The Sparrow Sisters (32 page)

“She's been digging around. Maybe she knows something.”

“Oh, Ben,” Nettie said. “What could she find to help Patience?”

“She played the Eliza Howard connection for good in her piece. She wrote how Granite Point has a history of accusing the wrong people, going a little nuts, collective hysteria stuff.”

“Well, people have certainly gone nuts this time,” Nettie said. She accepted Ben's help standing, and they walked back in together, her shoulder barely touching his arm.

They were the only residents of Granite Point who would be eating local produce. For several acres in each direction, the rain and alternating cold and heat had all but destroyed every crop: corn, lettuce, peppers, and zucchini, melons, peaches, rhubarb, and potatoes. If anyone believed in curses, and right about now they did, Granite Point was under one. And while Charlotte discovered that all the women she contacted figured that Patience was at the center of the bad luck, she also found that none of them really blamed her.

Sally Tabor was the first person to put words to the theory that the town needed to get behind Patience before she was
indicted. Who knew what could happen if a grand jury was called? Charlotte met her for coffee in Sally's kitchen. Claire from the bakery; Marni Sanborne, the vet; and Fiona Hathaway, the Episcopal minister's wife, joined them. Had Charlotte been a pearl-clutching sort, she might have reached for hers. Instead she said, “What the hell?”

“Why are you so surprised?” Sally asked. “You've lived here long enough to see how central the Sparrows are to us all. We all know you've been calling around your circle. Well, here is ours. Let's put this together.”

They agreed that yes, Patience was innocent of any wrongdoing and that it was, for the most part, the men in Granite Point who were whipping up anti-Sparrow feelings. All of them, and all the women they knew, continued to take their remedies and smooth their creams over their chapped hands, rub salve into their children's scrapes, drink tea as clean and green as grass. They made sure their husbands and grown sons drank their coffee only from the thermoses or mugs they carefully dosed and wore undershirts washed in Patience's berberine solution. They argued in furious whispers when those same men dared to bad-mouth the Sparrows, and they kept each other's confidences as they always had. What they needed now was a critical mass. As their remedy stocks dwindled and their babies stopped sleeping through the night, their toddlers stomped cranky and obstinate through their kitchens, their teenagers lay exhausted and weepy in their rooms, and their husbands turned away from them in their beds, the women of
Granite Point found the strength to make themselves heard. Charlotte Mayo made sure of that.

Simon was on his way out of Ivy House when his wife came to the door. They stood facing each other in the hall when Sorrel walked in.

“Oh, Charlotte,” she said. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“I was just leaving,” Simon said and moved to take Charlotte's elbow.

“Yes, I would very much like that, Sorrel,” Charlotte said and left Simon open-mouthed at the door.

Charlotte entered the kitchen as if she wasn't terrified of everything the Sparrow Sisters meant to her. She smiled as if she didn't care that Patience held her secrets and Sorrel her husband's heart.

“I've been thinking about how I can help you, Patience,” she said.

“You've already paid my bail,” Patience said and reached for Henry's hand.

“Yes, well, that's just money. I'm here to offer more.” Charlotte looked around at the people in the kitchen.
Here'
s a family,
she thought.
These people belong to each other, even if they have chosen to be together.
They love one another no matter what it costs.
I want this,
she thought and nodded firmly.

Charlotte took out her phone and scrolled through a list of contacts before she held it up to show Patience, the names still spinning by.

“These women are willing to support you,” she said. “They
know what I have only just realized: you are at the heart of this town, Patience. Without you, and your sisters, Granite Point is failing. We all know this is true.” She looked around the room and settled on Simon. “Now we convince the judge.”

“The judge couldn't care less where Patience fits in this town, Charlotte,” Simon said. “I need to prove that she didn't kill Matty.”

“That's where you're wrong,” Charlotte said. “Judge Adams grew up out here. I've been watching him, and I am betting that somewhere in his story there is a Sparrow. When we find that connection, then he will care about Patience and this town, and he won't need proof that Patience did nothing to Matty. He'll simply know it.”

“And I know how to do that,” Nettie said and reached under the sink. She unfolded the newspaper and pointed at the picture of the digitalis. “Emily Winston.”

Patience stared at the
New York Times,
her head to one side as everyone else in the room began talking at once. She walked toward Nettie and took the paper, holding it closer to her face.

“There's a marble here,” she said.

“Matty's marble?” Sorrel asked and reached for the paper. Below the eerie, shadowy blossoms, at the base of their still-green stems, there was a dark blue marble, no bigger than a Sparrow Sisters' blueberry, which is to say about the size of a gumball. If you didn't know what it was, you'd never see it at all. It was lying in a clump of drying mud, partially covered with fallen leaves. But to the Sisters it was terribly clear.

“Oh, Matty,” Patience whispered and sat down at the table. Henry stepped to her side.

“I'm not getting this,” Charlotte said as she sat next to Patience. She swallowed and rubbed her palm over her forehead. “May I have some water?” she asked in a thin voice.

Simon filled a glass at the sink and gave it to Charlotte. Henry turned so he could see her face and took her wrist gently between his fingers.

“This heat is hideous,” Charlotte said.

Patience put her hand on Charlotte's shoulder and then reached to take a sip of her water.

“Yes, I'm sorry,” she said. Charlotte looked at Patience. She saw that she was diminished by the last weeks. Her hair was more brown than red, her freckles as stark as pepper. She wondered which one of them felt worse.

Patience listened to the talk around her. At first she understood it. They were trying to make a plan with Charlotte, something about the women of Granite Point coming together to signal her innocence, something else about getting the reporter to write another story. Then Patience lost focus. She didn't hear them because there was something she was trying to grab. It was as if everyone was saying the same word over and over until it became nothing but a collection of meaningless sounds. The one thing she needed to understand was just out of reach.

“So what are we going to do?” Charlotte asked. “Who will call this Emily Winston?”

“I will,” Nettie said.

“Wait a minute,” Simon said. “What are we doing, who are we calling?”

In a startling display of solidarity Charlotte and Nettie and Sorrel all groaned.

“Keep up, Simon,” Sorrel said. “Emily Winston writes the ‘Emily's Evidence' blog, her piece is in the
Times
today because she's been in court every day this week. She's digging around, she's following Patience, and much as I don't like it, Ben and Nettie are right. This woman could help change what's happening.”

Henry watched Patience. Her eyes jittered between her sisters, and she kept shaking her head as if to clear it. As everyone gathered around the table, filling the salad bowl with lettuce, squeezing lemon over the leaves, slicing hard garlicky sausages and cold steak, tearing basil, pouring icy white wine, Henry thought that as horrible as the situation was, he'd never felt so safe. If Charlotte saw a family, Henry saw a team, and for the first time, he thought that maybe this team was going to win. Except that Patience was still missing. When he placed a glass of wine in her hand, she finally looked away from her sisters.

“I think I need to go to the Nursery,” she said.

Henry squatted down next to her. “Can't it wait until the morning?”

Patience thought for a moment. She let her fingers drift over Henry's where they gripped the edge of the table. His nails were bitten, his cuticles ragged. She nodded and stood. Char
lotte reached for her wine, but Patience slid it away. Charlotte looked at her and then drank from her water. Patience pulled out a drawer beside the sink and brought a small tube over to Henry.

“This will soothe you,” she said as she smoothed the cream over his fingertips. It smelled of mint and witch hazel.

“There,” Charlotte said. “This is what I'm talking about. People need to see what Patience does, not what they imagine she does.” She turned to Nettie. “Call the reporter,” she said and handed her the phone.

H
ere's what I see,” Emily Winston said.

Henry had taken up a spot at the sink in the crowded kitchen.
This is so peculiar,
he thought. The reporter sat at the Sparrows' kitchen table, a glass of wine in her hand and a notepad dark with ink at her elbow. Simon leaned against the tall cupboard; Nettie, Sorrel, and Ben sat across from Emily with Patience and Charlotte to either side. Emily couldn't keep her eyes off Patience, as if she could see the truth beneath her skin. What she could see was Patience's remarkable beauty, the fragile bones that made her hands look like birds as they fluttered over the table.

“Rob Short is wavering.” Emily took a drink of her wine and reached out to pop a cherry tomato into her mouth. “It was obvious this morning when you”—she pointed at Henry—“were testifying.”

“What did I say?” Henry asked.

“You begged for Patience. It was clear that you love her, and I think that Matty's father saw that he'd already lost, saw
what
he lost, I think.” Emily slapped the table for emphasis. “Besides, the evidence against Patience leaves room for doubt, and Hutchins knows it. That doesn't mean Rob Short can't sue you, but he really doesn't look up to that, does he?”

“If that's what you got from the session, why didn't Hutchins jump on the opportunity put the grieving father on the stand, save what he could of the case?” Simon asked.

“Didn't you see him tear out of the courtroom? He couldn't wait to shake that man.” Emily looked at Simon. “You know it too. If Hutchins succeeds in getting Patience Sparrow in front of a jury, which by the way is the only way he'll get anywhere with this judge, it will be solely because you guys fail her. And if he gets her that far, then she'll be moved to Hayward where she's as good as convicted because she'll have already been tried in the court of public opinion.”

Everyone stared at the reporter.

“What? Do you think people are any kinder or gentler in the real world than they are here in ‘Story Town'? If Judge Grumpy Adams is having a hard time believing Patience Sparrow isn't the wicked witch, good luck in the big leagues.”

“Then why are we asking you for help?” Henry asked. “You think we're such idiots, we can't win for losing, why bother to offer your help?”

“Because it's not just the judge you need to win over, it's the town. And that's something I'm good at.”

Patience opened her mouth, but Emily stopped her, putting her hand up.

“In the four days I've been here I have been soaked by rain, fried by the sun, bitten raw by mosquitoes, seen little kids sitting on their porches like old ladies, dogs lying down in the middle of Main Street, and a hermit crab scuttling over a gravestone miles from the ocean.” She looked at the Sisters. “Am I right? Is this town seizing under some kind of guilty conscience?”

“Something like that,” Ben said.

Emily Winston dug in her bag and came up with all the research she'd done on Eliza Howard. She sifted through the damp copies until she found what she wanted.

“Here,” she said. “Eliza Howard was accused of witchcraft, falsely, obviously. The whole town began to fail and people were frightened, just like now.” She began to read. “‘Granite Point is a forgotten place. Never have so many elements gone so horribly wrong. With Eliza Howard in the dock, the summer is lost and anything good with it.'” That's testimony from the court records at the Howard trial.” She put her papers on the table.

“So, three hundred years later, and none of you can see the
parallels, the story here?” Emily said, looking up at Henry. “I'm not about helping you. I'm a reporter, and this is a good story. If, as a result of my digging, Patience Sparrow finds justice, or Rob Short gets revenge, then I'll report that too.” She stood. “I have a call to make.”

Emily was going to tell her editor (the editor of the
Times,
yes!) that she was in with the Sparrows. She would turn this column into a headline in less than a day, into a TV piece soon after, a book contract, HBO series, who knows.
You gotta love small-
town scandal,
she thought.

W
HAT SHE SAID
was true: the town was indeed spasming, completely undone by its own history. Just the other day Chief Kelsey had reached into his pocket to pay Claire for his coffee and come up with a handful of tiny mussel shells, wet and sandy. Paul Hutchins returned to his car to find it freckled with plover shit. He tried to scrub it off, but it was baked on hard by the heat that had swept in while he was in court. When he dipped his handkerchief into the old trough kept filled by the village improvement society, he found it running over with seawater, three skipjacks swimming in circles against the stone sides. Judge Adams's wife came to town on a whim to collect her husband one early evening. She parked behind the courthouse and opened the glove box to get a wet wipe; it was so hot, her mascara had run. She brought her hand out filled with deep-purple viola petals. She closed her eyes and remembered
Honor Sparrow, her best friend all through school. Sandra Adams cried.

Emily Winston may have given a name to the strangeness gripping Granite Point, but most people already believed in it. Everyone watched Emily leave, gawping like carp, wondering if this was a good or bad thing they'd gotten themselves into. For Patience, it was clear: it was good for the journalist and it wouldn't change what was happening to Patience. She understood Emily Winston: here was a woman who went after what she wanted, and although she preferred not to run anyone over on the way, sometimes she had to. Also, Emily Winston was a loner, something Patience certainly understood. Although she couldn't quite remember why now.

Patience gazed around the kitchen at the people who loved her—the ones who had to, her sisters, the one who chose to, Henry, and the ones who had gotten dragged along: Simon, Charlotte, and Ben. She thought that maybe everything that had happened in the last weeks might almost be worth it if she could keep these people. But Patience knew that if she was convicted, they would be lost to her in the most physical way. If she was released, would any of this odd little family ever forgive her for pulling them into the dark with her? Losing looked all kinds of ways to Patience.

“Is this woman for real?” Sorrel asked. It was late and she was tired. There was something slightly predatory about Emily Winston, and Sorrel wasn't entirely sure she trusted her.

“I believe that if this case gets a lot of light, people will begin to see that whether or not Emily is for real, Patience is.” Ben finished one of the longer sentences he'd ever spoken and smiled at Nettie.

“Well,” Patience said. “Thank you.”

Sorrel was indeed physically tired, as was everyone in the kitchen. No one was sleeping properly; they all either startled awake in the night, woke before dawn, or tossed among alternately hot or cold sheets for hours before falling, flailing really, into troubled dreams. But Sorrel was more than tired; the unfamiliar feeling of fondness and respect she'd developed toward Charlotte Mayo exhausted her. Then she was surprised that over the weeks she'd watched Simon defend Patience, Sorrel had come to realize that she did love Simon, just not in the way she had once been so certain of. She felt the absence of that tiny torch with a sensation of lightness in her chest. As everyone else marked out the next steps, Sorrel watched Charlotte watch her husband and knew that, if nothing else, those two had found their way home.

So it was decided that the following day, after court, Patience and Emily would go to the Nursery together. Emily would profile Patience, and the tide of public opinion and the power of a fascinated nation would naturally raise her up beyond the reach of even Judge Adams. That is not what happened.

First, Henry stayed the night at Ivy House. It still amazed him that there wasn't some sort of rule about a prosecution witness sleeping with the accused person so, as if he were a
school child and Simon his teacher, Henry avoided making eye contact with him as Patience took his hand to lead him up the stairs, grateful for every step they took toward her room and each other. And if the kitchen was the site of multiple epiphanies that evening, it was the small gray bedroom that woke in Patience the answer to Matty's death.

Just after midnight Patience sat up with a certainty that made the air turn cold around her. The moon was high and for the first time in days the sky was clear so that her room was as light as midday under it. Henry turned restlessly in his sleep but did not wake. She saw that his hair had gotten so long that it fell over his eyes in a dark mass. His arm was thrown above him as if he was warding something off.
Me,
she thought, and pulled on her clothes. When she got into the truck, she put it in reverse and coasted down the driveway and onto the street before she started the engine.

It was so simple, obvious really, now that she thought about it. The only living thing left in the Nursery was why Matty was dead, and although she hadn't mixed up an elixir of poisonous digitalis, she might as well have. She was sure of that. By the time she stood in front of the cluster of foxglove, it was bathed in ice crystals as well as moonlight. Patience bent to retrieve the blue marble and remembered the day she'd told Matty that this plant, this last of the Sparrow Sisters' flowers, could fix a broken heart. Matty, being Matty, had taken that to be true, literally. And, although Patience might have thought of a scenario whereby he'd give it to his father, whose heart
had broken in so many ways, somehow Matty took it himself. Patience pulled off her sweatshirt, wrapped it around her hands and began yanking the plants out of the ground. She didn't give a thought to the evidence they still represented or to the trouble she might be pulling out of the ground right along with them. All Patience thought was to rid the Nursery of the poison. Her sweatshirt became coated in dirt and stained with a sticky white sap that leaked out of the stems. As soon as she touched the foxglove, it wilted beneath her hand, the blossoms closed in and browned. Fog rose from the ground and wrapped around her legs in ribbons of silver and pale blue. The bitter scent of dandelion and black elder hung in the air. Her arms were soon covered with long streaks of red blisters, as if she'd been stung by jellyfish. The welts rose visibly as she gathered the rotting foxglove and carried it toward the shed. Patience dumped it in a pile on the sandy driveway. She snapped her fingers against each other, wiped them down her pants to rub away bits of soil and stalk.

Patience walked over to the shed and fell to her knees beside the step. She bent at her waist; to anyone watching she looked like a pilgrim seeking absolution at a shrine. Except that Patience was sweeping her right hand and arm back and forth under the step until she found the box. If she'd thought about it, under a single step, open to the elements on both sides and right under her sisters' noses was not an ideal place to hide anything. But when Patience started smoking in college, she slid her cigarettes into a baggie and threw them under
the steps because she knew she always had an excuse to come to the Nursery. Later, when her collection of random bits of family treasure grew, she put everything in her father's small lockbox, joined by the cigarettes. Eventually, Patience quit smoking, although she kept a pack in the box for emergencies. She hadn't had an emergency in nearly a year so she hadn't opened the box.

Now Patience turned the key that she kept in the truck and opened it. She took out her mother's lighter, the one she'd used through college. It was short and brown, wrapped in a kind of faux leather. Honor's initials were engraved on a tiny silver plaque on the front: H. J. F. Honor Jane Fairfield. The Sisters sometimes thought they should have called the nursery Fairfield. The lighter still worked because Patience kept the fluid topped up. She left the box on the step and went to stand in front of the foxglove, flicking the flint wheel over and over until the sound was so sharp and fast the crickets silenced themselves to listen.

The moon was bright white and cast shadows as inky and dark as the nights had been all month. As soon as Rob Short started walking down the drive, Patience recognized him. She pocketed the lighter and stood as still as any startled animal. When Rob drew close enough to speak, he did.

“Don't burn that,” he said, his voice scratchy from disuse. “Whatever it is, they'll see the smoke and think something's wrong.”

“Something
is
wrong,” Patience said. “You said I'm wrong.”

“I know.” Rob rubbed his hand over his jaw. There was a stain on his shirtfront and he smelled like undone laundry. “I don't . . .” he started. “I wish . . .” He reached into his pocket and for a ridiculous second Patience thought he was going to pull out a gun. But it was only his cigarettes. He shook one up and offered it to Patience. He had to lean over the foxglove pile. It was an oddly courtly gesture, the bow, the offer. Patience took the cigarette and used her mother's lighter and tossed it to Rob. The smoke climbed down her throat with complete and satisfying familiarity, and she remembered why she'd quit in the first place. They stood staring and smoking for a minute or so before Rob spoke again.

“I know you didn't mean to kill my boy,” he said. Patience opened her mouth. “No. I'm saying I don't think you hurt him at all.” Rob walked over to the step and sat, and Patience followed.

“We probably aren't supposed to be talking to each other,” Patience said. Her voice was so light with relief it was barely audible. Hearing Rob Short say he knew she was innocent was almost better than hearing Judge Adams say it.

“I don't give a shit about the rules,” Rob said. In the moonlight his jaw was so jagged it looked as if it hurt. “Matty was born like he was. I know that too. His mother thought it was her fault, that she'd done something to make him sick. When it got so bad that last year, she once said she thought that she ought to let Matty go if he was so determined to leave.” Rob lit another cigarette. “Of course, she was the one who left.” He
turned to Patience. “Everyone thinks she didn't leave a note, but she did. She asked me to remember her as better than she was.” Rob wiped at his nose. “Do you think anybody will do that for me?”