Jane had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from screaming back then as well. She bit down, chewed at her palm until she tasted blood.

She sat there, crouched down in the bushes, and watched as the men cut her mother down, stuffed her dress full of rocks, and dragged her out into the middle of the bog, the deep place where the spring came up.

“The spirits will protect us,” Mama had always promised.

Now, years later as an adult with children of her own, Jane felt her chest grow cold and tight as she remembered her mother saying those words. And how earnestly she’d believed them.

“Hattie says she loves you,” her daughter told her, clutching the terrifying doll in her arms. “Do you love her, too?”

“Of course I do,” Jane said.

When she went in to tuck her daughter in at night, she covered the doll’s face with a blanket; sometimes, if Ann was already asleep, Jane would take the doll out and hide it under the bed or in a dark corner of her closet.

But somehow, each morning when Ann woke up, Hattie the doll was beside her once more, peering up at Jane with her shiny button eyes when she came in to draw back the curtains and say “Good morning.”

“Hattie says you shouldn’t go to work today,” Ann announced this morning as she clutched at her gruesome little doll. Its button eyes seemed to watch Jane, to give a familiar little glint when she dared look in her direction.

“Whyever not?” Jane asked, spooning more oatmeal into Ann’s bowl. Mark and his father had gone outside to feed the dog and chickens.

“Something bad is going to happen,” Ann said, pushing the bowl away. “She says you’re going to make something bad happen.”

“Me? All I’m going to do is run those old looms.”

“Please, Mama,” she said, her brow furrowed like an old lady’s, not like a little girl’s.

“Don’t be silly,” Jane told her. “Eat your breakfast and get ready for school. I’m going to work, just as I do every day.”

But when she got to the mill, Jane realized she should have listened.

Tom Chancy, the foreman, told the women they were behind—they’d gotten too lazy, too slow, and if it kept up, he was going to dock their pay. “No more midmorning breaks,” he announced when he gathered them all in a circle for a meeting before the first work bell rang. There were murmurs of dissent. “And no one,” Tom said, voice rising above all the mumbled complaints, “I mean no one, is to leave their workstation until the bell rings at noon!”

“What about cigarettes?” Maggie Bianco asked.

“You’ll wait till noon. If any one of you is foolish enough to try to sneak a smoke in here, you’ll be fired instantly.”