I told her not to do it, you know. I told her to let it be, just forget it and live like it never happened. But she had to be a nosy little bitch and give her two cents to everyone, blabbing about conspiracy and how those teenagers weren’t missing, they were dead, and we needed to contact the proper authorities to find the bodies. Everyone knew that, the dumb broad just didn’t understand: we just didn’t want to talk about it. It was our secret, our pact. The whole town knew; who, what, where, when, why and how; we just didn’t want the outside world to know. But she had to disobey, she had to break the promise, she had to go off and try to tell the outside about our little mishap with the Davey boy and the Bloom girl. I was angry, of course: she had told me when she moved into my house that she would just go with the flow so she could fit in with the community. But she lied. Not only did she disobey, she betrayed, and that means she sinned. Our town doesn’t like sinners. So we drove her out, too, took her down to the creek and did to her what we did to the Davey boy and the Bloom girl. She was trying to break a promise, and you just can’t do that in Holy Nettle.