My mother (her name was Thomasina but everyone called her Tommy) used to tell me never to let the world make me who I was. It had to be the other way around, she said, you have to make the world what you want it to be. There is no destiny but what you make, and the novel of your life can have but one author.

Then she got hit by lightning. I don’t know what to make of that.

Thing is, she was digging my father’s grave at the time. Why did she pick that particular moment, in the midst of the worst storm this town had seen in fifty years, to do it? For that matter, why was she digging it at all? Why didn’t she just bury him in the town cemetery like my family had done with all its dead for three hundred years?

There are answers to all these questions, and I can’t say as I blame you for asking them. It’s your job, after all. This may be a small town, but murder is murder, and justice is justice.

I guess it really began with the drifter that came to town 23 years ago, and with Uncle Tim’s gun…