d abandoned all hope of waking up.I’
I tore into the weeds, ripping them up from the soft earth one fistful at a time. The overgrown vines hid me from view as I worked, clearing another section of the garden inch by stubborn inch.
Eamon had left for Esther’s as soon as Margaret arrived, and I’d caught her watching me out the window more than once.
Even now, decades before I’d know her, she couldn’t hide that concern on her face.
I’d known for days that this wasn’t a dream, but that morning had been the first time I’d felt like what I was doing here was actually dangerous. Nathaniel Rutherford’s murder happened only a couple of weeks before I left, the same day as the Midsummer Faire. I hadn’t put that part of the timeline together before and judging by Eamon’s reaction in the kitchen that morning, I had to question whether it was a coincidence.
What would have happened if I’d been questioned by the sheriff, unable to account for anything he knew to be true about me? Jasper was the kind of town where you couldn’t hide things. It was too easy to unearth them when you knew so much about everyone. And people talked. You could always count on that.
I’d walked the edge of the field for more than an hour after Eamon left the house, scouring the horizon for any sign of the door. I counted back to the time I’d seen it in the churchyard and then tried to remember the time before that. I needed a pattern. A sequence that I could dissect in order to make some kind of prediction. But if recording my episodes had taught me anything, it was that they seemed to be completely random.
The locket watch around my neck was growing heavier by the day, a tightening noose that felt more and more like a ticking clock. Esther had been sure that the door would reappear, and Eamon was sure that the last time I’d left, I’d walked through it. That I’d gone back home, to my time, where Birdie, the house on Bishop Street, and Mason waited.
Every time I thought about Mason, my heart twisted. He’d be frantic by now, doing whatever he could to find me. If it had come out that I’d been going to see Dr. Jennings, the sheriff would likely determine that I was unwell, and that my condition was linked to my disappearance. They would draw connections between me and Susanna, maybe even before I was officially designated as a missing person. My name, description, and photo would be sent to neighboring counties, but I knew what most people would say. That what had happened to my mother had happened to me. That the madness was to blame.
I raked my hands through the soil as I kneeled in the garden.
There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky or even a hint of a breeze, making my hair stick to my face and neck. I didn’t care, digging until the muscles in my arms were weak. I ignored the ache in my hands and the beginnings of a sunburn cresting my cheeks. The inside of my head was a maze, one I couldn’t find my way out of. And the more I tried to escape, the more lost I was becoming.
My hands stilled around a newly unearthed tomato plant when I felt the soft whisper of someone’s gaze on me. I looked
over my shoulder to see Annie watching from the makeshift fence. Her small hands were curled around the wood planks, her brown eyes blinking at me over the top of the railing.
I pulled off my gloves, wiping my damp forehead with the sleeve of my shirt. “Hi.” There was that pathetic word again.
She waited a moment before she came through the gate.
Eamon had gotten her dressed in a little green jumper and white collared shirt that made her blond hair appear even paler.
She didn’t seem wary of me, exactly, but she was definitely curious. Her gaze roamed over the half-cleared garden before finding me.
We stared at each other, and that feeling woke in me again —like the tug of the river pulling me downstream. A tide of memories was there, dammed in my mind by something I couldn’t see. It was too far out of reach.
I waited for her to come closer, but her feet didn’t move. I looked around until I spotted a golden cherry tomato hiding in the leaves. I fished it out, plucking it from the vine and holding it out to her. It was warm, the ripened flesh soft between my fingers, and her eyes brightened before she finally stepped forward. Carefully, she took it from me. Then she turned the tomato around, inspecting it, before she popped it into her mouth.
A smile broke on my lips. She settled down on the ground beside me, sinking her knees into the sun-warmed soil, feet tucked beneath her bottom. The edge of her skirt touched my leg, and I felt myself lean toward her. We were only inches apart.
I sat there, studying her face, her hands, the color of her hair. Those embers of memory were glowing now, and I was terrified of the moment they would reignite, like they’d burn all of me down if they could.
She was studying me, too, and I wondered if she was comparing me to her faded recollection of the mother she knew. I wasn’t sure what Eamon had told her about me or if Annie had even asked to begin with. I still hadn’t heard her speak a word, but I could see that same quietness about her that Margaret had mentioned in Eamon. The two were cut from the same cloth in countenance, but in the look of her, Annie was more like me.
Her attention snagged on my throat before she reached up, almost impulsively, to draw the locket watch from the collar of my shirt. I sat very still as she took it into her hands, turning it over so that the sunlight hit its surface.
She inspected it, more focused than what I imagined was natural for a four-year-old girl. Almost as if she could sense that it wasn’t just a trinket. I remembered feeling like that, too, opening and closing the locket in a compulsive rhythm as I sat on Gran’s lap. She’d sing that song I loved…what was it? The words wouldn’t quite come to me now, but the broken melody was there, like a badly tuned radio cutting in and out of the silence.
The one place I hadn’t let my mind wander was to the thought that if this child was mine, that meant she was a Farrow. And if she was a Farrow, we shared a fate that ran in the blood. It flowed through her veins like it flowed through mine. One day, she would be like Susanna and the rest of us, with a mind frayed between time.
I swallowed against the thick emotion curling in my throat, the question bearing down on top of me until I could hardly draw breath. How could I have done it? This perfect creature would wither and fade, and it occurred to me all at once that maybe that’s exactly why I had left. Maybe I was afraid to watch the consequences unfold. Maybe I’d been running from this, from her, when I went back through that door.
Annie snapped the locket closed, looking up at me, and her gaze took me in. There was a calm intensity behind her eyes, giving me the sense that she knew what I was thinking. Or, at least, that she could feel what I was feeling. I hoped that wasn’t true.
“Annie.” My voice was strangled as I said her name. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to know if she knew, really knew who I was. “Annie, do you—”
The sound of a truck made both of us turn our attention to the road, where Eamon was pulling in, tires cracking on gravel. The locket slipped from Annie’s fingers as she sprung up, pushing back through the gate and running toward him.
The hollow space she left beside me was palpable in the air.
She was in Eamon’s arms seconds later, and I got to my feet, tucking the locket watch back into my shirt. It stung where it brushed my skin, as if Annie’s touch had electrified it somehow.
Margaret came down the porch steps. The thought hadn’t occurred to me until just then that she had most likely been waiting for Eamon to return before she left. I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t trust me with Annie, either.
She kissed Annie, exchanging a few words with Eamon, and though they didn’t look in my direction, I could feel the weight of their attention. Whatever they were discussing, it had to do with me. She waved before she climbed into Esther’s truck, and then she was gone.
Eamon walked toward me, his face turned toward Annie’s.
Her mouth moved around words I couldn’t hear, and I found myself concentrating hard, trying to comb the sound of her voice from the wind. I came through the gate, pulling the gloves from my hands. The distance Eamon had put between us earlier was still there, and I thought back to that morning, when he’d watched me in the kitchen. When he’d said it was
hard to look at me. There’d been an unraveling in that moment, one that had made me trust him. But the man who’d given me those gloves and the one who’d lied to me didn’t fit together in a way that made sense.
He set Annie down, meeting me halfway between the house and the fence. We stood there in silence for several seconds before he finally spoke.
“Esther will be by in the morning. She’ll be heading to town to drop off flowers for the Faire, and I think it would be a good idea if you go with her.”
I blinked, sure I wasn’t understanding him. “Into town?”
Annie crouched behind him, picking a cluster of dandelions and gathering them in a ragged bouquet.
“Caleb coming by means that people in town are doing more than talking. The longer you stay out of sight, the more they’ll be curious, and we can’t afford to have people paying too close attention.”
I glanced at the road behind him. I’d seen more than one neighbor slow down as they drove by, sometimes the same car multiple times a day. Only minutes after Caleb’s visit, Eamon had gone to see Esther, and this was what they’d decided.
Without me.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, that choked sound resurfacing despite my best efforts.
“You can’t just hide here. Caleb isn’t the last person who will knock on that door. Trust me.”
Trust me. Those were the same words written on the envelope that had convinced me to walk through the door in the first place. At the time I’d thought they were the words of my mother. Now, I wondered if they were mine.
I shook my head. “I can’t. What if someone talks to me?
What if I say something wrong?”
“You won’t.”
“Eamon—”
“Look, this town has been waiting for its chance to avenge Nathaniel Rutherford. You don’t want to know what can happen if they think they can get it here, at my door. In a place like this, no one is going to stop them, do you understand? No one is going to come to our rescue.”
I winced, bristling at the fierceness of his tone.
“First, it’s a knock on the door; then, it’s a fire in the barn. It doesn’t stop there, June. If you’re here tomorrow, you’re going to town with Esther. You’ll make an appearance, and we’ll show them we have nothing to hide.”
His voice held a finality that said he was done talking about it, and before I could argue, he started for the barn. That was what had been in his expression that morning, when he’d looked to the rifle hanging on the wall. He wasn’t just afraid of the sheriff, he was afraid of what Jasper was capable of. And what he was implying was that there was more than one person in town who wanted to know what I knew about the night Nathaniel died.
As soon as he was through the door, he started on the smoking rig, lifting the lid off one of the aluminum bins and scooping what looked like wood shavings into the canisters suspended at either end of the dowel.
I didn’t know if Eamon was used to giving me orders, or if he was just scared enough that he wasn’t going to give me the option of refusing. I had a feeling it was the latter. He was a man on the verge of coming apart. That was obvious now.
He’d already lost his wife, and at any moment, he could lose his home, his farm, his livelihood.
I looked up to the sun, now falling from the center of the sky. He was getting a late start on the fields, which meant he’d be working late into the night. Much too late if he was going to get any amount of sleep.
“Let me help you, Eamon,” I called out.
He ignored me, striking a match and sinking low to light the canister at his feet.
I sighed, shoving the gloves into my back pocket. If he was stubborn enough to do the job of three men on his own every day, then I wasn’t going to convince him. I don’t know why I was trying to help in the first place.
I stalked toward the house, where the chimney was smoking, the curtains fluttering behind the open windows. The kitchen smelled like pot roast when I came inside, and I stopped when I saw the trimmed carrot tops on the butcher block. They were cut bluntly at the base and stuck into a jar of water.
Gran had always done that, never wanting to waste anything. She’d save the tops to sauté with greens or to chop and cook into a meatloaf. Whatever was left was tossed out for the chickens, but until then, they sat like a wild bouquet of greenery in the window above the sink.
I could see her barefoot in our kitchen, hear her humming that song. What was it called? It was on the tip of my tongue, the very edge of my thoughts. But every time I tried to bring it into focus, it only blurred, floating farther away from me.
Gooseflesh snaked up and around my entire body, like the trail of a flame. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall it.
Second by second, more of it vanished. The bits of melody, the words…it was all slowly disintegrating.
I knew it. I’d known that song my whole life, heard her sing it countless times. So, why couldn’t I remember?
