It was the smell that stopped me.

You have to understand, it was early March.

Still cold enough that your breath came out in front of you,

still cold enough that the ground hadn't softened yet.

That time of year, smells don't travel. Everything is locked down tight under

the frost. So when something reaches you anyway, when something finds you across a frozen

door yard on a morning like that, you notice it. I told myself it was nothing. An animal maybe

that had gotten into something at oughtn't. It happens on

a farm. You learn not to jump to conclusions, but I slowed down, and then I stopped. The well was

just standing there the way it always stood. Stone. Ordinary. The spooners had kept a tidy property. You'd have said that about them. Whatever else you

said. A tidy property. A well-kept house. Nothing that morning looked different from any other morning

if you didn't look too closely. I looked too closely. I don't, I won't describe what I saw when I looked down into

that well. I've tried over the years and the words don't. There aren't words that do it justice

without doing more harm than good. I'll say this much. It was not an animal. I stood there for

what felt like a very long time. It probably wasn't.

And then I did what you do. I went for help.

Brookfield, Massachusetts, March the 2nd, 1778. A dooryard, a well, a smell that shouldn't have carried on a morning that cold.

What that neighbor had found, what the constable confirmed when he arrived, what Worcester County

would be talking about before the week was out, what the newspapers would call the most extraordinary

crime ever perpetrated in New England England started, like most extraordinary things,

with something entirely ordinary.

A man who went to the tavern, a woman who waited at home and a household that had been coming apart at the seams for 12 years,

...