Aunt Doris surveys the path. “You could hardly sling a cat through here. Why did I let you talk me into coming, Charlotte? Just because you’re upset about Herman.”

“Doris, you’re always so hard on him. That’s what he says, how we never understood him. He’s blaming me too, now, because of you.” Charlotte sets off on the trail and Adam and Aunt Doris follow.

“When were you talking to Herman? He’s still in jail, isn’t he? Charlotte, did they let him out early?” Doris’s voice vibrates with anger and apprehension. “At least it wasn’t for murder this time. You think it would have taught him, but no, he’s bad through and through.”

Charlotte turns and shakes her fist at her sister. “I haven’t laid eyes on Herman, Doris.”

Aunt Doris lets out a sigh of relief, much to the irritation of her sister, who whacks the trail with her cane. “I don’t blame Herman for hating you so much, Doris. You don’t even care that today is his birthday. Even if I don’t see him, I still remember his birthday. All the years are swooping back at me. Time goes so fast. When I was a little girl no one ever told me life would move so fast,” Charlotte says as she rubs her hands together. She quiets her voice and continues in a conversational tone, “Why, my goodness, I should have worn more practical gloves. My gout is flaring up. These gloves are so pretty, though, don’t you think? I knit them out of angora. Adam, you’re so kind to take us old girls on our favourite outing.” She grins, as though the argument they’ve just had never happened.

There hasn’t been any rain in weeks and the dry leaves crackle as Adam and the old ladies walk on the path which, it’s now clear, had been a farm road decades ago. It threads through the woods, which are growing increasingly darker, the silver birches lining the path looming like wraiths. Adam looks at the sun: it’s later than he thought. He should have planned better for this afternoon out, used his GPS. He doesn’t even know where they are, and his phone doesn’t work here in Dog Fuck Nowhere. Adam sits in front of a computer all day long, fiddling with InDesign and answering emails, and then racing to pick up his daughters from daycare. But it’s Sunday afternoon and the girls are at the babysitter’s.

It’s been just over a year since Elizabeth died — this annual outing with her decrepit relatives is part of his inheritance from her. Though what he thought he was inheriting was just a normal country drive — not a pilgrimage into the remains of her family’s dark story.

That story is a piece of family lore that Elizabeth had shared with him before they got married, before he had met her family for the first time. The ancestral home — the ruins of which this path is leading them to — had burned to the ground with the great-great-grandmother trapped inside. Elizabeth had told him the story as though it were a fairy tale, something for scaring children, nothing more. The same casual way she had told him her cousin Herman had gone to jail when he was eighteen, for murdering his father.