first in case Marcus might have returned, and then hurries, unzipping the bag farther and rearranging the clothing, to get to the dead man’s upper arm. And there it is, as Lanny had said it would be, two interlocked spheres with tails trailing off in opposite directions, and the dots look similar, in size, in the hand-done quality, down to the slight wobble of the line.
Retracing his steps through the empty halls to the emergency ward, Luke struggles with the jumble of thoughts, mostly questions. They are like matter and antimatter, canceling each other out, two truths that cannot both exist. He knows what he saw in the emergency room when the girl cut herself: it cannot have happened, and yet it did. He had touched that very spot on her torso, before and after the slash, so he knows there was no trick. But what he saw couldn’t have happened, not as he saw it.
Unless she is telling the truth. And now there is a handsome man in the morgue, and the tattoos… It all leaves him with the feeling that he needs to listen, to go along for a change. But he’s stubborn because he’s a man of science; he is not about to chuck everything he knows to be fact. He is, however, curious to learn more.
The doctor bursts through the door to the examination room in the darkened ER-his energy and nervousness in his chest like fireflies in a jar-to find the prisoner huddled on the gurney, caught in the downward shaft of light and the whirling motes of smoke. She could be an excommunicated angel, Luke thinks, her wings clipped.
Lanny looks at him hungrily. “So, did you see him? Wasn’t he everything I said he’d be?”
Luke nods. Beauty like that is its own kind of narcotic. He rubs his face, takes a deep breath.
“So now you understand,” Lanny says solemnly. “And if you believe me, Luke, help me. Untie me,” she says, arching her back and holding out the restraints, her sweet child’s face turned up to him. “I need you to help me escape.”
FIVE
Perhaps Jonathan and I would both have been better off if I had been born male. I’d rather have let our friendship continue and always have Jonathan in that way. We’d have spent our entire lives within the confines of that tiny village; I’d never have gotten into the trouble I did, never have suffered this terrible ordeal put upon both of us. Our lives would have been so small, but full and rewarding and complete, and I would have been happy with that.
But I was a girl, and for all my wishing there was no changing that. Ahead of me loomed the mysterious transition from girl to woman, as unfathomable to me as a magic trick. Whose example was I to follow? My mother, Theresa, wouldn’t be able to give me the kind of guidance I craved-she was too demure and quiet for my tastes; I did not want to be like her. I wanted more. I wanted to marry Jonathan, for instance, and it didn’t seem as though my mother would be able to teach me to be the type of woman who could make Jonathan her own.
There were secrets, it seemed, that not every woman was allowed to know. Luckily, there was a woman in town who did, a woman about whom things were said, whose name prompted a smile from the men (if their wives were not nearby). She was a woman unlike any other in the village and I had to figure a way to get her to share her secrets with me.
On a well-worn path, hidden in the shadow of the blacksmith’s forge, was a small cottage. If it was noticed at all, you might think it an outbuilding or a toolshed for the smithy, a place to store pig iron. It was far too ramshackle and tiny to be a house, yet it didn’t appear to be abandoned and the path to the front door grew more worn with time. Certainly no more than one person could live there, and customary law against solitary living still prevailed at the dawn of the nineteenth century in our bleak Puritan outpost (for Puritans we were, make no mistake about that; the fathers of the town had grown up in the Massachusetts territories and were accustomed to blending religion with governance). However, in this northernmost reach of what would become the state of Maine, the sole reason for the edict against solitary living was that of necessity: it was unthinkable that one person alone could perform the multitude of tasks it took to get by in this harsh environment. By contrast, in a more strictly Puritan town, no one was allowed to live alone because, in solitude, one might stray. One might do ungodly things. The edict against solitary living allowed for the policing of one’s neighbors, but the citizens of St. Andrew valued their independence and guarded their privacy a shade more fiercely.
Someone did in fact live alone in that tiny house, a woman on the outer limit of her childbearing years, beautiful still, though faded. She rarely went out, but whenever she did venture onto the street in daylight, the townspeople gave her a wide berth. The men would contrive not to let their eyes meet hers, and the women would pull their long skirts aside. Some would glare outright at her.
But at night, it was a different story. Under the cover of darkness she had regular visitors. Men-one at a time, more rarely a pair-would scurry up the path and knock politely on the aged door. If no one answered the knock, the visitor knew to take a seat on the step and wait, his back to the door, pretending not to hear whatever sounds came from within. Eventually, the sounds from the cottage would fade into murmurs of conversation, then silence, and within a minute the front door would open for the waiting visitor.
Those who knew of her existence called her Magdalena. It was the name she’d given herself when she arrived in town seven years earlier. No one questioned the odd appellation at the time. She arrived with a small group of travelers from the French Canadian territory, and when they moved on, she stayed. She said she was a widow and had decided to relocate to more southerly climates, that is, if the towns-people of St. Andrew would let her stay.
The blacksmith offered to convert his old shed into a tidy little abode and the good women of the village helped her to settle in, bringing her whatever precious scraps they could spare: a wobbly stool, an extra bit of tea, an old blanket. Husbands were sent over with firewood and kindling. When asked what she would do to support herself-needlework, spinning, weaving, perhaps? Was she a midwife, skilled with healing and nursing?-she merely smiled demurely and dropped her head as if to say, “Me? What skills could I have? My husband treated me like a porcelain doll. How should a poor unskilled widow make her way in the world?” The good wives walked away puzzled, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads, not knowing what to say except that God would provide for all his children, including this innocent woman who seemed to think boundless charity was to be found in this rugged, lonely town.
As it turned out, she did not have to depend on charity. Mysteriously, sustenance appeared at her doorstep, unbidden. A crock of sweet butter, a bushel of potatoes, a jug of milk. Firewood piled outside the back door. And money-she was one of the few people in town who had actual coin, would count it out at the provisioner’s when she ordered her supplies. And what curious supplies: bottles of gin, tobacco. Neighbors noticed a lantern burning late, through the one window of her tiny cottage-did she stay up all night smoking tobacco and drinking gin?
In the end, it was the axmen who gave her away, the lumberjacks who worked for Charles St. Andrew a year at a time and lived far from their wives. Men like this are capable of sniffing out women like Magdalena from across a town, across a valley if the wind is right and they are desperate enough. First one, then another, then each of them in turn found their way to Magdalena’s doorstep once the sun went down. Not that the axmen were her only customers: they paid in coin, after all, not in eggs and cured ham. But through the axmen her reputation was spilled across town, like tainted water emptied from a rain barrel, and the ire was raised of many a good wife. Still Magdalena said nothing. Not while the sun was up. Not even when she was insulted to her face by an indignant spouse.
The wives, enjoined by the pastor, organized a movement to have her ejected from town. Her presence was the first sign of sinful city living to sprout up in St. Andrew, the sort of thing the settlers were trying to escape. Pastor Gilbert went to Charles St. Andrew, as he was the employer of the axmen, those customers who could be openly complained about.
Sympathetic as he was to the pastor’s request, Charles pointed out that there was another side to Magdalena’s services that the townsfolk were overlooking. The axmen were acting on completely natural urges-to which the pastor grudgingly agreed-separated by many miles from their legal spouses. Without Magdalena’s
