Kate sat in her truck and studied the house in front of her. She understood houses, read their character a lot better than she read people. Most houses didn't lie. Hell, even Alice's House wouldn't lie to Kate.
Middle-aged white house, owned by a middle-aged white couple. Square two-story plan, square windows, square chimney set foursquare in the center peak of the square roof, square asbestos shingle siding, square white couple that attended the square white church with the square white steeple and square white parsonage that sat squarely centered overlooking one side of the town commons, AKA the village green.
She hadn't been inside that house in twenty years. Didn't want to go there now. She could smell the hypocrisy from here, like it had soaked through the walls and wafted downwind like skunk spray.
She rolled and lit a cigarette, just to calm her nerves and give her hands something to do. And the house already reeked of smoke as well as intolerance — both of them smoked, or had the last time she'd seen them, maybe six months ago, in a chance sighting down in the village collecting their mail. They hadn't even shown up for Lew's funeral. Didn't want to recognize their tie with the town drunk.
Everything self-centered and neat and white and smug on its hill above the road. Even Mom's white Chevy sat neatly square and centered in the white gravel driveway. Kate did not want to go in there. But she had to. She needed answers, and the most likely source sat squarely in that house.
Three times now, you've come by and nobody home. God or the Devil offering a subtle hint?
Yeah, she'd think about God and the Devil, looking at that house. She took a deep breath and climbed down from her truck cab. God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. Even the Devil can quote scripture for his own purposes. The mills of the Lord grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine. She felt the pious mouthings beat against her ears, from clear across the road.
She was dithering, avoiding the house. And more to the point, the people who lived there. At least his truck was gone. She'd only have to face one of them, not both at once. And Frank wouldn't know the things she needed to know.
She stepped in through the side door and into the mudroom, the damned door left unlocked even with fear walking the streets of Stonefort — no reason to fear when you're armored with the Power of the Lord. Kate knocked at the kitchen door and then opened it.
"Hello?" The room looked exactly the same as the day she left — same stove and fridge, same canisters and cookbooks and spices and toaster on the counter, same kitchen table with what looked damn-all like the same plastic placemats in the same places.
She heard footsteps from the back bedroom, the sewing room it had been when she lived here, footsteps down the stairs, and her mother came around the corner into the kitchen, stopped with one foot in the air, and frowned.
"Katherine?" She finished her next step, eyes narrowed and suspicious. "What do you want?"
Ah yes, welcome the Prodigal Daughter. Kill the fatted calf and all that. Kate felt the anger growing inside her again, and cut to the heart.
"Tell me about my grandmother."
Mom stood up straight and squared her shoulders, big and blonde just like her daughter and granddaughter but with silver taking over her hair and the weight migrating from shoulders to butt. She looked for all the world like she faced a firing squad. "Your grandmother was a good Christian wife and mother. It's a shame you never spent much time with her."
Kate cut her mother off with a sharp wave of her hand. "Grandmother Rowley."
Her mother jerked and sagged, the bullets from that firing squad hitting home.
"Grandmother Rowley was not a Christian woman. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but you don't want to know more than that about her."
Remember why you left home. "Grannie Rowley took us in when Dad was killed in Vietnam. I don't recall your mother making the same offer. 'Didn't have room,' I think you said. In a five-bedroom house."
"My mother never approved of Barry. Said he was a charmer but not a good man. Said I was well rid of him, and I can't say she was wrong. After all, when Barry died, God brought Frank into my life. She said you'd never amount to much, bad seed grows bad fruit, and I can't say she was wrong there, either."
Remember why you left home. At least Frank isn't here, so I won't have to bruise my knuckles on the way out the door. "Grannie Rowley went to Mass damn near every Sunday. Priest gave her Communion, just the same as any other woman. You saying Catholics aren't Christians?"
Kate's mother looked like she might make just that claim. Some hard-assed Protestants did. All those idols in the sanctuary . . .
"She worshipped those stones."
So Mom knew. "Worshipped? Or maybe just used?"
"'Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.'"
That forced a laugh out of Kate, and she shook her head. "Ain't a single one of those stones 'graven' in any way, shape, or form. They're just the way God made 'em, straight from the glacier and not a tool-mark anywhere to be seen. Unless you call the last ice age 'God's tool.' Same with the hilltop and its power. Only thing those old folks did, was drag the stones into a circle so's they could measure the seasons. If God made a thing, why can't we use it? 'Use,' not 'worship?'"
"God made the Tree and told Adam and Eve they couldn't eat the fruit. Those stones are forbidden fruit."
"Sounds like quite a jump to me. But if we're quoting commandments, how about 'Thou shalt not steal.' That one's in there, ain't it? What happened to the papers the lawyers sent me?"
Her mother froze and then melted into a chair at the kitchen table. "We tried to raise you as a Christian girl."
Kate sat down across the table, stared quietly at her mother for a minute, shook her head, and then pulled a quotation out of her memories of Sunday school. "'For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' Alice Haskell acts more like a Christian than you do. She does that sort of thing every day of every week. 'And they were judged every man according to their works.' Book of Revelation, that one. I remember it."
Her mother straightened up in her chair, face white and then flushed, hands clenched into fists on the table in front of her. "Alice Haskell is a witch and a homosexual. Those are her works. She uses the Devil's power and does the Devil's work. God will cast her into Hell."
Kate shook her head. "God created those powers. God created homosexuals. Now you're telling God what to do with 'em, what to do with her. Alice may be a Haskell to the core, but she ain't that big-headed. She says she doesn't think any God worthy of worship would rig the game so that nine out of ten souls end up roasting for eternity. Even Hitler and Stalin didn't torture that many people."
Kate took a drag on her cigarette and concentrated on the hot bite of the smoke, ignoring her mother's sputtering rage. She finally stubbed the butt out in an ashtray lifted from a restaurant up in Naskeag Falls, looked up, and watched her mother simmer into silence. Remember why you left home.
"About Grannie Rowley?"
Her mother crossed her arms over her chest and glared. "You already know more than's good for you. You wouldn't be asking if you didn't. You may not believe in Hell, but I won't risk my soul by telling you more."
Kate shrugged. About what she'd expected. "What happened to those papers from the lawyer?"
"Burned them. Tools of the Devil."
But her mother's eyes were focused somewhere on the far wall, not looking directly into Kate's. Her cop instincts woke, and she thought of kids caught shoplifting and other shifty characters she'd known . . . professionally.
"Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor's."
Her mother winced. She stood up, weary and pushing against the table for balance, suddenly showing every one of her sixty-plus years and a few extra besides. She turned at the door, shoulders bowed, and spoke to Kate's feet. "Let it be on your own head, then. We washed our hands of you long ago."
Then she vanished, into the hall and then the parlor, judging by the footsteps and Kate's memory, and came back with her shoulders up and head up as defiant as before. She handed Kate two packages wrapped in yellowed white paper, dusty, one about the size of the huge old family Bible and damn near as heavy, and the second closer to a double deck of cards.
"We burned the rest. These looked too valuable to throw away." And then she left the kitchen without a further word or backward glance.
Kate stared at the empty doorway and shook her head. Mom hadn't been like that before she married Frank. Talk about a heavy load of sin . . .
She tugged at the knotted twine closing the smaller package, unwrapped it, opened the age-browned cardboard box inside, pulled off the top layer of yellowed cotton batting inside that. Her breath caught in her throat.
A silver brooch, large as her palm, tarnished blue-black with age and salt air but still beautiful enough to make her heart ache. It swam in her deepest memories, something Grannie had worn on a pale green dress long ago. The silver held set stones, deep green and orange, she didn't know what kind but they caught fire from the kitchen light even without cleaning.
A sprig of rowan, green leaves and ripe berries.
She touched it, gently at first and then daring to pick it up and hold it, feeling warmth that stones and silver shouldn't give after decades in storage. It wanted her to wear it. It looked too precious, too ancient, for anyone to wear. She'd seen the Morgan dragons and this looked like it came from the same master's hand.
She couldn't wear it now, not on a tan work shirt and her headed out to shingle Lew's roof. Instead, she slipped it into her left breast pocket and buttoned the flap. The brooch seemed content with that.
What else? That second box . . . again she tugged at knots, fingers trembling now with mingled fear and wonder. Kate unwrapped a cardboard box worn to shreds and patched back together with ancient yellowed tape. She lifted the top, found another box inside, wood, the deep red of rubbed oil with a faint whiff of cedar. Heavy.
Heavy and plain, but master woodworking, dovetail corners and rabbitted base as tight-fitted as molded plastic. Camming latch like a window, to pull the hinged lid down tight. Sealed? She thumbed the latch. The lid stayed tight. The two sides offered smooth indentations for her fingers, asking for a little pressure. The lid popped up with the faint cracking of something like glue or rosin, she touched ribbed and grooved edges, interlocking seal with a thick coating of wax. Bee's-wax, it looked, it would reseal with the pressure of the latch. The smell of cedar had grown stronger. Preservative.
And inside, a book. She reached in, using grooves in each side that let her fingers slide down beside the covers and grip. The box was fitted to the book, made to protect and preserve it. No nails, no screws, no metal, even the latch and hinge had been carved out of hard white wood or maybe ivory, now yellowed with age and spidered with faint brown cracks from centuries of winter dryness.
She lifted the book. Wood covers, grain looked something like rock maple, ribbed leather spine, she spanned it with her outspread fingers and guessed ten inches by sixteen by maybe one and a half thick. The cover was smooth and shiny and dark with the oil of centuries of hands and it had crosses carved into it, a large one in the center and four smaller ones spaced in from the four corners, Greek crosses if she remembered right — four arms of equal length crossed again at the ends. A Bible?
She opened it, feeling the uneven thickness of the pages, old stiff parchment, and again she found it hard to breathe. My God. No wonder Mom wouldn't burn this. . .
Hand lettered, illuminated, she couldn't read the text, couldn't even recognize the language. Maybe Caroline would know it. Or know someone who did. The colored inks glowed with fire, red, green, blue, brown, deep pure black, twining foliage and Celtic knotwork, gold leaf, saints with their hands raised in symbolic gestures, mythical beasts. She ran one finger along a line of script, feeling the weight and thickness of the ink, the groove left by the ruling stylus, thinking as she did that she committed some kind of sacrilege by touching the parchment with her naked hand.
Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . She conjured those words in Grannie Rowley's voice, not from Alice and the Naskeags. The Morgans were Catholic, the Welsh Alice said had come to Stonefort back before the dawn of history. The Naskeags were mostly Catholic. The English, the Scots, the rest, they'd brought the Reformation with them, Church of England and Baptists and Methodists and the Pilgrim Congregationalists.
Where had the Rowleys come from? When? This Bible sure as hell wasn't in English. Didn't look like Latin, either.
Bible, or something else? The title page bore words so twined in ivy or knotwork she wondered that anyone could pick out the letters. Under them sat a sprig of rowan, green leaves and orange berries. Twin to the brooch.
She took a deep breath, giddy, forcing air back into her lungs. Closed the book. Lifted it and lowered it back into its box, sealed the lid in place, and wrapped it.
*~*~*
Kate set the handbrake on her truck and shut the engine off. She sat and thought and stared at the box stashed in the passenger-side footwell. Twenty years or more that treasure had waited in the dark and dust, on the top shelf of the parlor closet. She didn't have a clue what to do with it now that it had seen light again.
It belonged in a vault somewhere, or in a bulletproof glass case filled with nitrogen under controlled-spectrum lighting. Alice would know what to do. Caroline would know. Kate was just a carpenter.
But if someone had handed her the book and told her to protect it, that cedar box would be damned near what she'd do. No power tools, metal hard to come by, that was what she'd make. She stared at her hands, her scarred maimed hands that spoke to wood and stone.
Some ancestor's hands had looked like that. Grannie Rowley made things, Dad made things. She still had some of their tools, hand-made wood-bodied planes, chisels reforged and tempered for specific cuts, fine-toothed dovetail saws and shaped cabinet scrapers, a set of wood-carver's knives that Alice said had been forged from a meteor's nickel-iron bones.
Strange, the traits that lived in the blood, down through generations. Lived, or skipped — Jeff was closer to being her son that way, closer to Rowley blood than Jackie, whatever the names might say.
She didn't know what to do about the book, about the brooch. They'd waited twenty years. Another day or two wouldn't be the end of the world. And she wasn't ready to forgive Alice, not yet. She was working on it, now that she could dump the major blame where it belonged. Mom and Frank would have a lot to answer for when Saint Peter opened up his book.
"Never amount to much . . ." Kate muttered her memory to herself. Jesus was a carpenter.
The book would wait. She did what she always did, when faced with a problem she couldn't solve — shoved it to the back of the stove to simmer and went straight ahead with what needed doing next. She climbed down out of the truck and locked the door.
Lew's house. Jeff should be up on the back side of the roof, laying shingles. Quiet, no tap-bang of the hammer, he must be taking a break. His bike was here, leaning against the corner of the house, aluminum-framed mountain bike with a bazillion gears and knobby tires that could climb trees. Grass was still wet from the morning fog, tracks coming and going.
She headed across the lawn and around the corner, stopping for a moment to pick up Jackie's beret from the grass and swat it against her thigh to shake off a couple of dead leaves. Damn kid kept losing bits of clothing, jackets or boots or scarves or gloves, expected her mother to pick up after her.
Kate froze, her eyes burning with almost-tears. Jackie was dead. She kept forgetting.
She stared at the beret in her hand. Purple, she was sure she'd bought it a couple of years ago. Turned it over. Looked inside the band. There was the label she'd sewn in, "J. Lewis." Jackie'd fumed over that, snarled that sewing labels into things meant Kate still thought her daughter was a baby. Wrong. Sewing on a name tag meant they'd get the hat back when Jackie left it somewhere.
Like here.
The hat hadn't been here when Kate mowed the lawn a week or so ago. She felt the fabric. Dry. Hadn't been here through the rain a few days back, hadn't even been here overnight when the fog rolled in so thick you couldn't see the end of the driveway. Kate shivered. Then she straightened up and clenched her teeth, anger replacing the sudden fear.
Ghosts? Bullshit. Ghosts didn't leave hats and scarves and jackets behind them. Didn't even leave ectoplasm, if you believed Alice. Someone wanted to freak her out. Probably someone from the Pratts — Jackie had taken the hat with her when she ran away. Had taken all the clothing she still used.
Maybe Jeff had seen whoever did this.
Kate stalked on around the corner, around the back. No sign of Jeff. He wasn't on the roof. No tracks through the wet grass into the woods, and he wouldn't need to go out behind a tree to take a piss, anyway. He would go inside, use the bathroom. He knew where she'd left the spare key.
"Jeff?" No answer. She raised her voice, facing the woods. "JEFF?"
Silence. She checked the back door, locked, and then the front door. Also locked. Unlocked it, opened it, went inside, searched the house. No Jeff. No wet footprints, either his Red Wings or any other feet.
Outside. Around back, she climbed up the ladder, hip thinking about filing a complaint, and peered over the eave. Stack of loose shingles ready, couple of unopened bundles, halfway up the roof and halfway along one course a shingle hanging at an angle with one nail in place. Jeff wouldn't leave it that way, even if he had the trots. He'd nail it down and then run for the john.
And his hammer was lying there. And the chalk line, and the cat's claw to pull old sheathing nails that he couldn't set true, and his tool belt. Kate muscled herself up onto the roof, jaw clenched against the wakening aches in shoulder and hip. Jeff wouldn't leave his tools lying around like that, 'specially in the damp. Boy had enough of the craftsman in his blood.
The layer of black roofing felt looked rumpled, right next to where he would have been squatting. Right where he'd left his tool belt. She climbed to it, weary, wary, her hand clutching at her shirt pocket and the brooch hidden there. She felt something stirring under the cloth, not movement but emotion, almost anger. This was wrong.
Squatting on the shingles, hip catching fire again, looking at the felt, she picked out lines and curves pressed into the heavy asphalt surface. Letters, scratched with the claw of the hammer, she saw traces of the black goop on one corner.
A single word. "Jackie."
Kate's head spun, and she pitched forward onto hands and knees to stay on the roof. Black filled her sight. She couldn't tell if it was the roofing felt, or inside her brain. Jeff was practically her son.
She saw the House, the Haskell House, against the darkness, the lamp glowing in that kitchen window. Alice. She's a witch. She can help. Time to swallow your pig-headed pride and go hat in hand to Alice. Forgive her. If there ever was anything to forgive.
She squatted, ignoring the flames in her hip and shoulder. She picked up Jeff's hammer and a couple of roofing nails from his belt pouch, set the dangling shingle straight, and nailed it down. She gathered his tools, rigged the tarp back over the stripped roof and anchored it, and climbed down. Set the ladder down on the lawn, safe from wind, safe from curious kids. Stowed his tools and bike inside the house.
Straight ahead, automatic pilot, just do what you have to do. Think about it later.
Jeff was her son.