Adam's Woods (35 page)

They kicked the bikes alive, and Eric was thrilled but still apprehensive about the power that coursed through the machine and into his body, and the lack of any protection between him and the asphalt should that power turn against him. But the thrill outweighed the risks, and he put on his helmet and prepared to ride.

He might sell the house eventually, but he planned to return here when finished. He still had a book to produce to fulfill his contract, and Harry had pitched his idea of a non-fiction account of what had happened here at Lincoln Corners to his publisher. They loved the idea. He knew they saw dollar signs, and couldn't resent them for wanting to use this tragedy to make a buck. A publishing house wasn't a charity. But he would use them to tell the story in a way to preserve the dignity of the people that lived here. Sure there were villains, and he wouldn't gloss over their actions, but he knew now that things were never as simple as they appear, nor necessarily so easy to categorize.

He might have come to the idea alone, but several residents had approached him with a request that he tell their tale. Journalists had been poking around, looking for interviews and information. Eric had turned down requests himself. His neighbors wanted the world to know that they didn't grow monsters, and believed that only Eric, one of their own, could explain that. Sure, others could try and would, but no one else had heard Pastor Burroughs' deathbed confession, no one else but JT knew the final events at the cabin, and only he had been given insight into the twisted mind of Isaac. But that was for the future, and this was for now.

They rode side by side through the town, passing the cemetery at Eric's request, to say a final goodbye to his brother. There was one thing he wouldn't put in the book, nor ever speak out loud. He still didn't know what to believe. Oxygen deprivation the most likely explanation.

The knife pulled from Isaac's neck had been in the swamp for years. Long enough that the handle had rotted away and left only a rusty blade. JT couldn't recall seeing Isaac throw his away after killing his brother. Might have been tossed or accidentally dropped in by a hunter. But if he closed his eyes to approximate the blackness of the swamp water, he could still see the flash of blue, the color of Adam's shorts that day, and he could still feel the small hand that pressed his own down into the mud. And he did believe that he would see his brother again in Paradise.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and in the case of Eric Kane, author of the well-known "Dark Forces" series, a whole lot stranger. His latest work, the New York Times best-selling "Brother's Keeper" is the true account of a small town with very big - and very dark - secrets.

The author's brother, Adam, was murdered in the woods just behind their house in the town of Lincoln Corners, Pennsylvania, in August of 1986, stabbed to death at the age of eight. The killer was never caught and his family soon moved away to pick up the pieces of their brutally altered lives. Eric's return to Lincoln Corners over twenty years later sparked a chain of events that uncovered deception and a conspiracy more believable as a work of fiction, and these events in detail are the subject of his book.

Kane, a central participant in the story that culminates with his killing in self-defense of the man that took his brother's life, brings a surprising objectivity to the telling, and manages to convey the humanity of even the most culpable characters. Even the man that killed Adam. He seeks not to condemn, or to sensationalize the story, but tell it as it happened to one man that only wanted to know the answer to one question. Why? As I read, I experienced his pain as he wrestles to understand hard truths almost beyond comprehension. He pulls no punches, and the story isn't for the faint of heart or those looking for light entertainment beside the pool.

Nor is it for those overly complacent with themselves.

Because, if you're anything like me, you shook your head in disbelief when the story first broke. How could something like this happen? And how could one of the central participants be a man of God? I began reading as though ushered to the front row at a freak show, prepared to see something strange and exotic. But Kane doesn't let us off that easily. He forces us to see beyond the sensational nature of the deeds and look at ourselves through the mirror of Lincoln Corners. When held up, I wanted to turn away, but I couldn't; and saw parts of myself reflected in the residents of Lincoln Corners: in Patrick Burroughs and Arnie Fisk and Paul Myers. And, God help me, Isaac Burroughs. Because Kane, with a thorough examination of the murders and most importantly motive, has made them out to be what we all are. Simply human. After I put the book down, its narrative continued to haunt me, and kept me up nights longer than any work of horror fiction ever could.

Albert Ashe - Bookweek