Hattie went willingly to the tree, the largest in the woods around the bog. When they were young, she and Candace had called it the “Great Grandmother Tree” and marveled at its thick limbs that stuck out like arms in every direction, some straight, some curved.

Tree of life.

Tree of death.

Tree of my own ending, she thought as she saw the hangman’s noose. There was a stool directly under it. A simple, three-legged kitchen stool. She wondered whom it belonged to. If they would take it home later, put it back at the table. If someone would eat dinner sitting on it tonight.

The men shoved her over to the stool; one of them put the noose around her neck, the rough rope draped like a heavy necklace. The rope had been thrown over a branch about fifteen feet up, and beneath it, three men stood holding the other end. She recognized them as the fathers of the dead children: Candace’s husband, Huck Bishkoff; Walter Kline; and James Fulton.

“You should cover her head,” Peter Boysko from the lumber mill suggested. “Blindfold her.”

Peter had visited her for herbs and healing charms when his wife and children were so sick with the flu a few years back. They’d recovered well, and Peter had returned to Hattie with two of his wife’s chicken potpies to thank her.

“No,” said Candace. “I want to see her face as she dies. I want to watch her and know there is justice for Lucy and Ben and Lawrence. Justice for everyone she’s ever harmed.”

“I’ve harmed no one,” Hattie told them. “And if all of you had listened to me, those children might still be alive.”

If it weren’t for my daughter, they would still be alive, she thought.

If only she’d been able to see that part. If only she’d known what was coming, she might have been able to stop it. But if there was one thing she’d learned, it was that you can’t change the future. You can catch a glimpse of it, but it’s not in your power to change it.

“Shut her up!” Barbara Kline snarled. She was Lawrence’s mother. Lawrence had been very ill with chicken pox last year, and his mother had brought him to see Hattie, who’d sent them home with a healing salve and an infusion to drink. Lawrence had recovered without so much as a single pox scar. “The witch lies,” Barbara hissed now.

    “Send her back to the devil where she belongs!” a man in the crowd bellowed.

“Get her up there,” another voice called, and a group of men grabbed hold of her, and then somehow her feet were on the stool. She had no choice but to stand up straight. The three men holding the end of the rope pulled back the slack, kept it taut.

The stool wobbled beneath her. Her arms were bound behind her back; the rope was already tight around her neck. She looked out across the bog, out at her cabin, saw that it was in flames. She had built it herself when she was all alone, just after the family house burned. After her mother was killed. Jane was born in that cabin, had had twelve birthdays there with cake and candles.

She thought of Jane, over where the old family house once stood, tucked quietly into the root cellar, like a forgotten jar of string beans. She’d be safe there. No one knew about the root cellar. No one knew there was anything left out there in the wreckage and ashes of the old family home.

What people don’t understand, they destroy.

“Wait,” someone called. It was Robert Crayson from the general store. He came forward, looked up at her. For a split second, she wondered if he would stop this madness, bring them to their senses. “Before justice is done—any last words? Do you want to beg forgiveness of these people? Of God?”

Hattie said nothing, just gazed out at the bog, her beautiful bog. Dragonflies soared over the surface, wings and bodies shimmering in the sunlight.

“Maybe you’d like to tell us where the money is?” Crayson went on. “Financial restitution for your crimes? We could give it to the families of the children you killed. Never bring ’em back, but might go a little way.”

“I killed no one,” she repeated.

“Where’d you hide it, witch?” someone yelled. “What happened to all your father’s money?”

“Richest family in town,” another man spat. “And look where it led them.”

    “Please,” Crayson asked, his voice pleading now. “Put your family’s wealth to good use. Don’t let it die with you. Let your one last act be charitable. Tell us where you hid the money.”

She smiled down at him, at all of them gathered below her, faces bright with hope. She smiled the smile of someone who has a secret she knows she’ll never tell.

The rope tightened around her neck as the men behind her pulled. Up above, the branch it was looped over creaked. A squirrel chattered. A nuthatch flew by.

“You can kill me, but you can’t be rid of me,” she told them. “I’ll always be here. Don’t you see—me and this place, we’re one.”

Hattie took in a breath and waited.

She had climbed this tree as a child. Climbed it with Candace. They had dropped their flower-head dolls down, watching them flutter softly to the ground.

They’d called it the angel game.

Life is a circle, Hattie thought, tilting her head back to look up at the branches, where she could almost see the little girl that she was once climbing up, higher and higher, out of sight.