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         No one understood how anyone on that dark, windless night could not have heard the awful thing that happened to the Forest children.

         The Town of Shapely Mills is an average one - that is, it has enough people for two elementary, one middle, and two high schools, several churches, nightclubs, a profusion of restaurants - trendy and not - several major businesses and a summer stock theater. It was the kind of town where you always saw a friendly, smiling face, received a hearty greeting and where children still addressed adults as 'ma'am' and 'sir.'

         The town wasn't crime free. Like most places, Shapely Mills had its share of bad boys - young and older - , bad girls - young and older; hell-raisers, brawlers, and drunkards. On week-ends the sheriff's office was busy with handlling everything from a misdemeanor to a domestic dispute to a fender bender. Sexual assaults, while rare, did happen, along with the occasional felony that involved someone other than the local jurisdiction.

          But, why Charles Langforth chose Shapely Mills to carry out his heinour crimes was anyone's guess. Maybe he decided the town needed a major shaking up. Perhaps he'd been wronged by someone and just took his revenge on the people nearest to him. Maybe he just liked the name Shapely Mills. But he began his reign of terror on a July night, during what Shapely Mills folks called the 'sittin season', that is, the time during the summer when the heat and humidity made it impossible to do little more than sit around.

          Everyone knew that Langforth did it. His confession not withstanding, his fingerprints had tainted everything in the house and he'd been found with the weapons. He was also covered with blood. What no one, including Langforth himself, could understand was why he did it or why he picked the Forests.

          The Forests weren't typical Shapely Mills' townspeople. That is, they weren't born and bred in the town. Ellicott Forest (he hated his name; said it sounded like a park) had actually been transferred to the town from somewhere on the west coast. He'd been an executive at Plen-Gen, a company that was involved in economic development, and came to Shapely Mills to set up a branch office that would do site selection work for developing the surrounding area.

Ellicott and his family settled in on Stampede Road, in what folks still called the old Miner place. However, by the time the men he hired finished knocking down, adding on and repainting the giant house, it bore little resemblance to the home that had belonged to one of the town's founders. Folks not too suspicious of strangers went out of their way to give Ellicott a history of the house. Of course, he laughed and flippantly remarked that a ghost was just what he needed to take his mind off his problems.

(Indtnt) People didn’t have to wonder what those problems were. All they had to do was look at and listen to the rest of his family.

The missus, Emily Ann as Ellicott called her, was a small, pretty woman of unflagging energy. The only trouble was that it was directed against her husband for moving them to “this God-forsaken, stinky little dust bucket of a place.” Ellicott was embarrassed by her tirades, which happened indiscriminately, no matter where they were. People thought that the expensive renovation to the Miner home was his way of appeasing her. For a while it worked, especially when he indulged her competitive nature and let her decorate the interior in a manner that far outshone the other homes they got invited to.

The Forests had three children. Edgebrook Ellicott was the eldest. Emily Ann had once confided in Jean Dorrance that Ellicott insisted their son be just as miserable as he was, however they shortened the unfortunate boy’s name to E.B. Emily Ann insisted that with a name lik E.B., her son was bound for fame and glory. She was right about the fame, but that comes later.

Edgebrook was indifferent to his name. Like his father, he was extremely good looking in an Eric Roberts sort of way. Unlike Ellicott and Emily Ann, he’d inherited his reddish hair, deep blue eyes and quick temper from his Irish grandparents. He, too, hated Shapely Mills. At 15 ye’d had a following in his old high school and was quite a man about town. He smoldered with resentment for a couple of weeks. But E.B.’s kind of looks and attitude doesn’t go unnoticed and eventually he became acquainted with the town’s bad boys and got involved in petty crime and other mischief.

The second child, Earlie Elizabeth, was Emily Ann’s heart. In fact, the two of them bore such an uncanny resemblance to each other people often mistook them to be sisters instead of mother and daughter. Earlie, called so because she was premature, was the type of daughter most parents wished for – sweet-natured, helpful, kind, loving, affectionate, smart and pretty. From childhood on, she exhibited a remarkable talent for playacting and her parents proudly informed their friends and acquaintances that Earlie was going to be the actress of the family. Earlie would smile sweetly and agree, but neither Ellicott nor Emily Ann was aware of the destructive forces that she kept hidden deep inside herself.

Last, there was Evan Elijah. Now here was a child that nobody seemed to understand. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was the least attractive of the family – long, rangy and awkward looking. Emily Ann had once remarked that he looked more like a drowned rat than a baby. Over the years, his looks got worse instead of improving but Evan learned to hide his distress whenever people looked at him and grimaced or when children teased and called him ‘Rat Boy.’

By the time the family had settled in Shapely Mills, Evan learned to disguise many of his emotions behind a cryptic little smile. It had a chilling effect on people, especially his parents. As a result, they pretty much left him alone, unaware of how he indulged his passion for the macabre.

They were a strange family and though they were hard to get along with, they didn’t deserve what happened to them on that hot, humid July night. Yet, as the investigation continued, the authorities encountered some very disturbing things about the Forests.