All the anger and certainty seemed to bleed out of the older woman, the line of her mouth becoming wet and infirm.

“It was so long ago … Even with the best will in the world, things get clouded. I painted some of it, and some of it I couldn’t. Babies crying, blood in the earth …”

“I’m sorry? Blood in the earth?”

Pamela Whittaker shook her head but didn’t say anything.

“Pamela, are you aware that Michael Reave was there, at the commune?”

The older woman went very still, like a rabbit in the grass when there’s a dog in the woods.

“Do you know who I mean by Michael Reave? The Red Wolf?”

“I thought you said you wanted to talk about my art.” Pamela Whittaker’s voice was a small thing now, and vaguely petulant. “I feel I’ve let you in here under, under false pretenses. You’re a journalist, I know that, or you used to be. I can use Google, you know.”

Heather shrugged a little, feeling all her previous admiration for Pamela Whittaker dissipating. She didn’t want to think about her old job, or how she had lost it.

“Don’t you think it’s interesting though? Here you are telling me that Fiddler’s Mill is evil, that you saw some terrible things—and all the while there was a serial killer there. I reckon that makes your story even more believable, but you don’t seem very willing to actually talk about it. Why is that?”

Pamela Whittaker pressed her thin lips together. “He was there. There were others, too. I told the police later, when all that came out … I can’t talk about it now.”

“What happened? Did they threaten you? Who else was part of this circle?”

The old woman shook her head slowly, her face creased with distaste. “There were always rumors flying about. Rumors about sex parties in the woods, what those led to, the aftermath. I got to know a young woman called Anna. She was very fragile, very vulnerable, and she should not have been in a place like that … I didn’t realize until it was too late, of course.”

“What happened to her there?”

“Truly? I don’t know. But she left Fiddler’s Mill deeply changed. I won’t lie to you, Miss Evans, Anna wasn’t entirely well to begin with. In the head, I mean. But when I saw her afterward she told me that she had gotten pregnant at the Mill, and she had had it, out in the woods. And then creatures came and took the baby away, stole it from her.”

“Monsters stole her baby? That’s what she said? Did you see her pregnant while you were there?”

Pamela Whittaker heaved her thin shoulders into a shrug. “I wasn’t always there. I drifted in and out for a while, looking for work in the area, but I do remember there was a time when she seemed happy. She wouldn’t tell me why, but she kept her hand on her stomach a lot then. I should add,” she looked at Heather from under her eyelashes, “she didn’t look pregnant to me then, and she was a tiny slip of a thing. A pregnancy would have stuck out like a bowling ball.”