Verity hadn’t had the building torn down, but the forest was slowly reclaiming it anyway.
There was a hole in the wooden floor; it had been there before the fire. At some point in the past the boards had rotted and the cider press had smashed through to the cellar. Sorrow and Patience had been forbidden from playing inside ever since Patience, a courageous thirteen years old, had decided to build a balance beam across that hole in the floor. She couldn’t find one board long enough, so she had tried to nail two together and ended up sticking her hand on a protruding nail. It punched right through her palm, and Verity had had to take her to the urgent care clinic for stitches and a tetanus shot.
It would have been fine—Patience thought it was cool, having a hole in her hand; she kept shoving the bandage in Sorrow’s face to show off—but Mrs. Roche had seen them going into the clinic, and she had mentioned it to their neighbors the Johnsons, and the Johnsons, who were newcomers to town, had carelessly told Mr. and Mrs. Abrams. After a visit from child services, questions from the social worker, and a tearful apology from Patience, Verity had put a padlock on the door and forbidden them from playing in the old ruin again.
The sheriff said Patience had fallen into the cellar.
Sorrow was never supposed to hear that. She had crept out of bed to listen from the stairs when the sheriff was talking to Verity and Grandma in the kitchen.
Patience must have fallen into the cellar through that gaping hole in the floor. She was knocked unconscious, and the roof collapsed. Julie Abrams had seen the fire from her bedroom window and woken her parents to call 911, but by the time the firemen arrived it was too late.
Sorrow had never questioned it, that story she’d overheard as a child, but she knew now the sheriff had probably made up the unconscious part to be kind. Patience would have been trapped in the cellar whether she was awake or not, whether she was injured or not. She could have been screaming for help. Nobody would have heard. The Abrams house was too far away, the road even farther. The cellar was at least ten feet deep. She wouldn’t have been able to escape.
Sorrow looked up at the remains of the cider house roof, where rafters and beams were broken at burned, spiky ends. She brushed her fingertips over the wood, almost expecting—it was stupid—almost expecting to feel cold winter wind breathing through the gaps. She closed her fingers into a fist, squeezed her eyes shut to chase the sensation away.
Sorrow lifted a hand to scratch the side of her neck—brush a hair away, or a spiderweb—and she stilled, suddenly tense, nerves sparking. She turned. The meadow was empty. Grass rippled on both sides of the wire fence like the pelt of a slumbering creature, a gentle breeze caressing shades of green from light to dark to light again. Up the hill the Abrams house gleamed in the sun; its redbrick chimney was an artery on the side.
It was too hot to be wandering around out here in the orchard, collecting ticks and a sunburn in exchange for nothing but more questions, waiting for the kaleidoscope contents of her memories to shake into some kind of sense. There was nothing of Patience left in the cider house. Sorrow could stare into that patchwork of darkness and light for hours and it wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. It was only a ruin.
She strode away from the cider house, aiming for the shade of the apple trees, but just as she dipped from sunlight to shadow, something caught her eye. She stopped again, turned, cast her gaze over the meadow.
There was something on the well. A small object perched right on the rim.
She looked around, her skin prickling into goose bumps. She was alone in the meadow. She had been all along.
She kicked her way through the high grass, her shoes squelching in hidden pockets of mud. The well was about waist-high, and it had been boarded up for as long as Sorrow could remember, a double layer of solid hardwood planks bolted securely into the masonry and stone. She had never known before why it was covered. She didn’t like knowing now. It had always seemed such a harmless thing, squatting there in a meadow of rich green, part of the landscape.
Perched on the edge of the cover was a single white rock.
Sorrow reached for it, but she stopped a few inches shy, curled her hand into a fist to steady it. It was one of the stones from Silence Lovegood’s grave. There were no chalky white stones like that anywhere else in the orchard.
She remembered watching Patience’s hands, thin and winter-pale, gloves stripped away in spite of the cold, her long fingers moving with nervous energy as she passed the stone back and forth between her hands, back and forth, back and forth, constant motion while the rest of her was so still, and her voice tight and unwelcoming—
There had been somebody else in the orchard that day.
15
EIGHT YEARS AGO
THERE HAD BEEN somebody else in the orchard that day, but when Sorrow followed Patience out of the cemetery grove, it was so quiet they might have been the only people in the world.
They skirted the hill in the center of the orchard, staying well above the meadow and the fence line. For that Sorrow was grateful. Patience didn’t always heed their mother’s warnings to stay as far from the Abrams property as they could, and normally Sorrow enjoyed the little thrill of disobedience she got from ducking through the wires past the No Trespassing signs or chasing frogs around to the forbidden side of the pond. But today, looking at the Abrams house across the wind-scalloped field of snow made Sorrow’s insides squirm like a knot of worms.
From this far away the burned corner of the Abrams barn didn’t look like much, only a black bite chomped into the red. The sheriff had said nobody had been hurt; the Abrams didn’t have any animals. All that had been damaged was the hayloft where Cassie Abrams had her playhouse.
“What are you staring at?” Patience asked. She was several steps ahead, already climbing the hill.
“Do you think they’re going to catch who did it?” Sorrow asked.
“Probably,” Patience said with a shrug. “You don’t have to worry about it. It’s nothing to do with us.”
She started walking again. Sorrow sniffled, wiped her nose on her coat sleeve, and went after her. The snow was deep on the north-facing slope. Sorrow followed in her sister’s footsteps, stretching her legs to reach each punched-through hole, until the ground leveled, the trees opened, and a whirl of wind bit at her face. They had reached the black oak.
The clearing around the oak was slick with hardened patches of ice, but the ground above Silence Lovegood’s grave was bare and muddy. Patience picked her way over the ice, choosing each step carefully, but Sorrow ran past her and threw herself into the trunk of the oak. She climbed up onto the fat, knobby roots that curled from the ground like monstrous snakes and hopped her way around the tree, keeping one hand on the trunk for balance.