Tori’s mother retreated to her bedroom with Alistair’s envelope and closed the door. Alistair might have said he was done here, but Tori didn’t believe him. He’d cut her mother’s padlock. Had tromped all over her property and raided her shed before her mother could even finish her coffee. And Tori didn’t trust him not to keep snooping around, looking for someone to blame for whatever he’d seen in the cemetery that morning.

Tori raced upstairs and tore a sheet of stationery from her desk drawer. Then she scratched out a letter in loopy cursive letters. Scurrying down the stairs, she called out a quick good-bye through her mother’s door and chased her brother down the long, gravel driveway to where he waited for the bus.

When she finally caught up with him, she was winded and dizzy and her shoes were soaked through to her socks from all the puddles after last night’s rain. She hesitated before giving him the letter.

“What is it?” he asked, eyeing her suspiciously—Tori never rode the bus.

“I’m going to be late. Give this to the attendance office at school.” Tori thrust the note she’d forged into his hand. It was written in a close impression of her mother’s handwriting and signed, “Sincerely, Sarah Burns,” but Kyle didn’t look fooled. “If anyone asks, tell them I’m sick.”

“Where are you going?”

“None of your business,” Tori replied.

Kyle’s brow wrinkled. She could see the worry burrowing under his skin. Which made Tori worried too.

“On second thought…” She reached to snatch back the letter. “Never mind. It’s fine. I’ll go to school.”

“I can do it,” he said.

Tori paused, torn between putting it in her pocket or trusting him not to snitch. “Swear you won’t tell Mom?”

“I can keep a secret,” he said, trying to look offended. But his brows knit deeper, like maybe he wasn’t so sure.

Down the road, the Slaughters’ dogs started barking. School bus tires crunched over the gravel toward Tori and Kyle’s house, and Tori knew it was too late to take it back. She shoved the letter in Kyle’s hand and retreated behind the bushes, out of sight of Mrs. Butts, the driver. The people who lived in Chaptico had too many eyes and ears, and everyone talked too much. Even the bus drivers gathered in the school parking lot every morning to gossip over coffee.

Kyle didn’t look back as he climbed the bus steps, and Mrs. Butts pulled away down Slaughter Road, leaving a cloud of exhaust behind her. When the bus was out of sight, Tori texted Drew and Magda, telling them she wouldn’t need a ride and hoping neither of them would bother to ask why.

WHY? came Magda’s immediate reply.

Headache, Tori texted back, feeling guilty for the lie, even if it wasn’t entirely untrue. A pause followed. Tori could picture Magda reading her reply to Drew, who was probably driving and already on his way. She didn’t think they’d bother to come to check on her. But just in case, she added, Going back to bed.

K. Text us before 2nd if you’re feeling better. Drew had study hall during second period, and after he’d signed in, it was easy to slip out unnoticed.

Thx. Tori waited a minute, and when they didn’t reply, she circumnavigated her house where her mother’s car still sat in the driveway. If she stayed out of sight until her mother left for work, her mother would never know she’d ditched. Her mother called it work. But it wasn’t really. Not the kind that paid. She volunteered, teaching painting at the senior citizens’ home in town. It gave her something to do, and a long, sterile hallway with crappy lighting where she was allowed to showcase her paintings. For today at least, Tori was glad her mother had somewhere pressing to go.

Tori picked her way through the woods toward the cemetery.

Avoiding her mother wouldn’t be hard, but avoiding Alistair might be. The Burnses’ twenty acres sat smack in the middle of the two hundred that made up Slaughter Farm, a peculiar tract of land that made little sense to Tori and her mother. The northwest corner was marked by the overgrown field—the giant dead oak and the small cemetery plot. The southwest quarter was densely wooded from the field all the way to the river’s shore, sheltering the remains of a few long-abandoned wooden structures that looked like old barns and sheds. The east side of the property was mostly soybean fields, and through an arrangement suggested by Alistair’s father in his will, Tori’s family was paid a nominal fee each month to continue allowing the Slaughters to farm it. Since Tori’s dad had no life insurance and her mother had never worked a paying job outside the home, the monthly check they received from the Slaughters was all that sustained them now. The house, the Burnses were told, was paid for, free and clear. But it didn’t feel that way when they had to cross someone else’s property just to walk to their own front porch.

When Tori’s mother first received the letter from Al Senior’s attorney, telling her she’d been granted this strange piece of land, her mother had combed through the will—through every document and letter she could find—searching for an explanation. As far as they knew, their family had no roots in this town. No connection to its people. Why them? Why here? When the Slaughters had so many family members with a rightful claim to it?

And then they’d found it: a clipping of her father’s obituary from the Washington Post, citing the names of his surviving family members and a request for donations to help support them. Al Senior had included it in a letter to his attorney before he’d died, “bestowing” Tori’s mother the property. The house had been a gift. A charitable donation, pure and simple. Al Senior had died less than a week after he’d requested the amendment to his will, before anyone in his family knew what had happened. Before any of them had a chance to argue with him.

Tori followed a thin footpath through the woods and emerged at the edge of the cemetery field. She looked around for signs of Alistair, but it was empty, so she stepped out from the cover of the trees. The dead grass formed a distinct brown ring around the cemetery that crunched under her feet. In the dark last night, she hadn’t noticed, but it seemed to reach farther than it had last week. Probably from the cold.

The graves were scattered in a loose circular pattern, as if the old oak was the center of a forgotten clock, the hours marked by headstones around the circumference of its trunk. They leaned in places and heaved up in others, the roots having grown through and around them. Tori could only guess how long the tree had been here by the dates on the stones. The oldest one she could decipher was over a hundred years old, and others…probably older…had worn so thin, few legible markings remained at all.

As Tori came closer, her toe connected with something hard. She stooped to pick up her flashlight. It was solid and heavy and covered in frost, and the longer Tori held it, the more real her memories of the previous night felt. But they couldn’t be real. It was blood loss. She’d been disoriented and dizzy and she’d imagined the entire thing. Hallucination. Plain and simple. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

Tori took another few steps, shaking the flashlight. It was still switched on, but the batteries were dead. When she looked up, it left a smear of blood on her hand as it fell to the ground.

Inside the ring of headstones was a hole.

A large hole. Dirt caved in around the edges, where it looked as if someone had climbed out.

No shovel marks. No tracks left by any farm equipment or digging tools. Just a recess in the ground about as deep as a shallow grave.

She crept to the edge of the hole. The roots of the oak snaked through it like veins.

There was no way…no possible way she saw someone crawl out of it. Tori touched her bandage through her sleeve, willing herself to remember tearing her favorite shirt. Desperate to remember herself binding the dressing over the wound. She searched the muddy ground for signs of her own footsteps, impressions of her sneakers pointing toward the house. Proof that she’d walked herself home.

Because if she hadn’t done these things, who had?

Tori’s breath caught.

A chill snaked up her spine as she knelt over a pair of large, bare footprints in the mud.

The footprints sank deep and clear in the ground. They wound through the cemetery.

Tori followed them, occasionally pausing to pick up the trail where it was lost in wet leaves or around a headstone. The trail disappeared into the trees. Toward her house.

Brush crackled somewhere close and Tori froze.

Her breath came fast, hot anxious puffs against the cold as she searched the tree line for the source of the sound.

And then she saw him.

A young man, standing at the edge of the wood. His long hair fell limp around his face, and two vivid green eyes peered through the tangled strands. He was shirtless, his pants caked with mud and hanging low on his hips. He stared vacantly at the tree, heavy-lidded and swaying.

Tori stood no more than a few yards away, but she couldn’t be sure he was even aware of her. Stumbling through the cemetery, he dropped to his knees in front of the oak to the carvings in the trunk—initials in hearts scratched deep into the wood with dates spanning decades. Tori watched as he traced them with shaking, dirt-caked fingertips. Streaks of thick mud covered his shoulders and back and the soles of his bare feet.

Relieved, she choked back a strangled bubble of laughter. She’d come back in the daylight searching for an explanation that made sense, and she’d found it. Whoever this guy was, he was clearly high, or at the very least, mentally ill. She should go. She should call someone. The police? Her mother? Alistair? She wrapped her arms around herself against the cold and held her breath as she walked away, cursing the mud that sucked at the soles of her shoes.

“Is this how it ends, then?” he asked.

Tori nearly tripped when his voice broke the silence. It was low, scratchy and cracked, like maybe he hadn’t used it in a long time. Or maybe he’d been crying.

“Who are you?” Tori called back, not wanting to get close. Whoever he was, he was trespassing. She meant to sound authoritative and commanding. But she couldn’t seem to find enough air to play the part.

He turned sharply to look at her, his green eyes widening when they found her. They flickered over her, confused.

“This is private property,” Tori said, louder this time. “What are you doing here?”

His gaze drifted to a headstone, then another. He touched his throat. “Emmeline,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Is she dead?”

Tori had a sinking feeling, like concrete in her belly. Everybody in the cemetery had been dead nearly a hundred years. Some probably longer. If this Emmeline person was here, whoever this young man thought he was grieving for was long dead by now. Which meant he was sicker than Tori had thought.

Tori shifted from foot to foot, trying to figure out what to do. What to say. But she knew better than most people that there was no right thing to say in a cemetery.

“I think you might be lost.”

“Lost?” He wiped his cheek with the back of his arm, smearing mud across his jaw. His green eyes turned on her, incredulous. “I know exactly where I am. I spent days chained to this bloody tree. I’d know it blind!”

“Okay.” Tori held up her open hands to show she meant no harm. There was a hospital in town, about twenty miles or so from here. Maybe he’d escaped and hidden in the field. Maybe he’d dug himself a hole under a bed of weeds and shallow dirt to keep warm. Maybe she’d startled him last night, and that’s why he’d grabbed her. If he was the one who’d put the tourniquet on her arm, maybe he hadn’t meant her any harm either. “I believe you,” she said in a low, calm voice, the way the nurses had spoken to her the night she’d been admitted the last time she’d cut herself too deeply, when her mother had found her bleeding in the tub. She’d been terrified and confused. She’d wanted to be left alone, and at the same time, she was afraid they actually might.

The young man knelt by a faint inscription in a headstone, touching the dates the way he had touched the carvings in the tree, as if he wasn’t sure they were real. Or maybe they were too real. 1885–1935. His brow crumpled. He rose slowly to his feet.

His hand curled into a fist. His shoulders trembled as he looked up into the tree. Tori remained quiet, afraid anything she said might set him off.

“Slaughter once told me the fires of hell burned for each man’s individual sins. Is this place to be mine, then? Tell me!” he shouted, as if the tree was actually listening. Tori jumped as he kicked a spray of mud at the trunk. “Leave me to hell! I have no regrets!”

She waited for his tantrum to end, watching silently as he paced before the tree until his shoulders finally slumped, the last of his anger spent.

He sank to the ground and pulled at the dead grass. “Keep quiet, Nathaniel. You mustn’t tell, Nathaniel. You’ll heal, Nathaniel,” he muttered under his breath.

He was definitely crazy. Tori was certain of that. But whoever this boy thought he was, at least he knew where he was—Slaughter Farm. Maybe he knew Alistair’s family. And if so, maybe they could take him home.

“Do you know who you are?” Tori asked. “Do you know how you got here?”

He looked up at the tree and his eyes clouded over. His voice was brittle and thick. “My name is Nathaniel Bishop. I was murdered on the twenty-first day of September—”

A frustrated laugh slipped out of her.

The boy turned and bit out, “In the year of our Lord, seventeen hundred and six.” His eyes were like daggers, steady and unflinching.

He was serious.

The laughter dissolved in Tori’s throat. “I think you must be confused. That’s just not possible.”

He mumbled to himself and scrubbed his hands over his mud-caked hair, letting out a long, resentful sigh. No steam. No white clouds formed from his mouth. And something about that seemed very wrong.

Tori fought back a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature outside. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked, recalling the way her swim coach used to nag her about her breathing in the pool, that she was holding it too long. She’d insisted she wasn’t, but her exhale—the information hidden within a single breath—always managed to give her away.

The boy’s laugh came out as a choked sob and Tori looked sharply to catch the curl of warm air from his lips. But there was nothing to see.

“I asked you a question! Are you cold?”

Nathaniel swallowed hard. His face sobered. “If I am, I don’t seem to feel it.”

“But that’s…” Tori argued with herself—with the crazy, nagging voice at the back of her brain that couldn’t seem to just walk away. “Your body is ninety-eight degrees. It’s barely forty-five out here. The air should feel cold to you. Your skin should feel warm. And your breath…” She couldn’t make herself finish. He was looking at her. The color of his eyes was as impossible to grasp as everything else about him.

His hollow gaze came to rest on the hole behind her. Tori sucked in a breath as Nathaniel stumbled to his feet and stepped close. Close enough for her to catch the faint earthy smell of him as he passed. He stared down into the opening, then at his hands, at the dirt caked under his fingernails.

When he spoke, his voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Dear God, Emmeline. What have you done?”