History

The water had pooled ankle-deep across the floor of the Pizza Hut, and the area manager knew something was terribly wrong the moment he stepped through the employee entrance. The door should have been locked. By policy, every door in the restaurant stayed locked during pre-opening preparation, yet here it stood open, and the strange … Read more

On February 23, 2021, a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth II stood in the dock of Dundee Sheriff Court and listened as the judge ended a centuries-old tradition of aristocratic impunity. The 19th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorn, master of Glamis Castle, heir to a dynasty that had anchored the British monarchy for generations, was … Read more

The RCMP constable who took the call that October morning in 1994 had been trained to use careful words, and care from the police almost always meant a body. But he did not say body. He said they had a woman at the Kamloops detachment who claimed to be Eleanor Holloway, that she was alive … Read more

On the morning of October 2, 1934, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney sat in a New York courtroom and faced a question no fortune could answer. Across from her sat Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, her brother’s widow, a woman who had crossed the Atlantic as often as once a month while her daughter waited in a house full … Read more

In 1977, at seventeen years old, Randy Treywick was a troubled teenager in Charlotte, North Carolina, facing legal troubles and a future that looked anything but promising. He had grown up in the small town of Marshville, North Carolina, where his father, Harold Treywick, a country singer with a volatile temper, had pushed him relentlessly … Read more

Oren Veasey stood in a circle of warm black earth at the head of a hollow no map had ever named, and he could not tell you which way he was facing. His good brass compass turned in his hand like a thing alive, the needle swinging slow and steady around and around, never resting, … Read more

At a little table in the back room of the Piedmont Historical Society in Roanoke, in the autumn of 1938, Endicott Marshmount found something that should not have been there. He was forty-three years old, a tall man who unconsciously stooped when he rose from his chair, thin in the way a man becomes thin … Read more

Elias Warburton had two seconds to decide. The roar came from upstream, the sound of a jam breaking loose two miles up the Haines line, and when he looked up he saw the catwalk above him already buckling. He was a bridge foreman, thirty-seven years old, inspecting a trestle joint at the nineteen-mile marker. The … Read more

Before the roads were cut through, the hollow was a house with its door standing wide open. Anyone could walk in, and in some of those houses, someone already had. That was what a man named Orville Deskins wrote in the county surveyor’s ledger in the spring of 1951. He was eighty-one years old when … Read more