Chapter Seven

The girl was another fifth-grader named Molly Francoeur, and Hallie had figured out right away—in her very first hours in the new classroom—that the child was not one of the school’s popular kids. She was big for her age, already five and a half feet tall, and she towered over the boys and the girls. As a result, she was gangly, awkward, and could be very shy in the classroom and at recess. She wore a tractor green John Deere sweatshirt most days and reminded Hallie of a Sesame Street character. Her father had run off years earlier, and her mother worked a shift behind the register at the gas station and convenience store by the entrance to the interstate. She had a sister in second grade and a brother in ninth grade, at the high school, a boy who had already gotten into trouble for drugs and “borrowing” a car that belonged to a teacher’s aide. But Molly was also much smarter than Hallie had expected when Mrs. Collier was introducing the twins to the class and she sat Hallie down at the table with Molly and two boys. Hallie had slowly gotten to know the girl, and she realized that the kid had been besieged by bad luck since the day she’d been born.

At first, Hallie had feared that she herself wouldn’t have a lot of clout in whatever pecking order existed here in northern New Hampshire: She was new, her father was the pilot who crashed the plane into the lake (even if it wasn’t his fault), and she was twins with a girl with the freakiest red hair on the planet. It was why she had invited Molly over to their house the first time: She’d figured that beggars really couldn’t be choosers. It was only when Hallie had been in the school a few days and realized that Mrs. Collier was strangely excited by the idea that she was a twin and that the grown-ups in this town actually liked the color of Garnet’s hair that she began to understand it wouldn’t be long before she had reestablished herself as one of the cooler kids in the class. And this mattered to Hallie.

By then, however, she had already become friends with Molly Francoeur and, happily, learned that she might have underestimated this other child. Now it was early Sunday afternoon, and Molly had just been dropped off at their house for another playdate. Hallie and Garnet had taken the girl out to the greenhouse this time. The snow that had fallen the other night had melted off the roof, and the early March sun was warming the structure, but they still kept on their snow jackets. The three fifth-graders were creating a tableau with Hallie and Garnet’s large American Girl dolls and furniture, not especially troubled by the reality that some of the dolls’ clothing and tables and beds were supposed to look like they were from eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia while the other accessories were supposed to replicate the Northern Plains a hundred years later. Molly spoke with the laconic cadences that Hallie and Garnet had come to recognize from many (though not all) of the people they ran into at school, at the dance studio, or with their mom and dad at the supermarket or the hardware store.

They had just decided that the three dolls would be sisters—three beds and three dressers in a row, the dolls in their beds for the night—when Molly folded her fingers under her arms to warm them and said, “Maybe they should be triplets.”

“And maybe they’re orphans,” Garnet said, and Hallie had to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. Garnet loved building games around orphans. Over the years, she had made Beanie Babies, Barbies, and trolls into orphans. It didn’t surprise Hallie that now she wanted to make their American Girl dolls orphans, too. Usually Garnet’s orphan scenario was straight out of Annie or A Little Princess. There was an evil lady running an orphanage, and out of the blue a loving and spectacularly wealthy guardian angel would exact revenge on the orphanage director and whisk the Beanie Babies, Barbies, or trolls off to a life of luxury and unimaginable happiness. Sometimes the angel would be a prince, and sometimes there would be two angels—the orphans’ parents come to rescue them.

“Okay,” agreed Molly, and Hallie decided there was no reason for the dolls not to be orphans. The game would be a little predictable, but it was Sunday afternoon, she was tired from going to Mom’s boss’s house last night, and she didn’t have a better idea. “And maybe they’re cursed,” Molly added.

Hallie thought about this: It was definitely a new wrinkle. She and Garnet had never put a curse on their American Girl dolls. The closest they had come to using a curse as a device in any of their games had been a brief phase so long ago that Hallie had only the dimmest recollection. It had something to do with a couple of their “ball gown” Barbies and the two Disney princesses who wind up out like a light: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. “What’s the curse?” she asked Molly.

The child’s lips were chapped from months of cold weather, and she curled them together while she formulated a response. Garnet looked back and forth between Molly and her, waiting. Hallie had the sense that her sister didn’t want to deviate too far from the orphan game. Finally Molly unpuckered her lips and said, “They’ve been poisoned.”

“With an apple?” Garnet asked.

“No, that’s too boring,” Molly said, and Hallie agreed. The girl pulled her hands out from under her arms and with one of her hands pointed at the greenhouse walls around them. “Maybe something poisonous was grown in here. What’s a good poisonous plant?”

“Poison ivy,” Garnet suggested, but she crinkled her nose immediately after she spoke, and Hallie could tell it was because Garnet understood that this wasn’t at all what they were looking for. She was just brainstorming. They didn’t need a poison that made your skin itch; they needed a poison that might kill you.

“It needs to be much worse than that,” said Hallie.

“It does,” Molly agreed. “What would those freaky women around here have used? Maybe the lady who lived here before you brought weird poison plants back from Australia or South America. A lot of the women do that.”

The twins turned to each other simultaneously, and Hallie could see the surprise she was feeling mirrored in her sister’s eyes. What in the world would the lady who once lived here have known about poison? From the way their parents talked about the woman, it sounded like she practically never left Bethel. Why would Molly think she knew anything at all? Instead of answering Molly, Hallie asked, “What are you talking about?”

“You know, the woman who lived here. She was a witch. They all are. If there’s a greenhouse, there’s a witch. That’s how you can tell. And this one? Very scary. My mom says her son killed himself.”

“She was a witch?” Hallie said.

“I mean she wasn’t a real witch. They’re not like that. They don’t think they can fly through the air on broomsticks or something. They don’t run around in those pointy Halloween hats. But they are, like, into witchcraft. Witch stuff. My mom said they make potions out of plants that usually only grow in jungles and deserts. They’re all known around here for growing stuff.”

“Yeah, like herbs,” Garnet said.

“Much more,” said Molly.

“Look, I’m sure they grow vegetables and herbs and I guess some flowers,” Hallie told her. “You know, tomatoes. Parsley. Daffodils. Not …” And she stopped speaking because she had no idea what sorts of things a witch grew.

“It’s not like the woman was a real witch,” Molly said again. “It’s not like any of them are.”

“They’re herbalists,” Garnet told the girl, speaking the word very slowly because she had heard her parents using it one night after dinner, and she had never before said it aloud. It was, she decided, a mouthful.

“What’s that?” Molly asked.

Garnet shrugged because she wasn’t completely certain. “I guess it’s a person who uses herbs for stuff. But for more than cooking, because everyone uses herbs in cooking. Right?”

“What else did your mom say about the woman who used to live here?” Hallie asked.

Molly went to one of the dolls and adjusted the quilt. She’s stalling, Hallie thought, because she doesn’t know what to say. She wishes she hadn’t brought any of this up.

Finally Molly answered, “She said she was kind of weird. She and some of her friends. They scared people. There were all kinds of rumors about them, and it was like they were hippies, but older. At least most of them were. Not all. But all of them were women.”

Hallie thought of the pictures she had seen of hippies: the kaleidoscopic-colored T-shirts, the long hair. The ripped bell-bottom pants. The beads and the peace signs. The marijuana. “Do you mean she grew marijuana?” she asked Molly. “Marijuana’s an herb, right?”

The child shrugged her shoulders, which looked even broader and more substantial in her snow jacket. “I don’t know. But I don’t think that’s what my mom meant.”

“Then what did she mean?” Hallie demanded, and she knew there was a bullying quality to her voice that teachers would never approve of, but she couldn’t stop herself and she really didn’t care.

“Well, my mom said that the lady who used to live here and her friends all had these little garden plots or greenhouses where they grew the stuff for their potions. It was all very hush-hush. A lot of people didn’t like them, but I guess a lot of others did.”

“What kinds of potions did they make?” Garnet asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did they make poisons?”

“I said, I don’t know! But here’s the scariest part. She had twins.”

Hallie knew this on some vague level, but because her parents had only mentioned one and he lived in St. Johnsbury, she’d never really thought about it. There was so much other information to try to understand. But now the idea that there had been twins long ago in this house grew more real.

“They were boys,” Molly continued. “And one killed himself. At least that’s what everyone says. But my mom thinks he was murdered by the women. The police never arrested the lady, and she ended up shutting down her greenhouse—this greenhouse. But my mom says the women killed him.”

“How old was he? Our age?” Hallie asked.

“A little older. He was, like, twelve or thirteen,” she said, and suddenly this big girl bowed her head and her body seemed to collapse into itself, the child almost shrinking before the twins’ very eyes. She was, Hallie realized, on the verge of tears. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this stuff. My mom made me promise.”

“But you did,” Garnet said.

“It all just came out,” she murmured. “Maybe it’s not true. I don’t know. But you can’t tell anyone I told you.” Then: “I want to go home. I should go home. Can I call my mom?” The last of her sentence was smothered by a few pathetic sniffles, and she ran her bare hand across her mouth and under her nose. Garnet reached out to pat the girl’s arm, but Molly jerked away and wouldn’t look at them. Garnet had the sense that the child was scared—really and truly terrified, despite the reality that it was the middle of a Sunday afternoon and the sun was high overhead.

“Molly, please stay,” Hallie said, though she was still profoundly disturbed by the idea that twins had lived in this house before Garnet and her and one of them had either killed himself or been killed. But she also realized that one of her and Garnet’s very first playdates here was about to end in disaster. That wouldn’t bode well as she and her sister tried to make new friends. And, the fact was, they were stuck here in Bethel; they had to make the best of it. So she took a deep breath and then did what she could to salvage the afternoon. She pulled the American Girl doll from eighteenth-century Virginia from its bed and held it under its arms like an offering. She presented the doll to Molly and said, raising her eyebrows theatrically and trying to add an aura of evil to her sentence—as if she were the scariest witch on the scariest Halloween—“Now, how shall we poison the child?”

A nise handled a pestle with the grace of a gourmet chef wielding a chopping knife. This afternoon she was grinding hypnobium, using her black marble mortar because her wooden ones were far too absorbent for a plant this toxic, pounding and swirling the seeds against the sides of the bowl. It sounded almost as if she were dicing an onion on a cutting board or chopping basil for bruschetta. Clary Hardin was sipping green tea and leaning against the counter in Anise’s kitchen, telling her about her dinner last night with John, the Messners, and the Lintons. She was pausing now in her story only because her friend was so intent on her work. Finally Anise looked up at Clary and exhaled deeply. “Tell me more about what you think of the girls,” she said.

“I told you, I think they’re delightful. John does, too.”

“This morning Sage described them as rather philistine. She found their uninterest in plants off-putting.”

Clary shook her head at Sage’s description. “They’re ten. She forgets what it’s like to be ten.”

“She said they want to use Tansy’s greenhouse as a playhouse.”

“For now. But I’m sure they’ll grow into it.”

“And Emily?” Carefully she tapped most of the powder from the mortar into a wide-mouth glass canning jar, holding the jar over the sink in the event some spilled over the side. She reserved a teaspoon, which she dropped into a porcelain mixing bowl already filled with flour and margarine and the very last of her maple syrup. She was baking cookies.

“Emily is far more scarred than she lets on,” Clary answered. “Of course, she is nowhere near the wreck that her husband is. Now he is seriously damaged goods.”

“As he should be. But not the girls?”

Clary thought about this. “Oh, they are. I think they’ll do. Really. But Hallie is far more readable than Garnet. I know children are resilient—”

“Children are resilient,” Anise said, simultaneously agreeing with her friend and cutting her off. “But often their wounds simply remain invisible until, all at once, whatever is festering there becomes agonizingly apparent.”

“Nevertheless, neither seems quite as traumatized as I would have expected. They’re going to have dinner with Reseda tonight, and I will be very interested in her take.”

Anise pressed the lid atop the glass and then screwed the large ring around the top, sealing the jar shut. “Reseda’s talents are overrated.”

“You only think so because you are some strange exception to the rule. Trust me: When I’m with her, I spend most of my time pushing all compromising or catty thoughts as far from my mind as possible.”

“I can’t believe you have thoughts that are catty.”

Clary smiled. “But you do believe I have ones that are compromising?”

“Of course,” said Anise, and she squeezed past her friend on the way to the walk-in pantry filled with the raw materials for her cooking and tinctures: her powders and seeds and dried leaves. “You’re married to a lawyer.”

On Sunday night, Emily leaned back against the gleaming steel and marble cooking island in Reseda’s kitchen and inhaled deeply the aroma of rosemary and lamb from the oven and the scent of the beeswax candles that seemed to be alight everywhere. It was a wonder the woman had found the counter space to cook. Emily knew she was a little tipsy—maybe even more than a little—but she didn’t care. It felt good to relax and let down her guard a bit. She was drinking some sort of hard, mulled cider and it was like candy. The twins were watching movies on the other side of the house in the den while the rest of the adults were in the sunroom that was attached to this two-hundred-year-old Colonial like an architectural afterthought. In addition to Chip and her, Reseda had invited Holly and a young man with a silver loop in his eyebrow who seemed to be Holly’s boyfriend, and the Jacksons—an older couple whose attitude toward her daughters was eerily reminiscent of the way Clary Hardin and Sage Messner had hovered over the twins just last night. Emily had joined Reseda when the hostess came to the kitchen to check on the lamb and toss the potatoes that were roasting on a rack below the meat, offering to help but really hoping only to get away from the Jacksons for a moment.

As soon as she and Chip had arrived at Reseda’s, she had known who this older couple was. She wasn’t sure how because she had never met them. (She hadn’t returned to the Jacksons’ to get the bean sprouts and carrot tops for the girls’ class science project, because Ginger had taken the initiative and brought them to the school.) But, even before Ginger Jackson had opened her mouth, Emily had had a feeling that she was going to recognize the slightly throaty rasp that marked the woman’s voice from the answering machine. She pegged the woman to be in her late sixties and her husband, Alexander, to be in his early seventies. She thought she had seen him somewhere before but couldn’t pinpoint where or when. Then it clicked: He was the fellow that odd Becky Davis had nearly bowled over the day she raced out of the diner in Littleton. Alexander was tall and powerfully built and, despite his age, could pull off a completely shaved head. His shoulders seemed to be pressing hard against his turtleneck and navy blue blazer. Ginger wore her hair very much like Anise: It was a free-flowing silver mane that cascaded a long way down her back and looked a little wild. She was wearing a peasant skirt that fell to her ankles and rimless eyeglasses with lenses that didn’t look much bigger than pennies and seemed to be levitating just over her nose. The two of them, Alexander and Ginger, had been at least as smothering with her twins as the Hardins and the Messners had been on Saturday night. They had been so invasive of Hallie’s and Garnet’s personal space—what their third-grade teacher back in West Chester had called an individual’s bubble—that Garnet had actually backed away from Ginger and sat down on the plush easy chair beside Emily. For a moment, Emily had thought that her daughter was going to crawl into her lap. Then, when the twins had finally been allowed to leave the grown-ups, Ginger had started in on Emily. And she had started in with an eagerness that was downright relentless. She wanted to know whether Emily had ever gardened and what her plans were for her own greenhouse. She offered to come in with seedlings and starters for the makings of an Italian herb garden, as well as what she called the basics of a tincture patch. She said it didn’t have to be exotic at first, but—she assured Emily—it would be soon enough. She admitted that her own greenhouse lacked the powerfully healing aura of Reseda’s, though Emily had seen Reseda’s that evening, and she honestly wasn’t sure what was healing about a greenhouse filled with statues that were either frightening or freakish: A two-headed snake of some kind? A demonic-looking creature that was half man and half goat? A gargoyle clutching tiny humans who seemed to have great, leafy ivy where they should have had hands and feet? Then Ginger had gone on and on about the meadows around her house, comparing it favorably to the home in New Jersey where she and her husband had raised their sons, describing with a naturalist’s skill the occasional deer or moose that would wander along the edge of the woods here in Bethel. At one point, Ginger had pulled a compact from the pocket of her jumper and dabbed a watery cream at the edges of Emily’s eyes. “I make this myself,” she told Emily. “Makes those crow’s-feet disappear.” Emily had immediately noted Ginger’s surprisingly unlined face but still presumed the secret was Botox or a spectacularly gifted cosmetic surgeon—or, perhaps, both. When Reseda had risen, Emily had fled with her to the kitchen. Reseda seemed to understand that Ginger’s enthusiasm had crossed the rather substantial line between animated and rabid.

“She means well,” Reseda was saying, referring to Ginger Jackson. “I hope it wasn’t a mistake inviting her.”

“No, it’s fine,” Emily said. Reseda was wearing a perfectly pressed white button-down blouse, open at the neck just enough to show a hint of the lace on her bra, a black leather skirt that fell to her knees, and charcoal tights. Like Emily, she was not wearing shoes, but otherwise Emily felt underdressed beside her; she was wearing jeans, wool socks, and a blue and green Fair Isle sweater. It was a Sunday night and she had dressed casually. “But it is nice to catch my breath,” she continued. “She does have her share of very strong opinions. And she is very, very passionate about her gardening and tinctures and creams. But you all are, aren’t you?”

Reseda smiled but didn’t respond to the question. Instead she said with sisterly camaraderie, “I’ll see if I can discreetly seat you and Ginger at opposite ends of the table.”

“Or in opposite rooms, perhaps.”

Reseda nodded. “Chip seems a little better,” she observed.

“A little. But PTSD isn’t a cold. Depression isn’t a cold. It’s going to take time.” She thought again of the way he had razed that door in the basement and then how she had found him down there in the middle of the night sixteen or seventeen hours ago. She didn’t believe for a moment that he was checking the pilot light.

Reseda slid the roasted potatoes back into the oven and shut the door. “I think we’re just about there,” she murmured and then turned her attention back to Emily. “His name is Baphomet.”

“What is?”

“The creature in the fountain in my greenhouse. I rather like him.”

Emily gazed down at her drink. Had she mentioned aloud the greenhouse just now? She didn’t believe that she had.

“I bought him in a moment of minor anarchism. I knew what people were saying about me, and I thought I would really give them something to talk about.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Some people think he’s the devil.”

“Baphomet.”

“Yes.”

“And people think you do … what? Worship the devil? They think you’re a—what’s the word?—a Satanist?”

“Or Wiccan. But, I assure you, I’m neither.”

“John said you’re a shaman.”

“I’m not sure John knows what that means.”

“But you are something.”

Reseda sipped her mulled cider and seemed to be contemplating her answer, as if she weren’t precisely sure herself. Emily was struck by the woman’s eyes, which, in the candlelight in the kitchen, looked almost black. Weren’t they usually blue? Her lipstick was the color of a ripe fig, and her face was shaped like a heart. Emily realized that she wanted to kiss her, which struck her as odd because she hadn’t kissed a girl since she and a friend experimented at a sleepover in ninth grade. But she and Chip rarely made love now. Perhaps that explained her desire. Between his catatonia, her exhaustion, raising the girls, and the logistics of the move, she guessed that they had had sex perhaps a half dozen times since August 11 (and not once since moving to New Hampshire), and each event had been a rather rote affair. It had felt to her—and, she presumed, to him—like they were going through the motions because they were supposed to. They were married, they were in love; they were supposed to have sex. Before the crash, they had always had a rather interesting sex life, fueled by the three- and four-day absences that marked what he did for a living. Alas, romance, it seemed, was another casualty of Flight 1611.

“When I was a teenager, something happened to my sister and me,” Reseda said finally, stepping over to Emily so that Emily felt her lower back pressed against the counter. Reseda placed her cider on the marble. “It was violent and horrifying. But I learned something very interesting. Someday I’ll tell you.”

“But not tonight, I gather,” Emily said. She found it difficult to speak with Reseda so close, and her voice was barely above a whisper.

“No. Not tonight.”

The woman was standing right in front of her now, and suddenly all Emily could smell was the unrecognizable but absolutely heavenly scent of her perfume—the aroma of the lamb and the rosemary and the candles seemed to have vanished completely—and then the woman was closing her eyes and leaning into her, and pressing those lips the color of figs against hers. Emily was startled, but she closed her eyes, too, and accepted the woman’s warm tongue as it explored first her lips and then burrowed gently between them and started teasing the inside of her mouth. She felt Reseda’s hand reaching between her legs and massaging her firmly through her jeans; almost involuntarily she started to move her hips, to grind against the woman’s fingers.

And then Reseda was pulling away, her eyes open, smiling in a vague, absentminded sort of way. “Sweet,” she said softly, and she turned and took a pair of pot holders off the counter and went to remove the lamb from the oven. “This looks perfect,” she said.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Emily said, embarrassed, the words catching in her throat, but already Reseda was placing the great yellow pan with the meat on an ivy-shaped trivet and bringing one long, slender finger to her lips. In the kitchen doorway Emily heard her husband and Alexander Jackson, the two of them laughing about something, and Reseda said to the pair, “Ah, men. Lovely. Could one of you start pouring the wine in the dining room? We’re just about ready.”

Hours later, Emily woke up in the night when she felt Chip’s hands on her rear. She had been asleep on her side, and he had pulled her nightgown up and over her waist, and now his fingers were sliding down the crevice and rubbing her. She felt his erection against her thigh, and her mind moved between images of Reseda’s closed eyes and the taste of her tongue and the feel of her husband hard against her leg. When his finger entered her, she was shocked at how wet she was. She pressed her ass against him and heard herself purring ever so slightly. She couldn’t recall the last time she and Chip had made love in the middle of the night. No, wait, she could. It had been four and a half years ago, when he had gotten home from a deadhead leg at two or two-thirty in the morning after four days away. She started to recall the details, but now Chip was rolling her onto her back and all she was aware of was the feel of his mouth on her breasts and the way he was raising himself above her—she reached up and grabbed at the sides of his chest, her fingers pressing against his ribs—and entering her. She moaned and rolled her head back against the pillow.

In the morning, while preparing the girls’ breakfast with Chip, she tried to make sense of Reseda’s kiss and the reality that she and her husband had finally christened their bedroom in New Hampshire—and how, for the first time in well over half a year, the sex had left her satisfied. It wasn’t a coincidence, this she knew. There was a connection. But for the life of her she couldn’t decide what it meant.