“Did she write letters to Pine Breeze? I found one I think she might have sent.”

“Probably. I don’t rightly know. God knows she wouldn’t have told me about it, but she probably did. It sounds like something she’d do.”

“The letter kept calling Leslie’s baby ‘he.’ She thought I was going to be a boy?”

“I guess.” She shut her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again. I didn’t trust her fatigue, but then she was over a hundred years old and apparently drank like a camel.

I didn’t have to ask it. I already knew. “She thought I was Avery. She’s the one who convinced Malachi of it.”

Eliza was instantly awake again. It was that name, Avery. It stirred her every time I said it. “She was crazy. Crazy to think that.”

“Why did she think that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but I felt like she was being stubbornly untruthful. “I don’t know how she got it in her head. I told you, she liked to dig in things that weren’t her business. Arthur told her his family history, and she took it and went crazy with it. I suppose Louise told you the story, or you would’ve asked by now.”

“Yes, she told me.”

She closed her eyes again. “People used to frown on me because I never married or had children, but I’ve seen what mothers do, and I want no part of it. Avery, he . . . Avery might not have been so bad if his mother hadn’t been a witch. She did it to him. She made him what he was because she hated us, and she wanted him to hate us too. She wanted him to hurt us, because she hadn’t been able to. She made him into a monster. A sorko. That’s what they called him. It’s what he called himself, too. Wore it like a badge of honor. Lord, but he hated us all, and she’s the one who inspired it.”

Can’t hardly blame her, I thought, but I kept it to myself. “And Malachi’s mother wasn’t any better. You’ve seen a lot of bad mothering in your time. I don’t guess I blame you for not caring to have offspring.”

“Don’t you ever have children either. You’ve got it too, you know. I can smell it on you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, girl, I can smell it on you. You’re a witch like he was, and his mother.”

“I’m certainly not.”

“You are. I can smell it. An’ I don’t need Avery’s damned book to divine it. I smelled it on your mother too. All the women in your family, just about. There’s a smell to them, and once you’ve whiffed it, you never mistake it for anything else. Witches, every last one of you.”

“Look,” I insisted, sitting forward in the chair again. “I don’t know the first thing about Wicca, or voodoo, or anything like that. I wasn’t even raised with any of the more ordinary kind of churchgoing, so I sure don’t know what you’re saying.”