What Brings You Back Home (2)

Serial fiction: a woman returns to her hometown with a dark plan...

This is part 2 of the serialized story What Brings You Back Home. You can read part 1 here. Paid subscribers can listen to this story here.

Driving through West Mobile on her way from the airport, Rebecca sees a subdivision where the pecan grove used to be. The subdivision isn’t new, but it’s new to her. It looks like it sprung up in the eighties, one of a few dozen such subdivisions that rose up in that era of expansionist promise, each with a name splashed in cursive across a grand entrance. The entrances were usually made of brick, often whitewashed. For some reason, the developers in those decades gravitated toward the word “Plantation,” as though it were aspirational rather than shameful, a word without a history. This one is called Plantation Estates.