The world was too full of monsters for her taste.

By the time she pulled up to the stop light by the entrance to Moundbuilders Park, the booze-buzz had kicked into full gear, and the storm was practically right on top of her. Even sober, Lucy hated driving through rainstorms. You could never tell what might jump out into the middle of the road.

So she sat at the stop light, hoping a police car didn’t happen by and trying not to nod off while waiting for the green.

She rubbed her eyes as she at last took full notice of the monstrous storm falling down like a curse from Heaven—Jesus but the wind suddenly sounded like the way she imagined Sarah must have screamed at the hands of the monster who took her away.

A sputtering strobe of light from above illuminated the large sculpture just beyond the now-closed entrance gates to the park; it was so bright, in fact, that Lucy thought it looked something like a spotlight designed to draw her attention to it.

The piece, carved from a series of stones, was entitled Things Left Behind and had been commissioned from a Cincinnati artist by the Cedar Hill city council to memorialize the victims of a mass shooting some fifteen years ago. A kid named Andy-Something-or-Other had gone nuts one July Fourth and mowed down over thirty people, many of them right here in Moundbuilders Park. The artist had chosen to memorialize the victims by carving rows upon rows of faces into the gigantic circular stones, then setting the rows atop one another, creating a crowded stack of faces that went around and around and around. Depending on your mood, the faces looked either cherubic or shroud-like, sometimes a disturbing combination of both. The artist claimed that by walking around the piece—which stood well over twelve feet high and was hollow in the center, like a gigantic candle holder—one would feel the lasting effects of the “cycle of suffering.” Almost everyone praised it as brilliant. Lucy thought it was pretentious bullshit, but kept that opinion to herself.

But now...

Now, in the jagged, stroboscopic lightning, sheened in rain and covered with dead, drenched, wind-blown leaves that obscured many of the faces’ features, she found something sadly compelling about it.

She pulled over to the side of the road and sat staring at it. She had no idea of how long she stared, only that something about it was so mesmerizing that she couldn’t turn away. It were as if something from deep inside the sculpture was reaching out to her, calling to her, begging her to come closer, closer, closer…

Chapter Three

The trucker dropped off Ronnie in Heath, just on the outskirts of Cedar Hill, wishing him luck and driving off with a friendly wave. At first, standing by the side of the road, Ronnie felt a twinge of panic, wondering if he’d be able to thumb a ride into Cedar Hill or if he’d have to walk over to the Southgate Shopping Center and call for a cab.