There was a particular day, a cool and clear afternoon where the leaves seemed like bright flakes of paint falling from Heaven’s house, when the pair had just come around a bend in the path to catch sight of an odd woman standing on a gray humpback of rock not far inside the tree line. Though the weather was mild, the woman appeared to be wearing three overcoats with several layers of filthy shawl beneath, and the parts of her face that weren’t buried beneath coils of gray hair were nearly as dark as the stone. Because she had several sauce pots and pans lashed to a large pack on her shoulders, Lyman more properly heard her before he saw her. The woman clanged and banged with every twist as she danced upon the rock, scrutinizing the earth around her. When she finally glanced up to see them watching her, the woman said, “Watch’n your step—I ken there’s a turtle about.”
Minerva’s face lit up like the dawn. “Bitty! Bitty Breadsticks!”
“Aye,” said the woman, preoccupied with scanning the ground. She whirled in circles as if expecting an ambush from behind.
The pair approached her, careful not to toe stray terrapins. None were apparent. “I’m afraid I don’t see any turtles,” said Lyman. “Even if I should, they’re never a terrible threat to people.”
“Oh,” said Bitty Breadsticks, “the turtles ‘round here sure enough are. They’re snappers, these ones. Ferocious diggers.”
Minerva held in a laugh. “On my honor, Bitty, my friend Tom here has lived in the house nearby for several weeks now and he says he’s yet to see any animal beyond a few birds in the branches, let alone a turtle.”
“It’s true,” said Lyman.
Bitty looked at him sharply. “What house nearby? You mean the old Garrick house?”
“If you mean the stone house, yes.”
“You haven’t. The house’s ruined.”
“I’ve been repairing it.”
“You been livin’ there? Sleepin’ there?”
“Yes.” And then an idea occurred to Lyman. “Would you like to come see? We could make you supper, if you wish.”
Bitty stared at him a moment longer and then—gingerly, on tiptoe—stepped off the rock and crossed over toward Minerva. “Let’s haste away,” she said low into her ear. “I don’t like it when the turtles eavesdrop.”
It had been Lyman’s experience, elbow to elbow with the sailorly crusts of the Manhattan wharves, that beneath the thick rinds of graybeards and old salts lay the soft fruit of gossip if only one had the patience to spit out the seeds of nonsense that inevitably riddled it. Bitty, for all her antipathy toward Lyman and the stone house, could muster no dissent when Minerva showed her the contents of a small basket she had packed for a tea picnic in the woods. After finding an agreeable spot that the old vagrant pronounced free of turtles, the trio were soon enjoying an apple each while rashers sizzled in a pan over a cheery fire. Lyman did not hesitate to also produce a small bottle of Newport rum for supplementing their hot tea, offering it at the earliest opportunity so that Bitty’s tongue wagged with the meal.
It had the intended effect. Lyman was relieved to learn, for example, that Bitty had indeed been the figure on the road to lunge into the trees upon being viewed by Mrs. Grosvenor. “Your mum don’t like me much,” Bitty said to Minerva.
“Yes, well,” said Minerva, “more properly she does not care for your habit of hanging around the kitchen door for days on end, begging cups of coffee and table scraps.” Then she added to Lyman, “Their last encounter ended with Bitty on the swat end of a broomstick.”
Whatever Mrs. Grosvenor’s feelings toward the itinerant old woman, her daughter Minerva didn’t share them; in fact, Minerva possessed the foresight to appreciate Bitty for what she was—an eccentric in a world bursting its stitches with solicitors and bankers—rather than what she wasn’t. Bitty traveled a circuit among the towns and farms between Lyme and New London, panhandling and rummaging through garbage and junk heaps for trade-worthy bric-a-brac. For the past week she had, unknown to most of their community, been sponging off the charity of Mrs. Alby over by the cabins, but with her patience finally extinguished, Bitty had been forced to head toward the next destination on her tour. She did not intend to linger in the area—particularly this close to the stone house.
“You needn’t be so afraid of it,” Lyman told her as they stared into the flames and digested. “I’ll admit when I first heard the violin music my blood ran a little chilly too. But I’ve come to discover it’s just a trick of acoustics.”
“You rascal,” said Minerva with surprise, “so you have heard the music.”
Bitty growled deep in her throat. “The fiddlin’ is Sed Garrick’s doing.”
“Sed Garrick? Was he the Garrick who came from England?”
“Aye. From Dunwich on the coast.”
“The Garricks were the original settlers of the farm,” said Minerva.
“I remember,” said Lyman to Minerva. “Your father mentioned it my first day here. Something about the Garrick family exiled from England and the town sliding into the ocean.” Then he said lightly to Bitty, “Does Sed Garrick still haunt the basement, playing his violin?”
“Don’t mock me, young fella.” Bitty squinted at him. “The fiddlin’ isn’t fiddlin’ at all. It’s them, tryin’ to lure folks close.”
The fire cracked and popped. The sun seemed to drop faster on the horizon. “And who might them be?”
Bitty glanced over her shoulders, much as she had done when the couple first encountered her. Yet instead of answering Lyman’s question, she said, “It’s Sed Garrick who’s to blame. It’s he who taught them that trick. He played fiddle himself, see. Before’n him, they hunted as anything hunts, with strength and speed. As an animal hunts. But it was Garrick who lectured them in cunnin’.”
“Whatever are we talking about?” Minerva asked.
Bitty’s voice sank lower. “You reckon, that’s what got him booted out a’ England to begin with. What happened to Dunwich, if’n you can imagine. Old Man Neptune
