Mary Byrd could understand how the journalist couldn't resist the story: a nine-year-old boy sexually molested and killed on Mother's Day, 1966.
A suspect to whom nothing would stick. Neighbourhood secrets. No one, especially the Low Byrd County police, had known what to do.
It had been long before stories of sex and murder and missing children appeared every week in morning papers. Then, it was unheard of ? a front-page story in the Richmond Dispatch, the little School Days portrait of Stevie's crewcut head and thin, goofy smile and brown and orange striped t-shirt against a cheerful, sky-blue background.
And now Mary and her family would have to revisit it all again, and who knew how long it would go on and what would come of it. But she knew there wasn't really a choice. She'd go back to Virginia and do what she had to do: look at pictures, talk to the detective, the police, whoever. But she felt sure that like so many things in life there had been too much time and too much clueless bumbling. 'Closure', would most likely not be part of the story. And what was closure anyway?
As Mary sets out from Mississippi on a collision course with her past, she encounters an ice storm, has a mystical psychedelic experience, and witnesses several deaths and a funeral. With a flamboyant cast of characters (including Mary's husband and children, a prickly maid and her prickly mother, an eccentric artist, a possible lover, a homeless vet and a chicken broker), and with a tragic, true story at its heart, Flying Shoes is a rich and candid novel about family, marriage and memory and becoming who you are meant to be.
