“Any special reason you want Chip to see her?”
“Well, Valerian has a lot of experience with post-traumatic stress disorder. She works at the state psychiatric hospital two days a week,” he explained. “Tell me: Has Chip been acting particularly odd lately-you know, before last night?”
“You mean more than the flashbacks?”
“And, I suppose, a measure of guilt and depression.”
She watched the coffee drip into the glass pot and breathed in the aroma. “Yes. He has been a different person since the crash-which is to be expected.”
“Anything specific?”
“He…” She floundered for a moment, trying to find the right words. It had been much easier talking to the psychiatrist around midnight, when she was at once exhausted and in shock. When she resumed, she said, “As I told Michael last night, he went a little nuts on this door in the basement. It was just the old coal chute. But it was nailed shut, and he took an ax to it.”
“It was a violent act?”
“An act with an ax usually is.”
“I see your point.”
“And I think he was more disturbed than I was by Tansy Dunmore’s paranoia. At first I was pretty shaken- more than Chip. But I guess I got over it.” The night before she had told John and Clary that the knife Chip had brought to the basement was one of the items Tansy had left hidden in the house. “He was a little obsessed by it.”
“Her paranoia.”
“Yes.”
John shook his head ruefully. “She was a very ill woman toward the end.”
“So I gather.”
“And Chip’s therapist knew about all this?”
“Michael? Oh, absolutely.”
“Good,” he said, but the word caught just the tiniest bit in his throat. Then he smiled. “Tell me: How are the world’s most adorable twins?”
Before Emily could answer, Reseda appeared in the kitchen entrance from the dining room, a towel on her head like a turban. “They’re fine, John,” she told him. “I just peered into the living room, and they’re still sound asleep.”
“Reseda, God bless you,” John said, rising from his chair, a small eddy of laughter in his voice. “Well, I think that coffee is just about ready. May I help myself, Emily?”
“Go ahead.”
“You were suggesting Valerian to Emily?” Reseda asked him.
“I was, I was. Doesn’t this coffee smell heavenly? Ladies, may I pour? Reseda?”
“Thank you, John,” Reseda said, “but I think I’ll have tea.”
“Of course you will,” he murmured, “of course. You know, Emily, on the bright side, at least you’re here in Bethel right now and not in West Chester. I don’t know what sorts of friends or support group you had back there, but here you have a whole big family waiting to care for you and those two precious children of yours. Imagine: You had Reseda and Holly staying the night. You have Anise’s magical cooking in your refrigerator. And you have people like my own lovely bride and Sage and Peyton at your disposal.”
“And you, John,” she said, taking the mug of coffee he was handing her. “Really, I’m so lucky to have you, too. You’re such a gift.”
He rolled his eyes. “Some folks would say I’m more of a curse. Wouldn’t you agree, Reseda?” Her friend raised her eyebrows but otherwise didn’t respond. “But, yes, I do try. We all try here in Bethel.” He paused for a moment and then said with great earnestness, “It’s a bit like all of you have come home to a big family, don’t you think? It must feel a bit like coming home.”
G arnet had seen greenhouses as large as this one, but they had all been commercial nurseries-not someone’s personal greenhouse. There had been a nursery like this not too far from where they lived in Pennsylvania, and two or three times she and Hallie had gone there with their mother, and Garnet recalled trying (and failing) to convince Mom to buy one of the stone gargoyles or garden trolls the place sold. But she had never been inside a greenhouse this large in someone’s backyard-or one that had grow lights on stands above many of the tables of plants. It struck her as longer than any of the ones she had seen from the roads as they drove between the highway and their new home. It belonged to Sage Messner, the older woman she and her sister had met at Mr. and Mrs. Hardin’s house a couple of nights ago. Saturday.
It was a little hard to believe that Saturday night was only a couple of nights ago. It was Tuesday morning, but in some ways Saturday night felt as far away as when her family had lived back in West Chester. Maybe it even felt as far away as before her dad’s plane had crashed in the lake. She and Hallie hadn’t been expected to go to school today, and now their mom was off meeting with doctors and bringing their dad home from the hospital, and Reseda had taken her sister and her here to Sage Messner’s to see the greenhouse. Sage and Clary had been fussing over her and Hallie for over an hour, giving them lemonade with chlorophyll-the greenest beverage she had ever seen in her life, but it turned out to be pretty good-and chocolate brownies. Then Sage had shown them the guest bedrooms in the house, where she told them they could stay whenever they wanted. When she had shared the bedrooms with them, it was like when Mom and Dad had taken them last summer to Mount Vernon in Virginia, where George Washington had lived, and they had been shown his bedroom: Sage’s enthusiasm was just about off-the-charts crazy as she went on and on about some amazing herbalist who had lived in the house before her. Garnet had half-expected the bedroom doorway to have a red velvet rope in front of it. Consequently, she had been a little relieved when Reseda had taken just her and her sister out here to the greenhouse, leaving Sage in the kitchen to make them yet another snack.
“And this is memoria,” Reseda was saying, running the tips of her fingers gently along the purplish leaves of the plant. The memoria was about five inches high, the leaves the size of her thumb and roughly the shape of the spade on a playing card. There were seven of the plants side by side in small terra-cotta vases.
“Feel the leaves,” she added, and so Garnet did and then Hallie followed.
“It feels like puppy fur,” Hallie said, and Garnet thought this was the perfect description. Indeed, there was a light down on the leaves that felt like it should have been the coat on a cute little animal, not a plant. Garnet was wearing a small silver bracelet that resembled ivy around her wrist-Reseda had given it to her a few minutes ago-and Garnet noticed it once more when she gazed down at her fingertips against the memoria. She loved the bracelet as much as she had loved any jewelry she’d ever been given-even more, she realized, than the unicorn choker her parents had gotten her at Disney World just about two years ago now. It felt like a more adult piece of jewelry. Hallie had been given a bracelet, too, also silver, though the design on hers looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Garnet could tell that Hallie appreciated her gift as well.
“What do you do with it?” Garnet asked Reseda, referring to the memoria.
“It’s a healing herb. Medicinal.”
“What does it cure?” her sister wondered.
Reseda smiled at the two of them. She was wearing a suede duster, unbuttoned and open, that fell below her knees and blue jeans that clung to her legs. She really didn’t need the coat because the greenhouse was heated and there were steamers hard at work in two of the corners. The glass there had filmed over with droplets of water. But it wasn’t a very heavy jacket, and she looked elegant in it: Garnet liked the way it billowed around her like a sail as she walked. “Bad dreams,” she said simply and then, after a moment, added, “And bad memories.” Then she walked beside the long table and paused at another plant, beckoning for the twins to follow. “This one is despairium,” she said, and for a second Garnet presumed the long tendrils were dead because they were as black as the moldering coal that sat in a dank corner of their basement. But apparently they weren’t. “I don’t want you to touch it,” Reseda said. “But have you ever felt shrimp? The stems here feel just like cooked shrimp, except they leave a resin on your skin that is a bit like poison ivy. Only worse. It lasts considerably longer. That’s why you shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands.”
“Then why does Mrs. Messner grow it?” Hallie asked.
“If you know how to harvest a pinch and steep it in tea-with a little honey and a little lemon-it can give a person a new perspective on life. It can cause a person to see things, well, differently. And some of us like to bake
