John’s eyes looked a little watery, too, and his profile a bit less regaclass="underline" She wondered if perhaps he was weakening. But it was only age. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he smiled and shook his head firmly. “This is hard for all of us. I understand. I really do. But we only need one and it will all be over soon.”
Emily recalled what Reseda had told her, but still it seemed too cruel to be true. “You only need one… what? One of my children?”
He nodded. “It’s a very intense ritual, a very complicated process. A complicated recipe. You need the right person-the right genes-and the right plants. You need a twin, and, according to the formula, the blood has to have been forged by a great trauma.” He raised his eyebrows and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Tansy never forgave us-or herself. But our intentions were good, Verbena. You have to believe me. And the fact is, it worked with Sawyer. It was awfully effective. I am so sorry about what happened to the boy, but the tincture worked. Sadly, nothing from nature lasts forever, and now we need, well, boosters. We need more.”
“Did you kill Sawyer? Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”
“You must think we’re absolute fiends,” John said, and he actually chuckled. “Besides, I’m a lawyer. You can’t possibly believe that I would confess to something like that! Now, you should pay attention,” he admonished her. “We both should.”
Celandine was approaching Anise with a potted plant, the leaves cochleate and yellow as daffodils, with one spear-shaped bulb rising from the center. The plant was perhaps eighteen inches tall and the bulb the size of a grown-up’s fist. Clary Hardin and Ginger Jackson fell to their knees, their heads thrown back, nearly swooning with anticipation, as did another pair of women Emily didn’t recognize. They dropped their goblets onto the ground and spread wide their arms in ecstasy.
“They’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” John murmured. “Many of us have. To be so very, very close to the end and get a second chance? What a delightful notion!”
Sage Messner began herding the twins forward, edging them closer to the cauldron. Then the girls’ schoolteacher, Mrs. Collier-Yarrow Collier, Emily remembered-knelt before the children, handed them each a goblet, and said in a voice as soothing as a lullaby, “Enjoy this. Drink, girls, drink up.”
They both looked across the greenhouse at their mother, wondering what they should do, and so Emily violently shook her head. They looked tiny to her, more like big dolls than small children. Even in their winter coats they appeared waiflike. “Don’t,” she yelled to them, hoping she sounded more resolute than panicked-because she knew she was panicked. But she knew also that whatever herbal potion these women had prepared for her children would only harm them. She was as sure of that as she had been of anything in her life. “Don’t drink it!”
“Verbena, that’s enough,” Anise said, speaking to her for the first time since they had arrived at the greenhouse, and the two men tightened their grips on her arms. Her voice was absolutely inscrutable to Emily. Then she crossed the greenhouse and placed her long, cold fingers on Emily’s cheeks and looked directly into her eyes. For the briefest of seconds, Emily was brought back to that first Sunday morning when the woman’s rusted pickup truck had rumbled up their long driveway and she had appeared with a casserole and brownies.
“Send her away,” hissed one of the women Emily didn’t know.
“We don’t need her!” added Lavender Millier.
“No, I would rather she watched,” said Anise simply. Then she looked directly into Emily’s eyes, brusquely wiped the tears off her cheeks, and added, “Now: I must insist you behave.” Then she released her and went to Hallie and Garnet, kneeling beside Mrs. Collier so the girls were actually a little taller than she was. She seized the goblet from Garnet and took a sip, gazing at the girl and smiling. After that she took a sip from Hallie’s chalice, too, running her tongue over her lips after she had swallowed. When she was finished, she stood up and turned back toward Emily. She raised her eyebrows high above her eyes as if to say, See? Satisfied? I’m still standing. Then she motioned for the girls to drink up, and, much to Emily’s despair, they did, draining the two chalices that had been given them.
“Thank you, girls,” Anise said. “That was very grown-up of you.”
The twins glanced at each other and then at Anise and Sage and their schoolteacher. Emily thought Garnet looked like she might collapse, and she wondered what the group would do if her daughter had a seizure right now. She studied both girls and decided that Hallie looked a little wobbly as well; whatever was in that goblet had acted quickly. When Anise asked them to take off their snow jackets, both twins fumbled spastically with the zippers.
One of the women Emily didn’t recognize, a petite, square-faced blonde her age who would have fit in well at a Junior League luncheon back in Philadelphia, approached Anise and bowed her head ever so slightly. Then she gave the woman a leather sheath, from which Anise pulled a long, ancient-looking dagger with a T-shaped handle that appeared to be made of dull iron. It looked vaguely Celtic to Emily, and had a moonstone nearly the size of a golf ball at the edge of the grip and smaller ones along the handle.
“Blood meets seed,” Anise cried out.
“And seed meets soul,” the herbalists proclaimed together.
With two fingers and her thumb, Anise snapped off the bulb from the yellow plant, and the sound was reminiscent of a cat’s squeal immediately before a catfight. Then she took the bulb and held it above the black cauldron and slashed it open lengthwise with the knife, and a white milk waterfalled into the pot, and the smell-gardenia-like, and yet somehow it conjured for Emily the image and aroma of a just washed baby-overwhelmed the incense in the greenhouse. Then Anise dropped the empty husk into the mixture, too, and stirred it around with the tip of her dagger.
“And the last ingredient?” Valerian asked, though it was clear that she and all the other herbalists knew precisely what they would add next. Still, Anise glanced once at the grimoire that Valerian was patiently holding open for her. Then she signaled for the psychiatrist to shut the book.
“And so we finish,” Anise proclaimed. “To those we once were-”
“And to those we shall be!” the herbalists finished.
“To the youth of the earth and the power of the seed!”
“To the youth of the earth and the power of the seed!” they repeated.
Anise raised the dagger over her head, and Emily realized that these people who posed as her neighbors and friends were about to execute one of her children-slaughter a ten-year-old girl. And so she screamed for her girls to run, to run away, as she threw herself violently at Anise, dragging those younger men with her. She was aware of the two of them and John Hardin trying (and failing) to pull her back, but she was enraged and fell upon the woman- the witch, she heard in her mind, the witch -tackling her onto the greenhouse floor, all the while howling for her children to flee. She’d reached for the knife, unsure what she would do with it if she wrestled it from the woman, when she was violently lifted up and off of Anise, her arms wrenched so far behind her that she feared one of her shoulders had been ripped from its socket. She turned, and there was Alexander Jackson and there was his heavy fist coming toward her face, and then all was black.
Y ou had stood over each of the beds in the girls’ rooms on the third floor of the house, the pearl-handled knife in each case raised in your hand high over your head. And yet each bed was empty. Emily had vanished as well, the bed still made (and the knife, fortunately, still held by duct tape to the horizontal slat on your side). Her station wagon was in the driveway, which suggested that, when they left, they had left in someone else’s vehicle.
You wonder if they left because of the blackout. You noted in the kitchen that the digital clocks on the microwave and the oven were dark, and then in the girls’ bedrooms that the automatic night-lights were off. But again, someone would have had to have picked them up.