Marta excused herself and went to speak to a woman a few tables over.
“Let us know,” Emily said, managing a smile, then turned back to her son. “I think we’ll be heading home now.”
Paul took the cue and stood to hold the chair for his mother.
“Nice to meet you, Callie,” he said, sounding as if he meant it.
They said polite good-byes, and this time Emily seemed sincere. “Very nice to meet you, Callie. I hope we see you again.”
As Paul hurried to retrieve her coat, Emily handed Towner an envelope. Towner opened it and gasped. Callie could see the amount of the check: $300,000.
Towner was clearly stunned. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re very welcome.”
Paul helped his mother on with her coat, then offered his arm. “I hope you’ll consider joining us, Callie.”
Emily took her son’s arm, and they walked slowly toward the exit.
“What in the world was that all about?” Callie asked Towner as soon as she was sure everyone else was out of earshot.
“What do you think it was about?” Towner laughed. “I’d say from the invitation and from what I know of him, that Paul Whiting is interested in you.”
“I picked up on that pretty quickly.” Callie laughed. “But what was all that…other stuff?”
“Other stuff?” Towner feigned innocence.
“What was going on between Marta and Emily? Air quotes. Subtext and innuendo. I felt like I was at a new staging of an Albee play.”
“Oh, that. Well, there’s some history there.” Towner laughed again. “Come to Thanksgiving, and you’ll find out more, I’m sure.”
The deeds of witches are such that they cannot be done without the help of Devils.
—Malleus Maleficarum, 1486
“What do you normally charge per session?” Towner asked Callie. “I want to pay the going rate.”
“No, no, it’s on me. They’ve invited me for the weekend.” Callie glanced at the gift certificate Towner had prepared to present to Emily as a hostess gift of sorts. It entitled her to one music therapy session with Callie O’Neill. Callie was still wondering if she should have accepted the spontaneously issued Thanksgiving invitation, though it had been followed by Emily’s handwritten one the next day. When Towner had asked her to do a treatment on Emily, she’d asked about the cancer. “How bad is it?”
“It’s bad. Metastatic breast cancer. Stage four.”
“Damn,” Callie said.
“She said they used music therapy on her after her first surgery, so she knows what it is. Emily’s fairly traditional, though. I might hold off on the singing bowls.”
“That’s fine,” Callie said. They were two different treatments, really. Traditional music therapy involved three elements: the music, the patient, and the therapist. Sound healing with the bowls, on the other hand, worked directly on the patient, removing the middleman. And even if Emily Whiting was open to it, Callie’s full set of bowls was still in Northampton; all she had here was Towner’s salad bowl. “But I’m not taking your money.”
“I’ll see you at Pride’s Heart,” Towner said, leaving a check on the table anyway. “Wish Rose Happy Thanksgiving for me when you see her later.”
Rose was fully dressed and sitting at a table by the window, sketching the tree that sat on the hill across from the hospital parking lot.
Callie flashed on a memory of another Thanksgiving, at Rose’s house on Daniels Street.
Callie was sitting with everyone at the table, sketching a turkey wearing a Pilgrim’s hat that Rose found quite amusing, when a pounding on the door interrupted them. Olivia excused herself and went outside to talk to the uniformed policeman standing on the porch. The other women watched them through the window. Callie could hear her mother and the man arguing. Rose stayed seated.
As the argument escalated, Callie started to cry.
“What’s the matter, sweet girl?” Rose asked.
“Is he going to take her to jail?”
“No,” Rose said. Then, to Susan and Cheryl, “Though jail might do the whole lot of them some good.”
The memory took Callie by surprise.
“What are you frowning about?” Rose asked, pulling her back to real time.
It took a moment for Callie to regain her composure. She made herself smile. “That’s very good,” she said, pointing to Rose’s drawing. She looked out at the hill where the single oak stood in winter silhouette. Rose wasn’t drawing the entire tree; rather she was rendering an impressionistic suggestion of it in light and darkness, the branches and twigs weaving over and under as it moved across the page. “It looks like lace.”
Rose turned to look at her. “What else do you see?”
Callie gazed at the sketch. In the negative spaces between the branches, Rose had placed a series of check marks.
“What are those?” Callie asked.
“You tell me. What do you see?”
“Just some marks.”
“Not people?”
“People? No. Where do you see people?”
Rose pointed to the spots she had marked. “You don’t see anyone at all?”
“No,” Callie said.
“Good,” Rose said, and then shushed Callie and leaned in toward the window. “She’s singing to us.”
“Who is?”
“That oak.” Rose scrunched her face in concentration. “Listen.”
Callie could not hear anything through the closed window. “What song is she singing?” she whispered. Over the past two weeks, she’d found that agreeing with Rose’s more fanciful statements kept her talking; challenging them could shut her down.
“That Thanksgiving song,” Rose said. “You know it.”
Callie started to sing: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing…Is that the one?”
“That’s it!” Rose said, excited.
“It’s the only Thanksgiving song I know. I didn’t hear it from the tree,” she confessed.
“I know that, silly girl,” Rose said playfully, reminding Callie of the old Rose. Silly girl had been one of Rose’s nicknames for her when she was little. Silly girl, sweet girl, sweetie, honey, all pet names, and all uttered fondly, always followed by a pat on the head or a kiss on the cheek.
“And just how do you know that?”
“Because you’re singing it in a completely different key.” Rose laughed. “And you should know that your singing was flat.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Rose smiled.
It had been Rose who’d once told Callie she had perfect pitch, something Callie later found out was true. Perfect pitch was something they’d recently discovered was genetic. It must have come from her father, the musician. Olivia couldn’t sing a note.
“Tell me more about the trees,” Callie said. “I know they talk to you. What else do they say?”
“Did Dr. Finch tell you to ask me that?”
“No. Has she been asking you the same thing?”
“For years.” Rose sighed, closing her journal.
“And what have you told her?”
“I haven’t told her anything. She wouldn’t understand.”
“You’ve talked to Towner about the trees.”