Ivy’s long nimble fingers appeared to work slowly, yet she quickly added shelled pistachios to the bowl.
“This house is so quiet,” Billy said.
“Because the walls haven’t soaked up years of useless talk.”
“They haven’t?”
“My grandmother was deaf. We communicated by sign language and the written word.”
Beyond the back porch lay a flower garden in which all blooms were red or deep blue, or royal purple. If one leaf stirred, if a cricket busied itself, if a bee circled a rose, no sound found its way through the open windows.
“You might like some music,” Ivy said, “but I’d prefer none.”
“You don’t like music?”
“I get enough of it at the tavern.”
“I like zydeco. And Western swing. The Texas Top Hands. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.”
“Anyway, there’s already music,” she said, “if you’re still enough to hear it.”
178
He must not have been still enough.
Taking the photo of the dead mantis from his pocket and placing it on the table, Billy said, “I found this on the floor in Barbara’s room at Whispering Pines.”
“You can keep it if you want.”
He didn’t know what to make of that. “Were you visiting her?”
“I sit with her sometimes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“She was kind to me.”
“You didn’t start to work at the tavern until a year after she was in a coma.”
“I knew her before.”
“Really.”
“She was kind to me when Grandmother was dying in the hospital.”
Barbara had been a nurse, a good one.
“How often do you visit her?” Billy asked.
“Once a month.”
“Why have you never told me, Ivy?”
“Then we’d have to talk about her, wouldn’t we?”
“Talk about her?”
“Talking about how she is, what she’s suffered—does that give you peace?” Ivy asked.
“Peace? No. How could it?”
“Does remembering how she was, before the coma, give you peace?”
He considered. “Sometimes.”
Her gaze rose from the pistachios, and her extraordinary brandy eyes met his eyes. “Then don’t talk about now. Just remember when.”
Finished with two cherries, the raven paused to stretch its wings. Silently they opened and silently closed.
When Billy looked at Ivy again, her attention had returned to her shelling hands.
179
He asked, “Why did you take this snapshot with you when you visited her?”
“I take them all with me everywhere, the most recent photos of dead things.”
“But why?”
“Haruspicy,” she reminded him. “I read them. They foretell.”
He sipped his tea.
The raven watched him, beak open, as if it were shrieking. It made no sound.
“What do they foretell about Barbara?” Billy asked.
Ivy’s serenity and fey quality concealed whether she calculated her answer or whether instead she hesitated only because her thoughts were divided between here and elsewhere. “Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
She had given her answer. She didn’t have another.
