seemed to forge directly into a section of woods that the Brookhants students called the Tricky Thicket, an area of bizarrely dense growth—the trees leafier, the brambles bramblier—fed by a hot spring. It was said that even in winter, even with snow otherwise all around, the ground in that patch stayed thawed and ferns grew lush and green, and ripe blackberries might be found.
Perhaps thinking it would provide her with cover, Clara now much more slowly made her way through this thicket. And if she’d also been looking backward, every so often, checking on Charles’s unhinged approach, then that too would have hindered her speed.
Though they’d left the path, the two cousins were now close enough to the orchard, to Flo, that she would have heard their shouts. Or screams. It’s likely that this was why she came running toward them, hoping for Clara but finding Charles first. When that stupid man was brought from the woods, he had a black eye and a bleeding face swollen from more than stings alone.
“She charged me like a drunken bear,” he told a reporter from the Providence Daily Journal. He was talking about Flo, who, he said, had attacked him. In an interview given from his sickbed he called her “a real she beast. More animal than girl. She had something in her hand, a stone or stick.” He also said that her actions toward him had proved him right, and that what he’d previously told Clara about Flo was now made undeniably true. “That girl was no lady! She was a ruffian bastard—some foreign-born devil who exerted her depraved influence over my cousin. Clara was only too female-minded to see it.”
When asked why he had been chasing his cousin in the first place, Charles had said, as if obvious: “We had not finished our conversation to my satisfaction. And before we could do so she openly defied me, playing up to her schoolmates. I knew that her mother, my beloved aunt, would want me to correct that sort of insolence at once. So I did.”
Charles explained that during her weekend at home, Clara had been issued an ultimatum regarding her family’s expectations for her future comportment at Brookhants: if Clara wanted to continue to attend the school for her senior year, and to graduate with her class, she would immediately discontinue her friendship with Florence Hartshorn and cease all activities related to The Story of Mary MacLane. (And as you now know, Mrs. Broward apparently believed that even continuing to possess a copy of that book was an activity related to it.)
Wretched Charles might have admitted that Flo attacked him, but why and how she did so was as unclear (and speculated about) in 1902 as it is today. Was it only to interrupt his pursuit of Clara? Or did Flo witness something else between them? Something worse? And when did she do it, exactly—before the yellow jacket attack or while it was already underway?
Because in the end, Readers, the yellow jackets are the thing. I told you that at the start.
What Clara did, in the middle of the Tricky Thicket, was step over a fallen log and directly into a ground nest of them. And this particular ground nest was of a size not only unusual, but seemingly impossible for a northern state like Rhode Island.
Yellow jacket colonies in places as far north as New England are supposed to last only one season. They can’t overwinter, because the region is too frozen and food scarce for anyone but the queen, fed fat off the sweets of her minions, to survive. In places like Florida, warm even in January, it’s not so unusual for ground nests to continue season after season—for decades, sometimes, with dozens of queens ordering around thousands of workers—the cycle of birthing and feeding, eating and building, churning along without pause. But that’s not supposed to be the way in Rhode Island, which has a winter with snow and cold and frozen ground.
Just not in the Tricky Thicket.
And so here it was: a yellow jacket nest to build your nightmares from, its paper chambers stretching in underground layers until it was almost the size of three of Charles’s cars parked in a row. And Clara’s foot, slipping off the edge of a mossy log, landed in the uppermost layer of the nest’s papery frame, where it promptly sank and sank, up to her knee it sank, wrenching her to a stop. She would have had only moments to