Three sisters in the third pew nodded sharply in unison as John Hathaway looked out over his congregation; this made him stutter in an otherwise seamless sermon.
Patience Sparrow rocked in the pew until she made her sister Sorrel look away from the altar. Nettie Sparrow leaned in so that she could see both her sisters and smiled when she noticed they were already bent toward each other. Someone’s stomach growled. It was Easter Sunday and the women were ready to bolt. It wasn’t that the sermon was dull, or that they already knew how right the Episcopal minister was. Some stories, told enough, became as true as their words. Any of these sisters could tell you that. It’s just that they were hungry. The three swayed back and resumed their attentive poses.
In the last pew but two, Henry Carlyle sat on the aisle. He was not a regular at the First Episcopal church on the green. He was too new in town to be a regular anywhere, although he thought the little bakery down the street from his house was so good he might start showing up there every day. The phone in his pocket vibrated against his thigh, and he put his hand over it before the woman next to him got the wrong idea. She’d already shot him several curious glances, and he’d let his heavy, dark forelock fall over his eye to block her out. Henry needed a haircut. The phone buzzed again. He knew it was work; Henry didn’t have a friend in Granite Point, not yet anyway. Sampling the churches in town was his sorry attempt at meeting people. He watched the three heads a few pews up from his. He’d seen them laughing, acting up really, their shoulders shaking like naughty kids. A soft snort floated up from the redhead when the blonde in the middle nudged the others. Their behavior seemed so unlikely; one of the women (they were women, he had to acknowledge) had graying hair. Henry knew he’d have to slip out to answer the call, but before he did, he told himself a story about the women: how they couldn’t convince their husbands or kids to come to church with them, how they were best friends or neighbors who would pick up their Easter desserts at the bakery after the service. But his story wasn’t true because how could he know anything at all about the Sparrow Sisters? The true story would come later.
Chapter One
LUPIN CREATES a fresh color in the cheek and a cheerful countenance Once there were four Sparrow Sisters. Everyone called them the Sisters, capitalized, and referred to them as a group, even when just one had come to the post office to collect the mail. “The Sisters are here for their package,” the postmistress would say, calling her clerk to the desk. Or, “What do you know, the Sisters are taking the train into the city.” All four had left Granite Point over the years on school trips to Boston for the symphony or the museum, but they always came back; it was home. The only Sparrow sister who did leave town forever, did so in the hardest way. The oldest Sparrow, if only by seven minutes, was Marigold, Sorrel’s twin. She was the real homebody, the one people still shook their heads over, and she actually left Granite Point just twice; the first to accompany her father to a meeting with lawyers upon the death of her mother and the last upon her own death, in a smallish wooden box nestled inside an Adams’s Hardware bag on the arm of her twin. Sorrell took Marigold to the Outer Beach, past the break north of the seal colony, to scatter her ashes in the Atlantic.
Now there were only three Sparrows left in the house at the top of the hill overlooking the far harbor. Long ago this house that their great-great (and more) grandmother Clarrissa Sparrow built had rung with the shouts and laughter of her four sons and the many Sparrow sons that followed. It was made of the timber used to craft the whaling fleet that sailed out from the harbor and into the dark waves. Her husband was a sea captain so fond of his trade that Clarissa chose wood from her father’s shipyard with the idea that if George Sparrow loved his boat so much, surely he would be called home to a house made of the very same wood. She’d even built a widow’s walk high above the street so that she could watch for him to sail back to her. Eventually, the widow’s walk would earn its name several times over.