The Sparrow Sisters (29 page)

They both heard a car pull over on the other side of the gate. The door closed with a thunk, and Simon called to Patience. She stood and offered her hand to Henry; he felt light with relief and overtaken by the possibility that Patience could make his life easy again. Or that this was the last easy moment either one would have. He rose and pulled her to him, sliding his hands around her waist.

“How I wish I could do this to you,” he whispered into her hair.

“You do,” she said and slipped away.

Patience went back to Ivy House with Simon, and Henry climbed over the gate again, this time with ease, and drove home to his empty apartment. When he arrived, he collapsed on his bed, pulling Patience's quilt over him, and fell into a heavy sleep: deep and painless for the first time in days. His shoes left a trail of split carapaces on the stairs. His pants, piled at the foot of the bed, were gray with torn spider webs, and in his hair dried pollen made him sneeze in his dreams.

A
murder of crows.”

Pete stood behind his liquor store, a box cutter in his hand, a pile of empty wine cases at his feet, and beyond him, some twenty dead birds.

“No one would murder crows.” His son toed one of the corpses.

“That's what a flock of crows is called,” Pete said. “A murder.”

Down at the harbor, Ben Avellar stepped over coiled lines to squat at the edge of the dock. Dead fish floated around the
Jenny Joy
in a silvery wake; alewives, washed from their freshwater breeding grounds. Yet not a single boat had come in
with a catch. Lobster traps, still baited, were hauled up light and empty. The day boats came home heavy with frustration, not fish. If the men didn't say anything to each other, it was because they all thought the same thing: Sparrows. If they didn't blame them, exactly, they certainly knew Sister trouble when they saw it.

Before the boats went out each day, the men gave a quick pat to the painted tin mermaid hammered into the side of the harbormaster's cabin. Her features had long ago been rubbed away by so many fingers. They were a superstitious lot, fishermen, and it was an easy thing to drop a hand to the figure as they headed out. Now, as they stood in small clumps around their boats, they felt uneasy. Had any of these men been to the Nursery the day Patience got out? Had any of them pulled out a plant with the same vigor needed to haul in a full net? Hard to know. They were a silent bunch too. Should they fault the Sisters, just Patience, or themselves, for the bad luck that lapped at them all like a red tide? One thing was certain, all of them—each and every fisherman, dockworker, fish shack cook—couldn't shake the persistent anxiety that curled in their bellies and burned in their throats.

Ben left his boat and drove into town. He parked halfway between Ivy House and Henry's office and walked to the green. The grass was spongy beneath his feet, waterlogged and flooded in places. The mud gathered along the footpath across the green and seeped into the streets, a thick current of salty muck that belonged far from town. He picked his way along
the brick sidewalks, now slick with feathery seaweed, and came to the town hall. His heavy boots left sloppy prints across the lobby. Ben nodded at the clerk who stood behind the counter stuffing envelopes.

“It's nasty out there,” she said when she saw Ben's feet.

“Yeah, the season's pretty well screwed now,” he said.

Ben asked for the town records from the summer of 1691, the year Eliza Howard was arrested. He didn't really know what he was looking for, but he found it anyway. And it did not surprise him. He took copies from the outdated microfiche and drove his car to Ivy House, the folder clamped between his legs.

When Ben tossed the papers on the kitchen table, Sorrel and Nettie looked on blankly. Patience was still upstairs; she hadn't left her room much since the night she came home. She'd played with the dinner Nettie made, drank endless glasses of water, and never even glanced out at the garden.

“You know that whole history-repeats-itself thing?” Ben asked. He handed Nettie a page. “Well, here we go again.”

It didn't take long to read the full story of Eliza Howard. Nettie and Sorrel had always known it, of course. After all, the Sisters had read Clarissa's book, read her references to Eliza's gift and the trouble it caused her, the formulas Clarissa carefully transcribed and edited, which Patience copied over. Then they hid it because they knew how it might seem to some. Giving it to the museum was a way of preserving it should Patience need it again, of hiding it in plain sight. But seeing that
then, as now, Granite Point had turned against one of its own as quickly as the tide turns froze the Sisters where they stood. There was no going back; events would play out, as they must, as they had over three hundred years before. They could only hope that, in the end, Patience would be saved too.

G
ranite Point had always been such a clean and tidy town. Consistently stoic. Used to taking care of its business quickly and with little fuss. And despite the bizarre weather and general feeling of unease that filled every hour of the day and night, Granite Point did what it was good at and got Patience Sparrow's preliminary hearing running in the allotted time. The Sisters took comfort in the fact that Judge Adams hadn't called for a grand jury the first time on the strength of the prosecutor's zeal. The town was grateful the case hadn't been taken to Hayward. That drive was a real pain during the season. Although with the rain paused and temperatures hovering in the high eighties, the air conditioning at the big courthouse might
have been worth the traffic, and certainly nobody wanted to miss this spectacle.

Testimony began on a day so hot that finches and blue jays shared the same puddles, butterflies fell from the dogwoods into dusty piles, and chipmunks lay exposed and panting in the shade of the salt-seared privet. In the courtroom the curious and the complicit—it was impossible to tell which was which— gathered beneath the ceiling fans. Judge Adams was already sweating under his black robe. For the first time he lamented working the summer and thought with regret about his wife, whom he'd left standing on their porch that morning, a glass of icy lemonade in her hand. He looked down at the list of witnesses—there weren't many—and banged his gavel. He hoped that the opening arguments would be brief but, given the crowd before him and the Boston news van out front, he guessed he was in for a performance.

The Weather Channel had sent a reporter in a windbreaker out earlier that week to cover the tight pod of storms that had settled over Granite Point. His cameraman stalked the fishing boats and took close-ups of the mud that lined the streets, the knotted clematis and thorny roses along the increasingly moldy picket fences. He missed the pilot whale that washed ashore early one morning at the Outermost Beach. The beach patrol rolled the carcass beyond the low dunes and buried it. Before nightfall, someone had stacked stones over the grave, shaped them into the outline of a whale and stuck a small white cross deep into the sand. Pictures of toppled headstones in the tiny
old graveyard, their bases pulled free of the porous earth, had even made it into the
Boston Globe
. The Granite Point Tourist Information booth was shuttered after the woman who ran it came down with such a bad case of poison ivy that Henry had her hospitalized. Chief Kelsey sent a gloved deputy over to remove all the pamphlets she'd touched, now curling at their edges with toxic oil.

Judge Adams pressed his bottled water against his neck and called the court to order again. As he listened to the prosecutor outline his case against Patience Sparrow, he looked at the defendant in her neat skirt and blouse and recalled that he had, in fact, known her mother, if only through his wife. He remembered her wedding because his wife had wanted to go, but he was on a case, not yet a judge but already pointlessly ambitious. Just last night she'd recalled the sad circumstances of the death of Honor Sparrow. Now the motherless daughters were sitting before him, and he wished he hadn't listened to his wife's story, wished he didn't see loss in each of the women's faces.

Simon Mayo rose and began to speak. Judge Adams refocused. He needed to pay attention, to determine whether all this talk about Patience Sparrow and her remedies was the story of a murder or just a story.

Both lawyers spoke of the central role the Sparrow Sisters played in Granite Point. Paul Hutchins painted a picture of bitter, lonely women whose only pleasure came in winding themselves through the lives of the people of the town, tight and invasive as the ivy on their house. He spoke of Patience
as if she stood before an ancient grimoire, mixing and dosing with abandon, heedless of the damage she was inflicting. Ben Avellar, who sat beside Nettie, felt his hands fist as the prosecutor looked at the Sisters and sneered, dismissing them, heaping disrespect on them until Sorrel and her sister bent their heads in shame. When it was Simon's turn, he spoke of the Sisters with respect. The story was the same: the Nursery that fed and adorned the town, the women who remade the land with their own hands, a healer who maintained the delicate balance between well and sick, sadness and contentment. Simon tried to put the Sisters firmly in the light, to banish the shadows that Paul Hutchins had drawn over them all.

And this was just the beginning.

Simon had never been so nervous. He too had the list of prosecution witnesses. Henry Carlyle's name stood out from a short column of Granite Point residents and a medical expert from the city. The coroner's report stated the cause of death, coronary arrest. It was as mysterious and unsatisfying as could be. Matty's body still lay in the Hayward morgue. Rob Short could not come to a decision about where to bury him: with his mother in Meacham or close to him in Granite Point.

Poor Matty, Simon thought. He'd been taken apart in the last days and there were still no answers. What would be left to bury? What was left of Patience now, of Granite Point? Matty's death had poisoned an entire town. And yet, the proof of Patience's innocence was right in front of him. There were no harmful levels of any of the herbs Patience had given Matty, so
as Simon paged through his notes, he tried to imagine what the medical expert would present. He couldn't begin to imagine what Henry would be asked.

Robert Short sat beside the prosecutor. He was newly shaven, his Adam's apple scraped raw by the razor. His hands lay on the table like dead things, limp and pale. He kept his eyes to the front of the room, though not on the judge. They were bloodshot and blank, and one knee bobbed rapidly. Nettie could not keep her gaze away from him. She could not believe that such a little man was capable of so much destruction. Finally she closed her eyes to try to listen to the atmosphere in the courtroom. If Matty's father was silent, the murmur and shift behind her told Nettie that everyone else couldn't wait to talk. The gossip would spread quickly, as venomous as the blight that destroyed the Nursery. She was surprised to hear that the audience was divided equally between men and women. Didn't these people have jobs, children, lives?

Sorrel looked for Henry. He'd been a fixture each evening as the Sisters tried to maintain some kind of routine. The days leading up to the hearing crawled by, perhaps because everybody was trapped by the poor weather and even poorer moods. But when Henry was with Patience, everyone settled. It was strangely changeable weather, even for New England. There wasn't one person in town who hadn't been caught dressed poorly: a sweater when the thermometer spiked to ninety-seven, flips-flops that slipped and slid over a sudden sheen of sleet. Sometimes there was a break in the near blinding rain
or a breeze that lifted a wave of stifling heat, a flash of sun to warm the cold that draped over the town when no one was paying attention.

When those breaks happened, the Sisters rushed outside to pick vegetables and flowers or just stand for a few minutes in the fresh air of the Ivy House garden. It was barely marred by the troubles that afflicted the Nursery and the town. Certainly it rained and heat wavered over the asparagus ferns when it was cold enough for the Sisters to wear socks to bed. True, the jasmine had stopped blooming, and there were no more sugar snaps, but these were part of the natural order of things, an order that had never before placed itself over the Sparrow Sisters' gardens. Still, the dahlias were as tall as Nettie, the blossoms as big as sunflowers, their colors so deep they looked like velvet. Sorrel had to pick them twice a day to keep them from falling under their own weight. As it was, the flowers crowded together until they formed a solid block of red and pink in the dusk.

The Sisters' patterns reasserted themselves. They turned the radio up and listened to banal, addictive pop songs as they changed the linens and swept sand from the broad floorboards, cleared mud from the cracks between the porch steps. Nettie and Sorrel prepared dinner after one or the other went to the market. After dinner had been eaten, dishes washed and put away, Henry sat with Patience. If it was raining, they stayed in the kitchen and the Sisters left them. If it was not too hot, they sat outside. Each night that Henry sat at their table, he felt more
tightly bound to the women. As he stood at the sink, rinsing glasses and handing them off to Nettie, he never wanted to leave. He couldn't take the chance of imagining his life in this house, but he couldn't help himself when the fragile peace set roots in him. If they could just get through this ludicrous trial, surely they could start afresh. But, of course, that would be impossible. Patience had, in her way, turned against Granite Point. It was generally agreed that all the nasty natural events had started at the very moment Patience was arrested. So it was no surprise that the town, in all its nearly genetic superstition, turned on Patience, on all the Sisters. As the first hearing day approached, news had traveled beyond the harbor town so that the nation was creeping in slowly, closer and closer to Patience.

Witnesses were lined up on both sides of the aisle. The day after Paul Hutchins told Matty's father he had to sit beside him for however long the hearing took, Rob Short stopped drinking. He still smoked. As his head cleared, he became more and more anxious. He wondered if this was how Matty had felt all the time, this certainty that everything was about to go terribly wrong. It wasn't that he didn't still blame Patience somehow; it's just that now there didn't seem to be any point to the thing. Matty was gone, Rob wasn't going anywhere, and half the women in the town looked at him with distaste now that he was back at the hardware store. He stopped covering the till for anyone at lunch and stayed in his tiny office with his ledgers.

Rob thought about the witnesses that would be called, the narrowed eyes he'd have to meet in the courthouse. He won
dered if the Sisters might actually spit at him or something worse. Did he think that they could actually put a hex on him, curse him, be-spell him? No, not really, not now that he was sober and the anger had burned remorse into his heart as it left him. But Rob Short could still be frightened.

S
IMON HAD WARNED
Henry not to tell Patience about his subpoena, but Henry couldn't keep secrets from her, not anymore. She'd looked at him with such regret that he'd mistaken it for pity.

“Don't worry about me,” he said. “I have nothing to say.”

“But you will have to tell the truth,” Patience said. She put her hand on his chest. “I am so sorry.”

“I'm not,” Henry said and brought her hand to his cheek. “I hate to think what would have happened to me without you. You are the only thing I have ever wanted to keep.”

And now, on the second day of the hearing, Henry sat in the old courtroom. He'd picked at his cuticles until they bled. He had to use his handkerchief to stanch the blood and remembered the night he let Patience plaster his face with her sticky salve, how he'd wiped it away with the handkerchief she was so sure he had, the one he went back for hoping he would see her again. The witness chair was hard, and he shifted as the pain in his leg returned with an almost electric shock. His back was beginning to seize up from the strain, and he felt as useless as he had in the VA hospital.

Henry hadn't come during the first day of the trial. Simon
instructed him to keep to his regular schedule, to go about his business quietly. He knew he couldn't have borne to listen to Sam Parker describe what he'd found when he came barreling into Rob Short's kitchen. He couldn't watch Patience as she heard, for the first time, how Matty's blood had pooled in his face and arms because he had died with his head cradled in them. He knew that it would destroy her to know that Matty had been dead for hours before he was found. Henry knew that every single detail the police saw and every action they took would be stated and dissected in the courtroom. So Henry stayed away and saw to his patients, some of whom hesitated before they asked, “How are you?” as if he might actually tell them.

Henry had already seen Matty's autopsy record; Sam snuck him a look at it just before the trial started. It held nothing to condemn Patience exactly; the levels of the herbs in his system were of no consequence, good or bad. As Henry ran over the stomach contents, he couldn't stop the shudder that went through him; there was a partially digested sprig of lavender. And yet, almost nothing else. It was true, Matty was frail, but it looked like he hadn't eaten anything but that cookie for some twelve hours. It was the digitalis that made Matty's heart stop, and that was more than enough to bring them all here.

“You are a medical doctor, is that right?” The young prosecutor—his name was something Hutchins—Henry hadn't listened—was talking, and Henry tried to appear professional and unaffected by the sight of Patience in a long-sleeved dress.
She was the only person not sweating in the close courtroom. Henry nodded before he remembered he had to speak out loud for the record.

“I am,” Henry said. His voice was deep but soft.

“And you are a U.S. Army captain?”

“I was.” Again Henry's voice rumbled, but this time he had to clear his throat. He dreaded where this Hutchins asshole was taking him.

“Yes, you were honorably discharged some seventeen months ago.” Hutchins looked at the papers on the table in front of him, and Henry looked at them too. The room was small enough that he could see the U.S. Army seal on the letterhead.

“You were wounded, spent nearly four months in a VA hospital. You still walk with a limp.”

Judge Adams looked down to Henry's legs and then back at Hutchins.

“I am hoping that this is going somewhere of interest, counselor,” he said.

“Dr. Carlyle, do you walk with a limp? Do you still suffer pain from your wound?”