Cookson Hills

Patrice's is the most recent, and it's from the hills above Tenkiller.

The Cookson Hills come down to the lake on the east side, and they're old outlaw country, the ground where Pretty Boy Floyd hid out in the '30s, steep and wooded and cut up with hollows that the roads have to wind around.

Highway 82 runs through them from Tahlequah south along the lake, and Patrice drove it every night in 2012, coming home from a job at the hospital in Tahlequah to her house south of Cookson, about a 30-minute drive, most of it in the dark.

The night she wrote about was in March, cold, with the trees still bare, and she was coming south a little after midnight on a stretch where the highway drops down along a hollow, and there's a creek crossing at the bottom with timber close on both sides.