Dead Echo

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  In 1848, three boys excavating along the backbone of a gradual rise near Grimball Rock Quarry, just on the verge of the present southeastern border, were smothered to death when the roof of their primitive tunnel let go. When discovered two days later (they had, of course, not mentioned to their parents their whereabouts nor their endeavors), a pair of hands and a pair of boots stuck out amid the rubble of the entrance. One going in, the other out, like adjacent currents in a vast ocean, two short lives caught in the process of entering and leaving.

  Then fourteen years later, 1862, a minister’s daughter suddenly missing from her bed, found miles away and days later, close within the dim rectangle, tied with rusty wire to a willow tree, her poor young body nude and ravaged from time, the wire, and depravity. For the crime a drifter took the fall, some toothless vagrant tossed out of his own home years before in the deathgrip of alcoholism, blasted out of his mind and completely clueless when the vigilantes rousted him from sleep near Gulliver’s Creek. To be hung by the neck from a nearby oak, vehemently proclaiming his innocence until his ability to continue was…shall we say, choked off.

  The area drew victims like a spider web draws flies.