"You don't believe that, do you? What he said about cannibals...?"

She trailed off, remembering what Mavis Lynch had said about the placenta before the women left the house the night of the birthing. That even though the baby hadn't survived it was important for the mother to ingest a portion of the afterbirth. It would balance hormone production, raise the mood, prevent postpartum depression.

It was an old wives' tale. A superstition with no basis in science. But Helen Birch had packed the afterbirth away in a Tupperware nonetheless.

She couldn't be sure it was the same Tupperware container they had brought for Ruby—but it was likely.

After the drugged tea Geraldine had fed her, she didn't think it was wise to underestimate anything these women said or did.

"I'm not sure what I believe," Martin said, feeling conflicted. Should he tell her about the hallucinations? Could he tell her he thought Mavis Lynch was the same woman he'd seen standing under the streetlamp the night of the fire? Would she be more apt to believe him, after what Dr. Mulligan revealed? "Last week I was on the road selling murder books to yokels, thinking this small-town life is my literal idea of hell. Now I'm back home, I feel like I'm trapped in a theatrical production of Peyton Place. That or The Hills Have Eyes."

Sheila forced herself to laugh. She couldn't tell him. He hadn't seen the same things she had. He hadn't been at the birthing. Hadn't drank Helen's special tea, made from herbs and "sundry."

"He's obviously suffering from delusions," she said. "Maybe from a minor stroke or post-traumatic stress, still grieving over his dead wife. He couldn't really expect us to go digging up corpses based on a hunch, could he?"

"But that Mavis Lynch, the picture he showed us..." He had to tell her, couldn't keep it to himself any longer. "I'm almost certain she's the woman I saw the night of the fire, standing in the shadows. How is it possible she still looks the same as she did in the eighties, and again in 1969?"

Nadine had asked him the same thing, only she'd been referring to his mother. Was she right? I laughed her off but what if she was telling the truth? What if she died for it?

Sheila eyed him queerly as they walked, studying him. She would dismiss these thoughts as magical thinking. He knew that. Deer killed Nadine Hinkley. A tragic accident. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

But if it wasn't? What then?

"Maybe it's one of her distant relatives," Sheila said thoughtfully. "Someone who looks the same. My mother always told me I look like my great-aunt Dolores. She died when I was little, but the old pictures of her look almost exactly like me, aside from the hairstyle and clothes. My mother always hated her sister."

"I guess so," he said. "But the stuff about my mother, that she and the other midwives kidnapped me away from some dead teenager or however it happened—I need more than just one man's word and a grainy old photo to buy into that."