“Life,” Juliet had murmured.
This indeed was the reason that Jenny had directed Elinor Sparrow to rid the house of any current newspapers. Poor Stella hadn’t a clue as to what was happening in regard to the murder case. So it was Juliet who now read aloud from the articles in the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. Both referred to Will Avery as a suspect. Stella didn’t like the way those words made her feel, as if anything might happen next. As though she might lose her father and not get him back. Such things happened, even in the most stable of lives. Stella’s mother had been three years younger than Stella was right now when she’d lost her father, hadn’t she? She might have been in this very room when she heard the news. She might have been looking out the same window, listening to the twittering of the peepers, unable to sleep. From where she sat on the love seat, Stella could see the branches of the forsythia outside, glowing in the dark. Beyond that it was pitch, nothing but shadows and trees.
“Are people at school talking about me?”
“You can’t think about that kind of stuff. But, trust me, there are a lot of words that rhyme with jail. They’re all idiots at school, Stella. You know that.”
“Right.” Stella was relieved she didn’t have to deal with her classmates. Maybe in Unity people would be kinder. In fact, they might not know about her father’s current situation; they might treat her as though she were an ordinary girl, an unremarkable individual who lived down the lane with her grandmother. An average ninth-grader who had troubles with math but loved science; a loyal friend, a good listener, whose best feature was her long blond hair. “If I wasn’t worrying so much about my father, I’d actually be glad to be here. Away from my mother. Away from all the Hillary Endicotts of the world. Free.”
“Free to do what?” Juliet had asked. She was a city girl, through and through. “Wander through the woods?”
“There’s a town, Juliet. This isn’t the outback. We have stores.”
“Is there a shoe store?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Stella admitted.
“In my opinion, any location without a shoe store is not a town. It’s the countryside. Yuck.”
NOW, on her way to school, Stella was traversing the muddy lane, a thoroughfare so narrow the branches of hawthorns and lindens met overhead to create a dark tunnel. She admitted to herself that Juliet was right, yet again. It was the countryside, no horns honking, no traffic, no one else on the road. It was desolate, really, for a girl used to Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue. Stella shook the bell on her birthday bracelet; she tried whistling a tune, but she didn’t feel any more secure. Starting a new school was never easy, and she actually had the chills when she reached the end of the lane, where it turned onto the paved road of Lockhart Avenue. She noticed a wooden post on the corner onto which someone had nailed a hand-printed sign, black paint scrawled on the wood: DEAD HORSE LANE. Oh, lovely. A countryside filled with deceased animals.
“Supposedly there’s a dead horse at the bottom of the lake,” someone said to her, a boy’s voice, one that startled her. Stella turned to find a tall boy beside her. He was a year or so older than she, with clear, blue eyes. He was grinning at her, as though they’d already been introduced. “It’s not exactly a scientific assessment. The lake is bottomless, it’s one of those glacial lakes fed by an underground spring. Supposedly, in the time of our great-great-great-grandparents, some idiot insisted on riding his horse down the path you’re not supposed to go on, the one where nothing grows. The horse spooked and the rider wound up getting thrown and breaking his neck. People say the horse never stopped running. It ran across the water so fast it didn’t sink until it reached the center of the lake. That’s where it drowned. But it’s all a bunch of bullshit, so don’t let it scare you.”
“Scare me?” Stella and the boy were in step now, walking down Lockhart Avenue. “I don’t scare that easily.”
A car came barreling by, too close to the shoulder of the road, forcing Stella and the boy to jump into a patch of nettle.
“See ya, Hap,” a teenaged boy yelled out the passenger window.
“Count on it, asshole,” Stella’s newfound companion called back. “Jimmy Elliot and his friends,” he explained once the car had sped down Lockhart. “Jimmy’s a total idiot. I tutor him in English and earth science, so I ought to know. We’ve got a lot of morons around here.”
“There were plenty of those in my old school,” Stella said. “Except they were all girls.”
“You went to an all-girls school? That sounds worse than Unity.”
They introduced themselves then. He was Hap Stewart, Dr. Stewart’s grandson, who lived on the other side of the woods, past the Elliots’ property.
“I’m living with my grandmother,” Stella said. “Over at Cake House.”
“Oh, I know.” Hap grinned that huge grin of his. “I know everything about you. Well, maybe not everything,” he amended when Stella seemed displeased by this notion. Still, he admitted they hadn’t met accidentally. He’d been waiting for her on the corner. “My grandfather said you might need help getting settled.”
“Well, I don’t.” The last thing Stella needed was someone feeling sorry for her.
“The real reason I came was because I wanted to meet you. You’re our closest neighbor—all you have to do is cut through the woods, go round the poison ivy, avoid getting any ticks, and walk five miles and you’ll be at my door.”
Stella laughed. “Lucky me.”
“I thought you could use some friendly advice on the way things are around here. Like for instance you might want to let people get to know you before they find out who you are.”
A school bus went by, and in the wake of its smoky exhaust Stella felt that fizzy feeling in her head. Was this boy telling her to hide her identity? Did he think he was doing her a favor by letting her know she wouldn’t be accepted?
“It’s because of my father,” Stella guessed. There were several groups of kids on their way to school farther up Lockhart, all turning onto Main Street at the intersection where the oldest oak tree in the Commonwealth had stood for over three hundred years.
“Your father?” Hap said.
“It’s because he’s in jail.”
“Is he? Wow. I don’t know if anyone from Unity has ever been in jail before.”
Now Stella felt even more of a fool. She’d defended an unhappy fact of her life that Hap hadn’t known about. She was overdressed, a nervous wreck, and now she had broken into a sweat. Stella wondered if she might have to breathe into a paper bag, the way her father sometimes did when he was anxious. She slipped off her woolen sweater and stuffed it into her backpack.
“He’s not guilty of anything. He’ll be out on bail soon.”
They walked along in silence for a while. In truth, Stella was grateful not to be approaching the high school on her own. They were passing the old oak, around which the brick sidewalk was buckling; the overgrown roots stretched out for most of an entire block, braided through brick and asphalt and grass.
“What were the charges against him?” Hap asked.
“Murder.” They both leaped over the twisted roots of the oak. Several older people in town had tripped at this very same spot, and they cursed the tree each time they went by. But the elementary school children planned field trips to the oak; they circled round and danced on the first day of spring. “He was only picked up for questioning,” Stella added.
“I see.” Hap was obviously impressed.
“But he didn’t do it,” Stella informed Hap.
“Of course not.”
The girls at the Rabbit School would all be jealous if they could see Stella now, walking down the road with a tall, handsome boy, discussing dead horses and murder as if such things were an everyday occurrence. She couldn’t wait to report back to Juliet Aronson. Hap Stewart’s best feature? Definitely his height.
“I just want you to know that there are people at school who always believe the worst. Especially when it
comes to Cake House. Some idiots have offered a hundred bucks to anyone who walks the path where nothing grows and survives to tell the tale. Jimmy Elliot made it halfway down. He swears he saw the dead horse. It was more likely marsh gas. Maybe it was gas from Jimmy. He is definitely full of it.”
They laughed at that, and Stella felt more relaxed.
“Why doesn’t anything grow on the path you were talking about?”
“That’s where Rebecca Sparrow’s blood fell. There aren’t even any weeds now. That’s how strong her blood was.”
So it wasn’t her father’s history Stella needed to hide. Now she understood: it was Rebecca Sparrow’s.
“She’s the reason I shouldn’t tell people who I am.”
Hap nodded. “The witch of the north.”
“Absolute bullshit,” Stella said.
Hap looked at her and grinned. “Absolute and total crap,” he agreed.
They had reached the high school; once they went past the crest of the hill on Main Street, it rose up from the athletic field like a mirage. Several school buses idled; masses of students streamed inside the building.
“It’s a lot bigger than my old school,” Stella said. Yikes, she thought. I’m a goner. I can sneak out at lunch and run through the woods and take the three o’clock train back to Boston.
“You’ll be fine.”
“Promise me that.” She tried to laugh. No use.
“Just remember it’s all bullshit,” Hap advised.
He had a way of saying things that made them sound as though they were true. And, in truth, she was fine, at least until lunchtime. As Stella waited on line in the cafeteria, a room that appeared to be larger than the entire Rabbit School, several boys behind her began to whistle and make obnoxious tweeting noises. The song of the sparrow, Stella presumed. Absolutely juvenile.
“Hey, Miss Bird Girl. Let’s see you fly,” someone called out as they waited in the lunch line. There were a few chuckles and several people stared to see what Stella’s reaction might be. Her response: she fervently wished the boys taunting her would fall into Hourglass Lake, headfirst.
The wiseguy approached her. “Seen any dead horses lately?” he asked.
“Only in the burritos,” Stella said evenly. She herself had bypassed the burritos, opting for salad, and now she smiled at the wiseguy’s full, meaty plate. “Watch out. You might choke on that,” she warned.
A second boy, quite handsome, a few years older, with black hair and a bad attitude, came forward. Jimmy Elliot. “Are you threatening him?”
“Me?”
That was a laugh. Stella had spent the entire morning getting lost in hallways that appeared to be endless, trying to make up notes for the half of the semester she’d missed, borrowing loose-leaf paper and pencils from students who hadn’t given her the time of day. At least she’d been partnered with Hap Stewart in earth science for a field project, a good thing, since Stella had never attempted research in the real world before. Now she glared up at the boy with the dark hair; she recognized him as the one who’d called out the window of the car that had nearly run her and Hap off the road. Thankfully, she didn’t see anything about this boy’s future, no death, no tragedy, only his dark eyes.
“Let me guess. You’re a moron who needs tutoring in English and science? You like to offend people and run them off the road? You must be Jimmy Elliot.”
Instead of stalking away or lobbing back an insult, Jimmy Elliot smiled. He seemed surprised and somewhat pleased by her response.
“Good one.” He nodded approvingly. “I guess you do take after old Rebecca.”
Stella had no idea if this comment was meant to be an insult or a compliment. “I’m just a good judge of character,” she informed Jimmy, feeling more flustered than she would have liked.
“I don’t think so,” he told her as he grabbed a serving of burritos. “You’re talking to me.”
INSTEAD OF SETTLING DOWN to her homework when she got back to Cake House in the afternoon, Stella made it her business to find some answers. Her grandmother was preoccupied with a delivery of mulch, which gave Stella the freedom to search the house. She rattled through the pantry, examined the contents of dresser drawers, mucked about in the overstuffed hall closet that was piled high with old rain gear and boots. Still, after several hours, Stella had found nothing worthwhile. Or at least she hadn’t until she came to the parlor. There was so much dust in the room it filled up the streams of light which filtered through the green-tinted windows with small, linty whirlwinds. Stella went to the corner where the bookshelves were. Here, there were editions the library would have loved to place on display, but the books hadn’t been opened for a hundred years, the leather bindings were cracked, the gold letters faded, the crumbling pages gave off the powdery scent of beetle dung and mold.
Stella ran a finger over the spines of the books, then took down an old seashell. She held it to her ear. No sound. No far-off seas. Only spiderwebs and a few dead flies within. She replaced the shell and turned to the draped piece of furniture to her right. The embroidered shawl that cloaked the case was decorated with a thatch of hand-stitched weeping willows and nesting birds, in black thread and brown, surrounded by a border of red cross-stitching, red for protection, and loyalty, and luck. Stella pulled off the coverlet and stood where her father had once been stopped cold, back when he was a wild boy, shocked by what he’d found. Stella rubbed off a circle of grime with the palm of her hand. On a yellowing piece of parchment a date had been written: 1692. In beautiful, curling script were the words: Saved so that we remember Rebecca Sparrow.
Stella rubbed a larger circle in the glass, then took the wool sweater she had tied around her waist and cleaned the rest of the case, not caring if her sweater turned black from the dirt. She saw the arrowheads set in rows, just as they were in the little house she’d been sent as a gift. The only real difference was that here the tenth arrowhead was missing. But at some point it had clearly been in place; time had edged its shape onto the satin where it had once been.
A silver circle, an old compass, was in the north corner of the case. A tarnished bell, much like the one on Stella’s bracelet, was displayed in the south. It may have been the rising dust that caused Stella’s eyes to burn, but most likely it was the sight of Rebecca Sparrow’s hair, the single black plait tied with a frayed strand of ribbon. Now she understood why these relics were kept behind glass. She understood why her mother had run away from Unity, as fast as she could. Jenny couldn’t bear to know what had happened; she’d do anything to stay clear of their family history. But Stella was nothing like her mother. For years, Jenny had watched her mother from behind her bedroom window without making a move herself. Stella, on the other hand, went directly to the garden, where her grandmother was raking mulch into a tall pile.
“Tell me about Rebecca Sparrow,” she said.
Elinor didn’t even glance up. “Out of the question. I can’t do that.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Elinor was exhausted from raking and worn out from the constraints of a houseguest. All the responsibilities of family life she’d given up so long ago had arrived on her doorstep along with Stella; she had to get groceries from the market, and make certain there were clean towels and sheets; she was forced to converse when all she wanted was peace and quiet—all the niceties she’d never paid attention to when Jenny was a girl. Naturally, Jenny had no faith in Elinor’s caretaking abilities and had therefore mailed out a written list of instructions denoting Stella’s care: no sugar, no TV during the week, no newspapers until the mess with Will was settled, no late nights, no fried food, and absolutely, positively, no Rebecca Sparrow.
“I can’t tell you because your mother asked me not to.”
Elinor took the opportunity to sit on the bench Brock Stewart had given her, earlier that month. Why, she hadn’t even thought there was anyone on earth who knew when her birthday was, and then the bench had been delivered on the day itself. She’d been ungrateful;
she’d told Brock the bench was an unnecessary luxury. Why, she never stopped working once she walked through the garden gate. But, lately, she’d come to realize it was a fine bench, beechwood, with a delicately carved back. Lately, she’d found she needed to rest.
“My mother,” Stella scoffed. “My mother was four years older than I am now when she ran away to get married, but she treats me like a baby. I want to know the family history. Maybe she was afraid to find out the truth, but I’m not.”
“Don’t you have history at school? Isn’t that enough?”
“The Colonial period. Today we made a time line charting the journey of the Mayflower. Not what I had in mind. I want to know about Rebecca.” Stella sat down across from her grandmother, balancing on one of the tumbled-down stone walls. “Just tell me a little bit. Tell me what her gift was.”
Elinor looked into her granddaughter’s sweet face. She wasn’t about to lie to the girl, despite Jenny’s instructions. “The worst one there is. She couldn’t feel pain. And don’t you dare let on to your mother that I told you.”
“Isn’t not feeling pain a good thing?”
Dusk had begun to fall in waves, first gray, then green, then inky blue. Today, in earth science, the teacher had noted that the sky began at the earth’s surface, but no one ever thought about it that way. It was just plain old air to most folks. They never noticed they were walking through the sky, just as they never recognized the lakes above them, formed out of vapor. Here, in the garden, the air was especially fragrant and damp. Rose petals that were doused tended to mold, leaves watered directly became mildewed, and so Elinor had rigged up an elaborate irrigation system, one that slowly leaked lake water into the soil. It was lake water, Elinor believed, that made the difference in her garden, the nutrients of all that muck: the frog waste, the insect larvae, the murky water from the depths, so cold the roses shuddered on the hottest days of August and gave off clouds of scent.
“Every gift comes with a price. Haven’t you found that to be true?”
Stella nodded. “Mine’s a burden.”
The Probable Future Page 10
