“Shouldn’t there be a farmhouse somewhere? For the family, I mean,” Melissa said. “They had to have a house somewhere. It’s not like the apples picked themselves.”

“Weird,” Jess said.

We peered at the map but couldn’t locate anything resembling a house. So I scanned the other papers and slid another toward me. This one was labeled 1875. It was nearly unmarked, with large farms crisscrossing the paper and only one road by our neighborhood. A small, dark shape was the only object close to where our houses would eventually be.

The shape was located at, according to my best guestimate, the intersection of my backyard with Jess’s and Liz’s. If all the fencing was removed and the land looked at as a whole, the dark rectangle covered a piece of each of our property. But the more I looked at it, the more it appeared to be mostly in Liz’s backyard. Right where the She Shed pit was located.

I tapped at it. “X marks the spot. Or, a weird rectangle from the 1800s.”

“That has to be a house,” Melissa said as she leaned forward and squinted at it. “Tony has been doing some research on the former owners of our house, and no one lived there until the 1960s. We thought it was all open land that was part of the Reagan farm, three miles away.”

“Yo, Mary Ellen,” Jess called across the stone room, her voice bouncing against the walls with the acoustics of a minister preaching fire, brimstone, and the stoning of witches.

Mary Ellen appeared at the threshold, frowning, her earrings swinging back and forth like pendulums. “Yes?”

I tapped the dark rectangle. “Do you happen to know what this is? A farmhouse? It’s really close to where we live.”

Her face brightened. “Oh, you live on that street? That’s where my best friend’s daughter lives. Heather Hacker. I’m sure you all know her.” She smiled proudly and then leaned in, her voice lowering to a whisper. “Her mom and I went to Winchester High together, and we were prom princesses.”

Jess stifled a laugh and Melissa looked away, annoyed. I feigned a smile. “How wonderful. Yes, we do know Heather.”

Mary Ellen beamed and then glanced down at the map. “Oh yes, that’s the old Wanneberg farmhouse. They are the ones who owned the apple orchard. Until . . .” She trailed off and a dark look passed over her eyes.

We collectively leaned forward.

“Until what?” I said.

Her eyes flitted down to the paper and then back to us. “The Wanneberg farm was involved in a tragedy. A horror, really. Very, very sad.” Her eyes slowly met ours, and I realized she knew exactly how much she was milking this moment.

“Keep it coming, Mary Ellen.” Jess put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands.