My heartfelt thanks go to Margaret Maron, who introduced me to Daniel E. Bailey, a chief deputy sheriff in North Carolina. He spent a lot of time answering my questions. I hope I haven’t made any huge goof-ups. Molly Weston, a most mysterious woman, helped me with climate questions, and Dr. D. P. Lyle, once again, helped me with medical issues. My friend Toni L. P. Kelner gave me some great ideas about improving the book.

One

THE eastern seaboard is crammed with dead people. When work brings me to that part of America, the whole time I’m there it’s like wings of a huge flock of birds are fluttering inside my brain, never coming to rest. That gets old pretty quick.

But I had some jobs in the East, so here I was, driving through South Carolina with my sort-of brother Tolliver in the passenger seat. He was sleeping now, and I glanced over at him, smiling because he couldn’t see me and it was okay to smile at him. Tolliver has hair as dark as mine, and if we didn’t run and spend quite a bit of time outdoors, we’d both be pale; and we’re both on the thin side. Other than that, we’re quite different. Tolliver’s dad never took him to a skin doctor when Tolliver was a teen, and his cheeks are scarred from acne; his eyes are darker than my murky gray ones, and his cheekbones are high.

When my mother married his dad, it was a case of two yuppies joining together in the hurtling path down the drain. My mother was dead now, and Tolliver’s father was somewhere, who knew where? He’d gotten out of jail the previous year. My dad was still in for embezzling and a few other white-collar crimes. We never talked about them.

If you have to be in South Carolina, it’s beautiful in the late spring and the early summer. Unfortunately, we were nearly at the end of an especially nasty January. The ground was cold and gray and slushy from the melt of the previous snow, and there was more predicted in a few days. I was driving very carefully because traffic was heavy and the road was not clear. We’d come up from mild and sunny Charleston. A couple there had decided their house was uninhabitable due to ghost activity, and they’d called me in to find out if there were any bodies in the walls or flooring.