Reseda was sensing: their panic that, for them, time was running out. The tincture had worked forty years ago, but now they needed more. One of the Linton twins probably represented their last chance. “No,” she admitted, “I don’t care much for those potions. Those, in my opinion, are witchcraft.”
“We know more now than we did with the Dunmore child. And we have you. This time nothing would go wrong,” Sage said, pleading.
Reseda looked back and forth between the women. “I am more interested in their father.”
“For a tincture?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why?” Clary asked, her puzzlement evident in the way she drew out that one short sentence.
“Something is going on inside him. I don’t know what precisely. But I don’t believe he’s the man he was before he came here.”
“Of course, he isn’t!” Sage said, seemingly nonplussed by Reseda’s uncharacteristic denseness. “He was the captain of a plane that crashed. It must be horrible.”
“It’s more than that.”
“More than PTSD?” asked Clary.
“Perhaps.”
“Well, John and Valerian and Anise have that under control,” Sage told her, and then busied herself by inhaling the rosemary. “Valerian is having lunch with Emily tomorrow. I am very confident that Chip Linton won’t have any effect on what we want.”
“Please, Sage: Be judicious with your use of the word we.”
“Does that mean you won’t help us?” Sage asked.
Reseda noticed the woman’s jaw working as she tried to control her annoyance. Her earrings were bunches of green grapes. “I’ll speak to Anise,” she said finally, and she watched as both older women relaxed, their shoulders sagging a little forward, and their minds focusing more on the possibilities held by the future than on what they had witnessed that night long ago when Sawyer Dunmore died. Reseda was glad for them-and for herself. That vision was, she decided, among the most disturbing things she had ever seen in someone else’s mind.
Y ou feel Ethan Stearns putting his cold, wet hands on your shoulders as you kneel in the front hallway, pressing the lid on the paint can. You close your eyes against the pain in your head.
“Chip?”
“Yes?”
“Keep your word to Hewitt. Do not tell Emily he was here.”
You push yourself to your feet, and he releases your shoulders. You rub your eyes at the bridge of your nose and you massage the top of your head, but it does nothing to ease the pain. In a minute or two you will take a couple of Advil, but you know that won’t help, either. At least not very much. The throbbing will cease only when Ethan Stearns leaves.
“I won’t tell her,” you agree. “But, please, don’t threaten me.”
“I wasn’t threatening you.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t tell her that Anise was here, either.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“If Anise wants her to know, Anise can tell her.”
Outside, through the glass window in the storm door, you notice two very large robins landing on a thin branch of the bare lilac near the front walkway. They are so large that you half-expect the branch to bow. But it doesn’t. Birds have hollow bones. It really is hard to believe it was birds that brought down your plane.
T he next morning, John Hardin strolled into Emily’s office in the Georgian beside the bicycle shop and sat down in the chair opposite her desk. “Verbena,” he said, his voice a little wan. “How are you?”
“Still Emily,” she corrected him. “Not Verbena yet.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, sipping his coffee. “Sometimes for a sleepy little corner of New Hampshire, we move too quickly, don’t we?”
“It’s fine. I’m just not prepared yet to make that… that leap.”
He shrugged. “And you should feel no pressure to,” he said. “None at all.” He paused and then took a deep breath. “This has been a very strange spring, hasn’t it?”
“I would say that’s an understatement,” she said.
“I just got a piece of news that makes me a little sad. It really has nothing to do with your family, but-”
“Then do I need to know?” she asked, cutting him off. “Honestly, John, I really don’t want to begin the day with bad news.”
“Sad-not bad. There’s a difference. And you’ll be fine. It just makes a man my age wistful. But it’s not tragic. You know that fellow you bought the house from? Hewitt Dunmore? Well, it seems he died last night.”
The news made her a little dizzy, a little nauseous, and she couldn’t say why. “I’m so sorry. How?”
“Natural causes, apparently. He was found in his garage. A heart attack, most likely. He wasn’t well. It might have been days and days before he was found, but, fortunately, the garage door was open and the light was on.”
“I never actually met him,” she said. “We spoke on the phone, but that was it. He didn’t come to the closing.”
“I know. I remember.”
“Who found him?”
“The fellow who delivers his newspaper. I guess he saw the light on in the garage and the garage door wide open. And then he saw the poor man.”
“How did you hear?”
“Old-fashioned grapevine, I guess. Someone told someone who told someone.”
“And who was the someone who told you?”
“Anise. I ran into her at the coffee shop. She was getting some tea.” He gazed out the window. “On the bright side, it’s going to be another beautiful day. God, I love spring.” He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast, stood up, and continued down the hall to his office.
Chapter Fifteen
Valerian Wainscott asked only for tea and honey at the booth in the diner, waiting until after Emily had ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a diet soda to put in her small request.
“That’s all you’re having?” Emily said to the psychiatrist.
“Oh, no, not at all,” Valerian reassured her, and she reached into her handbag on the cushion beside her and pulled out a Ziploc plastic bag filled with granola. “Voila! My lunch.”
“They don’t mind?”
The woman shrugged and smiled cherubically. “It’s homemade,” she said. Then she removed a black leather portfolio case and opened it on the table between them. On the inside front cover Emily saw a pocket with pages of handwritten notes about her husband. “There’s a lot I want to talk about,” Valerian said. “I have strong opinions about your husband and strong thoughts on how to help him.”
“Go on.” There was no doctor-patient confidentiality. Chip had told Valerian he wanted her to share with Emily whatever Valerian thought his wife should know.
“First of all, I worry that if we don’t, well, get him under control, he may hurt himself.”
“You mean again?” Emily said, seeing once more in her mind the knife in his stomach that night as he had stood at the top of the stairs.
“I mean worse than what was, in essence, an instance of especially violent cutting.”
“You’re suggesting that he might make another attempt to kill himself.”
“Yes.”
Emily sat back against the vinyl cushions and tried to focus. She reminded herself that Valerian was only
