Dorchester County sits between Charleston and everywhere else. The Edisto runs the south edge of it, black and slow. I-95 cuts the west. In between there’s St. George, Harleyville, Reevesville, Ridgeville, a courthouse, a grits festival, more churches than stoplights, and a good many things nobody put on the county seal.
Charleston calls itself the most haunted city in America, and that is probably true. Nobody has ever asked where it all comes from. The answer is about forty miles up the road.
I’ve been filing dispatches from here for a while now. The arrangement is simple. People tell me things. I write them down. I change the names of the living, and sometimes of the dead, since the dead around here are particular. I don’t change what happened.
You will want to know whether any of it is true. The barber will tell you it is. The judge will tell you it isn’t. The river doesn’t comment.
The dispatches go out one a week by email. When a year’s worth has piled up, they get bound into a book and sold wherever books are sold, so a person can keep them on a shelf instead of in an inbox. The first year is six stories. The second year is already underway.
Send me the dispatchesCounty Line Confidential is written by Charles Kirkland, who lives in the Lowcountry and has spent most of his life writing things meant to make people act. These are the first things he’s written meant to make people stay up. Correspondence welcome through the Contact page.