Alders and bushes peppered with clumps of bright red baneberries are thick around the shallow pool.

In fact, you might think you know exactly where this story is going — at least, right up to the point where Maggie drives to the house through woods swarming with sinister, spiky-leafed baneberry vines.

"That was the self-same preparation of baneberries he slipped into my dish of eels," and Letitia thought she heard the wind howling down from the mountain crags.

The professor had told her about doll’s eyes, another name for the white baneberry that could cause cardiac arrest.

As for why it grows on such a creepy blood-red stalk, that may be a holdover from its more common relative, red baneberry.