each others’ shoulders, circus-like, and unbolt the door? Or did I go sleepwalking and open it myself?”
“I really don’t know, ma’am.”
“Perhaps your ‘lost man’ left it open to spite you, then.”
She felt, before the words even left her tongue, the cruelty of conjuring this particular apparition. But it was too late now. She was rewarded with having to watch Josie’s face tighten into a rictus of misery. “I beg your pardon, ma’am—but it’s just plain wrong to hoot at the other living.”
An uneasy silence lengthened out. “I only mean to say: this is not an act of Providence, Josie. The door was left unlocked.”
Toby was crouching over the dead bird—a windhover, perhaps, or some other insubstantial raptor—so close that his nose might brush at any moment against its dry, flattened skull.
“Leave off that thing.”
“Don’t you think it’s some sort of omen, Mama?”
“Certainly—of our worsening prospects.” There was a crust of something in her hair, just above the nape of her neck, and she scratched at it until her nails came away pink. “That was the very end of our supply. Josie—do you understand?”
At last, Josie did. You could always tell a Damascus moment was upon her when her hands went to her forehead. “Almighty God, Missus Lark—the water! I am just that sorry.”
Now commenced a drawn-out treatise, of which Nora absorbed very little. She was thinking gloomily of the depleted kitchen bucket. She was thinking, too, suddenly and viscerally, of her mother, and the gusto with which Ellen Francis Volk had committed herself to the thrashing of servant girls. Whatever solace her mother seemed to find in throwing these sapling women over her knee had mystified Nora—until now. Now, she understood perfectly that her mother’s rage—a twisting, gasping, biting thing, indigenous to the Reilly women of her maternal line—must have loosened a little as the girls’ bare bottoms and her own hand turned the same blistering shade of red. Nora could well imagine herself in the teeth of that impulse. But she could remember, too clearly, witnessing this punishment, feeling her own face tickle until it had contorted into a kind of hysterical awe, laughing and crying in simultaneous horror of the executioner and sympathy for the condemned. None of that could happen here—not with Toby standing by, pretending to study the ground but listening, all the while, to every detail of Josie’s protestation. Which was winding down now, thank God, for Josie seemed to have got herself into a knot. “What I mean, ma’am, is that I can’t imagine how I could have left it open, since I remember my own hand on the latch. I do. But—if I did ma’am, if that happened to happen, I am that sorry. I suppose you’d be right in telling me that I should have gone out to make certain, but I didn’t think of it. And even if I’d thought of it—well—I doubt you would’ve let me, ma’am.”
Let her? Nora didn’t understand. “Why on earth not?”
“Well—it had fallen dark.”
“And?” She glanced back at the house. It was, at most, thirty yards. Hardly the Panama crossing. She turned around just in time to catch a guilty exchange of glances between her youngest and her ward disintegrating like the tail of a comet. “Why wouldn’t I let you, Josie?”
“Well, ma’am,” Josie said. “On account of the beast.”
AT THE TOP OF THE drive, nora found herself turning to look right down the empty road. An old habit, frustratingly revived since the Floreses’ flight had made the Lark place, once more, the northernmost habitation for miles. The last known point before the page went blank. Then she spurred old Bill left and rode toward town along the canyon road. It was just coming on fall, and the valley was making a brilliant spectacle of its own death. Yellow detonations stood like signal fires above the subducted creeks where the cottonwoods, at least, had managed to find water.
Toby had vowed to have the springhouse righted by the time she returned, and Nora had left it at that. It was enough for now—any further sanctioning would fall to Emmett, who could always be counted on to mete out the crushing blow of his disappointment. Nora would stay out of it. She had gone too far already in barbing Josie about the lost man—though she would not, now or later, be cowed into making amends for having done so, no matter how the boys felt about it. The most recent of Josie’s apparitions, the lost man