Unraveling Secrets: Benjamin Hale on the Mysterious Disappearance That Haunts the Ozarks
Lucy is a very private person — her husband knows about her past, but most of the people in her general everyday social orbit do not. She got freaked out by this project soon after those conversations, and completely pulled away from me. She does not, to say the least, want any attention for any of this after all these years.
The project became deeper, wider, and more complicated after that, she became a somewhat less central character, and I went full-steam ahead with it after she withdrew her blessing. I hope that one of the effects of this book in the mind of the reader will be to largely exonerate her of guilt, but I still feel treacherous and guilty about it. In the end the project went beyond the puerile magic-trick stage of the skepticism vs. belief issue and into much more meaningful and uncomfortable territory: religious faith, sin, and redemption. The conflict with Lucy seriously eats at my soul; because of that the book itself is a sin, but I am hoping that if the reader makes it to the end, it will also be my redemption.
