On paper, Leah carried the last name of her late father, who had died when she was four. But everyone in town knew she was Romani on her mother’s side. Her mother had died young too, from advanced tuberculosis, when Leah was only twelve.
The girl had been sent to a group home in the next county over, and she ran away from it three times before the system more or less gave up and let her stay with a distant relative in Ash Creek. By sixteen, Leah was on her own. Her aunt moved south to live with her son and left Leah a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of the last building on the edge of town.
Leah worked at the only place in town still operating—a small sewing shop called Sunrise, where twenty women sat at old industrial machines making work uniforms. The pay was low and irregular, and sometimes instead of wages they were handed bolts of fabric they could try to sell at the flea market. The shop was set up in a former daycare building on the far side of town, and every evening Leah walked home alone because she lived farther out than anyone else.
She was small and slight, with dark hair she always wore in a tight braid. Her brown eyes carried the watchfulness of someone who had learned early not to count on anybody. Leah knew how to make herself easy to overlook: she walked fast, kept her head down, avoided eye contact with strangers, and gave groups of young men a wide berth.
Back then, in a struggling small town, a woman walking alone after dark had to be careful. Especially if she was a Romani girl and an orphan, with no family around to stand up for her.
Everybody in Ash Creek knew the local pack of troublemakers. They were not a gang in any organized sense, just four young men who had managed to scare the life out of the whole town. At the center of it were the three Sinton brothers: twenty-eight-year-old Gene, twenty-five-year-old Victor, and twenty-two-year-old Alex.
Their father had worked as a mechanic at the plant until it shut down, then drank himself into an early grave. Their mother still lived with them in a cramped apartment, but in practice she was a shut-in. She was afraid to leave the house, afraid of her own sons, living on a tiny check and trying not to cross their path.
The Sinton brothers had never held steady jobs, and Gene had already done time for assault. Victor had twice gotten off with probation after bar fights. Alex, the youngest, was the most volatile of the three, his mind badly scrambled from years of huffing chemicals and swallowing whatever pills he could get his hands on as a teenager. The fourth man in their circle was a thirty-year-old drifter named Frank, known around town as Baldy, who lived in an old dorm building by the closed plant and scraped by on odd jobs…
