Page 1 of Forever Dead

PROLOGUE

The wind came in short bursts across the fields, lifting dead leaves from Eleanor Marsh’s yard and sending them scratching over the porch boards. She heard them each time they struck the front step: a dry rush, a scrape across timber, then silence until the next gust came through the trees.

Eleanor kept crocheting. Yellow wool slipped between fingers swollen at the joints, the hook moving in a rhythm learned so long ago she no longer had to watch what she was doing. The scarf lay across her lap in a loose coil. Her friend’s great-niece had asked for something “mustard, not yellow,” which Eleanor had decided was the kind of distinction invented by people under thirty. Ordinarily, that would have amused her. Tonight, very little did.

Halloween was less than a week away. October had stripped half the leaves from the trees, and the night carried the first real bite of the coming winter. The farmhouse stood several miles outside Elmsview Town, beyond the last cluster of houses and a long strip of pasture that belonged to the Winfields. At this hour there was usually nothing to hear but the wind, an occasional truck on the county road, and whatever small animals were busy in the hedges.

Eleanor had always liked that. Quiet had never frightened her.

Not until this year.

She paused and listened. The house answered with the familiar ticks and creaks of old timber cooling after dark. A pipe knocked somewhere behind the kitchen wall. The refrigerator motor came on. Nothing unusual. Still, she waited another few seconds before returning to the scarf.

Nine months was all it had taken for Elmsview to feel like somewhere else.

There had been killings before, of course. Harlan County had never pretended to be free of violence. Eleanor had spent thirty-five years teaching at Elmsview High School before retiring. Even now, former pupils stopped her in town, introduced their children and sometimes their grandchildren, and reminded her of things she had said in class that she no longer remembered. She had seen children come through her classroom carrying every kind of trouble imaginable. She had taught sons whose fathers were in prison, daughters who flinched when voices rose, boys who arrived at school with split lips and stories nobody believed.

Bad things happened everywhere. This had been different: too many deaths, too close together, too many familiar names appearing in conversations that stopped when someone entered the room.

The cases had been solved, and that was what mattered. Selena Raven had helped solve them. An FBI agent. Who would have thought it?

Eleanor allowed herself the smallest smile. Selena had been one of hers, not that teachers were supposed to claim students years after they left school, but every teacher did it. Some names vanished within months. Others stayed.

Selena had stayed. Eleanor could still picture her at sixteen, dark hair falling toward the page, one knee bouncing beneath the desk whenever she was impatient. Always running around with that Connor Chase. Bright without showing off. Restless. Sometimes angry in a way she tried to hide. The sort of student who read three chapters ahead and then acted as if she had not.

Now she had returned to Elmsview with the FBI and worked alongside Connor Chase, her former husband and the town’s sheriff, to bring killers to justice. Eleanor had felt proud when she heard. Proud, and relieved.

But relief had not restored what the town had lost. People locked doors earlier now. At the grocery store, women lingered beside their cars until someone else crossed the parking lot. Parents collected teenagers instead of letting them walk home after dark. At church suppers, conversations faltered whenever another siren passed outside.

No one had seriously said Elmsview was cursed, at least not to Eleanor. But the thought sat behind people’s expressions, as though something had entered the town and refused to leave.

The wind struck the side of the farmhouse again, and a branch brushed lightly against the gutter. Eleanor’s crochet hook stopped. She scolded herself under her breath and set the work down.

The room felt colder than it had ten minutes earlier. She pulled the wool blanket higher over her knees and shifted in the rocking chair. Her left knee gave a sharp complaint.

“Oh, don’t start.”

The knee, as usual, did not listen. Eleanor reached for the cane propped beside the chair, used it to help herself upright, and stretched the joint until the ache eased.

On the wall opposite hung a small wooden crucifix. It had belonged to her father, the wood dark with age and rubbed smooth along the lower edge where his thumb had touched it whenever he took it down. When Eleanor was a girl, it had hung above the kitchen door in the house where she grew up.

Her father had crossed himself whenever he left for work. Every morning. Even when he was late. Especially when he was late.

After his death, Eleanor had wrapped the crucifix in one of his old handkerchiefs and put it away in a cedar chest. It had remained there for more than twenty years. She had fallen away from Catholicism gradually. There had been no argument with God, no moment of rejection. Sunday Mass had become twice a month, then Christmas and Easter, then funerals. Life had filled the space.

Recently, she had taken the crucifix out again. She had not returned properly to church, though Ruth Calder kept trying to persuade her, but she liked seeing it there. Some nights she prayed. Other nights she simply sat beneath it.

Eleanor studied it now. “What would you make of all this, Daddy?”

Her father would have had an opinion. He had possessed opinions on weather, politics, television, hairstyles, teachers he had never met, and priests he had met only once. She could almost hear him telling her that fear was useful only if it made a person sensible. Then he would have checked every lock in the house.

The thought made her glance toward the hallway. The front door was locked. The back door, too. She had checked both after supper.

Eleanor settled back into the rocking chair, but a pale glow moved across the far wall before she could pick up the scarf.

She frowned and turned toward the front window. Headlights sat at the far end of the driveway.

For a moment she assumed the driver would reverse. People occasionally missed the bend on the county road and mistook her drive for the entrance to one of the newer properties beyond the ridge. The headlights remained where they were.