The Sparrow Sisters (27 page)

“Then what has she done to me?”

“Nothing,” Simon said. “Patience has no power over you, Henry. She has no mysterious potions, no incantations. Whatever her healing gift is, it is firmly of this plane.” He rolled his eyes. “I cannot believe I'm saying this to a doctor. That quilt has no more magic than the innate properties of the herbs she sewed into it, the hands that took each stitch.”

“That's just it, though,” Henry said. “The things she makes, they
do
work.”

Everyone nodded, and Nettie thought that maybe Henry had come through his crisis safely. At the very least, he finally understood what Patience could do for him.

“Then they can backfire, too,” he said.

Sorrel and Nettie exchanged a confused look.

“Her remedies, if they have power, can heal or harm.” Henry slammed his hands on the table. “Don't you get it? Even if there are no poisons in her stores, there are poisonous doses. Patience could have hurt Matty. She didn't mean to, but she was reckless, after all, and now he's dead.”

No one moved. Henry was breathing hard, and Simon noticed with the detachment of shock that Nettie's hands were
shaking and Sorrel was crying. He didn't think he'd ever seen Sorrel shed a single tear. Not even when Marigold died.

“Shut up, Henry,” Simon said. “This stays in Ivy House.”

“How can you be so callous?” Henry asked.

“Matty is dead. I am certain that Patience had nothing to do with it, and if you are not so sure, then you can either keep your doubts to yourself or get out.”

“I can't,” Henry said.

“You can't be quiet?” Simon wondered what he was going to do now.

“I can't betray Patience.”

Now Simon wanted a drink and as he poured it, he acknowledged how reckless
he
was, how precarious his position had just become. But there was no going back. If he couldn't give Sorrel his love, he could at least return her sister.

“Well then,” Simon said, “We're all in this together.”

P
ATIENCE FELT THE
real change begin as she sat in the holding cell and suspected that she had started it. She wasn't angry when the judge set bail so impossibly high. She wasn't angry when Annica, the linen lady, watched her leave the courthouse and deliberately dropped a bottle from the Sparrow Sisters Nursery to the ground. It shattered, and the scent of alfalfa, strong as Annica's disgust, drifted up from the sidewalk. Patience didn't get angry until she heard Chief Kelsey order his men to search Henry's apartment. Her belly clenched at the thought of the little haven she'd made for herself there, and she
clamped her teeth together so fast and hard she bit her tongue. Blood filled her mouth and she stood to spit into the small sink in the corner.

Self-control was a near thing as Patience wrapped her hands around the bars and shouted for Chief Kelsey. When he came to her, his eyes liquid with regret, Patience let the air out of her fury.

“I want a blanket,” she said. “Can I have a blanket?”

Chief Kelsey stayed his hand as it reached to pat Patience's knuckles and nodded. It had gotten cold in the cells, and he walked back to the office with an honest purpose for the first time. He called his wife.

“We need a few things,” he said.

Pamela Kelsey drove over to the department in the station wagon that had belonged to her parents. She had filled the back with a duvet and pillow, two paperback novels she hoped Patience would not have time to read, flip-flops, shampoo, and a proper towel. She brought two thermoses of soup, a packet of oyster crackers, a bottle of seltzer water, and a chocolate bar. Pamela piled it all into a laundry basket and carried it to her husband's office. He blinked in surprise when she thumped her load down on his desk.

“I've brought you some soup,” she said, and Chief Kelsey smiled. “Everything else is for Patience Sparrow.”

And that is when the first of the women took a stand. But it was too late. It would take a lot more than soup and pillows to stop the rising panic. It would take more than one woman to
turn the tide that already threatened to sweep Patience away. She would not go alone.

Patience was thrown when the chief came back to her with his wife's care package. He opened the door to her cell and came in without closing it.
Really,
he thought,
where'
s she going to go?
The rain had begun again, only now hail was mixed in with it, and one of his men had already informed him of a cracked windshield and a dented mailbox. The candlelight vigil for Matty organized by some fool group from the Methodist church in Old Hayward was rushed off its well-heeled feet when a street drain backed up and bathed them all ankle deep in a brown, gritty paste. It looked remarkably like shit to the two officers who were dispatched to keep watch. When they came back to the station, Chief Kelsey thought they smelled like shit too.

Rob Short stood at his kitchen window watching the church group disband. They left behind their placards and signs that had less to do with Christian kindness and more to do with some kind of anti-pagan crusade. He thought they resembled a bunch of cats kicking their feet and shaking their legs as if they had scotch tape on their paws. It's not that he didn't want the attention for Matty, the covered dishes that started appearing after Patience was arrested. A few of the guys from the hardware store had come by to bring him beer and cigarettes, drink his bourbon, and tell him how Patience Sparrow had gotten hauled off. Rob felt a little uncomfortable as the men reveled in her downfall. He wondered if maybe things were getting
out of hand when his friends told him they had a plan to trash the Nursery.

“A few phone calls, Rob, and we've gotten a boatload of guys ready to show those Sparrows their kind of gardening is not welcome in Granite Point.”

After the men left, Rob went back to watching the rain-washed street. He hadn't bothered to turn on any lights; all he needed was the bulb in the fridge when he opened it to get another beer. He turned away and went to sit at the kitchen table, careful not to choose Matty's chair. He sat there every night. Was it mourning or penance? He didn't bother to distinguish between the two or to even note the ritual: a beer, a bottle of bourbon, and cigarettes. Until Matty died he hadn't smoked in fifteen years, hadn't had a drink in over ten, not since Annie told him she was pregnant. He'd done it for her, then for his son, and now there was no one to care what he did. Rob really did believe that Matty died because Patience Sparrow gave him something that, instead of getting him through the day, plain old got him. He knew it was his fault that Matty needed an outsider's help, but he didn't care anymore. His anger and grief had overflowed, like that sewage, and now it was spreading through the town. It had been so easy to let the prosecutor take over. He seemed so sure that Patience was guilty of something. Rob couldn't remember all the legal terms; he'd been halfway to the bottom of a bottle by then. Anyway, they took his complaint, the chief, the lawyer, and a court stenographer, right there in his kitchen. He didn't have to leave, but he did take the empties out to the trash.

As numb as Rob Short worked to be, even he felt the changes around him. Something was happening, or rather, something had stopped happening since Patience was arrested. Granite Point seemed deflated by her incarceration. The buzzy hum of summer was missing, and vacationers and locals alike felt as if there was less oxygen in their air. The dogs that could usually be found snoozing on porches were more often huddled under their houses, terrified by the thunder, soaked by the rain. When the sun came out, it was so hot that everyone felt like ants trapped under a magnifying glass. The children who might have been experimenting with that magnifying glass dropped their bikes and scooters on the sidewalk and stayed inside, not just because of the weather and not just because their mothers pulled them closer, but because they were anxious, although they would never have been able to name the feeling. Instead they complained of sore throats and tummy aches, infected mosquito bites and lingering rashes.

Henry Carlyle put
his
anxiety into his work, and although there were a few cancellations, his office too had never been busier. Most of the summer folk didn't know he was connected to the hubbub at the police station; they had no idea that the longest-standing prisoner (now at forty-eight hours and counting) had spent her happiest moments in his bed. They dragged their children and spouses into his exam room with all the irritation their ruined vacations called forth. The migraine headaches, swimmer's ear, and infant colds weren't enough to distract Henry. He felt Patience's nearness and his inability to
be with her acutely. His nerves were frayed by his realization of how thoroughly she had affected the people in the town. The fact that her remedies were genuine should have been satisfying to Henry. He should have been thinking about how they could team up like a couple of medical superheroes. He teetered on the edge of making the connection between Granite Point's suddenly disastrous summer season and Patience's situation. But the idea that a town was as much a living, breathing entity as any of its residents, the understanding that that town could fall ill just like one of his patients, eluded Henry. He might have asked Patience what was going on, and she might have been able to tell him. Instead, he was filled with a terrible certainty that if he did go to Patience, she would take one look at his face and turn him away forever. This was something he did not think he could take, even as he allowed himself the agony of imagining her dosing Matty with poison.

The day he galloped over to confront the Sisters, Henry drank too much. The third Scotch he let Simon pour burned a hangover into him while he was still a little drunk, and he had to ask the lawyer to drive him home. The Sisters stood in such silence as Henry limped out of Ivy House that he felt pressure in his ears. His leg sang with pain. He took a Vicodin, and drank glass after glass of water standing in his bathroom. It was not enough to sedate him, but enough to make him groggy and unfocused so that the afternoon was murky with every sort of pain.

Sorrel, who had sometimes suspected that Henry had fallen
in love with the idea of Patience, now wondered if he was about to destroy the reality of her. She and Nettie went back to the Nursery in search of the property paperwork. If it was down to them to make bail, they needed to do it fast. There was no telling how bad things could get if Patience stayed in jail. Clouds hung like anvils in the sky over the town. Already the Nursery was changing. Patience's gardens were trampled by a flood of the curious who'd started coming the day after the Clarion article and the video release. The police had been more careful in their search than the visitors taking pictures of plants they couldn't name. No one bought any remedies—that would be foolhardy and besides, the sisters had locked the cupboard and put away all of Patience's bits and bobs. But the customers almost all came away with bouquets from the farm stand, tomatoes, arugula, and zucchini, pots of coneflowers and dahlias, flats of creeping phlox, anemones, dwarf marigolds, and zinnias. The Sparrow Sisters Nursery was bringing in cash, and the Sisters had to split up to look after the crowds. It wouldn't last.

Nettie finally found the deed to the land (it was back at Ivy House in the library), the last quarterly tax filing, and the mortgage they had taken out on Ivy House the year they bought the Nursery. She put the papers into a manila envelope. She and Sorrel closed up and took everything to Simon's office. His assistant, an older woman who had begun her career at Mr. Mayo Sr.'s elbow, greeted them. Her mouth was a thin, pale line, and when she held out her hand for the envelope, she was
careful not to touch Nettie's. Sorrel surprised herself by staying silent. She didn't even ask where Simon was although both Sisters were desperate to get things moving.

As it turned out, the Nursery would not be the thing to save anybody. The little burst of business in the early days after Matty's death only served to call attention to the Sparrows. By the time the Sisters arrived the morning after they agreed to use the Nursery as bond, not only had someone taken a bolt cutter to the gate locks, they had run over the herb gardens with what looked like a tractor. Entire years-old stands of sage and rosemary were torn out by the roots, the creeping thyme was flattened and muddied, and the box hedges that marked each area like walls were snapped at ground level. Sorrel and Nettie were so shocked they couldn't even cry, although they both felt the loss like a death. Sorrel turned in a circle, trying to understand what she was seeing. Nettie was the one who finally spoke.

“Patience can't know about this,” she said, and Sorrel nodded. “I cannot believe people are such shits,” she added.

“Those shits are the very same people who came to her for help,” Sorrel said.

“I wonder if they're the same shits who shopped here yesterday,” Nettie said.

The Sisters spent the day trying to save what they could. The little cart on the road had been turned over, and the honesty box was smashed but not emptied. Dollar bills had blown against the stone wall along the road like notes left at a memo
rial. For now, both women thought, the Nursery was just that. It was no longer a living thing at all.

Simon Mayo found Sorrel and Nettie sitting in the shed. He'd seen the overturned cart and the ruined plants, but he just couldn't believe that the damage was deliberate. One look at the women, and he had to face facts. The very physicality of the destruction spoke to him of men, and he suspected that the husbands and boyfriends, the fathers, not the mothers, were responsible. He was right. The women in town were horrified when they heard about the Nursery. They had spent the week listening to their husbands bluster yet they had never guessed they would turn to vandalism. Most of the women stood up for themselves and for Patience, and they all hid their remedies where they knew the men would never look: in the linen closet, at the bottom of the laundry hamper, behind packets and canned goods in their pantries, in the glove box of the family minivan. They spoke to each other in whispers about how fragile everything was with Patience in trouble.