All the Colors of the Dark

A one-eyed boy saves a girl and vanishes into darkness

Monta Clare, Missouri, 1975.

A one-eyed boy saves a girl and vanishes into darkness

Monta Clare, Missouri, 1975. Thirteen-year-old Patch Macauley—born without one eye, raised by a struggling single mother, costumed as a pirate because fiction dulled affliction—hears screaming in the woodland near the old railroad. He finds Misty Meyer, the most beautiful girl in town, being attacked by a hooded man beside a navy van. Patch hurls a rock and tackles the stranger at the knees, yelling for Misty to run. She does. The man grabs Patch's own dagger and drives it into his stomach. By the time his blood soaks the forest floor, the man has loaded him into the van. A witness sees the vehicle turn onto Highway 35. The town's pirate is gone, and no one yet understands that something irreversible has begun.

She came to report stolen bees and left to hunt a kidnapper

That same morning, Saint had walked into the police station to report her beehive raided—only to find Misty Meyer trembling before a cop, speaking of the pirate kid who saved her. Saint sprinted to the clearing and found only blood. Over the weeks that followed, she haunted the station, flagged leads cops overlooked, and refused every adult's order to stand down. She noticed Dr. Tooms, the town physician, had been in those same woods that morning claiming to search for a dog—but Saint knew he had never owned one. She climbed to his farmhouse at night carrying her grandfather's revolver, heard a scream inside, and saw blood on his hands. Chief Nix dismissed her suspicions. Saint stopped sleeping. She would not stop searching until the boy with the eye patch came home.

Saint sets fire to a killer's compound and finds Patch alive

Months into her search, Saint traced a school photographer named Eli Aaron whose advertising poster featured Misty's photo. She rode buses alone to his isolated compound deep in the woods, where a navy van sat in a barn. Inside the darkroom, Aaron admitted to taking the girls—then hunted Saint through the darkness with her own grandfather's gun. She fired her slingshot blindly, dropped matches, and the building caught fire. Chief Nix, alerted by Jimmy Walters from Saint's church, pulled her from the flames. That night, as cops fanned across the woodland, Saint ran alone through midnight rain until she found Patch unconscious in the mud, barely breathing. Three other girls' bodies were recovered nearby. Eli Aaron's was not among them.