Spider

Saturday, 30 June Georgetown, South Carolina

At the cool, dusky end of a sizzling day, barbecues spit flames while party laughter rolls along the banks of South Carolina's winding Black River.

Across town, in the sombre silence of Georgetown cemetery a solitary figure searches for the grave of someone once dear to him. He's travelled for days to make this pilgrimage and is already physically and emotionally drained. In his arms he carries a bundle of flowers, her favourite Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies. The first time he'd spoken to her, she'd been in a local park surrounded by thousands of them, and the flower had taken on a special meaning for both of them.

The headstones of the crowded cemetery bear names almost as old as America itself. Locals have been burying people in these plots since the country's first Spanish settlers grew old and died here, way back in the mid sixteenth century.

The grave he's looking for belongs to no one famous; there's no towering statue, no ornate family tomb to mark her place. Her anonymity disappeared only when her mutilated young body turned up bloated and decomposing in the Tupelo Swamp offshoot from the Black River, a stretch of ancient tumbling water that was once the conduit of commercial colonialism and the main waterway of South Carolina's plantations.

Finally, he sees her gravestone. Simple black marble, paid for by the community out of special grants for the poor. Engraved in gold lettering is her name: Sarah Elizabeth Kearney. But that wasn't what he called her. To him she was only ever 'Sugar' and he knew that to her he was only ever 'Spider'. Barely twenty-two years old, she was, like the Spider Lilies that had brought them together, just blossoming, just realizing her beauty and planting the seeds of her dreams.

Spider pulls out some weeds growing among the pebbles on her grave and lays down the big flowers. His mind slips back to their wonderful meeting twenty years ago this very day.

Sugar was so special.

She was his first.

The first he kidnapped.

The first he murdered.