The Sparrow Sisters (23 page)

Henry did wake with a stiff neck. As soon as he lifted his head, he clapped his hand to it and grunted. Patience laughed and squatted down beside him.

“I thought I'd lost you again,” Henry said as he blinked up at her.

“That would be careless.” Patience held out her hand, and Henry made a show of pulling himself up with a dramatic groan.

“I can't seem to be in the same place with you,” he said and gathered her into his arms.

“Come back with me. We'll be careless and forgetful together.”

“I'm afraid that's how I got here to begin with,” Patience said and turned toward the house. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

Patience made Henry an omelet. She plucked herbs from the garden and chopped a tomato into perfect cubes as he sat at the kitchen table drinking a beer. Patience wasn't hungry, hadn't been for days, but there was comfort in providing for Henry. She hadn't done anything for anyone lately. She was tired of being cared for, being coddled by her sisters as she tried to accept Matty's death. It amazed her that she could say those words, if only in her head. The image of Matty collapsed over himself had almost ceased to make her sick. Almost.

Henry watched Patience as she moved around the kitchen. He leaned back in his chair as she slipped behind him, let his head brush against her hip when she bent to lay his place. When she put his plate before him, he took a bite and closed his eyes with an open-mouthed groan.

“If food be the music of love,” Patience said.

“I think you've got that backward,” Henry said through a full mouth, his hand held to his lips.

“Really?” Patience smiled.

Henry ate everything, wiping a bit of bread across his plate, picking up the last of the lettuce with his fingers. He wanted to just go on consuming, not food perhaps but the quiet in the kitchen, the cooling shadows that crept through the garden, mostly the long muscles that wrapped around Patience's bare shoulders as she reached up to put away a mixing bowl. He stood and came behind her, felt her give in to him as she came down off her toes.

“Please let me stay,” he said.

Patience shook her head and then nodded. “Maybe just for a while.”

Henry was so relieved he was light-headed
.
I will take what I can get of this woman,
he thought.
When this is over, I will have all of her.

Henry didn't ask where the Sisters were; Patience would have told him to be quiet if they were near. He never tired of following her down the long hall, the scent of her as he walked behind her. His heart skittered at every step until when they
got to her room, he backed her into the bed with graceless urgency. She pulled his shirt over his head and pressed her cheek against his chest. Henry had to raise her by her shoulders to get her to look at him. He sat her on the end of the bed and she put her hands on his hips. When she ran one down over his thigh, he let her. In that moment Henry didn't care what her purpose was. He was aware enough to realize that Patience wanted to reach inside him; she was back to trying to fix him and that was fine. If she pulled every broken bit out of him, straight through his skin, he would not even cry out.

In the end it was Henry who left. Patience didn't need to ask him; he felt her withdraw as a heavy fog moved in from the water, swaddling the house in cold silence. The temperature dropped so fast that Henry felt the scatter of goose bumps as they rose on Patience's arm where it lay across his stomach. He slid out from under her and pulled on his clothes. Patience watched him, and when he bent to kiss her goodnight, she raised her hand in a languid wave. Henry grabbed it for a final squeeze and placed it over her breast before he tiptoed down the stairs. Patience curled into the dark and let her tears fall. She felt the sharp tug of homesickness.

T
he medical examiner from Hayward brought the toxicology results to Chief Kelsey by hand. He could have emailed them and sent the text copy with his seal overnight, but Dr. Wilkinson was bored, or perhaps more to the point, he wanted to be in on the action. It was rare to catch a case like this; a child's heart did simply stop now and then, but never had he seen a report like this. Digitalis—the doctor still couldn't believe the level in the kid's blood. He would have had to take more than a few sublingual tabs to hit this toxicity.
He must have gotten into someone's digoxin,
he thought.

“Grandpa should have kept his meds out of reach,” Dr. Wilkinson said as he handed over his report.

“There is no grandpa and what meds?” Chief Kelsey replied.

“This boy died of an overdose of digitalis, heart medication. Someone must have been taking it in the house.”

“Matty only had his father,” Kelsey said. “As far as I know, his heart is fine; it's his liver I'd worry about.” He thumbed through the pages of the report. “What am I looking at?” he asked.

“Toxic levels of digitalis in the kid's blood and tissues. It's hard to know if it built up over days or was administered in one go.”

“Wait, administered?” Kelsey asked.

“Well, taken then,” Dr. Wilkinson said. “Though why a little boy would search out this medication and eat a bunch of bitter little pills is beyond me. Of course, in pediatric cases it's usually given in a syrup, so maybe he took some from a friend.”

“Matty didn't have any friends, not kids that is,” the chief said. “He spent most all his time with the Sisters and their plant nursery.” An ugly thought was settling into Chief Kelsey's mind.

“What is digoxin made of?” he asked.

“It's as old as the hills, folk medicine originally,” Dr. Wilkinson said. “Comes from the foxglove plant; that's still the only real source for the cardiac glycoside.”

“Oh, shit,” said Chief Kelsey.

T
HE CHIEF PUT
the report into a desk drawer and locked it. First he'd stop home for a bite with his wife. Pamela could always steady him. Then he was going to have to get a sample of Patience's foxglove. He wished Sorrel had never pointed out the plant. More than that, he wished he'd never heard her say how poisonous it was.

“What am I going to do?” he asked his wife.

“Joe,” Pam said as she sat down at the kitchen table with him. “You know there is an explanation for this that has nothing to do with Patience. There isn't one reason on earth that anything she grows, anything she treats us with, hurt Matty.”

“Yeah, maybe, but three of the herbs she admits to using on him showed up in Matty's blood, those and the digitalis. I saw the plants, Pam.”

“Admits?” Pam leaned in until her face was level with Joe's bowed head. “Jesus, Joe, you sound like you want to arrest her!”

“I don't want to arrest anybody,” he said. “I just want this thing over. I want Rob Short to get help. I want everybody to stop talking about Patience like she's some kind of wicked witch. What I really want,” he sighed, “is to get the hell out of Granite Point before we become the next scandal at the supermarket checkout.”

“Well, it's probably too late for that, dear,” Pam said. “That busybody Ambrose Smith wrote a piece in the
Clarion
claiming Patience threatened to curse Rob Short that day he came to the Nursery.”

“Curse? Please, what is wrong with this town?”

“Maybe he wrote poison or hex or something. Doesn't matter, you know how people are. Now he's connected Eliza Howard and Patience Sparrow. He's dug up the old stories, and you're about to give them real wings.”

T
HE
C
LARION
STORY
did indeed give rumors wings. Ambrose Smith felt duty-bound to report the confrontation between Patience and Rob. He—not unreasonably Ambrose would assure anyone who asked—felt compelled to quote Rob's accusation that Patience had poisoned his boy and Patience's shouted threat to “do something” to Rob too. What that something was fascinated
Clarion
readers. The fact that Patience had visited the police station with Simon Mayo certainly looked damning. Soon enough the talk turned from “what a tragedy” to “that Patience Sparrow was always a little off.” If Ambrose Smith didn't have a tape recorder with him, it was no trouble for that nameless tourist to share the shaky video he shot with his phone.

In the same thoughtless way that Pamela Kelsey tossed around the words “hex” and “curse,” so the video flew around. First it made the rounds in town, then its flight widened and a game of Chinese whispers began to take shape. Telephones rang, beer drinkers at Doyle's nodded when anyone asked, “Did you see . . . ?” The words “threaten” and “nasty” started following Patience's name. The bank manager came home at lunch and rummaged around the kitchen looking for Sparrow remedies. When his wife walked in, he got a little shouty.
This is what transpired in other kitchens, on other porches and during dinner as husbands and fathers questioned their wives about what the hell they'd been giving the family all this time. And the women shouted right back, defending their healer, their friend Patience Sparrow. It did no good.

In Hayward the county prosecutor Paul Hutchins watched the video on the
Clarion
's website, then he Googled Patience Sparrow to see what came up. The first hit was the video, over and over, from YouTube to Salem's Plot, the website his wife sent to him. She called it “Witchy-Poo.com” and made fun of small-town superstitions. He couldn't imagine where she'd heard of the ridiculous thing because he didn't know that Linda Hutchins had driven to see Patience six months before when their baby was so colicky his mother wanted to leave him in a basket at the church. Eager-beaver prosecutor Hutchins didn't know that the sudden peace and quiet that swept through their house was all due to Patience. What he did know was that this Granite Point scandal could
be
something . . . and his chance to be something, too.

Well, he'd just have to head down to the seaside and have a bit of a day trip. If nothing else, Paul Hutchins thought, I'll bring home some lobster for dinner.

T
HERE ARE ALL
sorts of regulations about accusing someone of a crime. There are laws and statutes and personal rights and just plain old common sense and courtesy. Somewhere between Matty's death and the video of the scene at the Nursery all
those rules and any shred of civility collapsed. Maybe it was because the weather had been so dodgy, and locals and tourists were tiring of jigsaw puzzles, napping, reading, and the one movie theater. Or it could have been a result of the arguments simmering in so many households, the face-off that seemed to pit one part of the town against the other on the subject of Patience's guilt or innocence, her healing abilities or her rather questionable behavior over the years. When Paul Hutchins arrived that muggy morning to speak with Chief Kelsey, even he felt the tension; he didn't need to scent the air to know that this town was straining to live up to the pretty postcards for sale in the drugstore.

K
ELSEY AND
H
UTCHINS
sat down over coffee at Baker's Way Bakers. A mistake since no one recognized the guy in the suit with the chief and everyone started positing theories.

“I'm not going to mess around with a grand jury,” Hutchins said. “We just need a complaint to get a warrant to bring her in. File an affidavit that states this Sparrow woman's role in the Short kid's death. All you have to do is show probable cause then boom, catch, question, and maybe, maybe release,” Hutchins whispered. “That's the way to go for now. You follow the rules; you demonstrate that you take the crime seriously; you get to be the good guy.”

“Christ, you think I'm going to be the good guy? Besides, I did question her,” Kelsey said. “With the tox report in I can go back to ask about digitalis, but that's about it.” The horrible
thing was that the chief knew that one more visit to Ivy House was unavoidable, and it wouldn't be a chat this time. Hutchins's presence had kicked the investigation up.

“You have to establish that she grows the stuff, that she knows how dangerous it is, that the little boy could have easily gotten hold of it on her watch. This isn't some cozy little town mystery anymore, chief. This could be a murder investigation, if only because the silly girl got caught threatening the boy's father.”

“She didn't threaten him, for God's sake. She was pissed off and hurting. They both were, are.”

“It was a stupid admission of culpability whether Patience Sparrow meant it or not.”

Chief Kelsey used his thumb to dab up the rest of the muffin crumbs on his plate. Even in his state he couldn't leave Claire's baked goods alone. He pointed at Hutchins's cookie.

“You going to eat that?” he asked.

“Listen, Kelsey,” Hutchins said as he pushed the cookie over. “Do not let this blow up in your face. Get out in front. I want this case to be handled right. We can get her in on the father's accusations. I can talk with Rob Short to make a formal complaint to me, convince him to work with us on this.”

“All I wanted was to ask her about the digitalis,” Kelsey said. “There is no way I think she poisoned the kid.”

“I don't care what you think. I only care what the law says.” Hutchins hunched in close. “If she knew this kid was a mess, if she even suspected he was a danger to himself, or, say she
thought he'd be better dead than with the useless dad, or if she told him that digitalis was poisonous, or if she didn't but knew he could get some, we might be able to get her on negligent manslaughter. You file the complaint, I'll get the warrant.”

“We don't even know for sure that's where the stuff came from, the Nursery, I mean,” Kelsey said with no conviction. “Why is this so important to you, counselor? What's your angle?”

“Look, I'm just doing my job. Don't make me get someone in here to do yours.”

Hutchins followed the chief back to the station and took down the affidavit himself. He felt only a tiny bit remorseful about being so forceful with the guy. But now he could get the mournful dad on board.