The Darkest Night: The Murder of Innocence in a Small Town

He was arrested and arraigned before Justice of the Peace Alice Burridge—whose new granddaughter, Amy, had recently been middle-named “Allice” in her honor.

Detectives spent their days on heinous orange-brown indoor/outdoor carpeting and, inexplicably, all the walls were painted yellow.

Every piece of furniture was old and ugly, but functional.

Etymologists surmise that sometime in the nineteenth century’s Western railroad expansion, the phrase referred to that side of the tracks which, because of prevailing winds, usually received most of the locomotives’ black, sooty smoke.

So the road doesn’t always lead where we’d like to go. It’s just a road, and it just goes. All roads are connected. No road begins and ends without crossing another. And there’s no road someone hasn’t traveled before me. But sometimes the roads get all tangled up.

Survival is an instinct, not a choice.

Pain is the price we pay for memory. It’s some kind of sin to forget what hurts, as much as it is to forget what makes us smile. Suffering has its meaning, and memory has its graces.