The cruelty Alvin had witnessed through the window was not the crime.

It was the manufacturing of the evidence for the crime.

And they were, Inez told him, only weeks away from filing.

Alvin had not arrived a moment too soon.

He had arrived, quite possibly, in the last weeks it was still possible to stop it at all.

Chapter 11 — The Valley Land

To understand how it had come to this, Alvin needed to understand what had come before, and so the next morning he convinced his father to take a ride with him, out to Manuel’s old woodworking shop on the outskirts of town.

Dust covered the heavy mahogany workbenches, but Manuel’s vintage hand planes and chisels still hung neatly on the walls, exactly where they had hung all of Alvin’s childhood.