Divine Evil by Nora Roberts

changed little in more than half a century. Nor had her skittish, uncomplicated mind.
    She liked bright colors and shiny objects. Often she would wear three blouses, one over the other, and forget underpants. She would crowd dangling bracelets on her arms and forget to bathe. Since her mother's death twelve years before, there had been no one to take care of her, to patiently, lovingly fix her meals and see that she ate them.
    But the town tended its own. Someone from the Ladies Club or the Town Council dropped by her rusty, rat-packed trailer every day to take her a meal or look at her latest collection of junk.
    Her body was strong and solid, as if to make up for her fragile mind. Though her hair had gone steel gray, her face was remarkably smooth and pretty, her hands and feet chubby and pink. Every day, whatever the weather, she would walk miles, dragging her burlap sack. Into Martha's for a doughnut and a glass of cherry fizz, to the post office for colorful flyers and occupant mail, by the Gift Emporium to study the window display.
    She moved along the roadside, singing and chattering to herself as her eyes scanned the ground for treasures. Shestalked the fields and the woods, patient enough to stand for an hour and watch a squirrel nibble a nut.
    She was happy, and her blank, smiling face concealed dozens of secrets she didn't understand.
    There was a place, deep in the woods. A circular clearing with signs carved into trees. It had a pit beside it that sometimes smelled of burned wood and flesh. Walking there always made her skin crawl in a scary way. She knew she had gone there at night, after her mother had gone away and Annie had searched the hills and the woods for her. She had seen things there, things that had made her breathless with terror. Things that had given her bad dreams for weeks after. Until the memories faded.
    All she remembered now was the nightmare vision of creatures with human bodies and animal heads. Dancing. Singing. Someone screaming. But she didn't like to remember, so she sang and doused the memory.
    She never went there at night anymore. No sir, no indeedy, not at night. But there were days she felt pulled there. And today was one of them. She wasn't afraid when the sun was up.
    “Shall we gather at the riiiv-er.” Her girlish voice drifted through the air as she dragged her sack along the edge of the circle. “The beautiful, the beautiful riiiv-er.” With a little giggle, she touched a toe inside the circle, like a child on a dare. A rustle of leaves made her heart pound, then she giggled again as she saw a rabbit scamper through the underbrush.
    “Don't be afraid,” she called after him. “Nobody here but Annie. Nobody here, nobody here,” she chanted, dipping and swaying in her own private dance. “I come to the garden alone, when the dew is still on the ro-ses.”
    Mr. Kimball had the prettiest roses, she thought. He would pick her one sometimes and warn her not to prickher finger on the thorns. But he was dead now, she remembered. Dead and buried. Like Mama.
    The moment of grief was sharp and real. Then it faded away to nothing as she saw a sparrow glide overhead. She sat outside the circle, lowering her thick body to the ground with surprising grace. Inside her sack was a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper that Alice had given her that morning. Annie ate it neatly, in small, polite bites, singing and talking to herself, scattering crumbs for some of God's little creatures. When she was finished, she folded the waxed paper precisely in half, in half again, and stored it in the sack.
    “No littering,” she mumbled. “Fifty-dollar fine. Waste not, want not. Yes, Jesus loves
meeee.”
She started to rise when she saw something glint in the brush. “Oh!” On her hands and knees, she crept over, pushing at vines and old damp leaves. “Pretty,” she whispered, holding the slender, silver-plated bracelet to the sunlight. Her simple heart swelled as she watched the glint and