The Point Pleasant Incident

Forty-six people died when the Silver Bridge went down on December 15, 1967. The official report blamed a cracked eyebar. Nobody asked about the thing in the girders. Russ Cade isn't supposed to be the one asking, either. Four years ago he got a story wrong and somebody died for it, and the Gazette has had him covering church bingo nights and haunted barns ever since — exactly the kind of stories nobody takes seriously. Including, most days, Russ. Then a letter shows up. An old man named Earl Coombs says people in Point Pleasant saw something before the bridge fell. Saw it for over a year. Told the right people and got laughed at — and now, with the bridge down and forty-six dead, nobody wants to hear it less than ever. Russ doesn't believe in monsters. He's spent his whole life making sure of that. But Point Pleasant is full of people with the same look in their eyes — red-rimmed, sleepless, the look of people who've seen something and can't stop seeing it — and the longer Russ stays, the less sure he is which side of that look he's on.