“I'll tell the cook when she comes in,” Sinah said, sitting down in her chair and sipping at her cup. He was right; it wasn't that good. Probably the water, although it had boiled for long enough that at least the water was sterile. She drank it anyway, out of perversity, thinking vaguely about sun cream and enlarging Wycherly's wardrobe.
“Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph
through Persepolis.”
A half-remembered quote from his college days floated through Wycherly's head. He felt an odd, uncomfortable pang of tenderness for Sinah, similar to the feelings Luned aroused but not quite so awkward.
His foot was still in the bucket, though he could hardly feel the heat of the water now. The two of them sat in companionable silence in the sweltering room, but Sinah did not mention leaving, possibly because Wycherly could not.
Now that he had the Movie Star soggy with gratitude she'd hardly notice if he asked her to get him a six-pack of beer. He could drink as many as he liked without having to apologize. He had an excuse; he was hurt. He'd do better tomorrow, but now â¦
Aren't you even a little tired of being an object of pity?
Wycherly shook his head as if to dislodge an irritating insect, but the voice came from within, not from outside. Tired of being an object of pity? Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. And so he wouldn't have a drinkâor if he did, it would be just one can, or, at most, two.
For now. For today.
But he didn't think abstinence would change anything. He thought the black beast would still be out there no matter what he did.
And so would Camilla.
He wanted to think about something, anything, else.
“Sinah?”
With an effort, he dragged his mind back to Sinah's problems. They made an interesting puzzle. What crime could Athanais Dellon have committed that her illegitimate daughter would be ostracized a good two decades later?
“Yes?” She looked up from her coffee. Wycherly tried to remember what came next in this odd meaningless social dance. After a moment he remembered.
“How old are you?”
She smiled; it gave her dimples. “Really? Or for my biographers?”
“The truthâI won't tell.” The soak had helped, loath though he was to admit it, and now Wycherly felt the drugs begin to blunt the talons of pain that were clamped around his foot. They did nothing about the beast, but even so, he could afford to be charitable.
“I'll be twenty-eight this year,” Sinah said. “My birthday's August 14âwhat's wrong?”
The mention of the date had made him turn his head, as if someone were offering to strike him. For a moment the roar of the water and the stifling reek of the river were all that was real.
“It's my birthday, too. Someone died that day,” Wycherly answered raggedly.
Had it been him? It seemed weirdly possible that the last fourteen years had been a peculiar form of Hell.
“I'm sorry. But ⦠you've thought of something, haven't you?” Sinah asked, watching his face.
“I think I know where you were born,” Wycherly said.
August 14, 1969. The year of the calendar there on the wall.
Here. In this house. In the bed I've been sleeping in.
“I don't know how much of this they believe themselves,” Wycherly began, “but when I got here, Luned and Evan Starking, the brother and sister down at the general store, sounded as if they were pretty well convinced I was the new warlock on the block, come to take the place of the dead witch-woman.”
At his insistence, Sinah had made him another cup of hideous coffee, and had poured a tall glass of tepid cider for herself.
“They wouldn't say much about herâbut when I wanted to rent a place to stay, they gave me her cabin. Her name was Rahab, not Athanais, but the cabin had been deserted for something like thirty yearsâyou can see the calendar on the wall over thereâand whoever'd been there walked outâdied, vanished, whateverâleaving everything behind but the bedding on the big brass bed.”
Sinah stared at him uncertainly. She wanted to believe him, he could tell. But it seemed almost too pat, even to him, and it was hard to blame her for being suspicious.
“That's awfully hard to ⦠Why you?” Sinah said, as if on cue.
“I told you; they figured I was her replacement. It's the hair. Red.” He gestured at his shaggy, uncombed mane.
“And all witches have red hair,” Sinah returned, quoting from a half-forgotten store of folklore.
“Witches, Judas Iscariot ⦠all the best people. But this particular lavish country retreat is apparently reserved for all the local hoodoos, so here I am.”
“And everything was still here?” Sinah asked uncertainly.
“Clothes, canned goodsâeverything. Most of it's still here now, or did you think I'd brought everything in that cabin with me when I came to stay?”
Wycherly stopped himself before he said anything further. There was no way this woman could know the circumstances of his arrival in Morton's Forkâor, in fact, anything about his past. And he liked it that way.
Sinah shook her head, not really listening. “All here? Nobody took anything?”
“Just like the
Marie Celeste.
And I think they were afraid toâjust as they're afraid to talk to you now.”
“And you haven't even met them.” Sinah managed a wan ghost of a smile. “May I look around?”
“Sure. You won't find much. The clothes got cleaned
outâand I think I gave one of your family heirlooms to the daily help,” Wycherly added, thinking of the ornate silver box he'd given to Luned.
“I don't care. I just want to
know,
” Sinah said.
I want to know the truth about myselfâand what my family is.
“Maybe you don't.” Wycherly reached out and put his hand over hers, surprising both of them. “Families only make you miserableâyou're lucky not to have one. And secrets are buried for a reason.”
It would be too easy to be fond of Wycherly Musgrave, Sinah thought to herself. Facile charm was supposed to be her stock in trade, but Wycherly had itâwhen he chose to exercise it.
So this is where I was born,
she thought, looking around the kitchen with new curiosity.
In the cabin of the local witch-woman
.
Black magic or not, she couldn't believe that her mother's witchcraftâreal or imaginedâwas what had turned the villagers against her. From his own words, the Starkings thought that
Wycherly
had occult powers, and all they'd done was rent him the nearest haunted house and pester him for spells.
So if they didn't object to witches, what
could
Athanais Dellon have done twenty-eight years ago to unilaterally terrify every single inhabitant of Morton's Fork? Why did they refuse to admit she'd ever existed?
Why? Why? why?
“As I said, feel free to look around,” Wycherly said.
The inside of the tin-roofed cabin was bakingly hot, but Wycherly didn't seem to notice. Instead, he pulled his shirt tighter around him as if he were cold.
Glancing back toward him as if to confirm his permission, Sinah walked toward the bedroom and pushed open the door.
In the small bedroom, the dresser, armoire, washstand, and bedside table all vied for floor space with the ornate brass bed. There was a hand-hooked rag rug on the floor, soft and faded with time.
“Go ahead,” Wycherly called encouragingly from the other room. “Nothing belongs to me except the shoulder bag and the shaving kit.”
Sinah nodded, as if he were confirming her suspicions. A minute later she called back, “You didn't bring any more luggage than that?”
“This was an unexpected stop,” Wycherly said. She heard water slosh as he lifted his foot out of the now-cool soak. Almost reluctantly, Sinah began opening drawers.
A bottle of patent medicine, its contents long evaporated. A sewing kit. Meaningless scraps of paper faded to blankness. A stub of pencil. The greatest find was a postcard of Wildwood Sanatorium, the hand-colored photo showing the building in all its glory, rising like Shangri-La out of the Appalachian woodland. Beyond those few scraps there was nothingâno mementos, no photos, no personal papers.
“No Bible.” Sinah stood at the foot of the bed and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Her sleeveless linen shirt had been softened with heat and moisture until it was molded to the slender curves of her body.
“Bible?” Wycherly asked.
As she'd searched, he'd pulled his chair into the doorway to get a better view of her activities.
“Every household around here has a Bible. I was raised in Gaithersburg, and we had one. This is the homeland of Billy Sundayâthey still have revivals here. Are you telling me whoever lived hereâwitch-woman or notâwouldn't have a family Bible?”
“Maybe it burned,” Wycherly said. “Maybe Luned took it.” From the sound of his voice he wasn't really interested.
“I don't think she would,” Sinah said stubbornly. “But it isn't here.”
“You're perfectly welcome to keep looking. Move the furniture around. Check for trapdoors and secret panels if you like,” Wycherly drawled.
He was humoring herâwell, she'd rather be humored than hated, if those were her choices.
“Root cellar!” Sinah exclaimed.
Luned had mentioned the root cellar the first night he'd come hereâa fact Wycherly only remembered as he sat on the bed watching Sinah drag away the linoleum rug that covered most of the floor in the outer room. Beneath it, the planks of the cabin's original building showed clearly, grey with dust and grit. Once the linoleum was gone, the outline of a trap door cut into the wooden floor was easy to see.
“It's probably filled with spiders,” Wycherly said helpfully.
Sinah ignored him, heaving it open. A dank, wet, earth-smell welled up out of the hole. It brought his exploration of the sanatorium vividly to mind.
“Looks dark,” Sinah said. Wycherly snorted eloquently.
Holding a lighted oil lamp out in front of her, Sinah knelt beside the hole and peered down into it. “It isn't as big as the cabin. Looks like the walls are packed earth. The floor is. I bet there used to be a ladder here somewhere; they were obviously using it for storage, at least before the linoleum went down. I can see some shelves ⦠. I'm going down there.”
She got to her feet, setting the lamp beside the opening.
“How?” Wycherly asked. “I can't help you.” He brandished the discarded Ace bandage. Meditatively, he began to wrap it around his foot. If he bound it tight enough and had something to hold on to, he thought he could probably walk, but that was a far cry from the athletics that getting into the root cellar would require. There was no ladder in the basement, and Wycherly would not have trusted one if it had been there.
“I think I can just jump down,” Sinah said. “If you can come over here, you can hand me the lamp after I'mâ”
As she spoke, she sat down on the edge of the trap and swung her feet over the edge. Holding tightly to the edge, she slipped down, hung from her fingers for a moment, then dropped free. Wycherly heard her grunt as she landed.
For a fleeting instant he entertained the impulse to just shut the trap again and leave her there in the dark, for no
more reason than because he could. He rejected the idea with disgust as soon as it occurred to him, and dragged a chair over to the opening.
Moving carefully, Wycherly handed the lantern down into the darkness, then lowered one of the kitchen chairs into the opening. Sinah set the lantern on the chair. The root cellar was now brightly illuminated. Wycherly looked down.
As she'd said, the walls and floor were of tightly packed earth. Tiny rootlets pushed through in a dim arterial tracery, and on one wall the large serpentine bulk of the taproot from some long-felled tree bulged out of the wall like the body of some half-glimpsed sea monster.
One wall was lined with crude brick-and-board shelves, on which were stacked row after row of Mason jars. A few of those had burst, so long ago that the spillage had already rotted away into dust. What must once have been cardboard boxes, long moldered to slippery blackness in the damp darkness, were piled in the opposite corner. Whatever its original uses, it was clear that the root cellar had not been used in decades.
“I've found something.” Sinah's voice was tense with excitement. “A metal box. It's heavy.”
She dragged it into Wycherly's line of vision. It was a small box, about the size of a large dictionary, and its surface was a dull grey color. Sinah struggled with the blackened claspâthe box was only held by a heavy twist of brass or copper wire, but the wire was corroded into an immovable clot of metal.