Granny claps her hands and they are just three people in an old house. “Stella, come back to us,” she says. They go down a skinny back staircase and Granny opens another door, at the rear of the house. The sitting room is an alcove with poufy chairs by an oval window looking over the gardens and out to the water. Granny turns on a lamp. The air smells savoury, aromatic — overhead, hanging from hooks on the ceiling, are thick bundles of dried herbs and flowers. Stella doesn’t know what these herbs and flowers are, or if they are freshly dried or have been hanging here for a hundred years. There is a wall-to-ceiling cupboard that runs the length of the room, the shelves lined with books and glass jars of dried herbs and flower petals, powders and salts, several mortar and pestles, made of marble and slate. There are glass bottles with unguents and liquids.
“This is where the Offing used to meet. The men have the Sodality and we have the Offing Society. They don’t pay attention to these things, you understand, Stella Maris.”
Cynthia sets the black book down on the wooden table. Granny holds her hands over it. “That’s right. We’ll keep it here. Better than at the Sprague house. It did well to avoid being discovered, except now, by you, Stella. I’ll see if I can remember how to use it. So much time has passed and it was something Morgana Llewellyn understood. She brought it from the island.”
Stella wants to linger in that old comfortable room with the pungent air, air dense with secrets, but Granny hustles them out right away, maybe worried Stella’s father might arrive while they are in this special room, that Frank might suddenly appear. “Girls,” Granny says, “the key is to keep a man’s attention diverted. It isn’t that men don’t pay attention — they sometimes cannot have their attention diverted when it’s drawn to a secret.”
They come downstairs just in time to see headlights turning into the driveway. Stella says goodbye to Granny and Cynthia. She goes out to the rental car and as she buckles her seat belt, she looks back at Cedar Grove. Granny and Cynthia are illuminated in the doorway, their arms linked. Stella’s father honks as he drives down the lane, away from the warm glow of the house.
Aside from a bit of catch-up, Stella and her father don’t talk. Stella wants to ask about her grandmother, about her aunt, about her father himself. If Granny mixed it up, if only her dad could just clarify, if he could just make sense of everything that had happened since the spring, how they had gone from a predictable life in Ohio to living in this weird village of Seabury where nothing seems quite right. She doesn’t know who to turn to. She wants to talk to Cynthia but she can’t. Stella has been waiting for Cynthia to confront her about the stolen paper, to ask why Stella did it, but it never comes up. It seems Cynthia hasn’t wondered at all. Maybe it doesn’t matter to her, as if at thirteen she’s already chewed on enough life to know that people do strange things. Either way, it’s disturbing.
That night Stella dreams of the verandah on Sunnyside Drive, the night sky, Polaris fixed in the muted ebony overhead. But then it is dusk. Her mother driving without the seat belt, surprised it didn’t work, that it was jammed, but not worrying about it. There is a flash. There is a shadow but it seems displaced, a broad shadow looming over everything. A flash outside the window before they leave the house. A man, a squat man, hurrying over the sidewalk. Turning towards the house, to the window, where Stella pulls back the curtain.
The Path.
The Rain.
Now
Mal sat on the lawn chair on the deck of her Sun Valley Motel cabin drinking coffee. The air was heavy and it was either going to start raining or the sun would blister through the clouds. Mal hadn’t bothered checking the weather or listening to the news. She worried about her phone now, although she suspected Seraphina was just ranting in the way manic people sometimes did.
This was all a very, very bad idea. Mal saw that now. She knew she was trying to prove to herself that she could do something of value. Grace had put it in plain words, the way her mother would have, and in the same non-judgemental way, an observational way. Maybe painters and poets had the same sort of brains, Mal thought. All of this was in response to the texts she got from her ex-boyfriend in Vancouver, just before her mother had started talking about going to Big Sur. He even wrote his text messages like he thought they were awesome poems.
Hey Mal Nice podcast
He had listened to her podcast. He thought it was nice. Nice.
Soothing like tea & strawberry jam on tea biscuits
The kind the Empress Hotel served for their high tea
Remember?
Of course Mal fucking remembered. That was part of the problem. She wanted to forget her poor judgement. Scott had been a geophysicist before he was a writer. He had decided to study creative writing after he started writing short stories when he was up in the Yukon working in the gas and oil industry, bored. They both loved cycling. That was their connection: meeting at a party, sex and mountain biking. And talking short stories. It was her first and only relationship aside from a few hook-ups. It lasted for a year. Then her father got sick. She went back to California. He was vaguely supportive, sending her ludicrous poetry texts, FaceTiming her before and after his mountain biking. Then that time she heard someone giggle, a female giggle,
