In the two years following William Tear’s death, Katie Rice had learned many things. She was with Jonathan constantly, and Jonathan sometimes simply knew things. But there was more to it than that. Sometimes Katie felt as though she existed at the hidden heart of the Town, a hub where all of the Town’s secrets were buried, and by now she knew many things, even some she wished she did not.
She knew, for instance, that when Lily Tear was in the final extremity of her childbirth, Jonathan and Mrs. Johnson, the midwife, had tried to perform a caesarean section. The results were ghastly, and Lily had died screaming. Katie would hear those screams to the end of her days, but that was not the worst of it. In the last moment, a thought had come arrowing out of Jonathan, the thought limned with despair, and yet so clear and sharp that Katie could almost read it, as though he had written it down:
We are failing.
Katie didn’t understand this. Lily’s death was not Jonathan’s fault; if anything, it was his father’s fault, for failing to return with doctors, or even to bring the White Ship safely in the original Crossing—though Katie could not truly believe this, not with the memory of Tear’s anguished face upon her. He had already punished himself. No fault could be laid at Jonathan’s door, but Katie knew that he blamed himself for his mother’s death. No man was an island, perhaps, but Jonathan was at least an isthmus, and Katie did not try to talk him out of his guilt. He would not be comforted, could only work his way out of it in time. Katie knew him well enough to understand that.
She knew that two more children had disappeared: Annie Bellam, while walking up from the dairy, and Jill McIntyre, who had been playing hide-and-seek down by the schoolyard, both of them gone without trace. These disappearances were bad, but because of Jonathan, Katie also knew that the depredations in the graveyard had begun again, that fifteen graves had been dug up over the past fourteen months, all of them belonging to children. The Town at large did not know about the graveyard—Katie herself had filled in several of the graves, tamping them down with extra dirt to hide the settling and covering them with leaves—but after the McIntyre girl’s disappearance, the Christers had gotten much worse. Paul Annescott, or Brother Paul, as he now styled himself, claimed that the disappearances were a judgment on the Town, a punishment for weak faith. This did not surprise Katie; what floored her was the number of people who listened. It was just as she’d feared: with William Tear gone, there was no voice strong enough to counteract the increasingly hysterical flow of religious rhetoric. Mum and Jonathan were working on it; Jonathan did not quite have his father’s ability to sway a crowd, but he could talk a good game when he needed to, his voice quiet and logical, the voice of a man who only wanted what was best for everyone. But it wasn’t enough. Eight months earlier, some hundred people had begun construction of a church, a small white clapboard building on the southern end of town, and now that the church was finished, Annescott held sermons there every morning. He had given up his day job of beekeeping, but no one dared remonstrate with him, not even Jonathan. Katie knew many things now, but she didn’t know how to fix what was wrong with the Town. She hoped Jonathan did, but couldn’t be sure of that either, and she had an uncomfortable feeling that the rest of Jonathan’s guard was riddled with doubt as well.