“Oh no,” Helen said, thinking of what Nate had said—it was spring fed, could go down very deep.

The librarian nodded. “George pulled her out, did CPR. He brought her back, but she was never the same. Brain damage.” She shook her head. Clucked her tongue. “Never woke up, poor thing. After a week or so, George had them turn off the machines, let her go peacefully.”

Helen’s mind flashed to the table in the trailer laid out for dinner, of the two empty wine glasses. The dusty bottle of wine that still sat on the top shelf of their kitchen cabinet.

“How horrible,” Helen said.

“An accident, they said, but George, he went around saying that it was no accident.” The librarian waited a beat, looked around, then lowered her voice and whispered, “He said it was Hattie.”

Helen felt a chill start at her neck and creep all the way down to her tailbone.

“I’m sorry, Hattie? Who—”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about Hattie yet,” the woman in the Snoopy sweatshirt said in a sort of chortling way, as if Hattie were some dowdy old woman who walked around town in funny hats.

“No. I don’t know that name.” Helen swallowed hard. Because she did know the name, didn’t she? Somehow.

Be a historian, she told herself. Gather facts. Leave your emotions out of it. “What can you tell me about her?”

“Oh, I guess you’d say Hattie Breckenridge is the most famous resident of Hartsboro. There are all kinds of stories. People said she was a witch. Some said she was the bride of the devil himself. Spoke in tongues. Knew what was going to happen before it did.”

“And she lived by the bog?”

“Oh yes, in a little cabin she built herself after her parents’ house burned down. All that witch mumbo jumbo—I don’t know about that. But she did live in a little house by the bog and that’s a true fact.”

“My husband and I found the remnants for an old foundation out by the bog,” Helen said.

The librarian nodded. “That’d be Hattie’s place. Folks called it the ‘crooked house,’ because Hattie wasn’t much of a carpenter and nothing was straight or level.”

Helen nodded, thinking of the arguments she and Nate still had sometimes when a measurement was off by a fraction of an inch. Would their house turn out crooked, too? She shook the thought away, remembering the beautifully straight and plumb downstairs walls they’d just finished today.

“What time frame are we talking about here?” Helen asked.

“Oh, I don’t know for sure. Back in my grandmother’s time. Early 1900s, I think? Mary Ann at the historical society would know.”

“Do you think there are any photos? Of the cabin or Hattie?”

“Could be,” the librarian said. “You talk to Mary Ann. If there are any, she’ll know.”