by Nancy Werlin
Lucy could afford to lose her home! She could afford to lose more.
Open your eyes, Fenella.
Fenella hadn’t realized she’d shut them. She looked down again reluctantly. She saw how Lucy leaned into Zach. How his arms tightened around her, and hers around him. She saw how Lucy instinctively reached out one bare foot and nestled it gently alongside her child, to feel Dawn’s breathing. Fenella winced.
They were talking again, their soft voices rising easily up the pipe.
“I heard Dad calling the insurance agent. His face just sort of changed while he listened.”
“Changed in a bad way?” asked Zach.
“Yes. Maybe we can’t replace the house? Maybe there isn’t enough insurance money?”
“Money.” Zach shrugged. “We’ll do whatever we have to. Our parents have been carrying us for a long time. Maybe this is a big wake-up call. I can work full-time and do college part-time.”
“Me too. Or I could quit school for a while.”
“I think I should be the one to do that. Look. We have to stay positive. We have options. There are six adults involved here. You can look at it as six people who need to be supported, or you can look at it as six people all pitching in to take care of each other.”
There was a pause. “You’re counting Miranda in the six adults?” Lucy asked. Another, longer pause. “And Fenella?”
Fenella’s stomach tightened.
“Yeah, well,” said Zach carefully. “Obviously Fenella hasn’t been able to help much so far.”
Another pause, this one longer. When Lucy spoke at last, Fenella had to strain her ears to hear. “Zach? About Fenella . . .”
Utter silence below. The couple had pulled apart. They were on their sides, facing each other, bodies still touching. Lucy had tilted her head so that she could see into Zach’s face, and he was looking back down seriously into hers.
I can’t stand it. Lovers who think they can read each other’s minds.
Shut up, Ryland, Fenella thought. She dug her nails into her palms.
“The firefighters said it was a gas explosion.”
“They’re still investigating the accident. Accident, Luce.”
“But you wonder too, I know you do. Fenella was all over the basement looking at the plumbing and electrical and heating systems. She followed the path of every pipe. She pored over that book until it fell open to the right pages automatically. I swear she understood everything.”
“I was even having a fantasy that she’d be able to get a job doing stuff like that.”
“Jobs like that can pay really well.”
“Yeah. I was thinking she could go to school for it.”
“Me too. I was excited for her. And . . . and also sad for Miranda. I was wondering if she would feel bad if Fenella sort of, you know, bounced like a rubber ball after everything she’s been through. Went to school, got a job, was earning great money. And even . . .”
“Even what?”
“Well, Walker likes her. Twice, she’s gone off with him alone. Also, she looks at him when he’s around. You know, under her lashes.”
Fenella glanced involuntarily at the cat, but he was peering down through the hole, his tail twitching slightly, and he said nothing.
Lucy’s breath was ragged again. “We’ve drifted off the subject. I guess neither of us wants to say it out loud. But you’re thinking it too, right? At first, when we saw the house—I thought maybe she had killed herself. But then there she was, just fine, and now I wonder—”
“Me too. But why would she blow up the house?”
“I don’t know.”
Another pause.
Zach said, “Maybe the investigation will turn up a problem. A gas leak. Something.”
“How can they be sure? They whole house is gone. The pipes are gone. Zach, she was all over the basement.”
“Coincidence. Or maybe when she was looking at everything, she pulled something loose. Accidentally.”
“Wouldn’t we have smelled gas?”
“From a small, slow leak?”
Silence.
“But either way . . .” Lucy’s voice was firmer. “Either way, don’t you see, we can’t trust her. There are too many questions.”
Slowly: “Yeah.”
Lucy said, “We’ve been trying to treat her like Miranda. But she’s not the same. She’s not really one of us. We don’t know her.”
“No,” said Zach. “Even Miranda says that now. She doesn’t know her.”
There it was. Fenella’s answer. She was not known. She was certainly not loved.
The second task would not be easy after all.
Chapter 21
When morning came, Fenella crept out of bed and slipped from the room. Miranda was either still sleeping or pretending to, with her back turned. Ryland silently paced down the stairs beside Fenella, an inch from her left foot.
Fenella moved quietly past the sleepers on the sofa bed, and into the kitchen area. There she paused. She looked around the strange room. Memories of things from the old home attacked her: Soledad’s knitting basket. Leo’s piano and his guitars. The schedule on the refrigerator. The worn kitchen table.
She whirled as she felt someone watching her. Lucy was leaning up against the wall three feet away. She wore the same clothes in which she had run the race yesterday. There was a crease on her face from a bedsheet.
“I was thinking of the house,” Fenella blurted. “Everything gone. It must feel so horrible.”
“Have some juice,” said Lucy. She turned away.
Over the next ten minutes, the others slowly, silently, filtered in. During breakfast, Fenella could feel everyone watching her. After breakfast, Lucy disappeared with Soledad, and when they returned, Fenella was not surprised that Soledad abruptly announced that she, Lucy, and Fenella needed to go food shopping.
They’re going to question you, said Ryland. Don’t go. You shouldn’t be with them when I can’t be there to advise you.
Fenella ignored him. She stood. “All right.”
Fine, muttered Ryland, sullenly.
The grocery store was only a few blocks away. Fenella found herself walking between Lucy and Soledad. She kept one hand in her pocket, touching her leaf.
She slid a quick look sideways at Lucy. She saw the furrow across her forehead, and the firm set of her chin, and the world of questions in her eyes. She remembered how on that first day, Lucy had reached out to Fenella, her whole body alive with joy and welcome. Now Lucy’s arms hung by her sides. Her hands were fisted.
Any second, the questions would begin. Fenella would have to lie. But if only—
She felt desperate to make Lucy understand . . . understand something. She couldn’t tell Lucy and Soledad what she was doing, of course. She couldn’t explain about the three tasks. But maybe if she told about Padraig—if she explained what had happened to her—
Because if the problem was that they didn’t know her, if they needed to know her to love her, then maybe they could learn to know her.
Fenella still had a hand on her leaf. With the other, she impulsively reached out and took Lucy’s hand, uncurling the fingers. Lucy stiffened.
“I have to tell you something,” Fenella said. “Please.”
Lucy’s face was wary.
“I have to tell you about Padraig,” Fenella said.
She saw the shock and surprise in Lucy’s widening eyes.
Fenella gripped her leaf. She turned to include Soledad as well as Lucy. Then the story came ripping out of her.
All the trouble began because of Fenella’s laugh.
Once upon a time, Fenella laughed often. Her laugh would begin with a creaky wheeze that turned into a snicker. Then the snicker would get louder, transforming into a noise perilously close to a horse’s whinny. A horse that had been crossed with a duck, because the whinnying was interspersed with a certain amount of what could only be called quacking.
Fenella had a laugh that could make everyone in a
crowded marketplace turn their heads and stare. As a small girl, her laughter had embarrassed Fenella so much that she would clap her hand to her mouth to try to keep it inside. But this only compounded the problem; she’d have to clutch her stomach and sway back and forth with her red hair flying over her face. If the laughter escaped anyway, which it often did, why, then, Fenella would find herself stamping her left foot while she whinnied and quacked and, yes, snorted. Because when Fenella Scarborough laughed, her whole body was involved.
By the time she was a young woman, she had gotten over her embarrassment and it hadn’t required much to set her off.
Look, young Fenella’s in one of her fits again, other folk would say in the marketplace, nearly four hundred years ago, and as they watched, smiles would tug their mouths, and soon they’d be roaring too.
Fenella’s laughter was so noticeable that the joy of it had penetrated into Faerie one day in 1627, when she was seventeen. On that day, Padraig heard her.
It was a warm afternoon in May. Fenella was walking her father’s donkey, Dando, home from market. Earlier, she had woven daisies into a wreath for Dando, but the wreath was too big and dangled down below his long ears. It made Fenella grin to see the silly floral arrangement on the temperamental old donkey, but that wasn’t the only thing that made her smile. Every so often, she rested her hand on one of Dando’s bulging saddlebags, aware of the length of fabric that was folded up within. She had done extra work for a long time to commission a fine, soft worsted from the weaver, dyed a pretty apple green.
Two slashes on the sleeves, Fenella thought. Could she have puffs on the sleeves, also? She would have to decide quickly.
The dress was for her wedding day.
Fenella’s sweetheart, Robert Ennis, had a sister, Agnes, who was defter than Fenella with her needle. Agnes had promised to make the dress. One thing Fenella knew: The overskirt would split over the underskirt so that it could easily be looped up on the sides. Fenella wanted the ability to loop up her skirt in case she needed to investigate something at the mill.
After all, she had to be realistic. This would be her wedding dress, but inevitably, later in its life, it would be needed in a more workaday way. Fenella was going to be a miller’s wife!
The road was rutted, and she had a few miles to go, but the soles of her bare feet were tough and callused, so Fenella barely noticed the road as she walked and daydreamed about Robert, and about their future, and, this particular day, about her new dress and how appealing she planned to look in it.
Under the skirt, Fenella would wear a farthingale to make the skirt stand out from the waist. At her bodice, her stomacher would pull in tightly to plump out her breasts just so above the square neckline. She’d cover up with her fichu, of course, for she knew what was right and proper, especially for her wedding day.
Later on, though, when she was private with Robert, he would take the fichu off.
Robert!
Their wedding wasn’t far off, but that very night, there were plans. She and Robert would sneak out and meet. They had been teasing each other for quite long enough. They would meet outside the mill at one hour past twilight.
Not that they were fooling anybody. Not that sneaking was necessary. It wasn’t as if their families didn’t know, and approve, and smile behind their hands.
But sneaking was fun.
At seventeen, Fenella was full young for marriage. Most girls and boys of Fenella’s station could not afford to marry until their mid-twenties. But as the son of the miller, Robert was already part of a thriving business, and it wasn’t too much to say that Fenella was part of it too.
From when she was a small girl, Fenella had liked to sit by the river and watch the big watermill churn. She couldn’t remember learning how the wheel’s machinery worked; it had seemed to her quite obvious. So, one day, when the great wheel ground to a halt that had everyone flummoxed, Fenella had boldly approached Robert’s father. With a small finger, she pointed to exactly where the mechanism had snagged, and explained in a high piping voice the obstruction that she knew was inside the wheel, even though it couldn’t be seen.
When Robert, then twelve, crawled sure-footedly out onto the wheel to locate and pull the obstruction out, Fenella— five years younger—had been right on his heels. Robert had been livid that she’d followed him onto the dangerous wheel. In fact, Fenella liked to tease him that he had not gotten over it until he was nineteen and she turned fourteen and her figure bloomed.
She and Robert would run the mill together. There would be other things they’d do together too. Fenella patted the saddlebag containing her fabric and grinned again. She had bought the extra fabric that Agnes demanded for putting in the seams of the dress. The seams could then be let out as needed. For who knew how soon there might be a new baby?
This very topic of children had been the subject of merriment today at market, when Fenella got her fabric. The weaver’s wife had much to say on the subject of babies, particularly early babies; holding forth as was her way. Fenella had laughed, not because the weaver’s wife was so witty, but because it pleased Fenella to see how the woman’s cheeks pinked with pleasure at being thought so.
Everybody enjoyed hearing Fenella Scarborough laugh and everybody tried to make it happen. They would elbow each other and say, “Will the girl burst this time, do you think?”
Today at market, she’d laughed her hardest because, well . . . Tonight. Robert! The sneaking! Her peals had reached out to the sky and beyond. The entire marketplace had rung with them, and the cows and the goats and the geese had joined in and howled right along.
All alone on the road now, Fenella let loose her laughter again. But this time, old Dando did not bray with her. Instead, his ears flickered uneasily, and then the donkey came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road.
One moment there was a shimmer in the air. The next, a tall, dark-haired man stood in the road before Fenella. He was dressed in clothes grander than anything Fenella had ever seen, silks and velvets, with an astonishing seven slits to his billowing sleeve, and fine lace beneath the sleeve as well as at his throat. He had tight boots of soft leather to his knees, and they bore no dust whatsoever.
His blue eyes glittered.
He bowed deeply, doffing a red silk cap with a long white feather. “Why, it’s the laughing girl,” he said. “Well met.”
His eyes swept her up, and then they swept her down.
Fenella’s laughter died in her throat.
Chapter 22
Fenella came abruptly back into the present. She was sitting on the crumpled autumn leaves and fading grass of a small park. She was leaning against the trunk of a tree, with Lucy and Soledad close, holding on to her, listening to her.
She remembered that the two of them had put their arms around her, walked her there, and made her sit, while she talked and talked and talked.
A short distance away, a play area was filled with small children and their caretakers. Raucous shouts drifted to her ears, but seemed unreal. She tried to smile. Lucy, looking at her, shook her head.
“It’s all right,” Lucy said. “We’re here.”
Fenella said hoarsely, “Thank you.”
How had she gotten so lost in the past? She slowly let go
of her leaf, which she discovered she had been clutching in her lap. It uncurled and lay on her knee, unharmed. “I have to stop talking.”
Lucy put a gentle hand on Fenella’s forearm. “Take all the time you need.”
Soledad put her elbows on her knees and buried her hands in her hair. “I knew Padraig too. While he was hunting Lucy, he interfered in all of our lives. I even hired him at the hospital. I invited him into our home—”
Lucy interrupted. “Mom, don’t start blaming yourself again for that. How could you know? He was charming and he used magic on you.”
Fenella was thoughtful. “In the old days, only the Scarborough girl would see him. Then at some point, he got bolder. ”
“He had
a whole life set up here in Boston,” Soledad said. “An apartment and a job. A bank account! For all I know, he even dated. Certainly lots of women at the hospital noticed him.”
Fenella thought of what an outcast Padraig had been in Faerie. No wonder that, more and more, he had enjoyed strutting around in the human realm . . .
“So he changed his ways over time.” Lucy’s eyes were narrow. She moved even closer to Fenella and put her arm around her. “Maybe he got more powerful here in the human realm, as time passed? The more successful he was? But we defeated him. He’s gone. He can’t hurt any of us again.”
Fenella swallowed. He can’t hurt you, she thought. Only me. Then another thought: But I can hurt you. I already have.
She got up. “We need to go to the grocery store.”
“But you were talking—”
“I don’t want to go on right now,” said Fenella.
“All right,” said Lucy gently. “Later, you can tell us more.”
It wasn’t until she was in the market, pushing a cart heavy with milk and produce and cereal, that Fenella remembered that Lucy and Soledad had been planning to question her about the fire. She had successfully distracted them.
She was so shocked, she stopped pushing the cart.
They would still want answers. But her breakdown had changed the moment. When they came, the questions would be gentle and accompanied by a predisposition to believe Fenella. She had in fact used the truth to manipulate them.
But she had not done it on purpose. She had thought— she had thought—
What had she thought? That she could make them sorry for her, and so love her? Did love work that way? Fenella stared blindly at a package of unsalted butter.
At checkout, Fenella bagged groceries beside Lucy. She loaded the bags into the little wheeled cart that they had also bought and would push home, and accepted two bags that she would carry by hand. “No, they’re not too heavy,” she said to Lucy. Her voice sounded overly cheerful in her ears, but Lucy didn’t appear to notice anything wrong. “I can take another bag. I’m strong.”