Author: thachtr

Part 1 The first gunshot sounded just as Rosie Marchetti pressed her thumb into the warm fold of the rosemary loaf. The glass in the…

Part 1 The dare began with expensive tequila, a false friend’s smile, and the kind of humiliation Clarissa Robinson had spent most of her life…

Part 1 On the second Tuesday of June, Darla Brockman stood beside the east pasture fence with a pair of fencing pliers hooked through her…

Part 1 “How many are still breathing?” The hidden cottonwood door swung inward against the force of the blizzard, and a breath of warm air…

Part 1 In the spring of 1963, people across southern Adair County, Missouri, laughed at Nadine Pruitt. They laughed first at Holcomb’s Feed and Seed…

Part 1 The railroad had been dead longer than Eli Mercer had been alive. Its ties lay crooked beneath the lodgepole pines, bleached gray by…

Part 1 On the morning of March 14, 2018, Dale Pruitt drove his rusted 2003 Ford pickup across a field that nearly everyone in Meade…

Part 1 The county auction lasted eleven minutes because nobody wanted Parcel 17. Sixty-three acres of abandoned pasture lay four miles east of Margaret Hail’s…

Part 1 Blood blisters covered Cora Sterling’s palms, and the dirt beneath her fingernails had packed so deep that every heartbeat made them throb. She…