Anise was still holding the dagger, and so Reseda looked around for another weapon, her eyes scanning the tables and the floor of the greenhouse. On a wooden bench in the corner near her were a pair of one-handed garden clippers. There were shears just like them, it seemed, on most of the tables. The safety was open, which meant the clippers were splayed into a slender Y, ready to harvest herbs or trim dying leaves. With one thrust she could slam them into either John’s or Anise’s eyes, certainly blinding them and-if she drove the blades hard enough into the brain-in all likelihood killing them. The problem, of course, was that there were far more herbalists around her than only Anise and John. They would swarm upon her the moment she attacked either of their leaders, and she knew well how ruthless they could be.
Besides, she wasn’t built that way; she didn’t believe that she was capable of lodging the steel blades of a pair of garden shears in anyone’s eyes. Not even to protect a child. And so instead she did the only thing she thought she could do. “I’m a twin, too,” she reminded them.
“Yes, of course, you are. But you are also rather-and you’ll forgive me if this sounds ageist-old for our purposes,” John told her, his voice knowing and smug. “The tincture demands the blood of a prepubescent twin.”
“And you have some,” she went on, nodding at the cauldron. “You already have a lot. I know the recipe. Use what you’ve harvested from the child and then supplement her blood with mine.”
John turned toward Anise, his eyebrows raised.
“We’ll need a good amount, Reseda,” Anise said, a crooked smile on her face. Reseda knew that Anise did not especially like her, but she was unprepared for how happy the woman was to augment the tincture with her blood.
“I understand.”
Anise nodded and turned to Clary. “Put a compress on the child’s arm,” she said. “We have plenty of her blood already.”
Only after Reseda had watched Clary Hardin press a white hand towel against the child’s forearm for a long, quiet minute did she extend her own arm over the cauldron and allow them to roll up her sleeve and gouge a deep trench into the veins there. Anise made the incision, roughly and inexpertly, but Reseda didn’t watch. She focused instead on the moonstone at the tip of the boline handle. The cut hurt every bit as much as she’d expected.
T here they are. There are the playmates your wondrous daughter deserves, standing perhaps a dozen yards apart, separated by a cauldron, each in the arms of those self-absorbed breathers. You stand at the entrance of the greenhouse as Reseda, looking uncharacteristically shaky, stares at something far away. Her arm is held over that massive black kettle, and the blood drips like water from a rusted-out rain gutter. They have not noticed you yet because they are focused only on Reseda and the girls, and they are in the midst of a euphoric chant about seeds and souls.
And so you charge, running across the greenhouse, oblivious to anyone and anything but the idea that Ashley will no longer be alone. But before you have reached the first of the girls, there is their mother, up and before you and throwing herself into your arms.
“My God, Chip!” she wails. “Stop them! They’re going to kill them!”
For an instant, you recall something. Them. Garnet. Hallie. They’re going to kill your children. The instant passes, because they’re not your children. Your child is Ashley. But that still doesn’t give them or you the right to kill… anyone. The whole notion has left you muddled, confused, and you find yourself staring at the knife as if you have no idea how it got into your hands. And just as you are starting to regain a modicum of your focus and your anger smothers your momentary befuddlement, the men in the robes-some, it seems, very old yet strangely strong-have a hold of your arms and the knife, and the greenhouse is filled with their admonishments to drop it, to stop struggling, to be still. You cry out against them, but there are so many and they are so forceful that they are able to pry the knife from your fingers. Your eyes rest on the women on the far side of the cauldron, and they stare at you, even Reseda, whose complexion is growing pale-as if the color is literally draining from her face and streaming into the cauldron. She murmurs, “Bring him to me,” and you are pushed forward so aggressively that only your toes are touching the greenhouse floor. She looks deep into your eyes across the black kettle and says, “I am telling you, she is gone. Your daughter is no longer here.”
She has said this before, and she will say it again. She will-
“I am telling you, your daughter is fine-but she needs you.”
She does need you. You are sure of this. A pitchfork leans against a glass wall, and the moment you spy it you rear up, bellowing like a wounded animal and breaking free from these old men. You grab it with both hands and jab at the crowd as they surround you. Once more you focus upon the children, standing a little stupefied with two of the older herbalists and their mother. And so you charge, the pitchfork a bayonet in your mind, only to be restrained again by the men and women in their robes. Their hands are everywhere upon your shoulders and waist and arms, and they are wrestling the pitchfork from your grip. And then abruptly they stop. You follow their eyes, but it must have happened so quickly that you are not precisely sure what occurred. Still, it appears that Anise and Reseda have collided and fallen to the ground as they tried to get out of your way. Or, perhaps, Reseda pulled Anise out of the way, trying to shield her, and the two women tumbled in a heap onto the greenhouse floor. Either way, when Reseda looks up at you, her face is oddly vacant. Almost bewildered. And then you understand why, as Anise is repeating “No, no, no!” over and over. Reseda’s blouse is black with her blood, and extending from that beautiful, swanlike neck is the long, elegant handle of the boline. When she fell, she fell on Anise’s hand and impaled herself on the knife.
“It was an accident, I swear!” Anise cries out, drawing the long blade from Reseda’s neck as if she is prying a carrot from soil, and a geyser of blood sprays the two herbalists in the face. Then, ever so slowly because Anise is trying to pull her up by her shoulders-as if she believes that so long as Reseda is sitting upright the woman will live-Reseda chokes out one last rivulet of blood and collapses, a marionette freed from its crossbar and strings. John Hardin falls upon her, though she’s already dead, as do Ginger and Clary and Sage.
And almost in that instant you see Reseda, alive and standing before you. She is offering you that unreadable smile, her blue eyes beckoning. She motions behind her, and there is Ashley, your beautiful daughter, the straps of her Dora the Explorer backpack looking a bit like suspenders against her summer shirt. She is grinning happily, her eyes alight, the way she did when she was beside you on the runway at Burlington International Airport and all that loomed was a fifty-five- or fifty-six-minute flight to Philadelphia. She waves. You wave back. And the moment you start toward her, all of the rage that has been burning inside you since Flight 1611 cartwheeled into the lake vanishes. You kneel before her and embrace her. Then, the sky brightening as if the sun is rising in June, you stand up and-still holding Ashley’s small hand-follow Reseda into the welcoming daylight.
Somewhere very far behind you stands a pilot. An airline pilot. He looks a little haggard-they all look a little haggard-as one of his girls is led back to the cauldron. You hope someday there is someone back there for him, too. Someone just like Reseda.
Epilogue
In all the years that you have lived in Bethel, you have to admit: Clary Hardin has never looked better. And while there are some people who presume that both she and her husband, John, have on occasion resorted to chemical injections and peels that minimize lines, you know them well enough to understand that they’re just not the type. Neither is that vain. Both are wary of inorganic toxins. Verbena also looks considerably younger than her peers. Maybe she escaped the pressures of that Philadelphia law firm just in time. The two of you have a daughter in college now, but still Verbena’s hair hasn’t begun to gray. Oh, she hennas it. She likes that look, as do you. But you are confident that underneath that color not a single follicle has turned white, and this despite the crash of Flight 1611 and then the death of a child-the single worst thing that can happen to a parent-a decade ago. Verbena misses the girl. As do you. You miss her madly. You see the child in the cheekbones and the shape of the eyes of your remaining daughter, her twin, when the girl is home from college or when you visit her there.