Hoskins from the window seat down to the cellar ("canal") for burial, according to a pre-arranged plan with his aunts.The stuff nightmares are made of.The children still feared me, and their fear gave me the power to invade their dreams, and that""s when the funreallybegan.In early July, 1932, Z.Smith Reynolds, the youngest 20 year-old son of the cigarette patriarch R.J.Reynolds, was suspiciously murdered with a gunshot wound to the head at the family estate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.The action is narrated, in flashback, by an offscreen character, the local Catholic Father Peter Lonergan (Ward Bond), the priest of the parish who is also a devoted fisherman, as he clears his throat:Now, I""ll begin at the beginnin"".