A Field of Darkness
Chapter One
There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them.
When the house on the next street went up in flames for the second
night in a row, I wondered again what the hell I was doing in
Syracuse. Let me say right up front that those fires had nothing to
do with the murdered sisters. They'd been dead nineteen years by
then, their throats cut one state-fair night back in 1969 when I was
three thousand miles away, about to start grade school in
California.
Still, if I think of those girls, of everything that happened once I
knew, it's the image of that twice-burnt house I flash on first.
Like maybe it was one long sly Dada-surrealist wink from the
universe, a warning I should have been hip enough to catch.
The first night was already hot, so still the whine of a neighbor's
dog carried right through our bedroom window. I heard a screen door
yaw wide to let him out, the tired spring slapping it closed behind,
the click of canine toenails on sidewalk. I kept turning my pillow
over and over, trying to find one cool spot on which to rest my
cheek, but by the time that dog scratche ... read full excerpt from: A Field of Darkness ebook
