The Boy in the Back Seat

Wendell Vickery buries thirty-one people a year in a dying Nebraska town and cannot afford to bury one more. Then a drought drains Cottonwood Lake, exposing an overturned Buick with his mother's bones in the footwell—thirty years after everyone agreed she ran off. The county's only hearse belongs to Dell, so the job of carrying her off the mud is his. So is the choice that follows: take the deal that saves his daughter's future, or pull the whole truth up out of the water.