The next day, as I wrote down a recipe for red, white, and blue M&M’s brownies, I had to concentrate on the ingredients—flour, sugar, vanilla extract—to keep my thoughts from returning to Mavis and her family.

When Whispering Farms was built back in the 1960s, it was billed as an engineered neighborhood for families. It was touted as a suburb that had it all. The best place to have kids, to form neighborhood friendships.

Little did they know that they were building on top of an evil darkness, a suppressed rage that patiently waited for someone to discover it and unleash it. Mavis would have her revenge, if she only bided her time.

As I pulled the dry ingredients out from the pantry, I thought about her and what life must have been like to drive her to do such a thing. It was unknowable, unthinkable, but part of me still understood. She was isolated from her parents, her family. In a strange country where she didn’t know anyone, at a time when tolerance wasn’t a virtue. Long days with her children and dark, cold nights at the house. I imagined that all she wanted was friendship. Someone to listen, someone to commiserate with.

Before the time of social media and houses so close we could peer into each other’s bedrooms. Before the time when taking your dog for a walk gave you the opportunity—or misfortune, depending on who you saw—to chat with a neighbor. There were so many times when I was frustrated and angry with the monotony of my life, and seeing one of my friends was a balm for my mood. Even though Winchester often felt suffocating, like living in a scaled-down Truman Show, and I couldn’t so much as go to the grocery store without social interaction, if our family lived alone in an isolated farmhouse without anyone around at all, I didn’t know what I would do.

The madness must have crept in like the autumn chill. Little by little, until one morning the air held a bite that couldn’t be ignored, a warning.

Until it was too late, and the snow had already fallen and the ground was frozen solid. And everything around was dead.

I shook my head and opened the kitchen window to let summer air blow through the house before I had to close it in the afternoon when the sun rose high. I focused on slowly stirring the batter with a rubber spatula shaped like a dinosaur that the kids had bought for me last Mother’s Day.

That night was the annual Winchester Fourth of July fireworks. As was tradition, the Whispering Farms neighbors would gather in Big Rock Park in the center of town to watch the fireworks and then retire back to the neighborhood to drink wine and beer on patios and front porches while the kids ran around with sparklers and glow sticks.