Wolf Worm — Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

“Dr. Halder?”

I was pleased with how light and calm my voice was. It was smooth and professional and there was no way that he could guess the questions that beat against the walls of my skull. Did you really get away with murder?

There was no answer for that question, but I had another, more immediate one. One that Halder was uniquely equipped to answer.

“Eh? Oh, it’s you, Wilson.” Halder sat back in his chair. Smiley slid past my ankles and circled the desk, clearly plotting what stack of paper to knock over first.

“I had a question, Doctor. A possum tried to get into my room last night.”

“What?” He turned toward me, his eyebrows drawing low. “A possum?

What are you talking about?”

“It was trying to break through the glass,” I said. “I know that it sounds bizarre. It was very strange behavior for a possum. But this morning, when Jackson collected the body, he found three…” I took a deep breath. “… three deflated warbles. From botflies.”

“It happens,” he said gruffly, swinging back to his papers.

“I know it does. What I wanted to know was if it was possible that having two botflies like that on its head might have affected its behavior.

Driven it to madness, like rabies.”

This time Halder stared at me for quite a long time. My gut began to clench tighter as the seconds ticked by. Had I somehow offended him? He was so protective of his notes, had I somehow guessed at something that he thought was a secret?

“I don’t…” he began, and then stopped. “That would certainly be unusual.” He pinched the bridge of his nose tightly. “Describe its behavior to me again. Describe it exactly.”

I obeyed. When I reached the part about it leaping at the doorknob, he muttered something to himself, then cut me off. “Where is the body now?”

“Err … Jackson was going to burn it.”

For a moment I thought there might be another eruption of temper. His face flushed dark red that would have required multiple layers of crimson to capture. But instead of yelling, he leapt to his feet and sprinted out the door at a speed I would never have guessed him capable of, shouting for Jackson.

I followed, more than a little surprised. It had been an odd question, but that odd? I truly hadn’t expected him to do anything but dismiss me out of hand.

Halder flung open the door and charged into the garden. “Jackson!

Jackson, where are you?!”

We ran the man to earth at the far end of the vegetable garden. He had been building a fire of brush in the burn pit, and looked up in surprise at our

shout. “Sir?”

“Give me that!” Halder shouted.

“Err…” Jackson looked down at the bundle in his hands. “Sir, it’s a dead —”

“I know what it is, man!” Halder snatched the bundle away from Jackson and began to unwrap it, revealing the stiffened body beneath. “Where … there! Yes. Warbles, most definitely.” He slid a finger into the opening in the slack skin and pulled it open, looking inside.

I took a step back. I know that rabies is transmitted by bites, and that possums rarely carry it in any event, but the sight of Halder’s bare fingers in the bloody flesh was alarming.

Halder’s face screwed up in concentration, then he turned, looking around almost wildly. His eye fell on the lean-to that served as a potting shed, and he rushed to it and swept his arm along the table, knocking trowels, pots, and bits of twine to the ground. The crash of breaking ceramic did not even seem to register with him.

Jackson looked at the mess with resigned dismay. “Sir…?”

I could have told him that it was no use. There was a light in the doctor’s eyes that I knew well, though I had never seen it in Halder before. Scientific

curiosity had set its claws in him and nothing short of an anvil to the head was likely to penetrate.

He laid the possum out on the table, wiping his fingers on the burlap.

“Miss Wilson,” he said over his shoulder. “Go to my study. There is a leather case by the desk there. Bring it to me at once.”

I did not like the man, but his intensity was infectious. I snatched up my skirts and ran.

The leather case was surprisingly heavy and resembled a doctor’s bag. I lugged it back down the stairs, to where Halder was practically dancing with impatience. He snatched it from me and opened it up.

The kit inside was a cross between a surgeon’s and a butterfly collector’s. He pulled out forceps and metal probes, then a small, sharp scalpel, and set to work.

Jackson edged away, but I found myself at Halder’s elbow, peering down at his work. He cut away the leading flap of the warble and peeled it back, revealing a round hollow in the jaw muscle and the skull beneath. “There,” he murmured, half to himself. “The larva was up against the bone, and— there!”

He grabbed a metal probe and poked it through a small, neat hole, just behind the eye. I swallowed and told myself that I was fascinated.

“Intrusion into the brain,” Halder breathed. “The hole is located where the larva’s head would be, but how could it have penetrated bone?”

He turned the possum, looking for the warble on the back of the skull.

Rigored as it was, the body did not wish to achieve that angle. “Miss Wilson!” he barked. “Hold the specimen steady!”

Nature, I told myself. This is an act of nature, and I am a naturalist. I picked up the burlap to wrap around my hands—I was not risking my fingers so close to a scalpel, no matter what Halder thought—and took hold.

It might as well have been a wooden carving of a possum.

Fully rigored, I thought absently, as the doctor began carving into the warble at the back of the skull. Usually achieved within three hours of death, lasting up to eighteen hours. Of course it would be stiff by now, it beat itself to death last night.

Something itched at my mind, but Halder let out a sudden cry of triumph and snatched up another probe. “Look!” he said. “Look, there! It has

burrowed through the bone and deeply into the brain!” He tilted the possum and slid a probe in, far deeper than I would have guessed possible.

“I did not think botflies did that,” I said.

“They don’t!” He beamed at me, his insectile face suddenly transformed.

“This has never been recorded before! Never!”

I don’t delude myself that Halder thought I was in any way worthy of sharing this discovery with him. If I hadn’t been there, he would have told Jackson, and if Jackson hadn’t been there, he would have told the cat. This was scientific enthusiasm, pure and simple.

He withdrew the probe, made a note of the depth, and began hastily scrawling down measurements on a pad from the bag. I set the body down with some relief.

“Could this explain its strange behavior?” I asked.

“What? Oh yes, yes. Well … possibly.” He frowned down at the possum.

“There are parasites that change the host’s behavior, certainly. The wasp Ampulexa sinensis stings a cockroach in the brain and renders it docile. It leads the roach back to the burrow by its antenna, and then lays its eggs in it. And of course that Wallace fellow was terribly excited about his Ophiocordyceps fungus and the ants. Though those are much more directed.

This may simply have been pressure on the brain causing strange behavior…” He trailed off, scribbling more notes and muttering to himself.

I suppressed another shudder. I had heard of the Ophiocordyceps fungus discovered by the famous Alfred Russel Wallace—there were still fights in nature journals about it now, twenty-five years later—but I had not heard of the wasp. While I had never previously empathized with a cockroach, it was much too easy to imagine oneself being helplessly led around, then lying passively in the dark while things hatched inside you and began to gnaw … “Miss Wilson!” Halder barked, and I looked up, grateful for the interruption, if not his tone. “Are you certain that the warbles were present last night? And that the larvae had not yet evacuated?”

“Completely sure,” I said. “I thought they were tumors.”

“And it did not occur to you to capture the beast?”

I drew myself up. “Dr. Halder, I believed it might be rabid. And when it stopped beating at my door, I assumed that it had left the balcony. I did not realize that it had simply dropped dead a few feet away.”

Halder sighed, much put-upon. “No, of course not. It would be too much to hope. I must show Sanders. He knows his mammals, he will be able to tell me … Jackson, prepare the wagon— No, never mind that. Saddle my horse. I must be in Raleigh at the earliest possible moment, before the body has a chance to decay any further!” He wrapped the bundle back up and made for the house, clutching the dead possum to his chest as if it were an infant.

Jackson gazed after him, glanced at me, and shook his head. “The man’s completely mad,” he said.

“Probably.” I didn’t feel like getting into a discussion over the joys of discovery. Mostly I felt an overwhelming need to wash my hands. Possibly with lye.

I went inside and scrubbed myself nearly raw with water that only had a few beetle parts floating in it. Partway through, I heard the sound of hoofbeats, a trot breaking rapidly into a gallop, as Halder made for Siler City and the train station. In the hall, the clock struck eleven.

The itch in my memory suddenly blossomed. I had staggered downstairs not long after dawn, and had found Mrs. Kent. Call it seven in the morning.

She had insisted that I eat, and I had obeyed, not wanting to seem any more hysterical than I already did. She had finished cooking, then agreed to go see the door. Had that been about eight? And it had taken at least an hour for Jackson to arrive, while I perused the sketchbooks. Yet when he had nudged it with his boot, the body had been as limp as a dishrag.

I had heard the clock toll midnight while I was frantically throwing the lock on the door. No matter how I calculated, the possum had been alive on the balcony until almost dawn, separated from me by no more than a pane of glass.

The time of death hardly matters, does it? It didn’t get in, and what’s an hour or two either way?

Yet despite that, it troubled me to think of the poor mad thing lying outside the door all night. Both because it had been suffering, and because I could not escape the feeling that it had been waiting for me to unlock the door so that it could finally get inside.

I went back to my room in a mood that had passed through pensive and come out the other side. Possums with wolf worms in the brain. Halder’s

excitement. The sketchbooks.

Dear Lord, the sketchbooks.

I picked one up, flipped through it, and set it down again. Louisa. What had become of her? Had she died? Had she gotten away safely? Had Halder really killed her lover?

Who might know more? If Mrs. Kent didn’t want to talk, who would?

The image of Ma Kersey dropped into my head, fully formed, like a page ripped from the gossip rag of the gods. I would bet my eyeteeth that she knows what happened to Louisa. Possibly before Louisa did.

I snatched up my own sketchbook and went to find out.

“You want to see Ma Kersey?” Mrs. Kent gave me a wary look, as if a rabbit had just announced its desire to pay a visit to the wolf. “What for?”

I’d run the housekeeper to earth two doors down from the studio, where she was determinedly airing out a guest bedroom. Furniture huddled under sheets like the ghost of occupations past.

Fortunately, I had already thought of an answer to this question. “I draw plants,” I said. “Well, I used to. For my father, you see. I like them a lot more than bugs.”

Mrs. Kent smiled, though she still looked a trifle puzzled. “I can understand that. Plants, eh? Flowers and such?”

“Yes, but also … here, it’s easier to show you.” I fetched the Botanica from my room and opened it to my favorite page, the jack-in-the-pulpit. A strange little vase of a plant, with dark streaks running up from the base, and the spadix tucked inside like a tongue in a toad’s mouth, and another illustration alongside it, of the bright orange fruit that clung to it later in the year.

Mrs. Kent gazed at it for a long time, turning the pages almost reverently. “So this is what you do…” she murmured.

I felt a sudden stab of embarrassment. Had I really not shown her any of my work? No, I hadn’t. However good a job I did on the screwworm larvae, it wasn’t the sort of thing I could imagine showing Mrs. Kent, and I’ve never been the sort of person to show off my sketchbooks. And yet she was, by leaps and bounds, the closest thing I had to a friend in this place.

I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing in the studio all day. Only bugs, not plants.”

“Virginia bluebells,” she said softly, running a fingertip over the page.

“These were my mother’s favorite.”

I had no idea what to say.

“You have quite a gift,” said Mrs. Kent, handing the book back to me.

She cleared her throat and straightened her back, apparently realizing that she’d been poring over the book for the last few minutes instead of working. “What’s it to do with Ma Kersey though?”

“Plants,” I explained. The deception, which hadn’t bothered me in the slightest five minutes ago, suddenly seemed like a betrayal. Nevertheless, I had started down this road, and suddenly changing my mind would sound even stranger. “You said she was good at doctoring. A person like that uses a lot of herbs—they always do—and I wanted to ask her about some of what she uses. Father was very interested in things like pollination and seed dispersal, but he never cared much for things like medicinal uses. I did.

Do.”

Mrs. Kent nodded. “Ah, yeah, herbs. She does a spring tonic that’ll curl your toes and chase the winter right out of your bones.” She fanned the air with her apron. A little breeze forced its way through the sluggish heat and stirred the furniture covers. “Right. She’s not hard to find. Just go left as you come to the road and go about a mile down, maybe a little bit more.

You’ll cross two roads, and then there’s an itty-bitty drive with about five houses on it. Hers is the last one in the row.” She paused, eyeing me up and down. “She likes people to ask her for advice. She’ll probably be happy to tell you. But I’d take her a little gift anyway, just in case.”

I set out the next morning with a satchel I’d borrowed from Jackson slung over one shoulder. Despite leaving early enough that it was still cool, I can’t say that it was a particularly pleasant walk. The weight of the Botanica made the strap dig into my shoulder after the first half mile, and the road itself was in dismal repair. The recent rain had turned parts of it into

sucking mud, and I had to switch which side I walked on multiple times to avoid puddles that resembled small inland seas.

Oh well, it’s still more comfortable than riding in Phelps’s wagon, I thought, with all his talk of devils in the woods. Presumably he’d been referring to the blood thieves? I suppressed the urge to look over my shoulder. There was nothing out here. It had been three years ago. I’d been roaming around at night myself, and the only thing I’d seen was Halder, who had been quite alarming enough, thank you.

The distance was more like a mile and a half, all told, but the right-hand side opened up after a while, into fields that had been cleared for farmland.

My mind kept returning to the possum, to the hole drilled into its skull … I ordered myself to think about something else.

Fine. Is Halder really a murderer, do you think?

This was not an improvement. I tried to distract myself by identifying the plants that sprung up along the verge—dock and bitter cress, garden vetch, crownbeard and speedwell. On the side partly shaded by the woods, burgundy wood sorrel put up tiny flowers. When I ran out of new plants, I went to birdcalls. The scolding of a Carolina chickadee, the liquid trilling of a hermit thrush, the white-throated sparrow that calls Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody … from low to the ground.

It was with some relief that I reached the turnoff. The row of houses was just as described. Ma Kersey’s house stood a little apart, surrounded by a garden that did not so much grow as rampage in all directions. A few chickens ran screaming from my approach, and a rooster stood on top of a ramshackle henhouse and shouted insults at me in Chicken.

Unlike her birds, Ma Kersey was delighted to see me, or at least did a pretty good imitation, and professed equal delight with the gift I brought her. I had spent part of the evening carefully drawing a rabbit, based on a few quick sketches I’d done of one that had been hanging around Jackson’s garden, made larger and fluffier with imagination. I wrote World-Famous Chatham Rabbit underneath, which she read aloud when I presented it to her with some trepidation. (It’s always awkward to give people art that you’ve made. It feels egotistical, as if you think so highly of yourself and your skill that you expect other people to be impressed as well. Even now, when I make my living with that skill, I can never quite shake the feeling

that people are humoring me like a child when I give them something I’ve drawn.) When she had finished admiring the rabbit, she put the drawing up on a high shelf, looking down over the room, then put on the teakettle.

“How you settling in?” asked Ma Kersey. She cocked her head to one side, eyes bird-bright. “How do you like them woods?”

“I love the woods. I grew up tromping through them with my father,

painting things.”

“Mmm.”

I wasn’t sure if that was an invitation or not, but I decided to treat it as one. “Though I heard something about some … err … bad things that happened in the woods years ago,” I said cautiously, “but that was a long time ago. Errr … blood thieves?”

Ma Kersey’s bright little eyes narrowed. “Jackson’s been telling you tales, has he?”

I gulped. I didn’t want to get him in trouble, and I had a feeling that Ma Kersey could make quite a lot of trouble if she chose. “He didn’t mean any harm. I’m sure he was just trying to put a scare in the new girl.”

“Mmm.” Ma Kersey poured the tea. “Wasn’t just a story. Some bad things went on back then.”

I was beginning to regret starting down this road at all. Despite the goodwill the Chatham rabbit had won me, the old woman’s tone was, if not hostile, at least chill. “Well,” I said hastily, “he said they caught some

people and it all stopped happening.”

“The three-month babies,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Brother and sister, they were.” She shook her head. “Old story. Old gossip. Never mind it. It’s over now. For good, I hope. What’s this you’re wanting to know about plants?”

The phrase “three-month babies” had lodged like a thorn in my brain, but I shook it off and explained about medicinal plants, passing the heavy copy of the Botanica to her. Ma Kersey read the title aloud, and began to page through it. When she reached a plant that she knew, she told what she used it for, and she knew a lot of uses. I hastily pulled out my sketchbook and began taking notes. It was unlikely that there would ever be another edition of Botanica, but there have been a few books published by female

naturalists over the years, and books on herbs and home remedies seem to be of greater interest to publishers. Perhaps my hasty deception might prove truthful after all.

My hand nearly cramped by the time she had finished telling me all the uses for dock leaves, and I stopped and shook it out. I was sneakingly grateful when she reached my favorite section of the book, page after page of terrestrial orchids. Few of them have any medicinal use that I know of.

Ma Kersey looked through them appreciatively nonetheless—crane-fly orchid, rattlesnake plantain, wake-robin, pink lady’s slipper. “Mmm-mm- mm,” she said. “You drew all these, huh?”

“Every one. Though it took a long time.”

“I’ll just bet it did.” She sat back, pushing the book back toward me.

“And now you’re drawing for the doctor’s book, are you?”

I didn’t think I’d get a better conversational opening than this. “I am.

Though that one’s partly done already.” I licked suddenly dry lips.

“Halder’s wife, Louisa, was the illustrator before me.”

“Oh, Louisa,” said Ma Kersey, shaking her head. “Poor unhappy soul.”

“I heard that she left…?” I let the last word trail off.

Ma Kersey pounced on it like Smiley on a piece of string. “Left! Ran for her life, more like. Oh, it’s a sad tale, it is.” She poured herself out more tea.

“She was younger ’n you when she married the doctor. Not that he was as old then as he is now. They were married a good fifteen years. Probably felt like fifteen hundred, so far as Louisa was concerned.”

“The doctor can be difficult to get along with,” I said.

“The doctor’s a horse’s ass, if’n you ask me.”

“That too,” I admitted. She cackled. I plunged onward. “Although I didn’t figure him for a murderer, but Jackson said…” I let the word trail again, and Ma Kersey obligingly picked it up.

“Saul, yep. Damn shame. Odd fellow, but a good one, and he loved Louisa something fierce.” She sighed. “Suppose if I was being charitable, I’d say the doctor didn’t mean to kill him, but I doubt he shed many tears when he did.”

So it was true. He really had killed Saul. I had no idea how to feel about that. Aloud I said, “Dear god. Poor Louisa.”

“Ayep.” Ma Kersey gestured with her cup. “Anyway, she ain’t been seen around these parts since, and if she’s smart, she won’t be. Halder’s still got

all her money, and maybe she could get a divorce and try to get some of it back, but I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for her chances.”

This struck me as extremely depressing. I clutched the Botanica against my chest, appreciating the solid, grounding weight. “And you’re sure she got away? Really sure?”

I hadn’t really thought Louisa was chained up in a shed being fed live chickens at random intervals … at least, I was pretty sure I hadn’t … but it would be nice to be sure.

Ma Kersey gave me an odd look. “Sure as sure can be. Why?”

I had no good answer. I ducked my head and said, “Just … I worry about things.” Which was certainly a truth, if not quite the truth.

She drummed her fingers on the table for a moment, studying me. “You ever start to worry about Halder, you tell Rose,” she said abruptly. “Or come tell me.”

I nodded, though the mention of Rose brought another question.

“Jackson said that Mrs. Kent … Rose … was Louisa’s friend. But how can she still work for Halder?”

“Ahhh…” Ma Kersey shook her head. “Don’t judge her too harsh. Her mama was in a bad way right then. She’d got old and her mind wandered ’til she could get lost inside her own house. Rose didn’t dare move her.

Probly she always meant to leave, as soon as she could. And then her mama dies and it’s hard to think about moving right then, and pretty soon it’s another year past.” She poured out more tea, even though it was growing cold. “And she keeps lookin’ for another place, but there ain’t so many people around here who’ll hire a married couple who ain’t the same color.

Halder’s a mean old bastard, but he ain’t stingy and Louisa got away safe, so maybe it doesn’t seem so urgent now.”

I felt my shoulders sag as I pictured Mrs. Kent, hating Halder and unable to leave because her mother was dying. I’d sat in a tiny little bedroom myself, listening to my father drown in his own lungs. I’d have worked for the Confederacy or the Devil if it meant I could pay the doctor. “God,” I muttered. “How awful.”

“It ain’t easy to swallow some things down. Makes you feel like maybe you aren’t who you thought you were. She’s got a good husband though, and that’s got to count for something. I’ll send you home with some of my tonic for her.” Ma Kersey stood, and I took it as a sign that the interview

was over. I gathered up my books, thanking her again for sharing her knowledge with me.

She waved her hand. “Ain’t nothing. Told plenty of people over the years.” She gave me a sly grin. “Couple of ’em brought me rabbits, but none so fine as that one.”

I was turning to go when another thought occurred to me.

“Ma Kersey?”

“Eh?” She paused, the shadow of the door falling over half her face, a study of light and darkness.

“You said earlier … ah … something about ‘three-month babies’?”

“Ah. Them.” A gold tooth flashed from the shadows. “Never were right, not since the day they were born. Their granddaddy was a preacher. Not a kind man, but he thought he knew his duty.” For a moment, I thought she would stop there and wave it off as old gossip as she had earlier, but then she heaved a great sigh, closed the door, and sat back down. I perched on the edge of the chair, waiting.

“Those two. Sad little things, they were. Brother and sister. I delivered them, you know. Their mama didn’t want to tell nobody about it. Strange, that was. Not that young women don’t get in trouble sometimes and try to hide it, the Lord knows, but this was a different kind of trouble, though I

was too stupid to see it at the time.”

“What kind of trouble?”

She picked at the corner of a shawl with her fingernails. “Swore up and down that she’d met the father not three months earlier. I thought, fine, she just doesn’t know how to count, or maybe there’d been somebody six months afore that. Or maybe she just didn’t know what she was doing would lead to a baby. Wouldn’t be the first girl who thought you couldn’t get pregnant afore you were married or if you were standing up or some damn fool thing like that. But afterward, I thought yeah, maybe it was only three months. Wouldn’t surprise me now. Those babes weren’t right from the first.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. This was making even less sense than I’d expected. “Weren’t right?”

“Not shaped right. Not moving right. Eyes all sealed shut like a kitten’s, and a mouth full of milk teeth like a kitten too.” She made a small, exasperated sound. “But I’ve delivered more babies than I can remember,

and they don’t all come out right. Sometimes they don’t grow right inside and they don’t live more’n five minutes. Got twins that were all grown together once, and more’n a few with some extra bits here and there. You ever seen one of those two-headed calves in a jar? People’re no different, really.” She grabbed the teapot from the side table and poured us both another cup. I accepted the one that she thrust at me, even though it was tepid by now.

“Anyway, those babies weren’t like that. They weren’t like a person gone wrong. It was like they were supposed to be some other thing entirely.” She took a sip of tea, then stared at it in disgust, nose wrinkling.

“Shit.”

“It’s fine—” I started to say, but she snatched the cup out of my hand and dumped it out.

“Never mind the damn tea. I need something stronger anyway.” She retrieved a flask from somewhere under the shawl, and poured a small amount of the contents into my cup, then slugged some back straight from the bottle. The smell alone made my eyes sting. I lifted my cup and let the alcohol just touch my lower lip, which promptly began to burn. Jackson’s moonshine clearly had nothing on Ma Kersey’s.

“Drink up, it’s good for you. Practically medicinal.” She gazed past me at nothing. “Not like a person. That’s what I’ve always thought,” she said moodily.

“Err…” I tried to find my way back into the conversation. “Thought what?”

“Those babies. They were like a whole ’nother sort of animal. Wrong for one of us, but maybe right for one of them. And maybe they did only take three months to get born.” She put back more of the moonshine. I tried letting a drop trickle between my teeth, and immediately regretted it.

“Did you ask their mother about it?” I asked, when I could breathe again.

“Couldn’t. She didn’t survive. You see that much blood going in, you know you can’t save the mama. Would have been better if I couldn’t save the babies either, but that’s the sort of thing you don’t know ’til later.” Ma Kersey shook her head slowly. “Not sure she would have made it anyway.

Wasn’t hardly anything left of her once them babies came out, like carrying ’em had hollowed her out. Most women gain weight, but not her. Wrists like sticks and her skin hangin’ loose as an old coat.”

In my mind’s eye, a green caterpillar clung to a stem, its body sagging as white wasp larvae devoured it from the inside. I took a larger swallow of liquor, not caring about the taste any longer, hoping the burn would drive the image away.

“Anyway, her granddaddy took ’em and said he was gonna raise ’em, learn ’em their Bible, made sure they had clothes on their backs. Not that they were simple, nothin’ like that. But strange, everything about them was strange. Their eyes were shut but with eyelids so thin you could see ’em watching you through the skin. Really watching too, not just staring the way any baby does.” Ma Kersey swirled the moonshine as if it were the finest brandy instead of a bare step up from wood alcohol. “Always meant to go back and check on ’em, but the next thing you know, the court strikes down the Rights Act of ’75 and things go completely to hell here.” She snorted. “All of us had a bit on our minds, you might say.”

“Understandable,” I said, a bit faintly. I had been born the year after the war ended. Fortunately, my father had been engaged in an extensive survey of wildflowers in New England when everything came to a head. We’d moved back while the ink of the South’s surrender was still wet on the page.

But I was old enough to remember Reconstruction, and how things had seemed to get better, and then suddenly it was all gone again.

Ma Kersey wiped her mouth. “Anyway, lost track of them and their granddaddy, but I didn’t think much of it. Lost track of plenty of people after the war, after all. Didn’t even occur to me they might be behind all the killings, I’ll tell you that.”

“Jackson said they were pretty bad,” I said hesitantly.

“Bad enough. When they finally did catch ’em, I still didn’t think of it at first. Shouldn’t have been more’n about twelve, and what those men caught sure looked older. But later I got to thinking, if it only took ’em three months to get born, maybe it didn’t take ’em that long to get grown either.”

She stood up, and this time it was clear that the interview was over. I went meekly to the door.

“What happened to their grandfather?” I asked.

Ma Kersey’s voice followed me down the steps. “It was pretty clear he’d been keeping them locked up. Inside an old shed on his property, like dogs.”

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