Carters Holler. By : Kimbra Gish The author starts the story with these sentences:

Trouble was a-brewing. I’d be feeling it for days, an uneasy, restless feeling, like fire shut up in my bones. I couldn’t put a name to what ailed me, except that Tom Lynn, my dearest friend, who’d come over to eat at our house whenever I cooked and sit in the porch swing with me these past three years, ever since I was ten, had disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to him, though they’d searched and searched.

How is this part of the story important to the whole?
im sorry im dumb :/