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just swallowed her up. My father hit the river in a loose dive, and came up alone. I made it to the dock as he went back down.
    I found him a quarter mile downstream, cross-legged in the dirt, Grace Shepherd on his lap. Her skin shone as pale as something already dead, but she was round-eyed and wailing, her open mouth the only slash of color on that bleak riverbank. He clutched the child as if nothing else mattered; and he was weeping.
    I watched for a long second, sensing, even then, that the moment was a sacred thing. When he saw me, though, he smiled. “Damn, son,” he’d said. “That was a close one.”
    And then he’d kissed her head.
    We wrapped Grace in my jacket as Dolf arrived at a run. Sweat poured down his face and he stopped, uncertain. My father handed the child to me, took two quick steps, and dropped the girl’s grandfather with a single blow. The nose was shattered, no question, and Dolf bled there on the riverbank as his oldest friend trudged, wet and weary, to the house up on its hill.
    That was my father.
    The iron man.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 3
     
     
       I slept some of the pain away, and woke to a thunderstorm that rattled the old windows and put jigsaw shadows on the wall every time the lightning flashed. It swept through town, dropped sheets of water, then boiled south toward Charlotte. The pavement still steamed when I went outside to get my bag from the car.
    I laid my fingers on gouged paint and traced the word.
    Killer.
    Back inside, I stalked the small rooms. Restless energy burned through me, but I felt at odds with myself. I wanted to see home, but knew how the seeing would hurt. I wanted to speak to my father, but feared the words that would come. His words. Mine. Words you can’t take back or forget; the kind that scar deep and heal thin.
    Five years.
    Five damn years.
    I opened a closet door, closed it without seeing what was inside. I drank water that tasted of metal, stared at books, and my eyes passed over it without seeing it; but it must have registered on me. It must have had some impact. Because as I paced, I thought of my trial: the hate that burst against me each day; the arguments built to hang me; the confusion among those who knew me best, and how it was compounded when my stepmother took the stand, swore her oath, and tried with her words to bury me.
    Most of the trial was a blur: accusations, denials, expert testimony on blunt force trauma and blood spatter. What I remembered were the faces in the courtroom, the ready passions of people who once professed to know me.
    The nightmare of every innocent man wrongly accused.
    Five years ago, Gray Wilson was nineteen years old, right out of high school. He was strong and young and handsome. A football hero. One of Salisbury’s favored sons. Then someone bashed a hole in his skull with a rock. He died on Red Water Farm and my own stepmother said I did it.
    I circled the room, heard those words again—
not guilty
—and felt the violent thrust of emotion they put into me: the vindication and relief, the simple conviction that things could go back to the way they’d been. I should have known that I was wrong, should have felt it in the dank air of the slam-packed courtroom.
    There was no going back.
    The verdict that should have been an ending, was not. There was also the final confrontation with my father and the short, bitter goodbye to the only place I’d ever called home. A forced parting. The town didn’t want me. Fine. Just dandy. As much as it hurt, I could live with that. But my father made a choice, too. I told him that I didn’t do it. His new wife told him that I had. He chose to believe her.
    Not me.
    Her.
    And he told me to leave.
    My family had been on Red Water Farm for more than two hundred years, and I’d been groomed since childhood to take over its management. My father was easing back; Dolf, too. It was a multimillion-dollar operation and I was all but running it when the sheriff came to lock me away.