Blood on the Tracks

C-VILLE cover story for the week of 5/1/2012:

Blood on the Tracks: A biography of Charlottesville’s Coal Tower

A partly cloudy day, late March, unseasonably warm. Two men look up as I step into a small clearing in the woods beyond the coal tower.

“Hope I’m not bothering you.”

“It’s cool,” one of them says. He moves over on the makeshift bench so I have room to sit down.

“I saw you taking pictures,” he says. “You know two kids were killed here?”

I know, and that’s part of the reason I’m there. But only part of it.

Read the rest of the story.