“Ma Bender: Born of Shadow”

They said she came from the Old World — that dark place across the sea where superstition lingered longer than law. Most agreed she was German, or maybe Dutch, though no one ever got the same answer twice. What they knew for sure was that she spoke in a thick accent and had eyes that froze you in your tracks. Her name changed with each town: Almira Meik, Elmira Hill Mark, Elvira Griffith — like a woman trying to outrun something, or perhaps bury it.

She had a history before Kansas. A trail of husbands, all dead. One by sickness, another by accident, and at least one who simply vanished. The townsfolk whispered of poison, of curses, of a woman who could read bones and call up spirits. By the time she settled in Labette County and helped open the Bender Inn, the locals kept their distance — and their suspicions.

But it wasn’t just Ma’s past that chilled the air inside that little cabin. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in her darkness. That her “family” was something far stranger than blood.