Let Me Die in His Footsteps

On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines, not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before, but armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs through her family’s lavender fields toward the well on the Baines’ place.

At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future. Not finding what she had hoped for, she turns from the well, and when the body she sees there in the moonlight is discovered come morning, Annie will have much to explain and a past to account for.

It was 1936, and there were seven Baine boys. That year, Annie’s aunt, Juna Crowley, with her black eyes and her long blond hair, came of age. Before Juna, Joseph Carl had been the best of all the Baine brothers. But then he looked into Juna’s eyes, and they made him do things that cost innocent people their lives.

Sheriff Irlene Fulkerson saw justice served—or did she?