But now something else clicked. He scrolled through the list of side effects again. Taking bimatoprost could change the color of your eyes, darkening the irises, effectively turning one’s eyes from blue to brown.
He pulled out the drawing of the rose and inked a name he’d penciled in and erased several times before. Then he picked up the phone and called Mickey. “How long do you think it would take to trace the ancestry of Finn Whiting?”
“You’re in luck,” Mickey said. “I’m already working on it. Though it probably won’t be done in time for the reception, I’m giving them their combined family trees as a wedding present.”
On January 15, 1697, Salem held a day of fasting in honor of the victims, known as the Day of Official Humiliation.
—ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem
Rafferty and Towner took their seats; Marta had seated Ann and Mickey with them, along with Zee and her boyfriend, Hawk, a rigger on the Friendship. The group sat one table over from the main table, which was set near the edge of the cliffs, twenty yards from the main house. They were enjoying a clear view of the border islands and Salem Sound.
“Isn’t this the perfect day for a celebration?” Towner said to Ann.
At eighty degrees and sunny without a visible cloud, it was as if Finn and Marta had ordered the humidity that plagued New England summers removed for the occasion. They’d had drinks and appetizers served in the orangerie, then moved the guests outside for the luncheon. Ann nodded.
“How’s old Finch doing, Zee?” Mickey asked. Mickey was seldom seen anywhere out of his pirate costume. Today, he looked handsome in a suit.
“Pretty much the same,” Zee said. Her father suffered from Parkinson’s. “Which is the best we can expect.” She looked around. “Does anyone else think this whole thing is kind of weird?” She tilted her head at Finn, Marta, Paul, and Callie, sitting at the main table. Finn and Marta looked extremely happy. Paul and Callie seemed miserable.
“Lots of gossip about their hasty marriage around town,” Mickey said, as Ann tried to shush him. “I heard one of our staunchest Puritan naysayers, Helen Barnes, say, ‘Well, it is very European, isn’t it?’ ”
Fortunately, Helen Barnes was seated at a table on the other side of Finn and Marta, and not within earshot.
“You two are next to tie the knot,” Mickey said to Zee.
Hawk smiled. “You don’t have to convince me.”
“Callie and Paul are next. Didn’t you see the ring on her finger?” Zee asked Mickey.
“Seriously, when am I going to see a ring on your finger?” Mickey asked.
“You’re such a rude man, even for a pirate.” Zee laughed.
“As your uncle, I’m simply looking out for your best interests.”
Rafferty said, “Mickey, I have a question for you.”
Zee shot Rafferty a grateful look.
“Whatever you’re going to ask, I plead the Fifth,” Mickey said.
“Relax. I’m not working today. I’m just curious,” Rafferty said, looking at Pride’s Heart. “You’ve been sailing the seas a long time. With the family living right here, how did you and your motley crew smuggle anything into the basement? I took a tour of the wine cellar on Thanksgiving, but I didn’t see an entrance to the caves below the house.”
“You want me to give away trade secrets?” Mickey asked.
“I promise I’ll let you turn state’s evidence if I have to arrest you.”
“I know my rights. There’s a statute of limitations on this stuff.”
Rafferty smiled. “No, seriously. I’m curious about how you got in.”
“If anything was still being smuggled when I started working for the Whitings—and that’s a big if—I imagine the crew, which was certainly not my own crew of merry, law-abiding pirates, would have used the back entrance,” Mickey said, pointing over the side of the cliff. “There’s a small beach about fifty feet below us. You can only get in when the tide is high enough to tie up. Or so they tell me.”
Rafferty had to laugh. “What did you just call them, your merry, law-abiding pirates?”
“I did.”
“That’s a bit of an oxymoron, don’t you think?”
Everyone laughed.
“I challenge you to name one of your crew who is law-abiding.”
It took Mickey a moment. “Jake O’Brien?”
“Jake O’Brien died six years ago,” Rafferty said.
“That doesn’t mean he isn’t law-abiding, that just means he’s dead.”
“Doesn’t count.”
“Okay, okay, give me a minute,” Mickey said, really concentrating, “Patch Willis!”
Rafferty cocked an eyebrow. “You’re trying to tell me that Patch Willis doesn’t have a record?”
“Misdemeanors. And that was a long time ago. Patch Willis has been a respectable citizen for the last ten years.”
The fact was that Rafferty hadn’t seen Willis for just about that long.
“Doing what?”
“He’s been the caretaker at Greenlawn Cemetery. He just retired.”
Bingo, Rafferty thought. He was already considering Finn his key suspect, but he didn’t have enough to go on. The connection between Willis and Finn, as well as Willis’s abrupt retirement as Greenlawn’s caretaker last December, had certainly given him more. Today might be a celebration, Rafferty thought, but tomorrow morning was going to be something else entirely. He had a lot of unanswered questions for Finn Whiting.
Mickey turned to Ann. “What are we drinking anyway?”
“This is Bordeaux,” she said, pouring him a glass. “But I hear we’re doing the wedding toast with the port.”
“No more of that phony stuff…” Mickey said.
“The real thing,” Ann said. “The blend that sells for a thousand dollars a bottle.”
Mickey looked impressed. Everyone at the table knew he had been part of a group that had poured barrels of phony port into Beverly Harbor, the scandal that had started with a bad business deal allegedly made by Marta’s father. Mickey was not much more than a kid when it happened, straight off the boat from Ireland. Costumed as pirates, the group—with the approval of Finn’s father—had dumped ten full barrels. The event was as famous in the area as the Boston Tea Party, and had given Mickey license to play the role of pirate ever after.
“There is evidently quite a lot to toasting,” Towner said. “No toasting with water, for instance. And you don’t toast when someone is toasting you. Marta taught us that the night of the Yellow Dog Shelter benefit.”
“I hear that’s bad luck,” Ann said.
“And never, under any circumstances, should anyone clink glasses.”
“Aren’t you Miss Manners today.” Ann laughed.
“I’m just letting you all know the proper decorum, so we don’t embarrass ourselves.”
“Who is giving the toast?” asked Zee.
“I hope it isn’t Paul,” said Mickey. “Look at him—he looks like he’s had a few too many already.”
Music started playing, and a hundred little girls all bedecked in flowers emerged from the orangerie. They wore long pastel flowered sundresses and daisies in their hair. Each had a corsage of yellow rosebuds on her wrist and carried a plate of food.
All the guests oohed and aahed at the adorable children. The girls were serving the main course, lobster risotto adorned with flowers.
“The flowers are from Marta’s new garden,” Ann told Towner. “Yellow roses, orange nasturtiums, violet pansies. And for all you cynics and snobs, yes, this adorable procession of young girls assures coverage by The Boston Globe and Vanity Fair.”
“Are we supposed to eat the flowers?” Mickey squinted at the plate of risotto one little girl had carefully placed in front of him.
“Oh yes,” Callie said, appearing at their table. She was still wearing the rosary Rafferty had returned to her, and she had on a long lavender sundress. Her hair was loose and adorned with flowers, like that of a hippie princes
s. “Lately we’ve been feasting on the bounty of Marta’s new kitchen garden: pansies with our pancakes, squash blossoms with arugula in our salads, and basil flowers in our pasta.”
“Hello, Callie,” Ann said.
Callie nodded. She knew Ann had helped Marta with the flowers and had done her best not to run into her. Paul had taken no notice of Ann’s presence on the property, which would have made her happy if she hadn’t been so worried about him. He couldn’t let go of his anger, and it was changing him.
Ann had made no move to speak with Paul earlier, but now she was looking in his direction. She asked quietly, “Is he okay?”
“He’s just fine,” Callie lied, turning to Rafferty.
Rafferty thought Callie looked precisely like her late mother. She’d dyed her hair back to its natural color. All she needed were bare feet and some patchouli oil.
Seeing Rafferty’s eyes move to her feet, Callie looked down, too.
The gaping hole in the lawn was now completely covered by a metal plate, the sod expertly patchworked over it, to be reopened after the wedding so the grounds crew could finish the repair job. It was so perfectly woven that she could barely see the damage the root removal had caused in the otherwise perfect lawn.
“I hear you’re responsible for all this pageantry,” Rafferty said to Ann.
“Only partly,” Ann said. “They hired a professional music director. And the girls chose their own flowers.”
Callie had watched from her window this morning as the little girls had picked flowers to garnish each plate. They’d flitted through the maze of midsummer blossoms, stopping briefly to pluck things and place them in the baskets they carried. From the perspective of the boathouse, the children had looked like butterflies or the tiny fairies Rose had described in her stories about Ireland. Not the ones trapped in trees, but the beautiful ones who lived in the fairy mounds, performing magic for deserving passersby. The sight had calmed Callie’s nerves and seemed to have had the same effect on Paul, smoothing over the most recent argument they’d had, one that had lasted most of the previous evening. They’d made peace before they went to bed, but they hadn’t touched each other. Callie had tossed and turned, and finally decided to just get up.
She’d grabbed Rose’s Book of Trees from the shelf where it sat next to Rose’s ashes and taken it to the reading nook at the top of the lighthouse stairs. Before she’d opened it, she had stood for a moment looking out toward Baker’s Island and the blackness beyond.
Rose had been heavily on her mind since the grounds crew had uncovered the roots of the tree. Callie had entertained the idea that she might scatter Rose’s ashes under the stump. But after the vision of blood she’d had, she knew the area was not fit for Rose’s final resting place. So many things she’d experienced recently were hidden, things that lay beneath: the reef at Norman’s Woe, submerged and treacherous; the frescoes concealed for centuries under layers of smoky soot; the root hole, now covered with sod. There were caves beneath the palazzi of the Sassi, and there were caves under Pride’s Heart. Indeed, there seemed to be things just below the surface of life itself, revealing themselves only at odd moments or when accidentally or intentionally disturbed.
She’d wanted to figure out a better place for Rose and had been hoping the journal would give her some ideas. So she’d sunk into the nook’s overstuffed chair and turned on the light, extinguishing the panoramic seascape and creating multiple reflections of herself in the angled glass walls of the lighthouse. Taking a deep breath, she’d opened Rose’s Book of Trees, fearing she would find a paranoia-laden manifesto, the scribbled prose of a disturbed mind. Rose had been penning in it so furiously in her last few weeks. Instead, Callie had discovered a work of art. Laced in a continuous pattern were sketches of trees, their branches extending from one page to the next, sometimes bared by winter, sometimes fully leafed. Veined oak leaves sprouted at the tips of random twigs. And then…what she’d thought of as a sampling of many trees resolved itself, and Callie had realized with a start what she was looking at. It was a single tree spreading across the pages. A Tree of Life, like the fresco in Italy. Its upper branches reached toward the sky, and its matching roots grew far into the ground, extending as deep as they were high. As above, so below.
The only words in the book had been names. The roots held the names of both the accused and the executed of July 1692: Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Wildes, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Good, and Susannah Martin, the five petals of the rosary she was wearing. She looked at the corresponding branches and saw names she didn’t recognize, names sitting on branches that led higher and higher up the tree. At the very top were the names of Olivia, Cheryl, and Susan, each on a branch that had been broken. Near the highest branches, Callie found Rose’s name, and just above it, on a branch that extended from Olivia’s severed one, was her own. It was an unfinished work: There were many gaps, places Rose had not yet filled in, but the meaning was clear. This was a family tree.
Callie had stayed in that chair all night, in a trance, paging through hundreds of names, until the rising sun pulled her out of her reverie.
Now Zee’s question pulled Callie back to the reception. “Have you ever seen anything so adorable?” she asked, indicating the flower girls as they continued presenting a plate to each diner.
“They are—”
“Excuse me,” Ann interrupted. Without another word she dashed across the lawn and snatched a long-stemmed purple flower off a plate. “Where did you get this?” she asked the little girl who had served the dish. “These are fairy’s bells. See this bell-like blossom? They’re not good to eat, sweetie. They can make you very sick.”
The girl started to cry. People turned to look.
Marta rushed over. “What are you doing, Ann?” She didn’t hide her concern.
“Go back to your table,” Ann said, waving her away. “I’ll take care of this.
“Can you show me exactly where you found them?” Ann asked the child, as she scanned the other tables. She found two more fairy’s bells and quickly snatched them off plates. The girl nodded and said she could.
“What was all that about?” Towner asked, when Ann rejoined their table.
“Nothing,” Ann said. “Crisis averted.”
Callie was looking at Ann. “Crisis?”
“Foxglove. Fairy’s bells. Those purple flowers grow wild in this region. They are beautiful but very poisonous.”
“Where were they, exactly?” Callie asked.
“In a patch just beyond the new kitchen garden, a section that must have been hidden by that tree stump they removed,” Ann said.
Mickey looked at his plate as if it might bite him.
“Go ahead and eat, everyone, it’s fine,” Ann said, reassuringly.
Callie made her way back to the main table.
Marta picked up her fork and began to eat, and the guests followed suit, reassured that whatever crisis had gotten Marta’s attention was now resolved.
The little girls, finished with serving, took seats at the long table by the orangerie and ate lunch together.
After the dessert course was served, the waiters filled the guests’ glasses with the thousand-dollar port for the wedding toast. A large carafe of an even more valuable port had been poured earlier for the wedding party. Callie knew it was from the barrel that Paul had served her from that night in the speakeasy. Finn and Paul had both consumed quite a bit already. After the waiter refilled their glasses, Finn stood and raised his. He spoke directly to Marta: “To my wife, Marta. It’s you. It has always been you.” Finn downed his entire glass of port in one go.
What followed was a prolonged and numbing silence. Finally, Helen Barnes raised her glass and, following her lead, the rest of the shocked guests joined in the toast.
Feeling Marta’s eyes on her, Callie took a sip.
Marta smiled but didn’t drink.
Paul hadn’t taken his eyes off his father. Though he’d already consumed quite a bit of the port, he didn’t join t
he toast.
“Everyone, please join Mr. and Mrs. Whiting for dancing in the ballroom,” Darren announced.
Marta stood and took Finn’s arm, and the two left the main table and walked directly toward the house and then through the French doors just off the ballroom. Paul stood unsteadily and followed; he did not take Callie’s arm, and she trailed a few steps behind the others. The crowd remained seated, staring after them until an usher appeared and gently escorted the guests to the house.
“Where are you going?” Callie asked Paul. While the rest of the guests had turned left into the ballroom, Paul had veered right, into the library.
The elevator was there, its iron grate open and waiting.
“The wine cellar’s unlocked for a change. I’m going to get more port.” He held the elevator door for her, almost losing his balance. “Alcohol’s the only way I’ll get through this ridiculous charade.”
“Let’s go back,” Callie said to him. “To Matera. Right now. Let’s drive to Logan, and we’ll get a plane out tonight. We could be at the monastery by morning.”
“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.
The Fifth Petal Page 40