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herself.
    “It was so odd,” Shellie later said. “I just found this statement to be very odd. Because Randi knew that when the time was right, she was going to tell the child herself.”
    Staring at her sister, Shellie thought something terrible was going on and she didn’t know about it. Something Randi wasn’t sharing. The way Randi cried and carried on about telling the child who his mother was made Shellie wonder what Randi had gotten herself mixed up in.
    “What is it, Randi?” Shellie asked.
    “Please, please do me this favor and just make sure he knows I’m his mother.”
    “Of course, of course, Randi, when the time is right. But why not tell him yourself?”
    “I just want to make sure that he is going to know.”
    “Yes, Randi, he is going to know.”
    As the night wore on, Randi made a point to tell her mother how much she loved her. The way she sounded, it was as if Randi was saying good-bye.
    For good.
    They stayed a while longer and Shellie drove Randi home.
    “I love you, Shell,” Randi said before getting out of the car. Randi was still feeling that talk back at her mother’s house. She seemed so sad.
    “I love you, too, Randi. More than you’ll ever know.”
    They said their good-byes and made plans to stay in touch by phone and hook up for dinner soon.

CHAPTER 12
    K atherine “Kat” Sturgell spent the morning of November 15 with her sister-in-law, Linda Franks. It had been a fairly mild start to the day, about 62 degrees Fahrenheit, no wind, some bright sun (for that time of year) poking through the opaque clouds. Kat and Linda were riding down Apple Road, inside the limits of Kings Mountain State Park in Blacksburg, just south of the Gaston County, North Carolina, border. This is a massive state park encompassing some twenty-plus miles of hiking trails, along with 115 campsites.
    Kat and Linda were trotting down Apple Road on horseback, lost in the beauty of what is fifteen miles of park equestrian trails. Earlier, Kat and Linda had ridden the trails with Kat’s husband and niece, both of whom had gone back home by late morning, early afternoon. Now it was Kat and Linda out on the trails alone.
    As they were trekking up Apple Road, Kat saw something that didn’t seem so strange at first glance, especially inside a state park.
    “Look,” Kat said as she passed the area before Linda, pulled back, slowed her horse, turned around, and went to check it out more closely.
    On the ground between the woods and the road, there was a large burn spot between some leaves and a downed tree. It was easy to see from Kat’s vantage point of being high on her horse: a black patch of what looked to be terribly charred leaves or pine needles by a tree, with something strange-looking inside the ring of ashes.
    Kat got down off her horse and approached the area. Something didn’t feel right all of a sudden. One of the worst things for a state park is to have an abandoned fire pit, smoldering. One gust of wind and it could swallow up the whole park within a few days.
    Linda was just coming up behind Kat. She stayed on her horse as Linda approached the scene.
    “What’s up?” Linda asked.
    “I don’t know. It’s a burn spot in the ground. Looks like somebody tried setting the woods on fire,” Kat said, walking closer.
    Kat tied off her horse and approached the burn. She stood by what she described as “the foot” of the patch of scorched ground, just a bit larger than the size of a human being. There was something inside the ring of char, faceup, although the face was blackened and perhaps melted completely off. There was also what looked to be a human arm sticking up in the air, stiffened with some type of black soot melted onto it. The entire “thing” was draped over a rotted log. There was some type of blanket or tarp melted onto the thing itself.
    Kat thought she was staring at a mannequin. Clearly, she could now make out that the thing was in the shape of a human being, with several