Chapter 4: Blood on the Silk

The threats began the next morning.

Ellie found the note nailed to the barn door with a rusty spike, the paper already damp with dew. Blocky letters cut from newspaper headlines spelled out: “SINNERS BURN IN HELL. REPENT OR JOIN WHITAKER.” Crude drawings of two women burning at the stake had been added in red marker that looked too much like blood.

She tore it down, crumpled it, and burned it in the rusted barrel behind the barn. Smoke curled into the gray sky as her hands shook—not from fear, but from rage. She didn’t tell Ruth. Not yet.

But the fear settled in anyway, a cold weight in her gut that made every creak of the old farmhouse, every rustle in the corn, feel like a threat.

Two nights later, the second murder happened.

Betty Lang, the loudest voice at the Methodist church’s women’s circle, was found strangled in her own kitchen. A length of clothesline had been wrapped tight around her neck, her face purple and swollen. Her Bible lay open on the table beside her to Leviticus 18:22, the verse underlined in fresh red ink. Betty had spent the last month at town meetings railing against “the moral decay” in Ames County, naming names and pointing fingers—especially at “those two girls who act like men and look at each other like devils.”

The town spiraled into full panic. Farmers locked their doors at dusk. Women refused to walk alone even in daylight. The sheriff doubled patrols, but everyone knew it wasn’t enough. Rumors flew faster than the combine blades: a drifter, a Satanist from Des Moines, or worse—someone local settling old scores while the farm crisis made everyone desperate and mean.