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Who can say where mysteries begin?

Perhaps they don’t even have temporality but exist instead in a timeless cycle, a spoked wheel, endlessly spinning, buffeting strange winds in all directions.

Or maybe their starting points are definite, but because mysteries are nothing if not dark mountains constructed out of darker hollows, those beginnings are ultimately as furtive as their solutions.

I’d spent most of my life chasing mysteries, following them up and down mountains in Georgia and North Carolina, tracing them as far as I could to their origins in order to better understand their endings and hopefully catch a glimpse of their solutions. This latest mystery had tendrils that reached into aspects of my unexamined life and would bring me to that point on the bridge, and ultimately to my second baptism. In many ways it was a mystery that had begun at Backslide Gap, where I’d played as a teenager, hanging from the suspension bridge over the long and tantalizing fall into nothingness, believing the equally tantalizing lie of my own immortality, and it was this mystery that had followed me toward the inevitable break with my father and his fundamental and stifling church to the cold beds of women I barely knew in an effort to find comfort, and then to my long love affair with the bottle. I left the mountains of North Georgia, thinking the answer to the mystery might be found elsewhere, like some boon at the end of an epic quest, only to find nothing but vaporous dreams and half-remembered visions of home. I was haunted. Not just by my past, but by my inability to piece it together with my present and envision a future that might act as some small salvation before my time here was finished. All of this to say that my mystery had many beginnings, but there was only one that hadn’t been obscured by the passage of time and the deficiencies of memory. One moment that opened the door to my past and my future.

And that was the moment I discovered the dead man in my yard.

*   *   *

I’d been on my way home from a disturbing night out with my best friend, Rufus Gribble. Rufus had been upset by something he wouldn’t share with me. Normally, a night out with Rufus at Jessamine’s, the area’s best honky-tonk, would involve us both drinking to the point of having to crash in my truck, but not on this evening. Instead, we had a few beers, I asked him what was bothering him, and he shrugged muttering something about how he hadn’t been sleeping well. Not much more happened. Just some drinking and monosyllabic grumbling about inconsequential topics.

We left the place at nine, only slightly inebriated, and I drove Rufus home, letting him out at the doors of my father’s old church, where he’d been squatting for the last five or six years. I glanced across the creek at the old moonshiner’s shack where Ronnie Thrash had lived before heading to the state penitentiary the previous January. He was doing time for manslaughter but had recently contacted me to tell me he was coming home soon. There were quite a few extenuating circumstances that had helped lessen his sentence, not the least of which was that the man he’d killed was a member of a white supremacist organization that had abducted Mary Hawkins, a black Atlanta police officer and my girlfriend.

Rufus left without saying much that night, and I watched him pick his way toward the doors of the old church, amazed as always by how easily he moved, how deftly he avoided obstacles despite his blindness.

I was probably three minutes from my own house when I heard what I felt certain was the report of .22-caliber rifle.

My reaction wasn’t instantaneous. Maybe it was the alcohol. I wasn’t drunk, but I’d had enough to take the edge off.

At first I thought it might be a hunter, but it wasn’t hunting season, and the only person who lived up this way was me. The sound was close. Close enough to make me wonder what occasion would have caused somebody to head up this far into the mountains. Other than the abandoned trailer down the ridge from my place, there wasn’t anything up this way except trees and rocks—and some of the best views you could ever imagine.

By the time I reached the last rise before the ridge I lived on, I’d all but dismissed it as some rando who’d decided he wanted to kill a six-pointer and had followed it a little too far up the backside of the mountain. Occasionally hunters did wander up this way, though I had to admit I’d never encountered one in July before, much less at this hour. There were also the Hill Brothers to think about. I’d seen them both before, several times, cutting through my yard, moving like ghosts from some mythical past, floating by the big oak tree where I parked my truck, their expressions somewhere between solemn and hangdog. They lived together in some undisclosed place in these mountains and made their way on foot through the darkest hollows, rarely speaking, never smiling, like spirits of long-dead men who lived feral and hard and with a kind of silent pride that bespoke violence and desperation as well as a strange and hard-worn nobility. I thought they must have been called the Hill Brothers because no one knew their real names, and they stalked these hills like panthers hunting for God only knew what.

I pushed my truck a little faster over the last rise. Immediately I noticed a dark sedan in front of my house. My headlights canvassed it, and I thought it might be a Ford or Chevy, fairly new. I cut my wheel onto my gravel drive, and my headlights picked up a shadow sprinting across the yard, toward the back of my house where I had a tool shed and lawn furniture and some cornhole boards set up. Beyond that were trees and higher elevations overrun with caves and gullies and boulders that made the terrain nearly impassable on foot. There were sheer drops that could make a man dizzy just thinking about them.

The shadow—I can hardly call it anything else—vanished behind my house. I floored the gas, planning to go around the other vehicle and squeeze between the massive oak tree and my little house to head the intruder off before he made the woods.

It might have worked if I hadn’t hit something first.

I saw it at the last second, far too late to stop.

It was a body; I knew when I heard the distinctive, and unmistakable crunch of bone beneath my tires.

I swung the truck around, completely forgetting about the intruder, who was surely to the woods by now, and aimed my headlights at what I’d just run over, hoping against hope it was a coyote and not my dog, Goose.

When my headlights illuminated the body, it was clear. That was no coyote or dog. It was a man.