It was while she was refinishing the wooden floor where her father had breathed his last that she discovered the Book of Secrets. She’d been laying heavy on the sander, sweat running down her back, melding her shapeless dress to her like a second skin, going at a particularly rough spot when her damp hands lost control of the machine.
It careened into the nearest wall of the foyer between the kitchen and the dining room, tripping a switch. A thick maple panel slid open with a whoosh and an exhalation of air that smelled of salt and roses, revealing a secret alcove as large as a bread box. Ursula recognized the same blue glow emanating from the cove as surrounded the plants she harvested for her potions. Heart fluttering, she reached in.
The secret space held only one thing: a book so thick that she couldn’t hold it with one hand. The outside cover was worn brown leather that always felt warm to the touch, like the skin of an elephant. She opened it with shaking hands. The paper inside was linen, and the secrets handwritten in fine, scrolled black calligraphy. No author was credited, though it looked to Ursula like at least two different types of handwriting were in the book, along with a third who had drawn vibrant designs of flowers, vines, and plump vegetables at the edges and in the corners.
She tried to start at the beginning. A different page fell open, and the silky promise of answers pulled her in. She lost a whole day to the book, reading of spells and potions, and barely put a dent in it. Magic was familiar to her—every Catalain woman was born with some—and so she accepted the book as she had accepted the house. It was a sentient thing, powerful and independent. She told no one of the book, vowing to open it only when she had a question or needed help, and went back to refinishing the house.
She hired a local handyman to scrape paint the color of a smoker’s teeth from the exterior. He tinted the turret and first and second floors a rich maroon and the third story malachite green. The recesses and trim were painted cream except for the many window frames, which he shaded the green of the turret on the first pass and deep purple on the strip closest to the window.
It took two years, but when she was done, she had reclaimed the storybook house of her imagination. It was in focus for the first time in a half century, a crisp form against the plum-and-cream of a dusky sky, and people commented on what a beauty it was, so well-kept. Of course, they whispered, it must be terrible to heat in the winter, those old houses always were, and thank goodness that wasn’t their problem.
Ursula chuckled. She could do that now that she had the Queen Anne.
With the house restored, she tackled the garden, an overgrown tangle of animal waste, crabgrass, and cigarette butts. She burnt off the top layer, letting fire cauterize and the ash seep deep into the dirt like balm. Then, she raked until she was sure all the glass and garbage were removed. Finally, she turned the soil with hand and spade, not willing to let the unnatural drip of a gasoline-powered tiller pollute what she was creating. When her work was complete, the plot was half an acre, abutting Rum River and half a mile north from the 20-foot waterfall that had given the town its name. The freshly-turned soil was as deep and soft as velvet, crawling with plump earthworms, swollen with minerals.
The cottage was her final project, the building little more than an oversized garden shed and draped with thick, spongy moss from which emanated the intoxicating scent of petrichor no matter the weather. Rather than disturb the drowsy moss, she instructed the carpenters to build up from the inside using wood and stone. They also added a small greenhouse onto the back, and leading to the front, laid river rock stepping stones to connect the tiny bungalow with the clematis-tangled back gate and the rear door of the Queen Anne. The result was a crooked garden cottage straight out of a fairy tale.
The inside of the cottage became a rustic but sturdy laboratory, the walls lined with bottles and herbs, books on alchemy, glittering charms, tables strewn with drying herbs, and containers of sweet oil that undulated even when the bottle was still. The smell was of humid earth and exotic plants, sewn together with a chemist’s tang.
She divided her days between the garden and the cottage, her sweet, serious Jasmine playing with hand-sewn dolls at her feet or chewing sticks and tasting herbs. The baby would reach up with chubby hands when she was hungry, and Ursula’s face would break into a surprised smile, as if she had forgotten she had a child.
On either side of her property, bland colonial ramblers sprang up, so Ursula built a six-foot tall cedar fence to shield her garden. And it was perfect. She grew no vegetables, only herbs and flowers, spicy bright things that winked and flirted with the sun and worshipped the moon.
When everything on the property was ready, Ursula invited her beloved twin sisters to live with her. The year was 1982, and she was eight months pregnant with her second child, father unknown, even to her.
Ursula’s sisters arrived together, Xenia driving a yellow moving truck and sunny Helena steering their cornflower blue minivan. “The Catalains are back in town,” people whispered. It was funny because Velda had been around for years. She had just done an exemplary job of massaging the town’s memory. And of course Ursula had been back for over two years, quietly building her nest and raising Jasmine. Something about the four women in town together for the first time in over a decade caused a critical mass.
Their combined presence dipped the townspeople a little more deeply into the muddy gray puddles of their lives than they liked. This is the way of all small towns, forever. Too much brightness reminds people what they don’t have, and so they fight to extinguish it. The whispers of witchcraft, so prevalent immediately after Eve and Ennis had built the Queen Anne and then disappeared, began to recirculate.
The twins ignored the rumors and talked Ursula into letting Velda visit when she wanted, and all four of them lived their lives. Faith Falls, for its part, spent the next twenty years in an uneasy truce with the Catalains. Men and women came and went from their bedrooms. Ursula’s daughters, Jasmine and Katrine, grew.
When the snakes returned to Faith Falls in 1990, as they did every 25 years since time remembered, Ursula held her breath, but of course her father’s corpse didn’t reanimate and enact revenge upon her and her children. The thought was ludicrous. Ursula believed in the science of magic, not the superstition of curses, and the recollection of her father’s murder faded to a daguerreotype gray.
Comforted by the embracing sweetness of moonflowers and the familiar rhythm of her oasis, Ursula pushed one hand into the rich soil. The pulse of the earth caressed her fingertips as she searched downward. Her stretching fingers passed earthworms and beetles and plunged through the crust into the first level of the water table. She let them dance there for several seconds before yanking her hand back, startled by the sound of a car.
It was 3:00 in the morning, and in a town of 10,000 people, traffic this late was as rare as a police siren. A lonely man must be lost, or a pair of hormone-drenched teenagers was searching out a quiet spot for late-night necking, though she doubted that’s what kids called it nowadays.
She shook the dirt from her hand, grabbed the blue decanter by its neck and stood. The glass hummed. “Oh, you old knees,” she whispered down at her legs. “What am I going to do with you?”
But her voice was playful. She was in her favorite place, and everything was now as balanced as she could make it. She even smelled a hint of rain in the air, the pregnant promise of a storm to feed her rootlings. But then she sensed something more. She sniffed to be sure, but there it was, a scent that made her shoulder blades draw up: a hint of sandalwood and cucumber. She cocked her head, searching the air with the antenna of her intuition.
That smell could only mean one thing: Katrine was here.
The Catalain Book of Secrets: Digging
Humans have an inclination to confuse pain, coal, and paper for something of value. Don’t despair if you can’t tell the difference between real treasure and fool’s gold, or worse, if you start treating the ill luck that’s befallen you like a diamond to be ho
arded. The answer is the same, no matter what you hold in your hands: don’t bury it.
If you find yourself drawn to the same patch of dirt—either in the earth or in your memories—locate a sturdy hand shovel and dig until you either find what you’re looking for or you feel foolish for putting it underground in the first place.
In either case, let it go.
Chapter 4
Ursula
“You sure you don’t need anything?”
“Mom.”
It sounded like a four-letter word the way Katrine said it, piercing Ursula. She had vowed to herself before she even knew she was pregnant with Jasmine that she would never criticize her daughters the way that Velda had put her down, never control them the way her mother had done to her. So Ursula nodded, and did more than bite her tongue; she swallowed it, turning away from the daughter she hadn’t seen in over a decade and closing the bedroom door behind her.
She walked downstairs, unable to shake the image of how tired Katrine had looked when she’d arrived twelve hours ago and how she still looked, her lovely cheekbones sunken into themselves, the gray dust coating her skin, the dimness of her eyes. It hurt Ursula’s heart, and so she soothed herself the only way she knew how. She’d been thirteen when she lost her virginity, fourteen when she started sleeping with men twice, sometimes three times her age. Velda hadn’t noticed.
Ursula’s latest lover was a plumber who lived on the south side of town. After running to the store to purchase all of Katrine’s favorite foods, Ursula drove to his house and watched him and his wife through their bay window, the light of the TV flickering across their faces. He was a potato-faced man, she a kind-hearted woman who’d grown tired with life. When the wife went to bed, Ursula left her car and tapped on the glass.
Startled, his head jerked toward the window. His eyes widened when he saw Ursula, traveled in alarm to the door his wife had gone through, then landed back on Ursula. She didn’t move. He met her at the front door.
“What are you doing here?” His voice was a heated stage whisper.
She took his hand and yanked him toward her car. This was their fourth meeting; the first had been when he’d stopped by three weeks ago to fix the water heater and the second and third were when he’d stopped by to do “follow-up work.” She had chosen him by the same criteria that she chose all her men: they were already taken and so there was no risk of a relationship, and the women they were married to had already strayed. He tried to pull back from her now, outside his home, but she placed her hand on his crotch, squeezing hard. His shoulders softened.
“Fine, but hold up. I need to tell Myrna I’ve got an emergency call.”
He slipped into the house, exiting a few minutes later with his plumbing tools in hand. Ursula was leaning against her car.
“Can you at least hide, for Christ’s sake?”
She stared at him coolly. “If you don’t want this, you didn’t have to come out.”
He glanced over his shoulder, then back at Ursula. His expression blazed with a particular heat she’d become accustomed to in the eyes of other women’s husbands. “I’ll meet you at the north edge of City Park.”
She beat him there, yanked open his pick-up door when he arrived, and climbed on top. She changed his radio to an oldies rock station before she unzipped his pants and guided him out. She wasn’t wearing underwear. Her movements were confident and aggressive. She rode him with her eyes closed, imagining he was someone else, until the wave of pleasure began to build in her stomach, searching higher, higher, until it overtook her. Her peace was complete, but temporary.
She climbed off without so much as a goodbye, leaving the plumber with his mouth and pants open. There was nothing more to be had from this man. She would end their trysting the way she always did, by giving him a potion that would reignite his love for his wife, turning it into a consuming passion where the only way he could earn respite was to treat his wife like a queen.
When she returned to the Queen Anne, she still couldn’t sleep. Her daughter had been gone for too long. The woman sleeping upstairs felt like a stranger. Ursula didn’t know what she should do for her, and so she lay in bed, eyes open, ears tuned to the slightest sound from Katrine’s room.
The sun rose, and still no sound filtered from her daughter’s bedroom. She tiptoed downstairs and was relieved to find Helena and Xenia were up and busy fluttering around the kitchen. The sight of her sisters bustling loosened her chest, and she pulled her first deep breath of the day.
“Katrine walked like a ghost who didn’t know she was dead, didn’t she?” Helena asked Ursula by way of a good morning.
“You don’t have to be so dramatic,” Xenia, Helena’s twin, cut in, reaching behind her sister to grab the coffee beans from the cupboard. Where Helena was round and comfy, Xenia was lean as a jaguar. Helena’s hair was thick blond and curly, and Xenia’s was black and straight as a sword, with encroaching gray above each ear. Ursula had allowed her twin sisters a tiny vegetable plot on the side of the house. Helena couldn’t bear to pull any of the tiny carrot shoots when they first sprouted, even if they were suffocating each other, but Xenia gutted them.
The twins had lived together since the moment of conception, and other than their devotion to one another and their malachite-green eyes, could not be more dissimilar. Despite the vast differences in their appearance and personality, they could be picked out as Catalains from across a crowded room. It was in their eyes as well as their quiet confidence, not the slightest hint of apology in the swing of their hips.
“She was just tired,” Xenia continued. “Jet-lagged.”
“Dead tired.” Standing at the island in the center of the Queen Anne’s grand old kitchen, Helena was using a metal spatula to coax the divinity off the parchment paper. She waved the spatula in the air when Ursula glanced at the candy. “Don’t even tell me it’s too humid to make divinity. We need this specific candy for the clarity it provides. Soothing, too. See the soft blues and greens I used?”
Ursula nodded and glanced at the clock. Katrine had been in her childhood room for nearly twenty-four hours with barely a squeak to anyone. She sighed and returned her attention to her sisters, her love for them a constant. She’d raised them, after all. An old thought, one she hadn’t considered in decades, flitted across her brain pan: would her sisters still love her if they knew she’d murdered their father? She stuffed the black idea back into whatever hole it had crawled out of.
“What do I do about Katrine?” Ursula asked simply.
“Let her sleep,” Xenia began.
“Then throw her a welcome home party,” Helena finished.
“But—” Ursula started, but before she could complete her sentence, Helena tossed a puff of divinity into her mouth, and the sweetness melted into her tongue like an answer. Such was Helena’s magic.
“Who wants to tell Jasmine?” Xenia asked.
“You don’t think she already knows?” Ursula leaned into a cupboard to grab a coffee cup when a muscle spasm tightened her right arm. She must be doing too much mixing in her shop. Or maybe it was the thought of her oldest daughter, who had grown from a serious and gifted child to a disconnected one, despite living only across town. Jasmine didn’t have her grandmother’s gift for mirroring or her shallowness, but in so many other ways reminded Ursula of Velda.
“There’s a lot that girl doesn’t know since she started medicating.” Xenia reached over and chose a kiss-shaped candy, a wisp of seafoam green, and popped it into her mouth. “I’ll call her.”
“Maybe we should invite her over for dinner? And Tara?” Helena had a habit of ending her sentences in questions, especially when she was talking to her twin, the yin to her yang, the shadow to her light.
“And Velda,” Xenia said.
Ursula clenched.
“And Velda.” Helena reached into the cupboard for pecans and brown sugar. “I’ll get started on the patience candy.”
Chapter 5
Katrine
> Katrine wasn’t asleep.
She guessed that her aunts were downstairs right now worrying, and that her mother was wishing she could brew a potion for her to ease the weight at her chest and throat, but she couldn’t find it in herself to leave her childhood bed just yet. Her room was a chantry of memories, her body a jittery cord of electricity under the Mariner’s Compass quilt. It took all her will to keep her eyes shut as her thoughts raced around her skull like caged fox.
The sharp, clean scent of sage threaded the cool cotton sheets and pulled her spirit outside along the whispering banks of the Rum River behind the house, where she and Jasmine had spent summers back when the earth was a softer place for children. They’d play at rock skipping, toad hunting, flower picking, and daring each other to swim out to the center where the current shot swift and silver like mercury sluicing down a hill. Playing chicken drop, they’d call it.
Katrine always ventured out the farthest in chicken drop, would let the force of the river carry her to the rocky whorls where the water washed over her head, bouncing her from side to side. She wouldn’t dare it when the water was so high that it rushed the banks, but if the summer had been dry, she’d let the river propel her to the edge of Faith Falls. They were Minnesota falls, neither high nor theatrical, twenty feet of foamy, roiling water that plunged down in steps rather than in a single dramatic drop.
One summer when Jasmine and Katrine were still pig-tailed and freckle-faced, someone had tossed a garbage bag of newborn puppies in at the public access, 600 yards north of the falls. Three of the retrievers had managed to paddle their way to the opposite shore, but the fourth had plummeted over the falls, where his body was found battered and bloodied.
The Catalain Book of Secrets Page 3
