No big revelation for those who know me and my family, but on this cold November morning, as I sit and watch the sun gild the harvested cotton fields with a false show of gold, I am acutely aware of the specters of the past. I suppose in one way or another, we are all haunted, though some of us more than others. In my haste to get to a predawn murder scene, I accidentally picked up my mother's car coat from the hook by the back door. Standing over the body of a dead twenty-three-year-old woman, I inhaled my mother's scent from the folds of her coat. I heard the words she told me when I was ten, grieving the death of a pet. "Death comes to all of us, Sarah Booth. It is nothing to fear or despair of, merely another journey, like birth. It is the cycle of life." I hated those words then, and I've come to despise them. My mother and father died two years later, victims of a tragic car wreck. It's an irony that now I make my living with death as my employer. I investigate deaths that are not accidental or natural.
