Her own car waited for her at the hilltop. She could leave if she wanted to. Just climb in and drive away without even saying goodbye. She hadn’t quit her old job yet. The city apartment would still be there for her.

The family house stood before her at the top of the hill, tiny glimpses of it peering out from between the trees. Margot stared at it and felt her heart ache.

If she left, she would forever be giving up the answers she’d come here to find. Who had her parents been? What could cause two otherwise healthy adults to die of heart attacks in one night? And why hadn’t she been allowed to be a part of their lives?

If there was something dangerous about the property, she could maybe begin to understand them sending a child away for their protection. But Margot had been an adult for years. They’d never made any attempt to reconnect.

“Think it out.” She spoke to interrupt the crunch of her footfalls, which seemed too loud in the otherwise still landscape. “What am I asking myself here? If I got in my car, what would I be running from?”

She had no concrete answer, she realized. Witchety had spoken in foreboding generalizations: The ground was turning bad. Margot needed to be careful.

Was it some kind of curse? Bad energy seeping out from the dead buried under the hill? Was she going so far as to consider actual literal ghosts?

Or perhaps, was it something more physical than that?

Margot ran through the events from the previous night. Someone had rung the bells. Someone, perhaps, had pulled the cloth from the effigy. What if her first hunch was closest to the truth? Kant and Witchety had spoken about how reluctant people were to step on the land. Even now, superstitions about the winery seemed to thrive.

Maybe everything they feared could be put down to an individual. Someone who slung old ropes around the house and staged events to give them an otherworldly luster. Someone who, for one petty reason or another, was intent on tormenting the property’s owners and those who worked there.

Kant had said it was a coincidence that the ropes had appeared the night Margot arrived. But Occam’s razor said the simplest answer was often the correct one: someone knew she was there, and they wanted to make her nervous.

She’d reached the fence running around the house’s lawn, and Margot stopped to lean against it to give her tired feet a moment to rest. Although a human threat would be less terrifying than something otherworldly, that was no excuse to take it lightly. She’d been lax the previous night; that wouldn’t happen again. Her phone would be charged. She’d have some kind of defense. And most importantly, this time the doors would all be locked.