And the trust clause was the whole cold engine of it: she had read my grandfather’s estate documents more carefully than I ever had, found the mechanism by which my death would enrich her line, and set out to trigger it slowly enough that no one would ever look too hard.

I had thought, for ten years, that I lived with a woman who loved me.

I had in fact lived with a woman running a decade-long operation to kill me for real estate, and the most chilling thing about her — more chilling than the jar, more chilling than the logs the police would find — was how long she had been willing to wait, and how kind she had been able to seem, every single morning, while she waited.

Chapter 16 — The Old Merrigan Chapel

“She’s at the old Merrigan chapel, on the ridge,” Darius choked out, tires spinning over mud and gravel.

“It’s been empty since the nineties.”