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 IN 2018, ON a spring day that felt like summer, a man died at a baseball game in Sanford, Maine. He was killed at a baseball game, run over by a car at a historic ballfield called Goodall Park. The person who killed him has never called the death anything but an accident, but no one who witnessed it thought it was accidental. It couldn't have been. There were too many people on hand, too many people who could have been killed instead, too many potential targets.

Approximately 200 people had shown up for the Babe Ruth League doubleheader that day. The weather had drawn them out after months of cold rain. They saw the car, a maroon Civic, on the ballfield. They saw players scattering and running away as the car circled the bases. They saw the car head toward people, only to turn away at the last moment. And they saw it speed past places where people usually gathered, the ticket windows and the concession stand. Then they saw it hit a man who stood at the park's front gate, its aim as unerring as a bullet with his name on it, and they saw his body fly into the air and land some 40 feet away, crumpled and bleeding.

Two people die in this story, one old and one very young. Two people kill in this story too, and one of the killers is also one of the victims. They're connected. Everything in this story is connected. There is a terrible secret kept and a score settled. There is a crime solved. There is a burden passed down from generation to generation and a burden finally lifted. Everyone who hears the story feels the need to interpret it; so do those unlucky enough to have experienced it. They all become philosophers and theologians; they talk about fate and karma, they talk about the turn of the cosmic wheel and the miracle of peace, and they talk about everything happening for a reason because it's too hard to imagine it happening for no reason at all.

2. DOUGLAS PARKHURST KNEW he was dying on th