In 1977, Taylor Behrens died of colon cancer at the age of sixty-nine. Shortly thereafter, Elaine moved to the South of France and remained living there until the early 2000s. She disappeared almost entirely from public life during these years.

  In 2011, Elaine purchased the film rights for the nonfiction book The Happenings at Brookhants, which details the history of the real deaths and supposed curse attached to the Brookhants School for Girls, a boarding school founded by Harold Brookhants and still remaining, though long abandoned, on the northeast corner of her Little Compton estate. The Happenings at Brookhants was written by then-sixteen-year-old wunderkind author Merritt Emmons, who credited Elaine with not only convincing her to write it but also significantly assisting in her research.

  Horror film director Bo Dhillon became attached to the project in 2014, with rising star Harper Harper cast as one of the leads and Brookhants remaining on as executive producer. Principal photography began in September at the Little Compton estate, and almost immediately rumors began online regarding supposed bizarre or ghostly occurrences on set. Elaine herself commented on the rumors in an interview with the Providence Journal just two weeks ago, saying, “Everyone involved wanted to make the film here because it’s a place full of tricks like these, so we can’t act surprised now that they’re being played on us. But it’s also a place full of treats. When you see it all captured on the big screen, you’ll know what I mean.”

  Esse Quam Videri

  When at Brook-hants, mind the hour,

  for here time is queer.

  If you think you hold the power,

  death will draw you near.*

  As soon as she was certain Ava was sleeping in her bed—her wounds dressed and her broken arm set in a cast by the doctor—our Libbie did not wait one moment more to do what she’d come back to Brookhants to do.

  What she’d pretended, for far too long, needn’t be done.

  She gathered the book and the awful doll, too. She bundled them in a feed sack she’d taken earlier from the barn. Then she packed a valise with a few items of clothing—she could send for the rest later—and told Caspar to ready the carriage because she’d want him to take her over to Newport as soon as she finished a chore.

  What gall, Readers, to call what she had to do a chore.

  And what gall to think she would ever finish it.

  Since nightfall, Libbie hadn’t been able to account for Adelaide’s whereabouts and that did trouble her. But she was already so troubled. What did it matter, really? Addie would find her, when she wanted to. Or she wouldn’t. No matter which, Libbie had things to do until someone or something stopped her from doing them. She herself would no longer be that someone.

  She headed out into the dark, across the terraced lawns to the wooden stairs, slick with mist and algae, that would take her down to the water’s edge. She took each step carefully, holding the railing with her free hand. No need to create cause for an accident when Spite Manor specialized in them.

  She cleared the final stair and her footfalls sank into the wet sand. The dark water flashed white in its crashing surf, like the ocean baring its sharp teeth again and again, its mouth rolling open and closed. As she walked, wind whipped sand into her own mouth. It crunched between her molars and tasted of rot. The beach was colder than she’d expected, than she remembered. Her time in the asylum had been like being buried beneath this sand: only the world in her head had felt real to her there. The doctors tried to reach inside it but she wouldn’t let them. And though it was a dark and lonely world, one built from her own guilt and fear, she hadn’t minded. Not entirely. It gave her somewhere safe to wait while she plotted. While she puzzled and repuzzled the events that had ended with her Alex at the bottom of the Spite Tower stairs. When Libbie apportioned the blame for this, she always took the biggest helping. Even still: there was plenty left to go around.

  And then Adelaide had written to tell her that Hanna was dead.*

  This news hadn’t made Libbie feel consoled so much as curious. And maybe a little bit brave. If Hanna’s death wasn’t a sign that it was time for her to act, what would be? Libbie was someone who put much stock in signs, now.

  So she’d stopped hiding.

  And just this morning, she’d come back to Brookhants.

  Sara Dahlgren told her plainly that it was mad for her to do so, even for only one night. In fact, Sara said, it was the kind of idea that belonged to someone who should stay in the asylum until she no longer had it. You must have guessed that it would be Sara Dahlgren, Readers, who would call in several significant favors from her coterie of well-connected double-dealers in order to bypass Senator Packard’s wishes and to hasten Libbie’s release. For now.

  Sara said she wanted to get them (and Ava) on a boat back to France as soon as she could make the arrangements. (And maybe after she’d also attended one or two parties in Newport. You know how it is, Readers: when in Rhode Island . . .)

  But Libbie had no such plans. When their carriage had rounded the Spite Manor drive earlier that day, and passed through the tower’s shadow as it stretched over the road, she knew she’d likely never leave again.

  “It’s as ugly as it’s ever been,” Sara said, as they pulled up to the house.

  “Worse,” Libbie said as a reward to Sara for getting her here.

  Sara had been anxious, distracted, saying, “Promise me you’ll pack only a few things, for now, and we’ll send for the rest later. We’ll go over to Newport for a week or so—if we make the ferry—just until you remember what it’s like to be a person with other people. And then on to Boston and out of Puritanical New England for good.”

  Libbie wasn’t even paying attention because there was Ava, already there she was, out on the porch to greet them with Adelaide close behind. (And with Hanna dead and gone besides.)*

  “She’s bigger than I imagined her,” Libbie said. Though she hadn’t imagined her very much. She thought she saw something of Harold in this girl now staring at their carriage from beneath the shade of the low porch roof. Maybe she even saw, strangely—impossibly—something of Alex. But Libbie saw nothing of herself.

  “Oh, she is a weed, isn’t she?” Sara said, looking, too. “France is more her home than America will ever be—clever girl. She’ll be happy to go back, I know it. And you’ll be happy again. Finally.” Sara had then turned from the window to look at Libbie. “Oh, Library, you look so old.” Were those tears in her eyes? Was it possible, Readers?*

  Sara Dahlgren was still Sara Dahlgren. There was some comfort in that. But Libbie didn’t want to be comforted. She’d only wanted to use Sara to do what had now been done: to return to Brookhants. She wouldn’t explain herself. She knew she couldn’t.

  So Libbie and Sara had argued. And then Sara had left, saying she couldn’t miss the ferry over to Newport or she’d be stuck here, but that she’d come back for them on Monday. She’d give Libbie the weekend to get acquainted with Ava and to pack her things, sort her affairs, but she would not leave without her. Sara knew Libbie would change her mind, she said. She knew Libbie would see her way to reason.

  But our Libbie no longer dealt in reason, Readers. She dealt in signs and omens. And this afternoon, in the orchard, she’d had plenty of those.

  Now, she walked on, thirty, maybe forty yards down the cold beach, to the area she and her friends had once favored for splashing about in their new bathing suits, the same place Alex had kissed her brazenly in the surf and Libbie had let her and everyone had cheered.

  Libbie was not surprised to hear the sound of the yellow jackets begin in a low hum and then ramp up to a deep and throbbing whir as she went. She had expected this. Though the pain in her hip, where the apple bruise had been—and where it hadn’t been for more than a year—that did catch her out.

  She knelt in the fine, wet sand near the shoreline and began digging with her hands. The silt wedged up under her fingernails and the crashing black water sprayed until her dress was sopping and heavy. She shivered but continued on. She had a job to do, one she’d neglected for too long—unforgivably too long. She finished one hole, judged its size as correct, and pulled the sack of items toward her. She took out the matches first, then the awful doll. Perhaps charm was more accurate? Or talisman?

  Alex, her Alex, had been right: fire was the thing. Burn these cursed items to ash and then let the tide carry them out and away from Brookhants. She would set fire to each of the doll’s selves on its own, just as Alex would have.

  And then she’d burn the book, each page. And then the orchard, every tree.

  And finally, if she had time, if nothing stopped her: the tower.

  This was her plan. And now to accomplish it.

  The wind took the life from the first match as soon as she struck it. It did the same to the next.

  She cupped the third until it caught and lasted, and then carried that cupped palm to the largest doll, the one with blackberry brambles wrapping her throat and a pile of stripped flesh at her feet. It took the fire as soon as she pressed the match to its side.

  As it burned, it produced flames of purple and green among the orange. It hissed and writhed in the silt hole where she’d dropped it, as if in death throes, until only a mound of black ash remained. Libbie swept more silt over that ash, filling the hole until it wasn’t there any longer. And now the waves could do their work.

  She dug another hole in the silt for the next doll, the Clara look-alike. Her fingers ached with cold.

  As she worked, she thought of the story she’d never told Alex. She’d never told anyone.

  When Harold had told her the story, which he’d done the first time he’d brought Libbie to Brookhants, she had dismissed it as silly and false: a relic from an unenlightened age. Or she’d wanted to do this, anyway. She’d told herself that’s what she had done.

  But the story didn’t care about that. It simply was, whether or not she chose to believe in it.

  * * *

  The curse at Brookhants, Libbie knew (and now believed), had not started with Flo and Clara and a book by a provocative girl from Montana. It traced much further back than that, to the Rash brothers and their Spite Tower, though not as in the historically sanctioned version of that story, the oft-repeated anecdote. That version, as with so many of the stories we tell about our history, erased a woman*—a plain, bad heroine—in favor of a less messy and more palatable yarn about two feuding brothers from New England.

  According to Harold, there had long been gossip about this woman, since even before the arrival of the brothers. These were enigmatic accusations, whispered primarily by locals on the rare occasions when they spotted her. (Or when misfortune fell upon them.) The kinds of things insinuated about her were exactly what you would expect to be said of an unmarried woman living alone in that era.

  She lived in a cottage on what is now Brookhants land, though back then it was her land. After the death of her parents, the entire estate had been (quite unusually, for the time) left to her and her alone. The girl’s parents were French immigrants and they had no close relations in America. (And were never very eager to discuss those that they’d left behind in France.)

  The small family lived happily and peacefully in the cottage on the water that the parents, both parents, had built by hand. The girl grew. She was bright and passionate. She was educated by both of her parents about things near and far, but what she cared most about in the whole of the world was this land on the water where she lived. And about this place she knew every single thing, everything there was to know.

  Years later, one of her parents died and the other too soon followed. It would be cliché to tell you that it was of a broken heart, and yet . . .

  After, the woman’s world remained as small or as large as that. She had no siblings and did not seek a lover. She lived simply in her cottage. She fished and hunted, sewed and painted, read and wrote and thought, and made her way alone. Sometimes she went into town to buy or barter for things she needed, but most often she did not.

  She was not unhappy. But she was alone.

  Her parents had once seen so much of the world, they had lived in it. But when they’d taught her about what they’d seen and done, it had not made their child want to seek it out for herself. She was content in this cottage on her own land by the water.

  Into this picture, enter the Rash brothers: Samuel, the elder and more pragmatic, and Jonathan, the more ambitious and with a temper to match. The brothers were full of belief in themselves and their masculine industriousness. Fueled by a generous allotment from their own father’s estate, they moved to the area expressly to buy and cultivate two large parcels of land adjacent to the woman’s property.

  And seeing as her property was wedged like a splinter between those parcels, the brothers thought they might offer to buy hers as well. As a condition of their offer, they would allow her to continue to live in her cottage as long as she wished.

  A few of the locals warned the brothers not to do business with this woman, that her lineage was unnatural and that she was not to be trusted. (That she was, maybe, even worse than that.) The Rash brothers scoffed at such old-fashioned superstition. They joked about how amusing it was for two farmers from Connecticut to be the men to finally bring modernity to the region. Samuel even made reference to the lessons of Salem.

  And so undeterred by local nonsense, they visited the woman at her cottage and she greeted them warmly, invited them in. Her rooms were small and spare but clean and warm—the cottage had a good fireplace. There were bookshelves on one wall and books on those shelves. She served them tea with honey and milk. She was much more refined in her manner than they’d been led to expect, and also, in the firelight, less plain and dour.

  Their mugs drained, the brothers made their offer. The woman listened carefully and asked to consider it for three days. Jonathan and Samuel agreed to grant her the time she wanted and said their goodbyes.

  It is as good as done, they told each other.

  Three days later they returned to her cottage. The woman was, perhaps, a bit chillier toward them than during their previous visit, though still polite when she invited them in. She did not offer tea. Instead, she asked if they had offered her a fair price. They said yes, they had. She then asked if it was the same price they’d have offered her if she was a man. The brothers said of course, just the same figure.

  The woman considered this answer for several silent moments. She then told the brothers about her parents and how much they’d loved this cottage, how they’d picked this place for its views of the glittering water and the lush surround of the trees. She told them how happy they’d all been here.

  The brothers listened without hearing.

  When she was finished, she asked them, a final time, were they sure they had offered her the fairest price for her land? An honest price?

  The Rash brothers said, Yes, yes we certainly have. We would not cheat you. We are honest men.

  Then I cannot sell to you, she told them. You’ve lied to me. And still you lie.

  They insisted that this was some misunderstanding, that they were honest men and true to their word, but the woman would not hear these insistences. She showed them to her door and wished them well in their work. Eventually, and with Jonathan still sputtering protestations, they left.

  Of course, you already know, Readers, that the brothers had not given her the fairest price. In fact, they’d purchased a lesser piece of land for almost twice what they’d offered her. It was good business, after all, to try to get the best deal.

  It’s also true that the woman could have simply told them that she knew this and asked for more money.

  But she had asked for something: the truth. And they had not given it to her.

  At first, the Rash brothers were angry, Jonathan most of all. But they had too much work to do to dwell on their anger for long. They consoled themselves with the belief that while they were sure to thrive in this new venture, the woman who had refused them would only grow weaker and more alone in her old age. Once their farms were prosperous, this same woman might even come begging them to buy her land. And when that time came, Samuel told his brother, they should take pity on her, for they were not only wise and strong, they were decent and God-fearing men who wouldn’t turn away a feeble old woman unable to care for herself, even if she had turned them down first.

  Jonathan was, for a time, appeased.

  The brothers were busy. Their undertaking was large and difficult. For more than six months they lived peacefully with their sandwiched neighbor as they cleared large swaths of woods for their crops, dug their wells, and built their houses. They would see her often but not always and she was unfailingly polite. Her own cottage she kept immaculately, every repair in order. And her gardens, though meager in comparison to their grand own farming plans, were lush and healthy. She gave them useful tips on clamming at the rocky beach and both Jonathan’s and Samuel’s wives found her pleasant and harmless if also rather odd, but then wasn’t that to be expected given her unusual circumstances?

  In the fall she brought them a crock of her blackberry jam, which was delicious. During that visit, she also gave each of their children small papier-mâché figures she’d made: an apple and a tree, a yellow jacket and a flower. They were beautifully constructed and painted, delicate and fine—it was clear she was an artist. The children loved these objects and treated them with care. Samuel returned the woman’s kindness with a gift of smoked pheasant.

  For six months all was well enough. Or so it seemed, though perhaps Jonathan Rash had been silently stewing the entirety of those days.

  He was the brother who had been the most unhappy about the woman’s refusal to sell her land. And by the following spring, as the days grew longer and their work more challenging, he began to blame every other setback or delay on this refusal.