“Or haunted by something else,” Jesse said, and Mira flashed to when she was a child and the way Mr. Loomis had leaned toward her face. His look as he stared into her eyes, one of confused familiarity as he tried to reckon with how he knew her followed by the torment of the answer. It was her blood that scared him, blood from the bodies of her ancestors his had helped to spill. He saw in her what his family had done, and, forced with the truth of his history, he had to look away.

Jesse leaned across the table and ran his hands over the photographs, spreading them around as he searched for another. He found the one he needed and grabbed it, picking it up to hold in front of her. “Here, what about him?”

This man was slightly older than the one she’d seen, with a thick mustache, but his eyes—when she looked closer she saw his eyes were the same.

“That one. Who is that?”

“This is Roman Woodsman,” Jesse said, confirming her thought, and she was quiet, seeing the resemblance to the white man she’d watched earlier in the day. It was Roman Woodsman who’d ordered those men. Roman who’d forced them to dig the hole and fill it with the bodies of the dead. Faced with this evidence, Mira had to believe the story Jesse was telling her. She couldn’t deny this photo.

“Here’s one you’ll be more familiar with,” Jesse said, handing her a copy of the portrait hanging in the Woodsman ballroom. “This is one from when he was older, right before he died.”

“How did he die? Do you know?”

“See, that’s the thing—in one of his wife’s letters she writes that he went mad. He told her he started to see ‘movement in the shadows,’ as he put it, and had nightmares so upsetting he was afraid to even sleep. He would do anything he could to keep himself up at night by”—he made air quotes—“‘taking whatever herbal remedy he could find.’ When those didn’t work he got so desperate he went and found one of the torture devices he used on his slaves. It was a type of collar that had these spikes that pointed inward so he couldn’t lie down or they’d pierce his skin. He put it on but when he wanted it off he couldn’t find the key. He panicked, searching the house trying to find it, but it had disappeared.”

“God,” Mira said, horrified. She was afraid to ask for the rest of the story, but Jesse continued.