Blackwater Lies

Inside the book

The story begins here.

Tom Rainer went up Blackwater Cut to photograph wood ducks.

What he found was caught in an old beaver dam. Farther on, he found more of it in a hog wallow.

Somebody followed him in that morning. While he was at the dam, somebody cut his fuel line. He made it out of the swamp with a hog's tusk wound in his leg and a roll of film he figured would settle everything.

It didn't settle anything. The film came back ruined, and the search found nothing. Somebody went through his shop and took the map he'd drawn. Every time he asked the sheriff's office a question, they had an answer that sounded fine until he thought about it.

Tom knows what he saw. So he goes back in by himself, on a bad leg with a borrowed camera, to bring out proof nobody can lose.

Deep in the cut is a place that isn't on any map, where one family has been keeping a ledger for a very long time.

Tom's name is already in it.