At last, she reached the final photo: a picture of her parents. It looked as though it might have only been taken a few years before. They were posed outside the house, just like their forebearer Ephraim had been. Her father held his arm around her mother’s back. She leaned into him, smiling.

“Your mother was the eleventh generation,” Nora murmured. She reached for the wine bottle but it was empty. “That makes you the twelfth.”

Margot felt frozen by her parents’ likenesses. They were smiling in the image, and it was hard to think of what would happen in just a few short years. Margot swallowed and felt a lump stick in her throat. “The tragedies didn’t end with Ephraim, did they?”

Nora and Ray didn’t answer, but they didn’t need to. As Margot turned back through the images, she saw hints of loss speckled through them: a child in one image that was missing in the next. A man with only one arm. A woman, eyes closed, not from blinking as the picture was taken but from blindness.

“This is why people think the land is cursed,” she said, the realization sinking into her like lead poured into her veins.

Ray cleared his throat. “Farms can have a high number of accidents. That’s true across the country. Things are safer these days, though. Guards on the vats; protocols to protect workers. It’s not like it used to be.”

They were pleasing words, calculated to calm her, but they were a deflection, not an answer.

Every new thing I learn about the hill is somehow worse. The hanging tree would have been enough to leave her cold on its own. But the layers kept stacking on: murders, deaths, suffering. At every turn there was some new dark pall draping across the estate.

As though it really was somehow bad.

Cursed.

She had seen the look in Witchety’s eyes: the wariness, the reverence. She believed the land had been poisoned by evil. And that evil, now, was returning. Coming to exact a price.

She turned from the photos to face the two store managers. They watched her, silent but expectant. A hint of red was still visible around Nora’s eyes, and the color hadn’t returned to her face. Ray had finished the bottle of wine. Even while Margot watched him, his eyes flicked toward the window for a heartbeat before returning to her.

“I think I saw someone in the shed behind my home earlier.” The words tumbled out of her like water. “Except, when I looked closer, they weren’t there.”

“Oh?” Nora’s smile twitched. She took up the napkin, already folded once, and flattened it before folding it along a different axis. “What do you think it was?”