Midnight is the Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Ashley Winstead
- Language: English
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
NOW
Five hours and forty-six minutes after a trapper pulls the skull from the
depths of Starry Swamp, shaking sludge and Spanish moss out of its eye
sockets, the entire town of Bottom Springs, Louisiana—all five-thousandtwo-hundred-twenty-nine Christian souls and the small handful of Godless
heathens—has heard the news. Once again, they whisper, a person has
been claimed by the swamp.
But days later, Sheriff Thomas Theriot holds a press conference. Sheriff
Thomas Theriot has not held a press conference once in his thirty years of
service to the law. In Bottom Springs, there’s never been a need. So this
morning, when he stands outside his office with the reporter from the
Trufayette Town Talk, flanked by his two deputies, the entire town comes to
see it. There have been people lost to the swamp for as long as there have
been people living in Bottom Springs, but this press conference means
something’s different. Even the ones who weren’t waiting for it—who
haven’t, like me, lain awake every night anticipating this moment—are
drawn out like a spell from the Dollar General and Piggly Wiggly and Old
Man Jonas’s Bait & Tackle Shop.
They gather in close quarters on Main Street, some nearly hovering, the
better to hear. They know Sheriff Thomas Theriot as Tom, or simply the
sheriff. But today he stands unusually rigid in his law enforcement regalia,
his mud-brown uniform with its pins and patches. He carries an air of
authority that makes him feel like a stranger. Like some big-city cop, not
our small-town, small-time sheriff.
“Good morning and thank you for coming,” he booms, kicking things
off with a gesture of politeness, which is our way. That and the thickness of
his accent is a comfort, a reassurance that despite his strangely formal
stance, he is still one of us. “I’m afraid I have troubling news to share
today.”
Unease ripples through the crowd. This is Southern Baptist country, and
people are prone to unease, apocalyptic and overly associative, seeing holy
warnings in the smallest of things, like the pattern sugar makes when spilled
across a counter. My father is where you’d expect him, in the middle of the
crowd, the tallest person here, thick, tanned, and already gleaming in his
cuffed white dress shirt. As the sheriff speaks, the hands of the townsfolk
find my father, until he looks like a massive sun radiating spokes of people.
They lay their palms on his shoulders and forearms as if he is an anchor, his
holiness a shield to protect them from the coming news. I cannot recall ever
touching or being touched by my father that gently.
I watch from the back, alone and invisible as always. An ominous
feeling seeps through my veins like silty black mud. It has been seeping
since the moment I heard whispers about the skull from Nissa, my
colleague at the town library.
“June seventeenth, at approximately 4:32 p.m.,” the sheriff says, “while
one of my deputies was responding to a vandalism issue in Starry Swamp
—”
He stops when the crowd titters, heads whipping to one another, eyes
flashing. We haven’t heard this part of the story. Like everyone else, I
frown. Vandalism in the swamp?
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB