“Oh my God, Callie. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” Emily stared at Callie as if trying to understand the full implications of what she’d just heard. “My God, what you must have gone through.”
“She apparently looks enough like her mother that Rafferty and Towner don’t think she should be staying in Salem.”
“What happened? Who accosted you?”
Callie looked at Paul, who nodded.
Callie related the story about the older man.
“ ‘I knew you’d come back to me’?” Emily repeated. “What does that mean?”
“I think he believed I was my mother.”
“Then she got several calls from The Salem Journal, trying to persuade her to do an interview about the murders,” Paul interjected. “They wouldn’t leave her alone. And someone broke a window at the tearoom. She can’t stay in Salem now. So please, I don’t want you coming in here and telling her she can’t live in Pride’s Crossing, either.”
“If you’d be quiet and listen for a minute, you might give me half a chance to say what I came here to say.” Emily turned away from her son and spoke directly to Callie. “If you’re going to be our long-term guest, Callie, I’d like you to stay in the main house.”
“For the sake of appearances?” Paul asked.
“Not entirely.” Emily took a long breath, as if reconsidering, before she continued. “I would like you to treat me,” she said. “With those…bowl things.”
Callie had marked Emily’s expression from the moment she’d entered the boathouse. She’d believed she had been witnessing disapproval; now she realized she was seeing something else. “You’re in pain.”
“Yes,” Emily said.
Paul’s face softened.
“Is this something recent?” Callie wanted to know.
“It’s been intermittent. Until recently.”
“What does Dr. Hayes say?” Paul asked.
“Nothing he hasn’t said before.”
Callie thought for a long moment. Truth be told, she’d be relieved to get out of the boathouse. The whole place smelled like Paul: soap, sweat, and some kind of spice she had smelled at Ann’s shop that day she’d told Rafferty about her memory of the party. She hadn’t been as attracted to anyone as she was to Paul Whiting in, well, ever. It would be too easy to just walk up those stairs at night…not long ago, she would have. But ever since the waking memory she’d had at Hammond Castle, the vision of the naked man with Paul’s eyes, and Ann’s description of the Goddesses’ seductive behavior—she’d been more and more uncomfortable with her own sexuality. She’d never realized how much her behavior mirrored the Goddesses’. Intentional seductions followed by one-night stands with no attachments. A preference she’d always thought of as her own had now become something else. Was she unconsciously mirroring the behavior she’d seen as a child? The idea was disconcerting at best. At worst, it made her feel slightly ill. She wasn’t sure she could trust her own instincts, and in Paul’s house, under the same roof, those instincts were screaming at her. And then there was Paul’s obvious involvement with Ann. Her mind told her to keep her distance, even as her body was telling her otherwise.
“You don’t have to offer me a room in your house, Mrs. Whiting. I’ll treat you. I can find another place to stay.” Callie’s tone had become softer. This whole thing was getting too complicated, and Emily wasn’t well.
“Don’t be silly,” Emily said and smiled at Callie. “I want you to stay with us.”
It wasn’t true, and Callie knew it, but it was gracious. And in February, when Paul went back to Italy, she’d have the boathouse to herself. At least until she found a place to live, someplace she could take Rose to when she finally got out of the hospital.
“I’ll have to go to Northampton to get my singing bowls.”
She wasn’t certain, but she thought she read disappointment on Paul’s face.
The cold and rain made the Mass Pike slippery. Callie turned up the radio to listen to Amy Black’s “Alabama” to distract herself from the confrontation with the nuns that she could no longer avoid. The fact was, she was ready for it. She needed answers. Why did they tell me Rose was dead?
The morning the nuns from St. James’s had found her, they’d told her they had been outside with all the students when they heard strange cries echoing down the North River. They’d thought at first it was some animal, a cat trapped under the brick building. After the children were led inside, the nuns had searched the property and finally realized the sound was coming from the hill behind Boston Street. They’d found Callie standing, trancelike and silent. The sounds had ceased.
It was a miracle, they’d said, that she had lived, protected by the rosary she clutched so tightly. The mark it left represented not only the five wounds of Christ but the Virgin Mary herself.
The song on the radio ended, and Callie switched lanes, passing a Massachusetts state trooper car hiding in the underpass. She checked her speed and slowed down.
When the nuns at the children’s home in Northampton had found out about the Goddesses and about Rose, they’d changed their minds. The miracle had quickly turned to sacrilege, and they’d begun to watch her with suspicious eyes, looking for something unholy, fearful that whatever had happened on Halloween night had scarred Callie far beyond the physical. “Why was there no figure of Christ on your rosary?” they’d asked her. “Do the petal scars stand for the five accused witches?”
She was so young; she hadn’t known how to lie or even to keep quiet about things that might be considered strange. When she’d told them she could see things, images of events before they happened, their fears about her had multiplied. In class, Callie often answered questions just before they were asked, as if she could read them as they were forming in the minds of the sisters. It was uncanny, and she’d sometimes been punished for it and called impertinent or, even worse, accused of cheating. Once, during an oral exam, Callie had given the answer before the question was asked, and had been accused of stealing a copy of the questions from Sister Agony’s desk. And there were other things she just seemed to know. Secret things about the nuns that she’d never been told. It worried them.
In self-defense, Callie had taken to eavesdropping on their conversations about her. “Do you think it’s witchcraft?” she’d heard one of the older nuns ask, her voice fearful.
“Well, there are seers in the Bible, too,” a younger nun had responded. “Weren’t the prophets seers?”
“That young girl is no prophet,” the older nun had declared.
The order was known as an old-fashioned one, and the children’s home was a place where, with the exception of Sister Agony, the more timid and world averse sisters of the order often ended up. When it came to superstition and fear, they were easy marks, not entirely unlike the Puritan citizens of Salem whom Rose had often described to Callie. Group hysteria was easy to ignite, and Callie had to admit she wasn’t entirely innocent of lighting that fire. To amuse the other girls, she’d often thrown her voice down a seemingly empty hallway, making one of the nuns turn to see who had spoken and find no one behind her. The young girls had giggled as they hid inside an empty classroom watching one of the more easily frightened nuns shiver, cross herself, and hurry away. It had made the girls admire Callie’s mischief, but it hadn’t made her popular. The truth was, Callie’s history had scared all of them.
Callie checked her speed again as she neared Chicopee, then took the I-91 North exit toward Amherst and her apartment.
Each time the nuns had sent her away to a new foster home, they’d seemed relieved, and every time she’d come back, they’d grown more agitated, studying her for “signs.”
Why did I keep getting sent back to them? And why did they allow it? Callie pounded on the steering wheel in frustration, thinking of all the years she’d spent believing she was alone in the world, when Rose had been just 120 miles away. The last time she’d landed on their doorstep, insisting she wouldn’t be fostered again, the nuns ha
d told her they’d let her stay because they “loved” her…now she knew they’d only done it because there’d been no place else for her to go. She’d often suspected that they also felt tasked to save her soul and make sure she didn’t end up like her mother. Or, worse, like Rose. They must have rejoiced when I went to college.
There was no one at her apartment when she arrived. Her room hadn’t been disturbed. Even though it contained all of her belongings, it still looked as if no one lived in it, which was partly true. Callie had never spent much time here. The bed was always made, and everything was perfectly arranged, a neat and tidy version of postcollege life. The only things that violated the image were the bowls. Four of them were lined up on the dresser; the other three were at the nursing home. She pulled the rest of her clothes from the closet, using them to pad the bowls as she placed them into the Volvo. After she’d cleaned out the room, she left a note for her roommates, telling them she was going to stay on the North Shore for a while and giving them permission to use her room for guests. Happy Holidays, she wrote, signing her name.
She didn’t plan to wish the nuns happy anything. She was too angry. Part of her wanted to grab the bowls and go, but she wasn’t going to do that. She was seething about the lies they had told her. It was time.
She drove to Northampton, parked in her regular spot at the All Saints’ Home, and walked inside, nodding to the receptionist, who was on the phone. She walked directly to Agony’s office and opened the door without knocking, not bothering to close it again as she entered. The nun was seated at her desk reading, her glasses low on her nose. She looked tired. “Callie,” she said with a smile, which quickly faded when she saw the expression on Callie’s face.
“Why did you lie to me?”
“What?”
“Why did you tell me that Rose Whelan was dead?”
The prioress got up and closed the door against Callie’s raised voice.
“She was the only family I had.”
Agony sat down again and quickly folded her hands, the rapid movement summoning a memory. Agony’s nickname had come from the ruler she used to punish the girls. It happened so fast you almost never saw it coming. They’d stopped using the old-fashioned punishment the year after Callie arrived, and Agony had taken to folding her hands, holding them in prayer pose until her knuckles went white in an effort to control her temper. Now the nun’s order formally forbade corporal punishment, but the ruler still sat on the nun’s desk, and Callie remembered its sting. Most of the girls had gotten slapped across their knuckles. Callie had received her lashes across her scar, the stigmata that had become unholy.
Callie watched the prioress’s knuckles go white. It was a long time before she spoke.
“How is Rose?”
Callie stared at her. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
—WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
It was after dinner by the time Callie got back to Pride’s Crossing. The harbor was fogged in, the horns wailing mournfully from across the water. In the driveway of Pride’s Heart, she ran into Marta wearing a trench coat and leather gloves and carrying a manila envelope.
It had stopped raining, but the ground was still slippery. Callie’s foot slid on the wet gravel just as she reached the landing.
“Whoa,” Marta said, reaching out. “Need some help?”
“I’m good,” Callie said, rebalancing the huge quartz bowl she was carrying.
“Where is everyone? Where’s Darren?” Marta asked her.
“It’s his day off,” Callie said. Emily had told her that when she gave her the key. “I don’t know where Emily and Finn are, though.”
“Let me at least get the door for you,” Marta said, taking the key from Callie and opening the huge wooden door.
The sound of their footsteps echoed as they stepped inside, the bowl picking up the vibration. Callie put the bowl down on the stone floor, and the echo reverberated through the hall.
“That’s wild,” Marta said. “Is it alive?”
Callie laughed. “I sometimes think it might be.”
“I saw more of them in the car. I’d be glad to help bring them in.”
“Thank you,” Callie said, “but Paul’s on his way.”
“Oh,” Marta said, smiling. “I heard you and Paul were an item.”
“We’re not an item.” Callie laughed. “We’re friends.”
“Okay,” Marta said, clearly not buying it. “Well, anyway, welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Thank you,” Callie said, not quite knowing what to do next. Without Emily here, she wasn’t really sure what the parameters were. “I need a glass of water.”
“I’ll get you one. Hildy’s not here today, but I know where everything is,” Marta said, leading her into the kitchen and getting a glass from the pantry.
“Bottled or tap?” Marta asked.
“Either,” Callie said.
Marta went to the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles. “Plain or bubbly?”
“Such luxury,” Callie said.
“Nothing but luxury here,” Marta said, motioning Callie to the kitchen table, then taking a seat across from her, co-opting an old Arlo Guthrie tune and customizing it, singing….“You can get anything you want at Emily’s restaurant.”
Callie laughed, knowing the tune. “Excepting Emily.”
Marta smiled. “Oh, you’ve picked the right house to move into,” she said, her voice concealing a bit of an edge.
The door to the butler’s pantry opened, and Paul came in. “How’d it go with the nuns?” he said. Then, realizing Callie wasn’t alone, “Oh, Marta.” His tone was neither welcoming nor surprised.
“I have some pledge papers for Finn,” she said, standing up and preparing to leave. “Will one of you make sure he gets them?”
“Sure,” Paul said, taking the envelope. “I’ll put this on his desk.”
They were on their third trip carrying in the bowls when Paul asked her again. “So what happened with Sister Agony?” He was dressed to help, casual with worn jeans and a blue sweater that matched his eyes. Alice blue, that’s what Rose would have called the color. Azure, Callie thought. The color of the ocean—though not today. Today the grey sky and ocean had been a moody watercolor wash, and the air tasted of salt.
She gave him a withering look.
“That well, huh?”
“She didn’t answer my question, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“What did she say?”
“She claimed they didn’t tell me about Rose to protect me, that they wanted to put distance between me and what happened. Evidently, the police questioned me so much I couldn’t sleep, or, if I did, I had terrible nightmares.”
“Which is well established,” he said.
“Agony said they planned to tell me Rose was alive, but then she became a murder suspect, and they didn’t want me to ‘reexperience the trauma.’ ”
“It sounds logical, Callie,” Paul admitted. “If ill-advised.”
“It does. But I don’t think it’s the whole story.”
Paul waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said, looking at the bowl he was still holding. “Don’t you want to put that down?”
“Not yet. I want to show you something first.”
“Seriously?” she said, feigning horror. “I remember the last time you said that.”
“Don’t worry. This one is my idea, not Ann’s.”
She hated hearing him say Ann’s name.
“We’re not leaving the house. This has to do with your bowls.” He led her into the library.
Tonight, the room was dark. With the staff gone, there was no fire burning in the massive fireplace. Paul turned on a table lamp, then walked to the far wall and pressed the button that turned the bookcase inward ninety degrees, revealing the hidden bar and the elevator leading down to the wine cellar, the one his father had been
boasting about on Thanksgiving Day. Paul put down the bowl, opened the iron grate, and held it for her. “After you.” She got in. He picked up the bowl again. “You have something to play this with?”
Callie reached into her pocket and pulled out a rubber wand. Now she was intrigued.
The elevator clanged loudly as it descended. They traveled past three levels of wooden racks filled with dusty bottles. At the first landing, Callie saw a corridor cut into the granite, leading to more racks. The air cooled as they descended. On the second level, another corridor led to a dark hallway with a huge wooden door at its end. At the bottom level, the elevator slowed to a grinding halt. Paul slid back the iron grate, then shoved open a thick glass door, securing it to brass cleats on the wall.
“Wait here,” he said. A moment later, the space was bathed in soft light, illuminating the pink granite walls and floor of a huge room, about forty feet in diameter and almost perfectly round. There were no wine racks, no furniture at all except for an old couch against the wall, on which Paul carefully placed the bowl. At the far end appeared to be some sort of water feature. The faint musky smell of salt water and ambergris perfumed the air.
“This is a cave,” Callie said, realizing what she was looking at.
“We call it the spa. It’s where the bootleggers in our family used to store their hooch when it came down from Canada, before the house was built. It’s too damp in this room for the wines, too close to the ocean. Hence the glass door,” he said, pointing to the elevator. “If we didn’t have that, the salt air would corrode the mechanics.”
“Sounds like that’s happening anyway,” she said. “The grinding noises that elevator makes? My teeth hurt.”
“It sounds bad”—he laughed—“but you get used to it. This cave is similar to those I’m restoring in Matera. The houses there are all built on top of hand-carved foundations, sometimes a few rooms, sometimes multifloored palazzi. The families added on to the structures above as they amassed greater wealth. Which is essentially what happened here.”
The Fifth Petal Page 24