“Send her back to the devil where she belongs!” a man in the crowd bellowed.
“Get her up there,” another voice called, and a group of men grabbed hold of her, and then somehow her feet were on the stool. She had no choice but to stand up straight. The three men holding the end of the rope pulled back the slack, kept it taut.
The stool wobbled beneath her. Her arms were bound behind her back; the rope was already tight around her neck. She looked out across the bog, out at her cabin, saw that it was in flames. She had built it herself when she was all alone, just after the family house burned. After her mother was killed. Jane was born in that cabin, had had twelve birthdays there with cake and candles.
She thought of Jane, over where the old family house once stood, tucked quietly into the root cellar, like a forgotten jar of string beans. She’d be safe there. No one knew about the root cellar. No one knew there was anything left out there in the wreckage and ashes of the old family home.
What people don’t understand, they destroy.
“Wait,” someone called. It was Robert Crayson from the general store. He came forward, looked up at her. For a split second, she wondered if he would stop this madness, bring them to their senses. “Before justice is done—any last words? Do you want to beg forgiveness of these people? Of God?”
Hattie said nothing, just gazed out at the bog, her beautiful bog. Dragonflies soared over the surface, wings and bodies shimmering in the sunlight.
“Maybe you’d like to tell us where the money is?” Crayson went on. “Financial restitution for your crimes? We could give it to the families of the children you killed. Never bring ’em back, but might go a little way.”
“I killed no one,” she repeated.
“Where’d you hide it, witch?” someone yelled. “What happened to all your father’s money?”
“Richest family in town,” another man spat. “And look where it led them.”
“Please,” Crayson asked, his voice pleading now. “Put your family’s wealth to good use. Don’t let it die with you. Let your one last act be charitable. Tell us where you hid the money.”
She smiled down at him, at all of them gathered below her, faces bright with hope. She smiled the smile of someone who has a secret she knows she’ll never tell.
The rope tightened around her neck as the men behind her pulled. Up above, the branch it was looped over creaked. A squirrel chattered. A nuthatch flew by.
“You can kill me, but you can’t be rid of me,” she told them. “I’ll always be here. Don’t you see—me and this place, we’re one.”
Hattie took in a breath and waited.
She had climbed this tree as a child. Climbed it with Candace. They had dropped their flower-head dolls down, watching them flutter softly to the ground.
They’d called it the angel game.
Life is a circle,Hattie thought, tilting her head back to look up at the branches, where she could almost see the little girl that she was once climbing up, higher and higher, out of sight.
Someone shoved the stool out from under her.
Her body bucked, her feet kicked, searching frantically for something to rest on, to get the pressure off her neck.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe.
Could only swing and twist, and for just a second, before she lost consciousness, she was sure she could see one of her old flower-head dolls drift down, its daisy face bright as the summer sun.
FOUNDATION
CHAPTER 1
Helen
MAY 18, 2015
The cement mixing drum turned. Fresh concrete poured down the truck’s chute into the form made from wood and rigid foam insulation that rested on a thick bed of gravel. The truck belched diesel fumes into the clean, pine-scented early-morning air.
We are meant to be here,Helen told herself, trying not to choke on the truck’s exhaust. It was eight o’clock in the morning. Normally, she’d be on her way in to work, or perhaps stopping for a latte, pretending she wasn’t a few minutes late. Instead, she was here, surrounded by trees and northern birds whose songs she didn’t recognize, watching workers pour her foundation.
The foundation was the one job she and Nate had hired out, and watching the men in their yellow boots, Helen was glad they’d left this one to the professionals. The men smoothed the concrete over rebar and mesh while Helen studied the scenery around her—the clearing they stood in, the thick woods encircling it, the hill to the west, the little path that led down to the bog to the south. Nate had argued that they could do the work, that a floating slab was easy, but Helen had insisted that a professionally laid out and poured foundation would give them the best start.
