What happened? She heard a door shut, but there were no doors in the ground. She was deeply frightened all of a sudden. Her father had a temper. He hit her mother, he hit Johnny. He hit her sometimes, too. She didn’t know where he had gone, but now she wanted to get away. She felt something scary, something threatening, so she ran back to the house and never told Johnny or her mother what she had seen. If her father found out, he would beat her with a belt again, she just knew it.

That afternoon, Tilly took a deep breath and headed out toward the back part of their property, up the hill, down the hill, and behind the rim of trees toward the stream. She didn’t know where to look at first. She knew now that her father may have had a hiding place back here. She was so young when she’d seen him with the black package, but what she saw wasn’t right. Was there a cellar all the way out here? Had he dug a hole? Then she saw it. The rock she’d remembered as a child. Her father had disappeared to the right of the rock. She got on her hands and knees and moved nettles and dirt for over an hour until her hands finally hit wood.

She brushed the dirt and rotting debris away until she uncovered a door in the ground, with a handle and a padlock. She could not remove the padlock, but she could remove, by stomping on it, the rotting wood around it. At first, when the door finally gave way, she saw nothing but a moldy ladder. Below that, a black pit. There were ropes and chains on the walls. There was dirt on the floor.

Tilly peered into the gloom. A rush of cool air that smelled of rot and mold and something else wrapped itself around her. She coughed, covered her face with her elbow, and sat back until the smell dissipated. Shaking, knowing she would see what she didn’t want to see, she gripped the ladder hooked to the side of the wall.

She wanted to run. She wanted to call the police. She wanted to get out of there, the sense of evil cloying. But more than that, she wanted to know. She climbed down the ladder, a step at a time. When she reached the bottom, the stench unbelievable, as if the devil had rotted, she took a deep breath, told herself to be brave, once again, and looked around.

Instantly, she wanted to scream.

Tilly swallowed down the bile in her throat. Inside the carved-out dirt room, in the place where her father told her never, ever to go, were the bodies.

She recognized one of her mother’s favorite dresses on a skeleton.

There were other skeletons. They wore dresses, too.