“The hangings happened on this hill,” Kant continued. “There was an oak tree here, a huge one, pretty close to where the house is now. When a person was sentenced to death, they would bring them up the hill, throw a rope into the oak’s branches, and hang them. Left the bodies there afterward. It was far enough from town that the smell and scavenging animals wouldn’t bother people, but you could look up and see the bodies each morning in the early light. They used them as a warning, I suppose, until the body began to fall apart, and then they would take them down and bury them.”

His eyes had grown distant as he stared into the mug, and Margot almost had the impression that he was looking back at memories. That was what happened when you knew a place’s history too well, she supposed. They stopped being distant stories and became something closer, something more real, almost tangible, as though he could reach back in time and touch the clammy flesh of a body hung from that tree.

“That went on for more than a hundred years. Eventually the town became more established. More civil. There were courts and jails and proper gallows, and the tree fell out of use. The land was put up for sale. Not many people wanted it; the deaths gave the air a bad taste, they thought. And it’s said that a lot of the bodies may have been buried on the hill. No one wanted to eat crops grown through graves or meat that had grazed above the dead.”

“But someone bought it,” Margot managed.

“Yes. Your family. Of sorts. There were two brothers at the time. The older bought the land, but it eventually passed to the younger. You come from his line.”

Margot frowned. “How long ago was that?”

“Seventeen sixty-one.”

“Seventeen—” She tried not to let the shock show on her face. “That’s…a long time.”

“Sure.” He paused to drink from his mug, then set it down gently. “The people who live here don’t tend to leave. It was that family—the older brother—who first created the winery. He knew the land wouldn’t be right for cattle or grains, but he thought he could build tunnels underneath that would be good for fermenting. He was right, I suppose.”

She let her gaze travel across the kitchen. The tiles and cabinets from the eighties had seemed old when she’d first seen them, but what if this was only the latest rendition of the kitchen? She imagined the walls, built with stone quarried out of the hillside—the house might have gone through a dozen remodels between its inception and the current day, but the bones could very well be hundreds of years old.