The winter of 1996 was especially brutal.
The mill town of Ash Creek, about twenty miles outside a midsize city, was slowly turning into a ghost of America’s industrial past. The farm equipment plant that had given birth to the town back in the sixties was dead. Its broken windows, rusting machinery, and weed-choked grounds gave the whole place a hollow, abandoned feel.
Of the three thousand people who had once lived there in better times, barely eight hundred remained. Young people left any way they could—Charlotte, Columbus, Nashville, wherever there was work. A few even tried their luck overseas. The ones who stayed were mostly the elderly, families without the money to move, and people who simply had nowhere else to go.
The town stretched along a single paved road that had long since become a patchwork of potholes and cracked asphalt. On both sides stood tired five-story apartment blocks—gray, weather-stained, with peeling paint and blackened balconies. Between them were empty lots overgrown with weeds, where people kept a few goats in summer and kids built snow forts in winter.
At the edge of town sat a row of rusted garages made of cinder block and sheet metal, where men spent more time than they did at home, tinkering with old cars. Most of those vehicles had become patchwork machines built from whatever parts could still be found. Beyond the garages lay the industrial strip: abandoned warehouses, sagging metal sheds, and old transformer boxes.
It was a bleak stretch of ground, the kind of place even the local stray dogs avoided. Too many blind corners. Too many dead spots. Too many ways for something bad to happen.
In winter the snow there turned black with soot and old factory grime, untouched for weeks at a time. The only tracks were from stray dogs and the occasional boot prints of people cutting across from the bus stop to save ten minutes on the walk home. That was the shortcut twenty-one-year-old Leah Demyan took every evening…
