmhouses and the woods thickened until they became as close to a choking tropical jungle as the temperate zone allows.
    “When were you up this way last, Roy?” Lonnie asked, one hand on the wheel, the other dangling out the open window.
    “Not since I left.”
    “Back when you were courting Lila?” “Yeah.”
    “You were coming up here pretty often in those days, I bet.”
    I recalled the anticipation of the drive, the long winding road that led to her house. “Pretty often,” I answered.
    The breeze slapped at Lonnie’s short-sleeve shirt. His eyes cut over to me. “Lila your first love?”
    Only love , I thought. The one hope I’d had for a wife, children, and which had died the day she wrote me in California, a letter whose final words still echoed in my mind, I can’t be your wife, Roy. Don’t come back for me.
    “When was the last time you saw her?” Lonnie asked when I didn’t answer.
    “The day I left.”
    “You mean for college?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I heard she threw you over. But I never heard why she did it.”
    “I never knew either.”
    Lonnie heard something in my voice, maybe. He said, “There’s always one you never get over.”
    I gave no response, though what Lonnie said was true enough. Not a single day had gone by in the twenty years that had passed since I’d last seen Lila that I hadn’t thought of her. I’d angrily tossed out the few pictures I had of her, discarded her letter, thrown away even the slightest memento of the time we’d spent together, and yet she’d haunted me through the years. The sight of a wildflower could bring her back, but I’d glimpsed her, too, at ball games and soda fountains, heard her laugh behind me in a darkened movie theater.
    “With me it’s