KAVITA AND MAHESH dropped Sorrow off at the end of the driveway, and she walked up to the house through the tunnel of maple trees. Ethan’s Jeep was still parked in the driveway, and inside Grandma and Verity were fixing dinner.
“We got a bit of a late start,” Verity said. “Chicken pot pie in about forty-five minutes. Go tell Ethan he’s staying for dinner.” She was scrubbing a cutting board in the sink, her hair drifting about her face in wisps.
Sorrow hesitated. She had been bracing for questions about her day, thinking of ways to answer without mentioning Mrs. Roche or Cassie Abrams.
But Verity only looked up and added, “I think he’s in the barn. Okay?”
“Yeah.” Sorrow pivoted back to the door. “Okay.”
The barn was about a hundred yards from the house, across the broad expanse of lawn and beyond the tangle of Grandma’s garden. The door was open a crack, a bar of yellow light slanting out. As Sorrow approached there was a rumble from inside: an engine, spluttering.
She pushed the barn door open wider; the wheels on the track loosed a rusty shriek. The barn was stuffy, still hot from the heat of the day, and dust tickled her nose. It had been decades since the building had housed animals, but the scent of hay lingered. Ethan was leaning over the engine of the old green John Deere tractor. He looked up when Sorrow came in.
“Hey.” His Red Sox hat was pushed back and there was a smudge of grease on his forehead.
“Hi,” Sorrow said. “I’ve been commanded to command you to stay for dinner. At least it sounded like a command.”
“It’s that late?” Ethan said. “I, uh, I didn’t realize. I’ve been . . .” He gestured with a wrench, knocking it into the tractor with a loud metal clang. He had the radio on low: an AM sports station. Yankees versus Orioles. Yankees up by two. “Mostly not fixing this.”
“Does it still run? It’s been dying for years.”
Ethan shrugged. “Sort of. I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
He didn’t particularly sound like he wanted company, and Sorrow had delivered her message, so she turned to leave. “Verity says it’s forty-five minutes until the food is . . .”
There was a pile of cardboard boxes just inside the door.
She hadn’t noticed. She had come into the barn to fetch this tool or that a few times since Monday, and she hadn’t ever noticed the boxes just inside the door. The barn was full of junk, had always been full of junk. The floor and stalls and shelves were so packed Sorrow was used to looking over the clutter without seeing it.
Patience. Something in her heart thrummed like a plucked string. Grandma’s handwriting in black marker on brown cardboard. Patience, Patience, Patience.
The boxes were sealed with cracking tape and darkened by water stains at the corners. Something had chewed through the side of one. A mouse, maybe, its entire family too. Patience would have laughed at that, mice living in her clothes like creatures from a fairy tale, nibbling apart the seams to make a nest.
Sorrow stepped around a rusty red wheelbarrow and reached for the top box. The tape came away easily, brittle as ashes. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a bulky gray sweater. Sorrow brushed her fingertips over the fat stitches. It had been Verity’s before Patience claimed it. She would wear it on chilly mornings like a robe; its sleeves were so long they had covered her hands, except for the holes where her thumbs punched through. Sorrow inhaled, yearning for the scents of woodsmoke and cinnamon tea, but she smelled only engine oil and hay.
“Sorrow?” Ethan’s voice, hesitant.
She wasn’t going to search through Patience’s things with an audience. She wasn’t going to search at all, because she wasn’t trying to find anything. A box of matches. A lighter. A helpful note detailing how much she loved starting fires. Sorrow hated that she was even considering it.
She folded the box closed and regarded Ethan thoughtfully. She didn’t know anything about him except that he didn’t like his family and he put up with her mother’s eccentricities. The brief conversations they’d had over the past few days had been about work around the farm, nothing more. If Andi were here she’d be rolling her eyes and dismissing Ethan as too quiet and boring to talk to, but Sorrow thought it more likely he just liked being left alone. That was fine with her. They didn’t need to be friends. All Sorrow wanted was somebody who could answer a question.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“It’s kinda personal.”
“Uh . . .”
“Not personal about you.” Sorrow left the boxes by the door and wound her way through the clutter to stand beside the tractor. “It’s more about my family. That kind of personal.”
Ethan set the wrench down and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Okay.”
“I know we don’t know each other, but I can’t ask Verity or—”
“It’s okay,” he said, laughing a little. “What is it?”
“It’s about my sister. You know what happened to her.”
Ethan leaned against the tractor’s large front tire; the yellow paint on the wheel rim was almost completely rusted away. “Yeah. I do. I remember when it happened.”
“What do you remember about it?”
“Not much,” he said. “Just people talking about it. My aunt and uncle took Cass and Julie out of town for a while because they were so upset. Mostly Julie, I guess. She’s the one who saw it from her window, and she was . . . not okay. She got really quiet after that and never really came back. That’s mostly what I remember.”
“Do people really think . . .” Sorrow swallowed, pressed on. “Do people think Patience started the fires herself?”
A few seconds passed before Ethan answered. “Where did you hear that?”
It wasn’t quite the vehement denial Sorrow had been hoping for. “At the store today.”
“Somebody just came up and said that to you?”
“Well. Not somebody. It was Cassie.”
“Oh, god, of course it was.” Ethan took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, put it on again. “I should have guessed.”
“Why? Has she said stuff like that before?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard, but she’ll say whatever’s going to stir up the most shit, whether or not it’s true.” Sorrow’s skepticism must have shown on her face, because he added, “The last thing she said to me, right after I started working here a few months ago, was that I was a traitor to our family and should be disowned.”
“That seems . . . extreme,” Sorrow said. “Even for our families.”
“It’s not like we’re close. I don’t care what she says.” But there was a bitter edge to his words, and Sorrow wondered if Cassie had upset him more than he wanted to admit.
“But is Cassie the only one who thinks that? About my sister?” she asked.
“I think most people figure the police were right about what happened,” he said.
“You mean that it was some random drug addict or something.”
“Yeah.”
“But most people isn’t everybody,” Sorrow pressed. “Cassie must have gotten it from somewhere. What about Julie? What does she think?”
“Julie never talks about it,” Ethan said. “Not ever. Cassie probably said it just because she knew it would bother you. And, honestly? If there was any chance my aunt and uncle thought your sister was responsible, the whole world would have heard about it.”
“I guess that’s true,” Sorrow admitted. Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had once called the police because Grandma had been walking too close to the property line; they would never have let something like possible arson go, no matter how tragically it had ended.
“Why does it matter?” Ethan asked. “Do you—is that what you think happened?”
“No, nothing like that,” Sorrow said quickly. “I was just wondering why she would say that. Wondering if that’s what people think.” She didn’t like the way Ethan was looking at her, like he was trying to figure out what she wasn’t saying. She took the coward’s way out and promptly changed the subject. “So you working here really does upset your family?”
“Yeah, but I don’t care,” Ethan said. “It’s still better than letting my dad think he can decide for me.”
“You’re doing it to piss off your dad?”
“It’s working. He hasn’t spoken to me in months.”
“That’s a good thing?” Sorrow said.
“You’ve clearly never met my dad if you have to ask that.” Ethan didn’t even try to hide the bitterness in his voice that time, and Sorrow had the uncomfortable realization that in trying to deflect the conversation from herself she had pushed it into territory that was painful for him.
“I don’t think I ever have, actually.” In Sorrow’s mind one Mr. Abrams was indistinguishable from the other: blond hair, polo shirts, nice cars. “Does that mean working here was your idea? Not Verity’s?”
“No, it was mine,” Ethan said. “And I asked Miss P first. I mean, I sort of—she would never admit she needs help with anything, even though she’s like seventy years old, so I kinda let her think she was doing me a favor. She’s always been nice to me, even when I was a little kid. Verity took some convincing.”
That wasn’t how Verity had made it sound; she had talked about hiring an Abrams like it was some kind of coup. And Sorrow hadn’t questioned Verity’s version of events. She hadn’t even wondered if she’d needed to.
“I think I sort of forgot what it was like,” she said. “Our families. I mean, I remember, but it was always just . . . you know, stories. Ancient history.”
“People don’t really forget ancient history around here,” Ethan said. “You know they still call it ‘witch weather’ when there’s an early frost or a bad snowstorm.”
The words whispered an echo in Sorrow’s mind, a long-ago memory of bright colors and spice cake—the yarn and fabric shop where Grandma sold her quilts. Two women talking in low voices: This chill in the air, it’s witch weather. Locals. Sorrow had seen them in the store before. They had shared a glance, a purse of the lips when they realized Sorrow was eavesdropping from behind a shelf, and the subject changed. She had known what they meant, and at the time it had made her feel proud, that those two women in the shop would blame the weather on her family.
There was a crunch of footsteps outside the barn. Verity appeared in the doorway. “There you are. I thought you’d gotten lost.”
“Between here and the house?” Sorrow said.
“Well, you are a city girl now.”
“No need for a search party.” Sorrow glanced at Ethan. “We were talking tractor repairs.”
“I thought I told you not to bother with that piece of junk,” Verity said.
“It’s only about fifty percent junk,” Ethan said. “Maybe seventy-five. The rest still works.”
“It’s almost as old as I am.” Verity stepped into the barn and rapped on the hood of the John Deere with her knuckles. “I remember when we got it. We had to replace the one my grandmother drove into the pond.”
Sorrow was certain she had misheard. “She did what?”
“She drove the old tractor into the pond. The one over in the northwest corner?”
“I know which pond,” Sorrow said. “I’m more interested in why your grandma drove a tractor into it. On purpose?”
“Absolutely. She was trying to make a point.” Verity’s smile was a flicker, gone far too quickly. “The pond is right on the property line, and she didn’t like that Eli Abrams—that would be your grandfather.” She nodded at Ethan. “She didn’t like that he kept pulling up the fence posts to claim the whole pond for himself, so she got on her tractor and rode down there and plowed right over the new fence he’d put up.”
“I think my grandfather told me about that when I was little,” Ethan said. “Only in his version she tried to run him down first. He really didn’t like her.”
“Well, she might have killed his father, so he had his reasons,” Verity said.
Sorrow laughed, a short startled sound, but Verity’s expression didn’t change, and Ethan only looked uncomfortable. The walls of the barn swallowed her laugh into an uneasy silence.
“Are you serious?” Sorrow looked between the two of them. “You’re serious. Is that true? She killed him?”
Verity didn’t answer right away, so Ethan said, “I don’t know if it’s true. I only know what Grandpa Eli used to say, and he was . . . you know. Not all there. Alzheimer’s. He was always saying Devotion Lovegood drove his father to an early grave. He loved to blame a whole bunch of stuff on her and Miss P, like stupid stuff they obviously . . .”
Ethan trailed off. He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck, and he glanced at Verity with a look Sorrow understood all too well. That was the look of somebody who knew he had said the wrong thing but didn’t know yet how Verity would react.
“But he said stuff like that all the time,” he went on quickly. “He was blaming communism on your family too, in the end. All kinds of stuff. Nobody listened to him.”
Verity’s expression hadn’t changed. It hadn’t changed at all, and her stillness made the hair on Sorrow’s neck stand up. Verity was looking at Ethan, her expression carefully blank, and his face was growing redder, and Sorrow almost felt sorry for him, definitely would have if her heart weren’t racing, if there weren’t a weight on her chest, if she could blink, if she could look away, if every muscle in her body weren’t tense with waiting to see what Verity would do.
Verity moved her hand, turned slightly, and for a heartbeat Sorrow was absolutely certain she was going to storm out of the barn. She would return to the house and thump up the stairs to her room. Sorrow could already hear her door slamming, that angry clap echoing through the house, a sound she hadn’t heard in years but had never, ever forgotten.
But Verity didn’t leave. Slowly she unfroze, melting from a tense statue to a flesh-and-blood woman again, and she tapped her fingers idly on the tractor, a nervous, arrhythmic drumbeat. She said, “We can’t claim responsibility for the communism, but he wasn’t entirely wrong about George Abrams. He and my grandmother hated each other, and they had good reason for it.”
“What kind of reason?” Ethan asked—too eagerly, Sorrow thought, too quickly, but she had believed the same once too, that asking Verity to delve into one of her cherished stories was the best way to smooth over an uncertain moment.
“Their parents,” Verity said. “They were only little kids at the time, barely old enough to know what was going on, but their parents were once on opposite sides of a little small-scale war here in town.”
Disappointment curdled in Sorrow’s chest. Of course they were. March back through history to parents and grandparents and beyond, and all you would ever find were entire lifetimes of distrust and spite traded back and forth across the fence line.
But Verity was talking, and Ethan was listening, and if Sorrow interrupted or walked away now, she would be the one who tipped the moment from cautiously curious into more dangerous terrain.
“Devotion’s mother—her name was Joyful—she grew up during World War One.” Verity leaned against the tractor and hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. To Sorrow the motions seemed deliberate, a calculated picture of ease. “Before the war, there was a big family living here, a few generations all crammed in together. But then the influenza epidemic happened, and the war happened, and by the start of 1920 there was only Joyful and her grandmother Justice.”
Sorrow walked along the cemetery rows in her mind. Justice’s ash tree had been struck by lightning long ago, but it had survived; its trunk was split midway up by a thick black scar. At the base of Joyful’s she had once found a rusty skeleton key for her favor collection.
“It was a terrible winter that year,” Verity went on, “and not just for the Lovegoods. It was bad for the whole valley, although of course they blamed us, as usual.”
“Witch weather,” Sorrow said quietly. The words felt cold in her throat, like the first startled breath after stepping outside on a winter day. Ethan gave her a quick look, but Verity went on as though she hadn’t spoken.
“Joyful was only about twenty years old, but she wanted to find a way to support herself and her grandmother besides apples, so they wouldn’t have hard times like that again. It just so happened that was the winter Congress passed the Volstead Act. Prohibition,” Verity explained, before Sorrow could admit she didn’t pay nearly as much attention in history class as she should. “She became a bootlegger.”
“No way,” Sorrow said, surprised. “Really?”
Verity looked pleased. “She was very good at it. She and her husband—his name was Eugene Rosenthal. He was a musician more than a criminal, really. Trumpet player. Joyful was the brains behind the smuggling operation. For about ten years they had the fastest route for bringing Canadian liquor over Lake Champlain and down to Boston and New York. As you can imagine, not everybody around here was happy about that.”
“No, wait, don’t tell me,” Sorrow said. “It was the Abramses.”
“You don’t get any points for guessing that,” Ethan said, laughing.
“The Abramses—they were two brothers—they tried to shut her down, but nobody much listened, so they decided to take care of it themselves.” Verity paused and tapped her fingers on the tractor again; Sorrow didn’t think she knew she was doing it. “They knew Joyful stashed her goods up by Peddler’s Creek when she moved them through town, and that’s where they were going to hit her.”
“That’s in the preserve,” Sorrow pointed out.
“It is now,” Verity agreed. “It was Lovegood land then. There are those small caves up along the creek—where the trail forks to the lake?”
Crackling autumn leaves under her boots. Vibrant red and gold branches arching overhead. The cold bite of wind whistling along a steep granite face. She walked the path in her mind, and with every footstep the memory shimmered and rippled, as though the ground and trees and stones were made of water and she was moving through a reflection. There was a wooden sign at the trail junction. Left and up for Frenchman Peak, right and into the deeper, darker woods for Lily Lake. She stepped beneath the cool damp overhang of rock, where footprints scuffed the bare ground and the remains of a campfire had been carelessly scattered. She felt her sister at her back, a comforting presence, and remembered how Patience had grumbled about the litter, about the fire, about people ignoring the preserve rules. They had cleaned up the garbage, the two of them, and left it in a little pile to pick up on their way down from the lake. The day, in Sorrow’s mind, was gold and red. The last autumn they had together.
“They’re not very big caves,” Sorrow said faintly. Cool air breathed through the open barn door. “Barely caves at all.”
“Big enough to hide a few barrels of whisky,” Verity said. “And one day Joyful’s twins—they were nine years old—they were swimming up in the creek when the Abrams brothers found them. Naturally there’s some debate about what—”
In the cave Patience had taken off her gloves to press her hands to the overhanging granite, and Sorrow remembered how oddly her voice had echoed, not expansively but dully, as though the stone were swallowing her words, and she had said, Do you think the mountains remember when terrible things happen?
“They shot the little kids,” Sorrow said.
Verity stopped. “Well—yes. That’s what I was about to say.”
Sorrow hadn’t realized she’d interrupted. “Sorry. Yeah.”
“One of the twins, Charles, he was killed immediately. The girl, Cherish, was injured, but she managed to get off a shot that hit one of the Abrams brothers before she got away.” The look Verity gave her was considering. “Have I told you this before?”
Sorrow didn’t have an answer, so she only said, “I don’t remember. What happened?”
But she knew this story. Every word Verity spoke was a burr itching at the back of her mind. She didn’t know the names, nor the details, but she knew the shape of it. She knew the way her sister’s voice had risen and fallen when she stood in that slanting cave and told Sorrow to listen, listen, and she took Sorrow’s hand in her own, peeled off her mitten, and pressed her fingers to the cold stone. Listen. Abramses and Lovegoods, parents and children, Prohibitionists and smugglers. Smashing bottles and hijacking wagons, burning fields and barns, setting stock loose and stalking the hills with guns in hand. Bodies dragged down from Peddler’s Creek and hastily buried. Shots ringing in the woods all through the night.
Sorrow had never been able to hear what Patience wanted her to hear.
“The townspeople called it Bloody July,” Verity was saying. “Something like twelve or fifteen people died altogether. They finally convinced the sheriff to do something, and he sent one of his deputies to arrest Joyful. Only the deputy was stupid enough to wait until dark, so nobody could see who was coming up the drive. Not that it would have made any difference—at that point they were shooting at anybody who came close.”
“They killed him?” Ethan said.
Sorrow had almost forgotten he was there. She made a fist, released it. The sensation of Patience’s hand covering hers faded. She missed it as soon as it was gone.
“Nobody knew who fired the shot but, yes, they killed him,” Verity said. She pointed. “Right out there on the drive in front of the house. The sheriff called in the FBI to help, and they arrested Eugene Rosenthal for the murder.”
“Why him?” Sorrow asked. “If they didn’t know who actually fired?”
“Does it matter?” Verity said. She gestured broadly, sweeping her arm to take in the barn, the door open to the night, the land beyond. “Because he was Jewish. Because he was a jazz musician. Because he was from New Jersey and not from around here. Because it was right at the beginning of the Hoover years and the FBI wanted to prove itself. He was the one they decided to blame, but it never went to trial. He died in police custody.” There was the faintest crack in Verity’s voice. “They said it was suicide.”
“He’s not in our cemetery,” Sorrow said.
“Joyful let his family take him back to New Jersey,” Verity said. “And for the second time in her life, she went from being surrounded by family to having almost nobody. She had two surviving daughters—Pride and Devotion—but Pride left too, a few years later. She ran away. She came back as an old woman, but I don’t think my grandmother ever forgave her for leaving. She definitely never forgave the Abramses for their part in it all. Grandma Devotion wasn’t exactly the forgiving type.”
Sorrow had been so lost in her memories of Patience in the cave by the creek she’d almost forgotten what had turned Verity down this story path to begin with. “Because she was the drive-a-tractor-into-the-pond type instead? Where does that come into it?”
“Simon Abrams had a few children, but the only one who stuck around was George. And George got it into his head that he could finish the fight his father had started,” Verity explained. “He had this foolish idea that people might remember his father more kindly if Simon had been defending Peddler’s Creek from criminal trespassers, not opening fire on little kids playing on their own land. So he tried to prove that our land ought to have been Abrams land all along.”
“Is there any truth to that?” Sorrow asked.
“No,” Verity said. “Not a shred. It was all jealous squabbling. It went to court a few times, but there was no point after my grandmother put the western acres into a trust. That only made George more bitter. The way Mom used to tell it—”
“Grandma?” Sorrow said. “You mean, when she was still—”
“When she was still talking, yes. She told me every time they met George Abrams in town he would take out this watch of his—the old-fashioned kind, on a chain—snap it open, and tell them he was counting down the minutes until the Lovegoods were gone for good.”
Sorrow opened her mouth to say, But that’s my watch. That’s mine.
She stopped herself; she knew how ridiculous that sounded. She remembered the watch clearly, a prized favor unlike any other, and how happy she had been to find it, how proud she had been to add it to her collection. She could feel it beneath her fingers: the metal clasp, gritty dirt on the case, drops of stagnant water seeping through the edges even months after she’d plucked it from the orchard. She hadn’t known who it belonged to. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask, when she had believed so fervently the favors were the orchard’s gifts to her and her alone.
Verity was saying, “It went on like that for a while, with George issuing threats nobody ever took seriously, until one day he was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Sorrow asked.
“I mean he disappeared,” Verity said. “People looked, obviously. The police came here. Devotion claimed she had caught him dumping lye in one of our wells—the one down in the meadow—and she ran him off. She said he’d probably skipped town because he was too much of a coward to show his face after getting caught. She boarded up the well, and nobody ever saw George Abrams again.”
The sensation of water on her fingers was so strong Sorrow looked down. Her skin was dry. She shook her hand anyway, wiped it on her jeans.
“Nobody in my family ever believed that,” Ethan said. “They’re all convinced she killed him and buried him somewhere in the woods. My dad and uncle used to go looking for his body when they were kids, like it was a game. The way they talk about it now, I think they’re still disappointed they never found a skull.”
“They get that from their father, Eli,” Verity said. “It’s just venom and spite, passed down again and again. Pulling up fence posts around the pond was the least of what he did to get back at my grandmother—and my mother, after Devotion died.”
“What did he do to Grandma?” Sorrow asked.
Verity started to answer, got so far as parting her lips to speak before the stillness came over her and her hand flattened on the tractor fender. The hair on Sorrow’s arms prickled. It was only a question. Verity had been talking, she had been fine, telling a story in her rambling way, and Sorrow had only asked a question. She hadn’t said anything wrong. She didn’t know why those words would have dropped like lead weights, why Verity wasn’t answering. If there had been a line she wasn’t meant to cross, she hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t been looking.
“Nothing as exciting as a Prohibition-era shoot-out.” Verity pushed away from the tractor and headed for the door. “Dinner will be ready soon. Come in and wash up.”
Sorrow watched her go, a shadow moving between the barn and the house, the sound of her footsteps fading. She couldn’t feel the long-ago autumn day anymore, nor the touch of cool stone beneath her palm. She couldn’t feel the weight of the watch, and she missed it. She didn’t want to chase after Verity and navigate dinnertime around a mistake she hadn’t even known she was making. She wanted to take her memories somewhere quiet, turn them over in her mind, examine every shining facet. She wanted to remember again the feel of Patience’s hand on hers. But she was firmly back in the barn, and Verity had walked away, and she could taste the scent of rust and old hay in the back of her throat.
A wrench clattered into a toolbox, and Ethan wiped his hands on a dirty rag. “Dinner?”
Sorrow turned toward the door, then paused. “What was it you stopped yourself saying before? About Grandma?”
He didn’t have to ask her what she meant. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid. My grandfather was totally senile by the time I was old enough to listen to him. I think he was confused, you know?”
“About what?”
“His brother Henry died in a car accident. It was just an accident, but Grandpa Eli had this thing about how it was all that Lovegood woman’s fault, everything was her fault, the Lovegoods had destroyed his father and now his brother and . . .” Ethan made a face and let out a short breath. “He was confusing your grandma with her mother. The same way he used to confuse the guy at the gas station with Richard Nixon. It was kinda sad, really. There was no reason to bring it up. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
The words rang with hollow familiarity in Sorrow’s mind as they walked back to the house. Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Shouldn’t have said anything. How many times she had thought that to herself, always so cringingly aware of saying the wrong thing. She felt a petty sort of satisfaction to learn that Ethan ran into those same traps, but the feeling was gone almost immediately. It wasn’t a contest. There was no prize for being the person who could run the obstacle course of Verity’s moods without tripping.