She was one of the last that he had put in his collection, and that had been so many years ago. He stepped back and admired his masterpiece. It was really quite an astonishing feat. He had done it ages before the ancestry websites had enabled people to it with the few clicks of a mouse. He had done it by hand, tracing the lineages with trips to the libraries in Jackson, Chillicothe and Athalia. He spent afternoons in the stacks, poring over every family history with ties to Willow Tree and the residents of the soil. He had been charged with the eradication of all links to an existence before the tree. When he left, those entries would have mysteriously disappeared from their genealogies. He would scrub the paths that led back to Willow Tree, while creating a new family tree that rivaled all others. This family tree actually was a tree. Davis remembered distinctly the crisp autumn morning when he had taken the shot of the Willow in the early sunrise.
