I can barely stand to look at my father, who sits at the far end of the attorney’s conference table. We’re listening to the lawyer read the will of my older sister, Lily, who, along with her six-month-old baby, Eddie, died in a gas explosion five days ago. I know my father is no more comfortable being here with his younger daughter than I am being with him. We have a history. He once beat me black and blue. In retaliation, I poisoned his mongrel mutt. He never beat me again. Though it happened more than a decade and a half ago, I sense he’s still afraid of me, or thinks I’m crazy. Maybe both. He probably thinks I blame him for Lily’s and Eddie’s deaths, and is wondering what I might do about it. The truth is, I don’t know if he was responsible. But what I do know is this: the official cause of death is absurd.

He’s accompanied by Eleanor Fitzgerald Wallace, his third wife, a Boston socialite who moved out to western Pennsylvania after their wedding several years ago. Today is the first time I’ve seen her in person. When she entered the room, in her stylish dark pant-suit and simple black heels, her golden hair curled up in a bun, she turned and gave me a warm smile. I froze. Even now I can hardly believe my eyes. She’s beautiful. She looks exactly like my mother, and very much like Lily. Short, full-figured, with soft facial features conveying warmth and friendliness. As opposed to me—tall and slim, with a square jaw and a crooked nose, intense, off-putting features. I’m more like my father in his youth, much to my dismay.

Until this point in the reading of the will, when the attorney, Don Reno, turns to the last page of the document, my father’s name has not been mentioned. Lily left all her possessions and money to me. I can see that my father is already restless, wondering why the fuck a man of his importance has been invited to this family get-together if it doesn’t affect him personally. In typical Lily fashion, my sister has saved for last the most dramatic part of her will.

“Finally, I leave to my sister, Caroline, a doll, Fairy-Belle, like the one I ripped to shreds when she was nine. I hope you forgive me, Carrie, and understand that it was never about you.

“And I leave to my father the studded belt and buckle that I stole from him when I finally escaped his tyranny, the belt he used to beat me with when I was a child.”

Reno looks accusingly at my father, who is obviously taken aback by Lily’s words. He and Eleanor are co-chairs of the Rolf and Eleanor Wallace Charitable Foundation, dedicated to “Improving the Lives of Children Worldwide.” It was her idea, of course, to use the fortune my father has amassed from his gas-fracking company for humanitarian purposes, but now he wallows in the favorable publicity. Of course he isn’t pleased that his dead daughter has just accused him of physical abuse.

He falters, starts to say something, reconsiders, and finally recovers in his typical bullying manner. “That’s bullshit!” he exclaims, standing and shaking his finger at Reno.

The lawyer is a small man, balding and gaunt, his hands shaking, but he nevertheless straightens up and looks defiantly at my father.

“That isn’t my belt, and you know it! How dare you read that libelous crap in front of me and my wife? You’ll hear from my attorney about this!”

In the few moments before my father spoke, Eleanor’s face went white. She heard the simple, undeniable sincerity of my sister’s words. She saw the truth flash across my father’s face. And my father saw that she knew. She put her head down while he lambasted Reno, and now, as he quickly escorts her out of the room, she keeps her eyes on the floor. Before I can react, they’re gone.

The next morning, at the Farmville cemetery, I stand back from the crowd, but still I can see my father at the head of a phalanx of supporters, surrounding the two coffins that contain the bodies of my sister and her baby. Eleanor isn’t present, and I can’t help but wonder how she’s coping with the surprise gift that Lily left to our father in her will. I’ve spent a good part of the time since yesterday trying to remember exactly what happened the day Lily shredded my doll, and why she made me a posthumous, symbolic gift of a new one. And I’ve also tried to remember when my father beat Lily. I can’t recall that he ever did so, but given what my father did to me, I have no doubt she’s telling the truth.

It’s sunny and cold, the ground soaked, the bright yellow leaves of fall now a mushy brown scattered all over the ground. My thin overcoat flaps against my bare calves; the wind is gusting up to twenty miles per hour. The pastor is speaking, but I have no desire to hear what she’s saying. She has an annoyingly upbeat personality, drawing meaning even from the meaningless accident—if, in fact, it was an accident—of a gas explosion that killed a baby and his mother. I’ve gotten angry in the past, listening to her preach at the evangelical church about how God works in mysterious ways. My father also works in mysterious ways, and I don’t find it an admirable quality in him either.

Fortunately, here in the cemetery, the pastor’s words are drowned out by the incessant hum of one of my father’s gas drills, #547, operating less than thirty meters away. Engineers estimate that the noise at the point of origin is 115 decibels, the equivalent of standing next to a chainsaw. It’s a common sound in town; there are gas drills almost everywhere you turn, a constant reminder that the townspeople have sold their souls to Wallace Energy, my father’s company. But here, ironically, in a place where quiet is normally revered, I welcome the racket that shields me from the verbal drivel bidding farewell to my sister and nephew.

I look at the coffins, trying to imagine both of them, inside. But my mind shuts down. Instead I see Lily sitting on the dilapidated sofa in the small cabin that she got from her teacher-husband when they divorced, her fierce and loving gaze directed at Eddie as his puckered lips suck milk from her full breast. This is raw emotion at its strongest, mother giving life to child, though she already knows for certain that he will not live a long and happy life. He’s missing hexosaminidase A, a protein that helps break down gangliosides in nerve tissue. Without the protein, the gangliosides build up in the brain’s nerve cells and eventually cause spasticity, seizures, and the loss of all voluntary movement. As Lily holds Eddie in her arms, she knows that his life expectancy is no more than five years.

Ten times as long as he actually lived.

Tears well up as that thought blows through my mind.

In order for a child to be infected with the Tay-Sachs disease, as Eddie was, both parents must have the Tay-Sachs gene. And even then, the chances of getting the disease are just one in four. Only my mother, not my father, had the gene, so Lily and I weren’t possible victims. But Lily inherited the gene. Another carrier was needed to give the disease to her child. Who was that carrier? Lily refused to tell me. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “But, if you have to know, it’s not Criswell.” He was the math teacher she’d run off with and married in her junior year in high school. They lived together for eleven years.

Now, of course, she’s right. It doesn’t matter.

They’re lowering the coffins into the hole, the larger one first, the smaller one on top. My father takes a shovel and throws some dirt into the grave. I imagine him saying, “For thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” That’s what he said when my mother was buried, quoting the priest on Ash Wednesday. At the time, I was too young to understand his words. Later I came to realize that he likes to pretend he’s a man of God, doing the Lord’s will.

Other mourners, most of them people representing the many organizations that have benefitted from my father’s charitable contributions, take their turns. The action unfolds in a noise-enshrouded silence, like watching TV while my hair dryer is going full blast.

As he leaves for his limousine, I see my father shoot a backward glance in my direction, but I keep my eyes on the growing mound of dirt. When everyone has finished, I take my time and walk to the edge of the grave, tears streaming down my cheeks, my strength ebbing. I feel depleted; there’s a hole in my heart so large I don’t see how my body can continue to function. I sink to my knees, then rest my forehead on the ground.

After some time, I stand and wipe my eyes. I take a deep breath. And I make a silent vow to Lily and to myself: I will not abandon her in death, as I did in life.

For years, I’ve viewed my decision to run away from home and live with my grandmother in a heroic light: a young girl suffering from abuse and neglect, finding the courage to leave her dastardly father and cruel sister and make her way into a new life. But as I reflect now on the events that led to my departure, I see a more complicated picture.

I’m driving my Mini Cooper back into town from the cemetery. Pastureland and woods roll by on either side of the road, but dominant in my view is Lily, warning me that Daddy will get mad at me for messing up the sheet and my nightgown. It’s the first time I’ve menstruated. We get into an argument, Lily wanting to show me how to use a tampon, me telling her that I already know, does she think I’m stupid or what. Lily getting angry because I reject her help, saying Daddy will beat me again if he sees the bloodstain. Me saying that if he does, he’ll be sorry. Lily saying, “Oh, yeah? Believe me, you’re the one who’ll be sorry,” and me saying, “Then I’ll run away and go live with Grandma.” And Lily saying…

The memory here is faint, unreliable, reconstructed each time I retrieve it. Now I’m reconstructing it again, trying to call up Lily’s answer through the refraction of what I’ve just learned about my father’s physical abuse. She isn’t angry so much as sad, I now see—resigned, not screaming at me as I’ve long remembered, but saying in a bitter tone, “Go ahead, leave us (or did she say leave me?), you’ll be better off.”

It was this retort that transformed my idle threat into action. Our father had already gone to work. When Lily went off to school, I claimed to feel bad, stayed home, and packed, then called Grandma, who made the four-hour drive to pick me up. It pains me to think that I never even gave Lily a chance to escape with me, instead taking off when she was at school, unconcerned about leaving her alone with a man I loathed. My body shudders when I think how livid our father must have been when he realized I had left, how he must have threatened to beat Lily within an inch of her life should she try to follow me.

The next year, though, she did manage to escape—barely sixteen, running away with her math teacher even before she had finished high school, giving up her youth and with it her dream of being “a great woman scientist.”

Still, what bothers me more than anything right now is that I can’t remember her being beaten. How could I have missed it? Was I so selfish that I didn’t realize the terror she was living under? Or did the beatings start after I left? That possibility tears at my gut, that I might have been the reason for my father’s abuse. I stop on the side of the road and close my eyes, tears escaping, an overpowering sadness engulfing me, for my sister, for a life she couldn’t have, for my role in abandoning her and leaving her when she needed me most.

After a while, I get back onto the road and head into the center of town, on Main Street, so built up with new stores and restaurants that I hardly recognize it. Large trucks carrying water, either wastewater from wells already drilled or fresh water for new drilling, run through the town on a regular basis. At this moment, I count six—three that I just passed going in the opposite direction, another one several cars behind them, and two ahead of me.

Except for the ever-present trucks and the persistent noise, it seems as though fracking has been good to this town. It was here that my father first used hydraulic fracturing to drill for natural gas. When that was successful, he expanded to other communities, and now he runs the largest energy company in Pennsylvania. But there’s been a backlash, as more and more homeowners on the fringes of the town, people who have their own wells, complain about polluted water. So far, though, the town’s aquifer hasn’t been affected, and many residents are getting rich beyond their wildest dreams.

In the center of town, I turn right onto Beavis Falls Road and follow it south for several miles to Willard Pond, where Lily lived in the cabin she got from her divorce settlement. During the eleven years when she was trapped in her marriage with Criswell, I finished junior and senior high school, got a Bachelor’s degree in Family Studies, and completed a Master’s degree in Journalism. My Master’s thesis was an in-depth research piece on the environmental impact of fracking, which got me a job as a political reporter with the Ohio Gazette in Columbus. I had just started the job when Grandma told me Lily had returned to Farmville, alone and divorced.

That was two years ago. My sister and I hadn’t communicated directly since the time when we lived together. Not knowing what I know now, I was still bitter at the way she’d treated me. But I went to see her anyway.

We sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Eddie hadn’t been born yet, and as far as I knew she didn’t have a boyfriend. She looked horrible, a far cry from the pretty girl with the drop-dead figure that I remembered. She had on a shapeless dress, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, the way she’d worn it in high school, but there were big circles under her eyes, her lipstick was the wrong color, her eyebrows needed plucking, and she wore no earrings.

She had bought some Pillsbury cinnamon rolls to go with the coffee, which tasted bitter, but at least, I thought, she was trying to be nice to me.

“I felt intimidated by you,” Lily said, once we got the hiyas and howareyas out of the way. She was explaining why she hadn’t let me know she was back in town. “You going to grad school, me only a high-school graduate.”

That made me feel pretty good, her finally admiring me, something I thought she’d never done when we were growing up.

“But Grandma says you’re a nurse. You must have some kind of degree,” I said.

She laughed, a musical laugh, very pleasant on the ears. It had been a lifetime since I’d seen her face light up like that. “You could call it that. I have an LPN degree—Licensed Practical Nurse. I took an online course.”

“That’s great!”

She shook her head. “Not so great. It’s grunt work. But I’m taking more courses. Someday, maybe, I’ll be a registered nurse. I’m determined.”

“What happened to Mr. Criswell? I thought he had a lot of money and you were living it up in Georgia.”

This time her laugh was harsh. “Hardly. We escaped to Georgia because the laws in Pennsylvania make fucking a student illegal, even if she has reached the legal age of consent. Which I had. But he could’ve gone to jail anyway.”

That surprised me. After a brief silence I said, “Did you love him?”

She waited a while. “I don’t think so.” She looked down, embarrassed. “I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”

“Can I ask—why’d you come back here?”

“Divorce settlement gave me this cabin. He never sold it, just rented it all these years. He’s found some other sucker to fuck, who’s younger.”

Shortly past noon, after the funeral, I arrive at Lily’s cabin—now mine—and see a pickup truck in the driveway. I grab my handbag and loop the strap around my shoulder, then walk past the door, which is lying on the ground, and into the small, charred building. The kitchen is on the left, where a large man wearing a construction helmet is swinging a sledgehammer at a part of the wall that’s still standing.

“Who are you?” I yell, just as his arms come swinging down.

The sledgehammer smashes into the wall, and the man jerks around to face me. “What the hell?”

“Why are you in my house?” I say.

“Listen, lady, I don’t care whose house this is. I have my orders. Get out of the way.”

“Who gave you orders?”

“None of your goddamned business! Get out of here.”

I see a Wallace Energy symbol on the helmet. “Are you from the energy company?”

He hesitates a moment, then says, “Yeah. Now, I don’t want to tell you again.”

He raises his sledgehammer as though getting ready to use it, and walks toward me. I reach into my handbag and turn on the recorder on my iPhone. “You’re threatening me in my own house,” I say.

He hardly notices, just continues to advance, until I’m backing through the tiny living room toward the bedroom door.

“Get the fuck out of my way, or I’ll have to move you out,” he says.

This is not something any uninvited person should say to a homeowner, especially if the words are being recorded. Last year, the newly elected state legislature passed the “Your Home Is Your Castle” Protection Law, which allows homeowners to shoot any person on their property if they feel threatened. The new law, opposed by police forces around the state because it’s essentially a license to kill, states that the mere fact of an uninvited person being on the property is sufficient cause for a homeowner to feel threatened.

Perhaps the man in my house hasn’t paid attention to the news. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that I’m in a nasty mood. The fact that he looks a bit like my father is not in his best interests.

I reach into my handbag again and this time pull out the small .22 pistol I always carry. I point it directly at the man’s right knee and pull the trigger. The resulting scream can probably be heard in the next county.

As he lies there writhing on the floor, the sledgehammer lying beside him, I call 911. We wait for the medics, with him screaming that he’ll get back at me and I haven’t heard the last of him, blah, blah, blah. I keep the pistol pointed at his other knee, hoping I’ll have an excuse to give it the same treatment as the first one. But the man doesn’t make any aggressive movement; instead, he ends up crying like a baby.

When the medics arrive, I put away the gun. They quickly come inside, put the man on a stretcher, and carry him out to the ambulance. I follow them outside in time to see a police car arrive.

The cop’s face is vaguely familiar, dark brown and square, but I can’t place it. He stands there with one hand on his gun, the other on a baton he can use to beat people. His overbearing attitude pisses me off.

“I have a report that you’ve shot an esteemed employee of Wallace Energy,” he says, with a wry grin.

The voice nudges my memory—a baritone, mellifluous, slightly mocking, coming from a tall, thin, pimply-faced geek in Lily’s class. He was always patronizing toward me, treating me like a little girl. I could never understand why Lily was friends with him.

“Reginald J. Gordon,” I say.

He looks uncomfortable. “Just Regi,” he says. Then he looks over to the cabin. “I’m really sorry, Carrie, about Lily and Eddie.”

“Thanks,” I answer.

He’s hardly recognizable from when I last saw him. No glasses, no afro, the straggly goatee shaved off. Smooth copper face. He’s gorgeous.

“What led to that man being shot?” he asks. He’s in cop mode now.

“I felt threatened.” I play him the recording on my iPhone.

He nods. “I need you to come down to the police station and fill out a report. Routine. You were within your rights to shoot the man, but we need your official statement. And I want a copy of the recording. Can I give you a ride?”

I shake my head. “I’ll be down shortly.”

“Have it your way.” He moves toward the police car.

“Wait,” I say, and he turns back. “Why isn’t anyone investigating what happened here?”

“I’ll interrogate the man later,” he says.

“I meant the explosion. With my sister.”

“Already done,” he says. “Your sister left the gas on in the stove, probably accidentally, then came back to the house and lit a cigarette. There were charred cigarette butts all around the kitchen, probably from an ashtray.”

I feel my heart quicken. “You can’t be serious.” My voice is rising. “You think she wouldn’t smell the gas from the stove? You think she’d be stupid enough to strike a match with gas all around?”

“I didn’t conduct the investigation,” he says. “I’m just telling you what’s in the report.”

“Regi! You know that’s not what happened.”

He shrugs, but the expression on his face tells me he doesn’t buy it either.

When he turns around and walks toward his car, I run after him. “Why did Wallace Energy send someone out here to knock down the walls?”

Still walking, he shakes his head and waves his hands in a gesture that says he doesn’t know.

Before he can get in the car, I grab his arm and pull him around. “Lily stopped smoking over a year ago,” I say.

The varieties of family dynamics have long interested me, especially once I became familiar with many of the sociological studies that have examined what really occurs among family members “behind closed doors.” As one researcher noted, for many children the greatest danger in their lives comes from their own close relatives. This suspense novel explores one family’s secrets against the background of the surging “fracking” industry.

After the death of her older sister and her sister’s six-month old baby from a gas explosion, Caroline rejects the official report, which declares that the cause of the explosion was her sister’s smoking. She suspects a cover-up by the Wallace Energy Company, a fracking operation that her father owns.

Caroline takes time away from her work as a reporter to investigate what really happened. She is aided by two of her sister’s friends from high school—Regi, a Jamaican immigrant, now a local cop, and Sachem, a Native American of the Lenni Lelape Tribe, the director of a nursing home where her grandmother is dying.

Their investigation reveals a much more complicated and dangerous situation than Caroline suspected, as she uncovers other secrets about both her family and her father’s fracking activities, including political corruption, extortion, and murder. As her search continues, she finds herself pursued by the police, monitored by the FBI, and targeted for assassination. In the end, as she reports on what actually happened, she must choose between a commitment to truth and her loyalty and love for her dead sister.