“I bet they thought it was witches,” Agent Moore gasped. For once, Laura didn’t feel the urge to scowl at her. Her childish enthusiasm was a little misplaced, but otherwise, Laura couldn’t see that she was wrong.
“There was a lot of suspicion at that time,” Alice confirmed. “Now, the fields at the time were mostly owned by a few members of the same family. Cousins, brothers, and sisters with their spouses and children. A man died earlier in the year, before the harvest began. He was one of the elders of the family, whose idea it had been to come to the new world in the first place. He’d been responsible for the initial land purchase and for dividing up the farming fields between the different farmers. Once he was dead, and the crops were only prospering in one spot, the remaining family members started to dispute whether he had really meant for those divisions to be the way they were at all.”
“It was a perfect storm,” Laura said. “Madness from the ergot, the desperation of hunger, the feud…”
“That’s why one of the men turned on the rest of the family,” Alice said. “He started with his uncle, who owned the fields here that never caught ergot. Two of his cousins were there and he slaughtered them too. From there, he just continued on. It was like he had a madness for blood and couldn’t be stopped. By the time the day was over, he had wiped out almost all of his own extended family.”
“Almost?” Laura asked. She knew an important detail when she heard one. She wasn’t going to let that slip out of her hands.
Alice turned the page. There was another tree there, a branch that shot sideways from the edge of the page. “This is the killer’s list of descendants. He did not kill his own wife or children.” She turned the page again, twice, to flip to the other side of the wiped-out tree. “Here, I have all of the descendants of the lone survivor. A woman. She was due to marry another local farmer and had been visiting the church with his family, chaperoned by the groom’s mother.”
Laura stared at the book for a long moment, trying to organize her thoughts and process what she was seeing. “You’re telling me that, nearly two hundred years ago, a whole family died except for two distantly related members—in the exact same way that people are dying now—and there are modern descendants of both the killer and the victims who are alive now?”
“The exact same way?” Alice repeated sharply. “Do you mean to say that the victims were killed with a scythe, mown down in the fields?”
In the fields, Laura thought. Only there weren’t as many fields out there now as there used to be. No, the killer had had to improvise—to go for the next best thing.
He’d had to settle for backyards.
“This is our link,” she said. “The massacre. Somehow, it’s linked to what’s happening today. Now we just have to figure out how.”