Massey was a soldier unfortunate enough to cross me, his commanding officer. In spite of this cruel treatment, Mary grew into a sweet girl who loved her wicked father. He neglected her, dressing her in rags, making her do all the farm choirs and half-starving her. He hated the child � a little girl named Mary - that had killed his wife. And then his beloved wife died childbirth. When the Civil War ended slavery, it was a disaster for Old Man Whales, who no longer had a profitable source of income to supplement his farm work. And we were all that stood between her and inheriting Father�s money when he died. We were the price my stepmother Gerta paid for being rich. There were three of us � me (Marie), my middle brother Richard and my youngest brother Charles. She only married Father because he was rich, and she hated children. I guess most kids think that when their father remarries. None dared cross the old crone for fear that their cows would go dry, their food-stores rot away before winter, their children take sick of fever, or any number of terrible things that an angry witch could do to her neighbors. Folks living in the town nearby called her Bloody Mary, and said she was a witch. She lived deep in the forest in a tiny cottage and sold herbal remedies for a living. With her bedraggled black-and-gray hair, funny eyes - one yellow and one green - and her crooked nose, Old Betty was not a pretty picture, but she was the best there was at fixing what ailed a man, and that was all that counted. Way back in the deep woods there lived a scrawny old woman who had a reputation for being the best conjuring woman in the Ozarks. No respectable citizen in town had anything to do with Mad Henry Others called him a mad doctor who could restore life to foul corpses from the local cemetery. Some folks said that he was a magician who called upon the powers of darkness to wreck havoc upon his neighbors. Rumors were rife about the wild-eyed man. Mad Henry was a hermit who lived alone in a decrepit mansion at the edge of town. There was a living air about the grieving angel, as if its arms could really reach out and grab you if you weren't careful. At night, the figure was almost unbelievably creepy the shroud over its head obscuring the face until you were up close to it. The statue was a rather eerie figure by day, frozen in a moment of grief and terrible pain. When Felix Agnus put up the life-sized shrouded bronze statue of a grieving angel, seated on a pedestal, in the Agnus family plot in the Druid Ridge Cemetery, he had no idea what he had started. They went off the road and slid to a halt at the bottom of an incline. When he stepped on the brake, the car started to slide on the slick pavement. Lightning flashed, thunder roared, the sky went dark in the torrential downpour. Susan and Ned were driving through a wooded empty section of highway.
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