Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Stacey wasn’t sure what was causing her the most frustration. That she was spending time on a task she felt was pointless or that she wasn’t getting the results she needed to put this thing to bed.
She’d opened her laptop and waded through the various templates for forming a family tree.
Finding one that was easily readable, she’d begun by putting in the information that was readily available.
First she’d plugged in the information for Martha’s children, then Martha and her husband, before using the other computer to conduct searches on sites such as , and .
She’d felt like a hamster running from place to place getting a bit of info from here and then a tiny bit of data from somewhere else.
But eventually a tree had started to form, with names tracing back to the late nineteenth century.
Next she’d trawled through records of births, marriages and deaths to add dates to the names she’d collected. And she had established an interesting timeline.
The Stout family had apparently been cursed in 1910. The following year, Evelyn’s husband, Edgar, the cause of the curse, died, aged forty-nine, in a public house from a timber beam falling on him.
Edgar and Evelyn had one son. Their son had two sons, and he died in 1940.
The oldest son died in 1970 in a motorbike accident, leaving no children.
He’d been thirty-seven. The younger son had twin boys before taking his own life aged forty-two.
One twin died before the age of five, and the other was Samuel Stout, who had married Martha.
He died in November 1999, aged forty-nine, leaving behind terminally ill Martin Stout, now aged thirty-nine; William Stout, who was now thirty-three; and Donna Stout, who was twenty-seven.
Stacey did the maths and realised that Samuel Stout had died when his youngest child was only two years old.
There was no pattern to the deaths of the Stout men. There were road accidents, sudden illnesses and one suicide.
There was no way Stacey was going to change her entire belief system because of a family who made decisions based off a century-old superstition… but one thing she now knew for sure.
Since the curse, no Stout man had ever lived beyond the age of fifty.