A PROLOGUE FROM AN UPCOMING NOVEL…
PROLOGUE
Legends help no one unless they are told.
Had this been a big city, one could perhaps have understood why vague mysteries had eaten at its heart so insufferably. But it was a small town, and things like this weren’t supposed to happen here. From a distance — as well as up close, on the surface — it seemed a place of tranquility, and had been that way at times before. Yet tranquility can be a mask, and Chandler, Alabama, wore it well.
The years had passed like the slow turning of a windmill on a hot July afternoon. The people moved at their own pace, talked slow, laughed easy, and minded their business. Front porches were full of rockers, and conversations drifted out into the night air like the smoke from a wood stove. It was the kind of town where folks remembered your name and your daddy’s name before you could remind them, and where Sunday mornings found nearly everyone somewhere between a steeple and a song.
But beneath the beauty, something stirred. Slowly, in the creeping way many a sinister course develops, a metamorphosis had taken place. The underside of that quaint little town had reared an ugly head of evil, causing its citizens to embrace an exposed vulnerability, and their innocence to putrefy like a broken Alabama twig in the middle of summer. The smile on Chandler’s face remained, but behind the eyes something began to change.
When the brightness of the sunlight had given way to the shadows of night, the town went to sleep on top of a cold, chilling secret. One of their own was dead, and one of their own had perpetrated it. The truth slept in their midst, hidden like a snake coiled under the porch steps, and those who sensed it dared not look too closely. The silence that settled over Chandler was not peace but fear, a fear baptized in whispers and bound by shame.
There comes a time in the life of every story when it must break forth from its hallowed prison walls and breathe the fresh air of exhibition. Sometimes it doesn’t happen for a hundred or more years. Sometimes for weeks or months. And sometimes it’s recorded as it happens — raw, bleeding, and real. This story must be told, and now is as good a time as any. Secrets do not die with the keeping. They fester. They rot. And when they finally emerge, they come clawing for the light.
The year of 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of a sinister time, and perhaps the closing of a chapter, in a small southern town. But the darkness that cast its shadow there had not begun then. It sprang from a season of sowing in the fertile dirt of wickedness, thirty years before — a harvest that would not be ignored. It is ultimately the story of greed, betrayal, murder, lust for power — and perhaps the secret working of things totally unexplainable.
It is also the story of conscience, of guilt that will not be silenced, and of a kind of justice that no man can escape. For though time may dull the memory, it does not erase it. The earth itself seems to remember where blood was spilled, and the wind has a way of carrying rumors that sound too much like truth.
And through it all stands one life — the life of an exceptional young man from an exceptional family — who got tangled in its harrowy web. His story is one of pain and purpose, of the search for light when all the lamps have gone out.
Welcome to Chandler, Alabama.
A place where not everything that dies stays buried.
Bryan Dewayne Dunaway
