Throughout the book, the women are constantly questioned about what they present as truth. The eyewitness testimony of women is not enough, so in response to being doubted, they present photographic evidence.

When Patricia and Kitty visit Mrs. Greene in Six Mile for the first time, Kitty is hesitant to believe Mrs. Greene about the two boys’ deaths and Francine going missing because she “hasn’t read anything in the newspaper” (146). When Patricia reports seeing James Harris physically assaulting Destiny Taylor, her husband dismisses her account as the fantasy of a bored housewife.

Three years later, Patricia and Mrs. Greene take a new tack: proving their words with photograph of Hoyt Pickens (now James Harris) from Miss Mary and a folder full of newspaper clippings about missing and dead children. The novel mixes the mystique of supernatural horror with the cut and dry fact-gathering of detective stories: Miss Mary appears as a ghost to give Patricia information about James Harris’s crimes and lead her to the photographic evidence.

Miss Mary first heard the hoot owl, a symbol for danger, when she was a girl, on the night of Leon Simms’s lynching. In the novel, the owl appears when something sinister is lurking, and is particularly associated with