Whatever the pill was, it hadn’t impaired his driving. In fact, it had helped clear his head, and Cincinnati seemed years away. Sure, it had been crazy taking the pill, but the orange bottle seemed like the only reliable and honest thing in his life. The radio offered no reports of a murderer on the loose, but he had no way to tell whether the body had been discovered or simply that murder was no longer major news. Despite the rental-car receipts being made out to “David Underwood,” Roland veered off the interstate in Kentucky and stuck to the back roads, crossing the Big Coal River and entering the mountains. His brother, Steve, a dentist in Fort Lauderdale, kept a log cabin there as a summer getaway and had shared a key with Roland. “We all need to hide out now and then,” Steve had said, flashing a six-figure smile. Roland figured Steve was talking about entertaining mistresses and fishing for trout, not evading capture for murder. But it wasn’t murder, he reasoned, as he eased past a goat farm on the outskirts of Logan, heading up the gravel road that led into a dark hollow of the type praised in old Appalachian folk ballads.
