It had been published by some house he had never heard of, one he guessed was out of business long ago, or perhaps the book had even been privately printed by a vanity press.

The Beale Haunting by J. R. Lipscomb. J. R. Lipscomb was not given to modesty, Binder figured, for the book was subtitled: The Authentic History of Tennessee’s Mysterious Talking Goblin, the Greatest Wonder of the Nineteenth Century.

He opened the book and with a shock of recognition saw an ink drawing of a girl, buxom and distraught, the words beneath: VIRGINIA BEALE, FAERY QUEEN OF THE HAUNTED DELL.

He suddenly remembered the Beale haunting, saw immediately that fate, coincidence, and synchronicity had played into his hands. This had happened in Tennessee, two hundred miles and a hundred years from his home. He remembered an old issue of Life magazine from his childhood, a Halloween number with an article called “The Seven Greatest American Ghost Stories” or something of that nature. There had been two pages on the Beale haunting.

That night he read the book cover to cover, then lay sleepless thinking about it, his brain striving to postulate a solution. It grew in his mind, tolled there some evocation of familiarity until he found himself obscurely homesick for a place he had never been.

The book was amateurish and extravagantly overwritten and mawkishly sentimental in its treatment of the Beale family and their travails, but Binder was fascinated. It was a clear case of material transcending style. On the surface it was a story of a family’s relocation from North Carolina to Tennessee in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a piece of history of the Tennessee wilderness, a story of pretty, teenaged Virginia Beale, whose wellordered life was shortly to be shattered. The tale deepened and darkened with the advent of the haunting and the ultimate descent into madness and bloody violence. Beneath the surface it seemed to Binder saturated with erotic Freudian symbolism, and he wondered if anyone had ever read the book in quite that way before.

He had to write a book about it; it seemed an unmined wealth of material. He wanted to let his mind play with the facts, rearrange them to his whims, find answers to the questions of rationality the book raised. A plan had already begun forming in his mind. He was burnt out on Chicago, had no desire to be here when the hot brassy summer changed to wind and snow.

The next day he bought an atlas of road maps. There it was. Beale Station, Tennessee, population 2,842. He could hardly believe it. The story had read like a dark fairy tale. It was like looking on a map and finding Magonia, leafing through a telephone book and finding a listing for Borley Rectory.

Beale Station, 1982

The real estate agent was named Greaves. He was a heavyset man in hornrimmed glasses and he had the professional gladhanding air of the successful businessman about him. He sat behind a desk littered with deeds and plats and advertising brochures, chainsmoking Lucky Strikes and drinking tepid coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

Yes, sir, he said. If banker Qualls told you that then he told you right. I have the only section of the Beale farm that’s available at any price.

The banker said the place had been split up quite a bit.

Oh my, yes. Originally it was over sixteen hundred acres, but that was way back in the eighteen hundreds. The only remaining section that could be called the Beale farm runs only sixty-two acres, but the house has been continually maintained and I guess you could call it the old homeplace.

The house? You mean old Jacob Beale’s house? I understood that was torn down years ago.

No, no. Well, the original log house was torn down, but Beale had another house built, a better one.