On February 23, 1927, weeks after Paul Peace vowed to
disinherit and divorce the wife he suspected of poisoning him, he
was injured in a hit-and-run and left to bleed out on the road.
Webb told me that the familiar forces had conspired to paper over
his death. “Maybe you could look into it,” she said. I nodded,
though I knew that in my own way I was as lost in the mist as Tom
White or Mollie Burkhart had been.
Webb walked me outside, onto the front porch. It was dusk, and
the fringes of the sky had darkened. The town and the street were
empty, and beyond them the prairie, too. “This land is saturated
with blood,” Webb said. For a moment, she fell silent, and we
could hear the leaves of the blackjacks rattling restlessly in the
wind. Then she repeated what God told Cain after he killed Abel:
“The blood cries out from the ground.”