When Lila Moore climbs into the creaking attic of her family’s farmhouse in Saint Inez Parish, Louisiana, she’s only doing what her incarcerated brother, Jason, asked over a crackly prison call: “There’s a box up there. Get rid of it.” She finds the trunk—old, scuffed, and heavy as sin—wedged beneath warped rafters. Inside: rot, plastic wrap clouded green, and bones. Two sets—one adult, one impossibly small. Detective Grant Harper of the parish sheriff’s office has waded through every kind of backwoods horror, but this is different. The DNA doesn’t lie. The tiny bones belong to Jason. Jason swears he bought the corpse—part of a backroom hoodoo ritual he was told would break a curse that’s been dogging him since he fell into pills and crank. He says the body wasn’t pregnant when he brought it home. He says a lot of things. As Harper and a weary corrections officer dig into Jason’s past—his years of addiction, a vanished girlfriend, whispers of graveyard dirt and “service work” done by two traveling dealers—the investigation slips into that sliver of the South where faith turns, and superstition bites back. Because in Saint Inez Parish, folks know: when the dead don’t rest, the living end up paying.
