She was taken in by a kind Baptist family in Lewisburg—the Millers. They had a large farm outside of town. Jane learned to rise in the dark hours before dawn to milk the cows, gather eggs from the hens, collect wood for the old cookstove in the kitchen. She went to church and prayed, read the Bible each night. Learned to fit in. To be someone else.

And now, now Jane was a married woman with children of her own. Her son, Mark, he was a good boy. At eleven, he looked more and more like his father every day. He took after him, too—did well in school, was strong and well-liked. But her girl child, Ann, Jane worried for her.

And, if the truth be told, Jane was actually frightened of her.

The girl knew things. Things no six-year-old should know. Things that she said her toys and dolls told her. She had a favorite doll that she was always whispering to. It was a doll Ann had made herself from rags and scraps from her mother’s sewing basket—she loved to sew, Jane’s girl. The doll was a funny-looking thing: a patchwork of colors with a pale face, an embroidered mouth like a red flower petal, and two black button eyes. Her hair was a tangle of black yarn braided together.

“What’s your dolly’s name?” she’d asked Ann, not long after she’d made her.

“She’s Hattie,” Ann said.

Jane stepped back, clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Ann giggled, thought Jane was laughing, too. “It’s a silly name, isn’t it?” she said, grinning. “It must mean she likes hats!”

Jane had never told her about her grandmother. About her real name or where she’d come from. No one living knew the truth about Jane.

“Hattie says hello,” her little girl told her. “She says she knows you.”

Jane felt as if she’d been submerged in cold water—the water back at the center of the Breckenridge Bog. She felt it pulling on her, sucking her down.

“Of course she knows me,” Jane said, forcing the words out through her too-tight throat. “She’s your doll. She lives here in our house.”

“No,” she said. “She says she knows you from before.”

Jane didn’t respond. How could she?

Before.

Before.

Before.

She tried to remember before, and what came back strongest was the smell of that damp root cellar she hid in, waiting for Mama to come. But she never did.

And what she saw when she got to the bog and peered through the circle of people gathered there:

Mama was hanging from a rope tied to a branch of that old pine, dangling, lifeless. She swung in small, slow circles like a strange pendulum.