Swing Low

Zara Lindell left Hollis Springs at eighteen without saying why. Seventeen years later she is back in the Ouachita Mountains, selling quartz out of the old rock shop where she once learned to dowse, from the woman whose death drove her away.

Verlie Odom went over the edge of the Bluff Mine on a September night nineteen years ago. Everyone agreed it was an accident. Everyone agreed not to talk about it.

Then a crystal pendulum from Verlie's leftover stock starts swinging toward one shelf and will not stop. Behind the shelf is a letter in Verlie's handwriting: if anything happens to her at the Bluff, it was not the dark.

With an old bluetick hound who knows a grieving house when he walks into one, a best friend who still has not forgiven her for leaving, and a deputy whose name is on the original report, Zara has until the Stone Night to finish the lesson she walked away from. Somebody in this town has been waiting nineteen years for nobody to ask.