Barry, Vermont. May 4th, 1919. The hotel Buzzle didn't have a toilet. That was the thing.

A man could rent a room for the night, sleep on a mattress that smelled like every man who'd slept on it before him,

and wake up Sunday

morning with the church bells ringing across the valley. But if he needed to relieve himself,

he had to go outside. Find a vacant lot. Make do. Harold Jackson was 21 years old up from

Brookfield. He stepped out the back of the Buzzell into the kind of Vermont

spring morning that hasn't quite decided to be spring. Mud season was ending. The air had an edge to it,

clean and cold, carrying the faint mineral taste of granite dust that settled on everything in

Barry, windowsills, laundry lines, the insides of men's lungs. The sky was pale, the streets

were empty. It was half-past seven on a Sunday, and the town was still asleep. Jackson crossed

North Main Street toward the Wheelock Garden, a vacant lot behind a woodworking shop. Patchy grass, bare

dirt, the kind of place that accumulated whatever the town

didn't want. Scrap lumber, broken bottles, the occasional stray cat. He saw a shape on the ground

and his feet stopped before his mind caught up, face down, a woman. She was naked, except for

her shoes, her stockings, and a pair of kid gloves. Her hands were

tied behind her back with a strip of her own undergarments, a cotton shirt waist, a common blouse of

the era, was knotted tight around her throat, cinched with a man's white handkerchief. She was small,

five foot three, maybe 110 pounds.

The kid gloves were still buttoned at the wrist.

13 feet from the body, a gold Waltham watch lay in the grass.

It was still ticking.

The case was engraved with three initials.

...