When Trey had come to visit me in the hospital, he’d already been reunited with his mother. In a strange turn of events, the police in Willow had been so preoccupied with the tragic death of Mr. Simmons that they’d completely chilled on their pursuit of Trey. It didn’t seem like Northern Reserve was eager to welcome him back, and without Mr. Simmons making demands on Judge Roberts to banish him from town, there was no longer any urgency around making sure Trey served out the rest of his punishment. It was frustrating to think that our lives had been so controlled by Mr. Simmons’s influence in Shawano and Suamico Counties, but I was trying my best to focus on being grateful that we were both still alive and that Violet’s willingness to invent a cover story had spared us trouble with the cops.

I hadn’t had a chance to ask Trey at Violet’s house about how he’d cut his hand when he was eight as his mom had advised me to ask at the Portnoys’ funeral. But Mrs. Emory had reminded him that he’d cut his left hand so badly on a thorn from this rosebush at his grandparents’ old house that he’d needed stitches across his palm. She had also told him that if he and I believed that the Simmons family was involved somehow with all the recent deaths around town, the rosebush she’d planted was the beginning of it all. It might not have mattered that Violet had cut down the bushes on her family’s property, or that she hadn’t taken care to destroy their roots. This rosebush still bloomed every spring.

Our oversight in not having taken care of this over the winter back when I’d first found the spell that Trey’s mom had tucked away in her journal was glaring; we should have known better.

I had texted Kirsten that morning about our plan to destroy this bush, and she had messaged me back immediately.

KIRSTEN 10:08 A.M.

Be careful. Remember the rule of 3. Trey’s mom cast that spell in anger.

The rule of three, of course. It was a basic principle of witchcraft specifying that any spell cast to bring harm to another would backfire threefold. But Trey and I weren’t the ones who’d cast the original spell. Even if our destruction of the rosebush might have brought bad luck to Trey’s mom, he and I were both in agreement that we had to do this, anyway. After all, Violet had visited me in the hospital and assured me that my electric “charge” was back, but there were still four more days until the next new moon.

I wasn’t about to take any chances.

“There it is,” Trey said, nodding in the direction of the front of the house. Underneath one of the front windows, an enormous rosebush grew. For the last few days, the temperatures in Wisconsin had warmed considerably, and the bush had sprouted fresh green leaves. It felt like it had been winter for ages, but now bees buzzed around us, and birds sang overhead, announcing the long overdue arrival of spring. Since the ground had thawed enough that week for Mr. and Mrs. Portnoy to be buried, I wondered if Stephani deMilo had finally been buried in St. Monica’s cemetery. When she’d died over the winter, it had been too cold.