Josie

Two buyers looked at the house and walked away. Neither would say why.

Bayonne, New Jersey, 1922. The house is too cheap, and in the ward they say it's cheap for a reason, and the reason is nothing you can put in a deed.

Konstanty Bogdzul buys it anyway: a saloon in the front, a flat above, an empty lot beside it, room enough for a whole childhood. An old woman crosses herself at his porch every morning. The butcher asks where his children sleep. Nobody on that street will tell him what he has bought.

Twenty-two years earlier, a nine-year-old girl burned at a kitchen stove in that front room and was dead before three the next morning. Her funeral was hurried through on an afternoon when armed men were pounding on the church doors. Nobody walked out to the grave with her. The priest wrote her name down wrong, and two pages of the register dried together, and for thirty-eight years no one could find her.

She is still in that room. She is still nine. And she has worked out that the only way to get her own family back is to empty the house of everyone else.

Over sixteen years the Bogdzuls lose four children to accidents no coroner can fault - a stone nobody threw, a dog that tests clean, a boy who steps off a curb after a scattered box of bottle caps, a woman who walks four blocks with a broom handle and cannot say why. The neighbors know. The neighbors have always known. And not one of them will say so out loud until it is far too late to matter.

Based on true events. Every public incident in this novel comes from the Bayonne newspapers between 1900 and 1932, found by typing a single street number into the archives - a dead child, a stabbing complaint, a robbery trial, a dog's head sent to Trenton for testing, two boys accused of stealing pigeons, and four small coffins carried out of one address in ten years.