“No way,” Paul said. He gestured for her to get in the elevator. She shook her head, and he shrugged; the door hit him as it closed.
She stood at the partners desk listening to the elevator’s groans and creaks. She had a bad feeling; her gut was telling her to get away and not to look back. She glanced out the window, and, for a moment, she believed she could see the hole they had covered on the lawn. It was throbbing.
Sadly, she realized that Paul would never leave this place. He would choose his birthright over his own happiness. It was the family curse, the curse of both the Hathornes and the Whitings, and it went back generations. He wasn’t free of it, and he never would be. It was more important to him than the happily ever after that he’d promised her. Marta was right. He would betray her.
She walked out of the library and went to the boathouse. Climbing to the top of the lighthouse, she looked out at Norman’s Woe in the bright summer sunlight and sensed the presence of something far darker than she’d once imagined.
Clutching Rose’s book to her breast and taking Rose’s ashes, Callie descended the stairs.
Through the forest that separated the boathouse from Pride’s Heart, Callie could hear music as the orchestra started up in the ballroom. She loaded her car quickly. Her fingers had swollen from the day’s heat, and she had to run her hand under cold water and slick her finger with soap to remove the emerald ring Paul had given her. When it finally loosened, it flew across the room and rolled under the couch. She crawled on hands and knees to retrieve it and carefully placed it on the table where he would see it.
She took the back roads, past the barn and the outbuildings, past the beach, turning left as she came to Route 127. She crossed the bridge, careful not to look in her rearview mirror. She didn’t have the strength to make it back to Amherst, so she drove to the Hawthorne Hotel and booked herself a room. She got all the way to the sixth floor before she broke down and sobbed.
Rafferty stood in the doorway of the ballroom talking to Ann and Towner while they waited for Mickey, who had gone in search of a bathroom. Helen Barnes approached them and stood for a long moment looking at the threesome. “Well, isn’t this a day of firsts?” she said. “Men and their mistresses! Have you ladies taken inspiration from Emily and Marta? How very European of you all!”
Rafferty stared, dumbstruck, at Helen and then at Towner. Mickey rejoined the group as Helen walked away.
“What’s going on?” he said, when he saw the looks on their faces.
“Come on,” Ann said to Mickey. “You promised me a waltz.”
In the realm between life and death, time, as we know it, does not exist.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
Towner and Rafferty didn’t speak during the drive back to Salem. They climbed the stairs to the coach house in silence, the distance between them growing.
“I’m going to bed,” she finally said. “Are you coming?”
“We have to talk,” he said.
“We’ll talk after. Come to bed.”
“We need to talk now,” he said, following her upstairs to the bedroom. He knew what would come after, had always known what would happen when he confessed. He knew too well what “after” looked like. It looked like the void, the place he feared most. After meant when she left and he was without her. He’d been there once before, and it had almost killed him. He wasn’t certain he would survive it again.
“About what Helen said…Ann and I…” he started.
She held up her hand. “Never happened.” She was removing her dress as he spoke, kicking off her shoes and putting on her robe.
It was just what Ann had said when he’d tried to talk to her about what had happened between them that night. Had the two women talked about this? Feelings of betrayal and shame settled on him, creating an odd blend.
“It did, though,” he said. “I was there.”
“Stop,” she said, putting a finger to his lips.
When she took it away, he spoke again.
“I went to Ann.”
“I know.”
“I thought you had left me.”
“I had.”
He sat on the edge of their bed, tears of frustration and grief streaking his face. “I went to Ann,” he said again, waiting for the full impact of it to hit her.
“I know,” she said again. “And Ann brought you back to me.”
He remembered her then, sitting on his porch in the early morning. “How?”
“I don’t know.” She held his face, wiping his tears with the sleeve of her robe. “But she did.”
For the first time he noticed that Towner was wearing a black kimono, the same kimono he’d noticed Ann wearing that night. In fact, everything about Towner was the same as it had been that evening: the curve of her neck, the way the black kimono hung off her shoulders. “It was you.”
She nodded, holding his stare.
“How?” he whispered.
“Time isn’t linear.”
She opened the robe and stepped toward him, exactly the same way she had done that night.
The banshee manifests as either a beautiful young maiden capable of luring her victim toward death or an aging crone, two aspects of the triple goddess. No human is able to glimpse the third and most prevalent aspect, the mother, yet she has been there all along.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
“I’m so sorry,” Paul said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We can go back to Matera. I want to go. I need you. Just come back.” His voice sounded strange, as if he were talking from a tunnel.
“Where are you?” Callie asked. She regretted answering her cell.
“The boathouse.” He coughed once, then again. “I came looking for you, and I found the ring on the table.” He sounded as if he were crying: ragged sobs that broke into a deep, gagging choke.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” he said. “My heart—it’s beating strangely. And there’s a weird green halo around the moon.”
She looked out her hotel room window, toward the west, where the sliver of waxing moon was just setting. There was no halo.
She could hear the sound of him retching.
“I’m sick,” he said. “Oh, damn.”
“What?”
“There’s blood in it. A lot of blood.”
She drove as fast as she could, pulling into the back driveway, the one nearest the boathouse. “Paul?” She rushed from living room to bedroom to kitchen to bath before climbing the stairs to the lighthouse.