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carving someone up like that indicated a monstrous anger toward the victim. That led him again to suspect a romantic breakup. Had one of those boys choked her and mutilated her body while she was still alive?
    â€œAnd then went back to sleep in the haunted house without waking a single soul?” he asked aloud.
    No , came the answer. It was either all of them, or none of them .
    Taking a different tack, he disregarded the five kids en route to questioning, and began to consider other possibilities. The Appalachians had their share of psychopaths—backwoodsmen who slithered through the trees, stalking their prey along trails instead of truck stops, campgrounds instead of bars. Had one of them come across these kids at the cabin and decided to have a little fun? Possibly, he decided. But why kill one and leave five sleeping like babies? And why carve her up like a Dead Sea scroll?
    He stood up and gazed down at the cabin. It cowered beneath the trees like some beaten dog, in the middle of three hundred acres of thick forest, miles away from anything remotely resembling civilization. Even after all these years—even with a Winchester pump at his side—the place still gave him the willies. He felt like somewhere, in the midst of those three hundred acres, a man was looking at him with pale, wide eyes, and laughing.
    â€œFiddlesticks killed her with his razor; slit her throat and then forgave her,” he repeated his mother’s rhyme in a whisper, thinking that if some places were truly cursed, then this was one of them.

Three
    Mary Crow looked up as the huge eagle made a slow, sweeping circle of the amphitheater. Wings stretched wide, the bird glided over the large crowd of citizens who’d gathered for the grand opening of the new sports park. By Pisgah County standards, the festivities had been vast. Lige McCauley and his string band had fiddled, the Cherokee Drum circle had drummed, and the Hartsville High marching band had presented a mini-concert, complete with fire batons. Now upturned gazes followed Sequoia as he winged through the air. Of equal interest to Mary was the raptor’s trainer, a man named Nick Stratton, whom she knew through three pre-festival phone conversations. From his crisp accent and straight-forward manner of speaking, she’d pictured him as a serious, bespectacled academic. That he was, in person, a rangy man who’d given her a funny little smile when he came out on the field, surprised her. Lately she was unaccustomed to any attractive man giving her any kind of smile, funny or otherwise.
    She turned her attention back to the eagle, which made two complete circles of the amphitheater, then made a sharp turn and headed straight for the stage. Mary fought an urge to duck as the bird bore down toward her with talons extended, but at the last second Nick Stratton stepped forward and slapped his gloved arm twice. Sequoia instantly feathered his approach and landed gracefully on the man’s arm.
    â€œOur national bird in flight, ladies and gentlemen!” cried Mayor Tom Burkhart, the master of ceremonies. “Let’s give Sequoia a hand!”
    Everyone cheered. Stratton tossed Sequoia what looked like a bloody chunk of raw liver before the pair stepped forward and took their bows. As Stratton turned to acknowledge the dignitaries on stage, Mary was able to get a closer look at the man. Light brown hair streaked with blonde, deep set eyes, handsome except for a deeply scarred upper lip, Mary decided that either Nick Stratton had a deformity that had been surgically corrected, or Sequoia had, at some point, mistaken his mouth for another chunk of liver.

    The dedication continued, with the Reverend Rosemary Brown of the First Methodist Church giving the invocation. As she asked the Lord’s blessing on the park, Mary offered her own prayer of thanks, remembering what an uphill battle the Pisgah-Cherokee Sports Park had been. She’d spearheaded the