For instance, they’d been forced to build the service road between their two parcels of land out beyond the farthest edge of the woman’s parcel, which extended their travel time between. This was something Jonathan found particularly aggrieving at the end of the day, when he had been working Samuel’s land and was now heading home to his own.

  Jonathan also saw that the woman’s land contained what could be better grazing meadows for their cows, and richer soil, and generally more favorable conditions—and yet she wasn’t even taking advantage of those conditions. She let most of her land sit feral, and wasn’t that itself an affront to God: to waste the resources He’d provided?

  Jonathan came to talk so much about this that Samuel began to tease him, saying that since he’d already made the woman’s land the Garden of Eden in his mind, he might do well to remember the snake that lived there.

  Soon, Jonathan refused to travel the service road after finishing his workday at Samuel’s farm. Instead, he cut across the woman’s land. Twice the woman saw him do this and he saw her. Both times she said nothing. After that, Jonathan only traveled via this shortcut and encouraged his brother to do the same.

  One night, in the silvery dark of dusk and after a particularly trying day, Jonathan was taking the shortcut when he glimpsed the woman moving through her woods toward the hot springs, which was yet another feature of her land that theirs did not share.

  He froze in place to watch her. This time she had not seen him.

  She was carrying a lantern and a cloth and he could guess her purpose: a starlight bath. Jonathan was tired and hungry, dirty and worn thin with stress over this grand endeavor that he and his brother were pursuing. Earlier that afternoon they’d had a plowing incident that had damaged two valuable machines: a plow and a horse. These damages would cost both time and money, neither of which they had to spare.

  In the wake of this day of disappointments, the woman’s peaceful freedom, her seeming self-possession and purpose, enraged Jonathan.

  So he followed her at some distance, through the woods to the springs, where she soon removed her dress under what she must have assumed was the cover of darkness on the privacy of her own land. Steam swirled from the hot springs as she slipped into the water.

  He moved closer.

  The woman was singing to herself, a song in French like a lullaby.

  Jonathan recognized the song. A week or so before he’d come home early with an injury and found the woman laughing in his own vegetable garden with his wife. The woman had been offering her advice on how best to arrange the string beans for success, advice his wife had seemed pleased to take despite the fact that he, Jonathan, was the farmer. The next day, he’d heard his daughter singing the song and he’d wondered where and how she’d picked it up.

  Now he knew.

  The woman had brought a bar of soap with her and Jonathan watched her use it. He was fully aroused, and this made him hate her more. She kept humming her song.

  He stepped out from behind the tree that had hidden him and strode, as loud as he pleased, to the water’s edge. The woman shrieked in shock and embarrassment. She cowered, trying to cover herself with her hands.

  At first, he talked softly and awfully to her, telling her that he’d seen her watching him, wanting this. But when the woman screamed and screamed and demanded that he leave, he called her a whore and a temptress and crashed into the water, grabbing her and forcing his kisses and hands upon her.

  As he worked to unbuckle his pants, the woman, with a strength he could not fathom, clawed his eyes and kneed him, and as he doubled over she pushed him into the water and climbed out onto the bank, hastily covering herself and telling him, as she turned to leave, to never cross her land again.

  Jonathan Rash arrived home that night wet and muddy, with a scratch across his face and blood in one eye. He gave his wife a stupid story about an unruly goat near a stream. He then ate his supper in silence, plotting against the woman. He went to bed plotting and dreamed in revenge: plots that curled and twisted into each other like a cave of poisonous snakes.

  When he woke in the morning and went outside, the woman was, as he expected she would be, on her slim wooden porch watching the sunrise over the water. The woman loved to look at the water. She especially loved the sunrise and sunset, but at all times of day she favored the view from her cottage. She stood still and breathed it in.

  Jonathan Rash hated this about her, her stillness, her peace, as the first or last rays of light found her on that porch. And so he had made his decision: he would take this from her.

  He could do so, he knew, if he built a structure just so. Her cottage was situated up and away from the water. Which meant that the view she enjoyed looked out over Rash land.

  He could take the woman’s view and at the same time give himself the best one for miles.

  That morning, plain as day, Jonathan went to her cottage to ascertain the angles that would favor him and hurt her. The woman hurried inside, barred the door, and was silent behind it. He ignored her, climbing onto her porch and lingering there while he took in the view he would soon be erasing.

  He started his construction of the tower that same afternoon. He did explain what he was building to Samuel, but when pressed for a reason for the construction of such a folly, and why so suddenly, Jonathan would say only that he had now lived next to the woman for long enough to judge her wicked, and that if she would not sell them her land through reasonable means, she must be convinced through unreasonable ones.

  Samuel (and also Jonathan’s wife) thought the tower was a waste of time and resources, but Jonathan would not be dissuaded. Eventually Samuel, who was plagued with his own burdens—including his father’s voice in his head telling him that he shouldn’t have entered into business with his hotheaded brother to begin with—decided it was more pragmatic to let Jonathan finish this madness quickly and be done with it than it was to keep arguing with him about it and getting nowhere.

  But the brothers had no idea what was to come.

  Jonathan finished the tower’s foundation, and the very next day, a field of soil that had been tilled and ready for planting was as solid as a floor of bricks and full of thick roots and weeds.

  Jonathan built the tower’s first walls, and crops that had been thriving withered as if they’d been cut down by harsh frost (this in summer).

  Jonathan built higher and higher, the tower taking its shape, and their new wells ran dry. And when more were dug, the water in them was unsuitable for use: brackish and filled with black algae.

  Livestock disappeared or grew sick with strange symptoms—skinny white worms spilling out of their mouths and noses when they died. Or even before they died, when they were stretched and bloated skin sacks showing bones. Hens stopped laying, or worse, laid eggs filled with blood, dozens at a time. And once: an egg filled with tiny green snakes all knotted together.

  The brothers fought constantly, and newly, with their wives and children. And those children, too often sick and improperly growing, sometimes saw strange and terrible things in the woods that left them unable to sleep at night, so they grew weaker and sicker still.

  Worst of all—or so said Harold Brookhants, when he’d told this story to Libbie—was the plague of yellow jackets. Every time the brothers cleared a new field, they’d run into another nest, and then another. Several workers were stung so badly they would not return to work, and those who remained refused to tend certain sections of the fields or demanded wage increases for doing so.

  And it wasn’t only the swarms of yellow jackets, the drifting, whirring black clouds that sometimes descended to kill a cow or a goat, it was how they littered the air like dandelion fluff. They were never not around: humming, buzzing, flicking about.

  They seemed to be watching, the workers said. They said this especially when they visited taverns at night, or gathered on church lawns Sunday mornings.

  Of course, some of this can be explained as part and parcel of the standard setbacks of the Rash brothers’ profession. It was hard work, and they were the men to do it. No profit without labor. God smiles upon the industrious. But as their troubles grew, week by week—never dwindling, always increasing—Jonathan’s conviction that the woman was at the root of them became more difficult for Samuel to dismiss. Especially when Jonathan began simply inventing things about her, such as claiming that one night he’d seen her spread a ring of salt around her cottage, salt she’d harvested from the bay.

  Their children and marriages and crops failing, the Rash brothers finally took their queer troubles out for a drink amid the ears, and mouths, of sympathetic locals. They had never relied on spirits before, but this night they accepted pours from neighbors happy to ply them with more outlandish stories about the woman. And even happier to hear the brothers’ fresh tales of her.

  Their reasoning was hateful and fearful and fully indulged in by the tavern’s patrons. Oh yes, they agreed: That woman has got the devil working for her, always has—and now he’s working against you.

  The Rash brothers left that tavern drunk. And furious. And more frightened for their futures than they’d ever been before. It was very late once they returned to their land, her land, and the liquor had helped them grow brash in their fear and rage.

  It was in that drunken rage that they found her, not at her cottage, but at the base of the tower, attempting to burn it down. And they acted. Together, the Rash brothers acted. She’d been able to fight off one, but both brothers, and in such a fury, were too much for her.

  She ran into the woods.

  They chased her.

  Near the hot springs, they caught her and strangled the life from her.

  Then they buried her there, right where they’d killed her.

  Soon after, the troubles plaguing the Rash brothers ceased. The work went better, day by day. Their children again grew healthy and strong. Their laborers were mostly content, and the fog of yellow jackets diminished to only reasonable encounters now and again.

  When the woman was infrequently asked after (before she was forgotten about), one of the brothers might say that he believed her to be visiting friends in a neighboring state. And once that rumor was spread and accepted, it didn’t take long for it to become she had moved away to Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or even sometimes to Delaware, to be with her only living relatives. And that was that. She was not particularly missed by anyone except for maybe one or two of the Rash children, and even then, it was only ever occasionally.

  Things continued on.

  Except now, between the two brothers was buried a rancid secret. And it was this secret, black and rotting, that fueled the feud between them. The local storytellers and their tales about Spite Tower got it both right and wrong. Jonathan Rash had not built the tower to block his brother’s sight lines, but the brothers had fought over it. Eventually they had. Once their lie about the woman’s departure was established, and she was no longer asked after, Samuel wanted the tower torn down. Jonathan refused to do so.

  And from there, our lay historians’ tale of the Rash brothers is close enough.

  Of course, they’ve left out so much to get there that they might as well be telling a different story entirely.

  It was never Spite Tower itself, or its rather silly and certainly incomplete local lore, that had interested Harold Brookhants. Instead, it was the bloody root of the brothers’ feud that lured him to this place, the act of murder that linked those men to a woman who once lived alone in a cottage by the water.

  A woman, Madame Verrett had explained, with a mysterious and powerful lineage.

  Once he’d acquired the land, Harold Brookhants had conducted all manner of occult practices in order to better understand that power. He consulted spirit guides and historians, geologists and diviners. (Harold had never had any compunctions about mixing his methodologies.) He’d even tried, on several occasions, to find the woman’s unmarked grave, but the mass of growth in the Tricky Thicket, and the yellow jackets that swarmed there, had thwarted those efforts.

  Harold Brookhants believed that some of that woman’s power remained in the land that she had loved, the land where she had died too soon and violently. And he wanted to not only understand that power, but claim it for himself. (In this life and in any others to come.)*

  There was now only one of the Matryoshka dolls left to burn: the smallest. The Ava look-alike. And Libbie had already dug its silt grave.

  Her fingers were so stiff that she could scarcely make them work to strike the final match. She fumbled with the box.

  “Mrs. Brookhants?” Adelaide’s soft voice was like its own set of cold fingers, fluttering over the base of Libbie’s spine.

  Between the digging and the burning and the ocean crashing, the yellow jackets’ hum, Libbie hadn’t noticed the maid’s approach. She looked up now to find Adelaide standing before her, over her. Too close. Adelaide was much too close.

  “I do not require your assistance tonight, Adelaide,” Libbie said, keeping her voice steady. “Nor do I want it.” Libbie had not yet managed to burn this last doll, but for now, she buried it in silt so it stayed hidden from Adelaide’s view.

  Libbie stood, Mary’s book in her hand. She backed away from Adelaide and her hip throbbed as she did. Her skirt was so heavy with water and sand that it seemed to pull her back to the ground.

  “I spotted you from the tower and grew worried,” Adelaide said, coming closer, the exact amount that Libbie had moved away.

  “I am no longer under the province of your worries, Adelaide.”

  “Why are you being so cold to me? I only came to see if I could help you.” She stepped closer still. “Mrs. Brookhants?” She tried again. “Libbie?”

  “Stay back!”

  Adelaide looked like she’d just been slapped. And even now, knowing what she did—or thought she did, at any rate—Libbie was embarrassed to have shouted at her.

  Libbie was still walking backward and without meaning to had drifted closer to the water, so that she was now in its thinnest edge, though right then she did not feel it soaking her boots.

  She kept her eyes on Adelaide and made her voice as level as she could. “Please stay back. There are things I have to do tonight and if only you let me do them, then I’ll be gone from here forever and you can stay on as you like. For as long as you like.”

  “What do you mean, you’ll be gone?” Adelaide asked, her eyes wide and confused. “You’ve only just returned! You’re to be better, now. And how would I stay here without you? Why would I?” She was still advancing, and so Libbie was walking backward, now sloshing through the foamy water as she went. “I thought we shared—”

  “I share nothing with you,” Libbie said.

  “But, Mrs. Brookhants, you know that isn’t true.”

  Libbie could not counter this. She had shared things with Adelaide, intimate things, up in the tower during their tutoring sessions. She’d shared complaints about what she’d then chosen to classify as Alex’s increasing delirium, and her many worries about the school, and her sorrow to be missing the life Sara Dahlgren was leading. Even her regrets about Ava.

  She had told Addie the truth about Ava. And Harold. And how she’d come to live at Brookhants. She had told Addie so many truths up in that tower, private truths, with Alex stewing away down below. Wonderful Alex, her Alex. And she had done more than talk to Addie, she had let Addie kiss her. And she had wanted to do much more than only that. Not since Alex’s death, at least, had she wanted this, though she knew that if she stayed, if she let herself live here with Adelaide, then perhaps . . .

  “Please come back with me now,” Adelaide said. “We’ll warm you up, get you out of these wet clothes, and then we’ll talk. We haven’t had the chance to talk, really talk as we should, as we once did, since the awful night when Alex—”

  “Don’t you say her name! You keep it from your mouth.”

  At this, Adelaide stopped approaching. Libbie stopped, too. They looked at each other. Strands of Addie’s hair tossed about in the cold wind and Libbie felt the hum of the yellow jackets vibrate through the sand, up through her feet, and into her legs and core.

  It was as if, in a collection of mere moments, Adelaide’s whole countenance changed. Gone was any pleading affect, warmth or confusion. It was replaced by a coldness that cast itself over Libbie like a shadow. Libbie shuddered. Adelaide was clearly now the one in charge. Perhaps, Readers, this had always been the case, since the day she’d arrived at Spite Manor.

  Adelaide turned around for a moment, her back to Libbie as she looked down the beach from where they’d come. Something about how purposefully she did this made it more awful still. She had no need to hurry.

  She turned to face Libbie again. “Ava’s doll took me weeks to make. She says she helped, I know, but really she only got in the way. She has no talent for that particular art. Not yet. But I do know she’ll be very upset to find it missing. What reason will I give her for its disappearance?”

  “I’m sure you’ll find one that suits you.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Adelaide said. “I could even tell her right now, if I wanted to. If she’d only open up to listen to me. But she’s young and still learning.”

  “Do not say these things to me!” Libbie shouted. She had to shout over the terrible buzzing of the yellow jackets. They might now be the sand: millions of yellow jackets piled atop each other like humming grains of quartz. “I won’t listen.”

  “I don’t think you have much choice,” Adelaide sang. “You can still come with me, sweet Library. Come and be with me. Everything here is ready for us to be together. The school could open again, little Ava is here. Come and let’s see how this might be for the three of us.” She extended her hand toward Libbie.

  It was too close; she was too close—Addie’s twitching worm fingers nearly against her dress. In her haste to get away, Libbie twisted her foot in a dip and crashed backward, hard, landing in the cold water.