And for once in her life, for the one time she could recall in her thirty-two years here on earth, the voices were silent.

And Hattie was afraid. Deeply, truly afraid.

She knew in that moment that it was over. Her time had come. But Jane, Jane would be all right. They would not find her. She was sure.

Hattie went willingly to the tree, the largest in the woods around the bog. When they were young, she and Candace had called it the “Great Grandmother Tree” and marveled at its thick limbs that stuck out like arms in every direction, some straight, some curved.

Tree of life.

Tree of death.

Tree of my own ending, she thought as she saw the hangman’s noose. There was a stool directly under it. A simple, three-legged kitchen stool. She wondered whom it belonged to. If they would take it home later, put it back at the table. If someone would eat dinner sitting on it tonight.

The men shoved her over to the stool; one of them put the noose around her neck, the rough rope draped like a heavy necklace. The rope had been thrown over a branch about fifteen feet up, and beneath it, three men stood holding the other end. She recognized them as the fathers of the dead children: Candace’s husband, Huck Bishkoff; Walter Kline; and James Fulton.

“You should cover her head,” Peter Boysko from the lumber mill suggested. “Blindfold her.”

Peter had visited her for herbs and healing charms when his wife and children were so sick with the flu a few years back. They’d recovered well, and Peter had returned to Hattie with two of his wife’s chicken potpies to thank her.

“No,” said Candace. “I want to see her face as she dies. I want to watch her and know there is justice for Lucy and Ben and Lawrence. Justice for everyone she’s ever harmed.”

“I’ve harmed no one,” Hattie told them. “And if all of you had listened to me, those children might still be alive.”

If it weren’t for my daughter, they would still be alive, she thought.

If only she’d been able to see that part. If only she’d known what was coming, she might have been able to stop it. But if there was one thing she’d learned, it was that you can’t change the future. You can catch a glimpse of it, but it’s not in your power to change it.

“Shut her up!” Barbara Kline snarled. She was Lawrence’s mother. Lawrence had been very ill with chicken pox last year, and his mother had brought him to see Hattie, who’d sent them home with a healing salve and an infusion to drink. Lawrence had recovered without so much as a single pox scar. “The witch lies,” Barbara hissed now.

“Send her back to the devil where she belongs!” a man in the crowd bellowed.