South of Woodville, we turn east off Highway 61 and head toward the Mississippi River, devouring the bends of the serpentine road that leads to the old logging town. I drove these curves back in December, and at a much higher speed, while searching for Caitlin. Not far to the east lies Valhalla, where I killed Forrest Knox, but I don’t mention that to Serenity. The swamp where Caitlin died lies to the south, in the lowland between the green hills and the river, and I can feel it pulling me, like some low-frequency magnetic field that tugs at flesh and bone.

“This is pulpwood country,” Serenity says in a hushed voice. “I feel it. A lot of shortwood came out of these forests. A lot of men lost fingers and hands up in here, or had their legs and backs broken.”

“They still do a lot of logging down here.”

She cuts her eyes at me. “I thought you read my book. Pulpwooding’s not logging. It’s nigger logging.”

I look sharply over at her, but she’s staring out the window at the virginal green of early spring. Pine and hardwood trees cover the hills from here to the Mississippi River, and most observers would think the sight beautiful. But Serenity Butler sees only suffering in those trees.

“You saw the Bone Tree, right?” she asks, still looking out the window. “When you found Caitlin and your father there?”

Her forwardness in asking about the place my fiancée was murdered surprises me, but it’s also refreshing. Serenity simply doesn’t worry about things like propriety.

“Yeah,” I say quietly, recalling the shock of leaping out of the helicopter into the swamp, fighting my way toward Caitlin’s bloody body. “I saw it.”

“Keisha told me they burned it.”

“Only partially.”

“I’d like to see what’s left someday.”

“Why?”

She raises a finger and taps the window beside her cheek. “Do you think some places are inherently evil?”

I want to answer no, but in truth I’m not sure. “Do you?”

She tilts her head, watching the forest rush past, then begins to speak softly. “I’ve stood on the sites of massacres. I’ve pulled my boots out of the sand in a mass grave. And I felt strange things there. But I think that feeling of wrongness came from inside me. From my knowledge of what had been done there. The land has nothing to do with it. The buildings, either. Nuns and children have been slaughtered in churches, schools, fields of flowers. It sucks, but that’s the human species.”

“I agree in principle. But the Bone Tree . . . people have done murder beneath it for centuries. Rape and torture, too. Why?”

She shrugs. “It’s isolated. Ancient. Different. Humans have always attached a totemic significance to that kind of thing. But in the end, it’s just an old tree. Right?”