Bonnie spotted us, beelined for our table, then dropped into the chair beside Belle without asking. Henrietta took the chair beside me. Billy Ray grabbed a chair from the next table over, dragged it to the end, then sat.

“Have you heard?” Bonnie asked, as if there existed a single person in Bramblett County who hadn’t.

I exhaled then said, “I found him, Bonnie.”

Her face crumbled. “Oh, honey. Oh, Lily, honey. You poor thing.” She reached across the table, grabbed both my hands, and squeezed hard enough to crack a walnut. “You should not have had to see that.”

“I’m okay.”

“Sweetie, you’re lyin’ like a dog on a rug.” She released my hands, straightened in her chair, then beat her cane on the floor for emphasis. “I’ll tell you what I think happened. No. What I know happened. Somebody broke in. A robbery. Some lowlife from outside the county came in looking for cash, found Jimmy, and that was it. Deader than a doorknob.”

“Doorknob? They don’t die, Bonnie.” Henrietta snorted so hard that her glasses slipped down her nose. “A robbery? At a bowling alley? What were they going to steal? Bowlin’ shoes that smell like the feet of our ancestors.”

“‘Course not,” Bonnie said. “The register had cash in it.”

“The register hadn’t worked since 2016. I know because my nephew tried to buy a Sprite there last fall, and Jimmy had to count change out of a coffee can.”

“Then maybe it was the coffee-can money.”

“Nobody murders a man over coffee-can money.”

“That ain’t true. Back in the day, they killed for a bet,” Billy Ray said then scratched his chin. “People do bad things.”

Henrietta shook her head. “It’s an outsider. Someone from out of town. Nobody in Bramblett would hurt Jimmy. He let my grandniece bowl for free when her daddy lost his job. What kind of person kills a man who does that?”

“The kind who doesn’t know him,” Bonnie said. She turned to Henrietta. “See? We agree on that.”

“We don’t agree. You said robbery. I said outsider. Those are different things.”

“An outsider who robbed him.”

“That’s my theory, not yours.”

“It’s the same theory.”

“It is not.”

Belle leaned toward me. “They’re going to argue about this for twenty minutes.”

“At least,” I said.

Billy Ray cleared his throat. He’d been quiet through the bickering, which meant he’d been saving something. “My cousin Dale drives for the coroner’s office. He picked up the body this morning.”

The table went quiet, even Bonnie.

“Dale said Doc Travers told the deputies it looked like blunt-force trauma. Back of the head. One hit.” Billy Ray turned his Yeti cup in a slow circle on the table. “Said the wound looked like something heavy and rounded. Not flat. Not sharp. Something you could swing with one hand.”

Belle’s eyes met mine across the table.

“Dale also said there were pills on the desk and an open bottle of whiskey. Doc told the sheriff he thought Jimmy might have been impaired. Slow to react.” Billy Ray shook his head. “Poor man couldn’t even fight back.”