She left Indiana with nothing but a black eye and a gray bus ticket. Abigail Bishop was seventeen in 1974, though she looked older—the kind of older that comes from being backhanded for talking back, locked in a cellar for forgetting to do the dishes, and told she was worthless so many times she started to believe it. The cornfields of her childhood weren't idyllic; they were prisons. So one night, after her stepfather broke two of her ribs with a belt buckle, she shoved a ch

Chapter 1: The Long Tide My name is Spencer McNelly, and I used to be a man who smelled of the sea. Not the pretty, postcard sea. The guts of it. The brine, the rotting rope, the diesel smoke that clung to my lungs like a second set of sins. Every night, from sundown to sunup, I loaded cargo onto the barges at Pier 14 in New York. My back was a map of knots. My hands were cracked leather. Martha was my wife. We married in ’29, right before the bottom fell out of everything. S

The summer of 1958 arrived in Red Hollow, Virginia, thick with humidity and suspicion. The town had long prided itself on being God-fearing and close-knit, the sort of place where every front porch doubled as a news desk and every Sunday sermon echoed through the week. That illusion shattered on a sweltering July morning when Reverend Samuel Price and his secret lover, twenty-eight-year-old Clara Moss, were discovered murdered in a secluded farmhouse outside town. The killing

They called her the Blacktop Siren, though the name was too pretty for what she was. The news anchors would murmur it with a kind of horrified fascination, their voices dipping low over grainy footage of a Florida rest stop or a Georgia swamp. Lenora Cade, they’d say, was a predator who wore the skin of a victim. But for the men who picked her up along the I-10 corridor in the early 90s, she was the last thing they ever saw. Before she was a headline, she was a girl born in t