You'll Be Sorry

In 1998, a violent thunderstorm strikes the tiny mountain village of Shereford, New Hampshire. Lightning splits an oak on the property of the Dixon family, one of the town's founding clans. When the power goes out, Dave and Janet Dixon and their four children, Henry, Violet, Josie, and William, vanish. The next day, the family's adopted stray dog appears in town with blood on its fur and leads Police Chief Ian Grady to the house, where he finds half-eaten snacks, abandoned drinks, and zigzagging trails of bloody barefoot prints across the hardwood floor. No bodies, no suspects, and no explanation emerge. The dog also disappears within 24 hours. For 30 years, the case haunts the community.

In the present day, Chief Grady's daughter Amanda "Mandy" Grady serves as Shereford's police chief, having returned after both parents died to take up her father's role. She drives to the Dixon property to welcome its new owners, Theo and Raquel Collins, a young Boston couple who purchased the decaying house for cash. Theo, a charming investment manager, and Raquel, a guarded interior decorator, ask pointed questions about the blood evidence and DNA analysis. Their specificity strikes Mandy as more than casual curiosity.

Raquel's connection to the house runs deeper than real estate. She discovered an antique mourning locket containing a daguerreotype, an early photograph, of a young woman holding a dead infant in a Charlestown antique store and traced the woman to the Dixon family tree. Three miscarriages, the last a stillbirth at 24 weeks, have left Raquel devastated, and she identifies with the property's grief. Her own past is far darker than Theo knows: She grew up in squalor under the birth name "Bunny," raised by a mother who murdered four of her own infants and was poisoning Raquel's younger brother through Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a disorder in which a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in a dependent. As a teenager, Raquel killed her mother with an axe to protect her surviving siblings, spent time in a therapeutic facility, changed her name, and built a new life.

A pale stray dog appears on the Collinses' porch, uncannily resembling the original Dog. Theo adopts it, naming it Mr. Man. The dog leads them behind the collapsed barn, where it digs frantically and uncovers a hand-dug well sealed with hemlock boards. At the bottom lie a sealed earthenware pot and a human skull surrounded by bones. Gouge marks on the well cover indicate someone trapped below tried to claw out. Forensic anthropologist Debs Mahone determines the skeleton belongs to a young woman who was alive when she entered the well.

The sealed pot contains a crumbling 1790s ledger and the skeletal remains of an infant. Raquel identifies the tiny bones before anyone else, her recognition rooted in the infant remains she once found in her mother's closet. The ledger, signed "Ruth" and later linked to a midwife possibly named Rita Louise Light, records births, deaths, and medical treatments. Five documented infant deaths appear in no official records. A matching personal diary surfaces at the local historical society, last traced to Dave and Janet Dixon. Theo discovers the diary's final entries contain hidden messages in invisible ink, visible only near heat. These passages describe mothers reporting nightmares of flickering flames and demons on cavern walls, each rejecting her newborn as a child of Satan. The entries suggest powerful men drugged and assaulted women in a ritualistic setting, killed the resulting babies, and scapegoated the midwife as a witch.

Meanwhile, Mandy contacts Detective Sam Adams at the state cold case unit. Adams delivers two critical findings: New footprint analysis reveals a hidden set of larger prints, men's size 11, belonging to an unknown intruder; and retested DNA from the bloody footprints matches three donors, one of whom is Chief Ian Grady. Mandy is shaken but refuses to accept her father's guilt.

Mandy traces a barefoot figure spotted near the property to Isla McLean, a reclusive hermit known locally as the Witch of the Woods. Isla knew the Dixon children, who visited her cabin and showed her their secret discovery: an enormous hidden cave concealed behind overlapping granite slabs. She also knew Mandy's father, who visited her on occasion. Isla speaks in riddles, invoking a local nursery rhyme about a witch in a well. The rhyme's references to four colors, red, blue, black, and white, have led locals to associate it with lost Continental currency from the Revolutionary era.

After Mr. Man leads Raquel and Mandy to bones scattered outside the cave entrance, Mandy and fire chief Austin Dekes enter the vast cavern. They find scattered human remains, a glossy black altar stone, and evidence of prior human use. Mandy counts only five skulls. The Dixon family had six members.

Two confessions reshape the investigation. Austin admits that during the storm 30 years ago, he struck something with his car and fired four panicked shots, then spent decades telling himself it was an animal. Mason Carhart, president of the town historical society, provides the second: He entered the Dixon house during the storm to search for the diary, hoping it contained clues to the lost currency. As he left, he encountered Dave Dixon carrying Josie, who had been struck by Austin's car and fatally shot by Austin's panicked gunfire. Mason mistook Dave's cry for help as an accusation and shot Dave, then killed Janet, Violet, and Henry to eliminate witnesses. The next morning, Mason returned to the house, cut his foot on a toy, and left the third set of bloody footprints.

Isla reveals the final truth. Dog led her to the property during the storm, where she found five bodies but discovered William, the youngest child, still alive with a bullet graze to his skull. She carried him to her cabin and treated his wound, then transported the bodies to the cave and collapsed the entrance with small charges. To confuse investigators, she created additional bloody footprints using her own cut feet and bandages soaked with Chief Grady's blood from a knife wound she had stitched the previous day. She smuggled William to a commune in Vermont, where he was adopted by a couple named Adams. Detective Sam Adams is William Dixon, the missing sixth family member.

In the climax, Raquel and Theo enter the cave during a blizzard to investigate the colored mineral deposits Raquel has identified as the nursery rhyme's true referents: red feldspar, blue mica, black onyx, and white quartz, marking the site of the historical atrocities rather than hidden treasure. Mason ambushes them, striking Theo and shooting Raquel, then digging for currency that Isla had already found and burned 30 years earlier. Theo fights back, and Adams arrives with a rifle, but Mason wounds Adams before Mr. Man, having escaped the locked house, races across the snowy meadow and takes Mason down.

In the aftermath, Mason confesses fully and faces charges. Ballistics confirm Josie was killed by Austin's weapon; both men are charged. Raquel recovers after two weeks in the hospital, and the couple decides to stay in Shereford. Adams takes a leave of absence, unable to process his rediscovered identity. Isla faces charges for concealing the murders and tampering with evidence, though Mandy signals she will not rush the process. Mandy, finally at peace with her father's legacy, resumes her patrol of the town she has come to love.