Chapter II, Part II

Many people, afterward, would mark Sarah Benadine's death as the first truly terrible thing that had ever happened in Clearwater—a horror that hit a town asleep. It was a quiet town, a safe town, a town you'd like to raise your children in. The kind of town where nothing ever happened.

All of it was untrue.

The significance of Sarah Benadine's death was only that it was perhaps the first terrible thing that could not be ignored. There had been others, 'incidents' spanning years that had been written off as personal battles and private family tragedies. The night in August, 1955 when Angela Carson discovered Sarah's body in the library, the town asleep had long since been caught in a nightmare.