The Water Tower: A Darkwood Legacy Lost Confessions Story (The Darkwood Legacy)

A Darkwood Legacy Lost Confessions Short Story

Three people have died in Heron Creek, North Carolina in three months. A volunteer firefighter walks into a controlled burn. An eight-year-old drowns in fourteen inches of water. A woman drives to an overlook at two in the morning and doesn’t come back. When investigator Mara Ellison arrives, she finds a town with a hairline fracture running through its ordinary life — and a water tower at the top of the hill that everything runs downhill from.

What she finds in that tank has been traveling through mountain clay and underground water since 1823, carried by the roots of a tree most people in these mountains only speak of in fragments and sidelong references. One of two hundred and thirteen confessions that never found their way into the objects carved from that wood. A preacher who believed, even at the last moment, that he’d had his reasons.

Some confessions don’t stay buried. They just find another way down.