The tragic part comes next. One night, Helen—her husband away for work in the city—showed up at Hezekiah’s house in a blizzard. She was having a baby and it was coming very early, and she needed help getting to the hospital. Hezekiah, seeing her outside and consumed with bitterness, ignored her cries at his window, the sound of her fists pounding at his door. He watched her wander away in the snow. Helen Bixby, I read on breathlessly, never made it to the hospital; she died in the snowstorm.

And then I come to the part that really makes me pause.

The articles indicate that no one would have been any the wiser about the terrible thing Hezekiah had not done if he hadn’t—drunk on whiskey one night—confessed all of this to his brother, who turned him in. And he was hanged for his crime, though many said it wasn’t a crime at all. One of the headlines of the articles reads: WHAT MAKES A MURDERER?

My arm hairs begin to prickle at the words.

I shuffle now, fast, through the articles until I come to one with a clear photograph, one that I can make out more easily.

There is the photo of Hezekiah Thomas. His eyes are fiery and full of anger. His skinny frame is coiled as if he’d like to lunge at the photographer. He is standing beside a beautiful white house, built by his own hands. My house.

I know him, of course. His face is only too familiar to me. He lives in my basement.

He haunts the hospital because he should have brought her there that night, I think. He can’t let the past go.

I feel a small—just a tiny—prick of sadness for the Murderer. Clearly his guilt and rage have made him a monster.

The phone rings again; again it’s Germ, and I don’t answer. She calls a few more times, then gives up completely. As the afternoon fades into evening, the house is quiet again.

Watching the sun sink slowly in the sky, I feel a weight in my stomach—about the Murderer, about the witches, about my mom. All of this knowledge, and I’m no closer to really knowing anything that can help.

Is Ebb right in telling me I should go, leave, run away and never come back?

I walk to my closet and pull my orange backpack out. I start to think about what to take if I do leave—I lay aside a couple of books, some warm clothes, a bag of Twizzlers I keep in my drawer. I put it all in the backpack, just in case.

Downstairs I make dinner for my mom and me. The wind is blowing, but clouds only briefly cross the moon before they float onward. The sound of the wind whistles against the windows.