“‘Why there?’ I asked him, and he said it was because Mom thought that hidden compartment in the trunk was the safest place. She’d gotten pretty paranoid by that point. She didn’t even trust the safe-deposit boxes at the bank. And I got to thinking about the vision you had on the night Mom died, how you just saw me opening the trunk, not what I was supposed to find inside. Of course, I’d naturally assumed the most important thing was the forged adoption papers. I mean, who wouldn’t? But it turns out there was something else in that folder, something that we ignored.

“Because I do believe in your gifts, Lee,” she told me, her hand on mine as we waited for the doctors to stitch up Horace. “I really truly 100 percent fucking do. I just don’t think you always interpret your visions right. Maybe that’s my real purpose. Maybe that’s what I’m actually good for.”

My head was all swirly, my heart broken and numb. Had I really killed Grandma? Had I really lost the Farm, lost Cass, lost everything? But Murphy kept talking, like if she didn’t get it all out now I would never believe her, I’d be lost to her forever.

“Anyway, that night I took the keys and went through Horace’s trunk again. This would have been at like two A.M. or so, when it was still pitch dark outside. Besides the hundreds of batshit letters from Grandma, there were a lot of files in that trunk, including a whole stack of court records, newspaper clippings, and Mom’s own handwritten notes detailing these mysterious deaths that happened in Benign, Louisiana, twenty-five or twenty-six years ago. Suicides and such, real dramatic sad things, like the mayor of the town slitting his wrists with a knife and then handing it to his wife, who did the exact same thing to herself. Or this rich old lawyer who cut his own throat in his bathroom.” I remembered my vision, the one I’d had after the party at the tenant house, and it made me sick. “Grisly stuff, and it was only happening to the rich folks in town, according to these old documents of Mom’s. And you know who they willed all their money to? You guessed it—right to Grandma. Turns out Jeremiah wasn’t this benevolent sweetheart of a guy after all. Turns out he was pretty mercenary, preying on the richest in town to fund the growth and development of the Farm.