About This Book
Reading about the gruesome death of someone you knew was like accidentally seeing your mother naked; it was too private, but you couldn t take it back. In January 1948, nine-year-old Philip Wade and his little brother David, move to the small Eastern Oregon town of Baker City where their father, Kenneth Wade, is about to begin his career as a mortician. In the spring, Philip s father hires Jack O Brien, a local recluse, to help him put on a new roof on their house. Three weeks later, a local schoolteacher is found beaten to death and Jack O Brien is accused of her murder. Kenneth Wade is the only person who advocates on O Brien s behalf fully believing the man to be innocent. Philip is a spellbound spectator and narrator of his father s consuming struggle to save a man he barely knows. Conversely he witnesses his mother, Margaret Wade, demonstrate a quiet determination to keep the specter of violence from distorting the lives of her sons. Twisted into the father s fixation to wrest Jack O Brien from custody, is the relentless memory of a boyhood friend who, when wrongly accused of a killing, hung himself in his jail cell. This long ago horror is key to Kenneth Wade s motivation he is caught up in the terrible present because of a past that will not let him go.
