Page 78 of Wildwood

Joan stares out the window, eyes distant, lips pursed. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “Look, no one talks to me about it. I found out by accident. Whenever I’ve tried to ask about it, Julian shuts me down. Tells me to forget about it.”

“Did you ever try talking to Madeline?” I don’t know why I ask the question. I think part of me, bizarrely, is trying to hold on to the idea that she is good. That not everything between us was false and calculating.

Joan laughs. “She’s the worst of them all.”

We are both silent for a moment, lost in our own thoughts. Our own replays of conversations and moments with the Brooks.

“So, we need to find the bodies,” I say finally, and, I hope, definitively.

“Yeah,” Joan says slowly. “We need to find the bodies.”

* * *

A few hours later, Joan and I sit on the parlor floor. She’d gone home to retrieve her laptop and now we both sit on an old oriental rug. I’ve got the fire going but the room still feels chilly.

My phone pings. It’s Mia.

Hi, how is the rain? What time will you leave tomorrow?

It’s slow work typing out a response. The screen is hardly responding and tapping my thumb produces a thousand more paper cuts.

Still pelting. Hope 2 leave at 9.

At least the part about the weather is true. The rain is still hammering the windows.

Joan and I are both futilely doing Google searches. Trying to find anything on the Brooks. To find evidence of murders and executions in Newfield. But we aren’t hopeful. If there was documentation, it would be known. As with my previous searches, nothing comes up. And the internet goes in and out, the lights flicker.

As we work, questions keep bubbling up, from both of us, as we try and reconcile and navigate this new alliance.

Joan asks if my uncle or grandmother ever shared anything with me. I tell her they did not, that everything about this side of the family became a mystery to me, after the great falling-out. She asks what others think of this, what I’ve told Topher. I tell her that he thinks I’m going crazy. That I’m processing trauma from my childhood. She asks about the night my cousins and I used the Ouija board. What I felt in that moment. She asks what I felt in the dreams. And I tell her. I tell her that in those visions, I can feel the noose, feel the injustice, feel the wickedness of it all. I’m almost scared of how she’ll see me now. But Joan doesn’t look at me like I’m crazy. She’s looking at me with profound sadness.

“There’s something else,” I say, suddenly remembering. “I’m not sure if it’s connected but it seems relevant. Come with me.”

Joan follows me upstairs to the room of painted trees. When she walks in, she falters.

“Oh wow.” She stands in the middle of the room, slowly turning in a circle. “What is this?”

“It’s a mural, done by some itinerant painter,” I say, opening my top drawer. “It’s creepy, I know. It’s called The Forest of the Dead.”

She peers over my shoulder, as I rifle under the black slip.

“Here,” I say, triumphantly, pulling out the pieces of paper I’ve kept hidden. “I’ve been doing research.”

As we kneel on the floor, Joan gives the walls another wary look.

“How do you sleep in here?”

I laugh. “I don’t.”

I show her the various lists. Printouts of the town death records. My handwritten lists of the names on the first set of graves in the hidden cemetery. The ones with at least faded inscriptions. Lavinia Brown, Hester Proctor, Amias Smith.

“These last names don’t appear on the death records,” I say. “I mean, come on, not even Smith.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Newfield Village was founded earlier than everyone thinks. Why else aren’t their deaths in the town records? And there was a fourth grave, the only one where I could read the date of death. It was for a man by the name of Isaac Garfield. And he died in 1753. So either the town was founded earlier than claimed, as is essentially proved by Isaac Garfield’s gravestone, or their deaths were deliberately not recorded.” I pause. “Or maybe it’s both. Maybe someone wanted to essentially wipe this first settlement from the history books.” It feels like I’m close. I can almost see the ends of all these threads, lit up and reaching for one another, yearning to connect.

Joan nods. “I think I need some water—do you need any?”