The Probable Future

“Well, evidently he can. He must have plowed a lot of snow.”

They both laughed at the notion of Matt driving through their snowbound hometown, then fell silent. Jenny felt their real worry settle down between them. “We can keep this from Stella. There’s no reason for her to know.”

“Uh uh. That won’t work. It will be in the newspapers. Hell, it’s probably already in the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. There’s no hiding it from her, Jen.”

“Then you tell me right now. Tell me the truth for once in your life.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire. What velvet tale can you tell? What foolish heart can you break? What shameful alibi can you concoct?

“I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t.”

Jenny studied him carefully because he really was good at deceit. He could tell her it was raining as they stood béneath a blue sky and she would be convinced she would soon be drenched, through and through. After all these years, she hadn’t a clue as to whether or not she could trust him.

“I did make the report. That much is true,” Will admitted. “But I did it because I promised Stella I would.”

“Oh, so now it’s Stella’s fault.”

He told Jenny what had happened that night, how Stella had confided in him on her birthday, how she’d begged him to report the murder she imagined would soon take place. Now Jenny understood, this was the aptitude that had been visited on Stella when she turned thirteen. This was her talent. An eye for death, an ability to read the human timetable; a nightmare of a gift. And she’d turned to Will, that was the thing; she’d confided in her father, not in Jenny. She had trusted him.

Jenny couldn’t help but think of Rebecca Sparrow and all her sorrows. She had found a portrait of Rebecca once, a miniature, perhaps a study for the larger painting that hung in the library. The miniature had been wrapped in water-stained silk and forgotten. Jenny would have never seen it if she hadn’t happened upon it as she searched through a cluttered cabinet for a gravy boat. She brought the treasure out to the shed, untied the silk, and found a girl with long black hair who looked as though she’d been crying. A girl who resembled Jenny enough to make her start. It was as though some of her own traits had been captured in paint three hundred years before she’d been born.

Rebecca Sparrow had been taken in by the washerwoman who lived by the lake, taught how to cut up frozen potatoes for starch with which to set collars and cuffs, worked hard, until her hands bled. She’d been instructed that a frog in the wash water brought luck, and had quickly learned that a washerwoman’s hands looked ten years older than her natural age. Every blister was a token of the life she’d led. Every burn, a document to her courage.

When Rebecca was barely thirteen, the old woman who had taken her in died suddenly. Rebecca herself then became the washerwoman. It was her fate and her duty; it was all she knew. She built a second shed in the woods, for making soap out of ashes and grease was a nasty, smoky business; there needed to be some distance between the laundry house and the place where Rebecca slept. Rebecca’s feet would turn green as she took the path where nothing grew these days, but where there once had been wild ginger and bloodroot and masses of wood violets. Jenny had always wondered if the portrait she’d found—which she guessed must have been given in exchange for laundry done—had been painted before or after Rebecca’s thirteenth birthday. Rebecca was too beautiful to be bound in silk and left in a drawer, trapped in a frame carved from ash. This was a tree that no longer grew in Unity; it had been cut down so extensively by the first settlers that it disappeared from the county completely. Jenny decided to keep the portrait in the soap shed, where she felt it belonged, where she imagined it must have hung on a nail so many years earlier. Jenny, who’d had something of a talent for painting, then began to create her own miniatures on tiny bits of canvas or wood, using a brush that contained a single horse’s hair and a magnifying glass she found in her father’s desk drawer.

The soap shed was the meeting spot that Jenny and Will chose when Elinor forbade them to see each other. Before long, their desire had mixed with the scent of harsh soap that still clung to the air. The windows had no glass and never had; Rebecca hadn’t even bothered with oil-soaked paper, she’d wanted the fresh air. Still, the shed was easily warmed by the fires Will set in the enormous hearth where Rebecca’s pots of boiling laundry had once been attached to the iron bar which swung out from the bricks. It was one of those fires that nearly destroyed the shed back when Will and Jenny were teenagers. They had stayed all night in the laundry shed, and Will had lingered after Jenny had slipped back to Cake House to get dressed. Later that morning, from her classroom at the Unity High School, Jenny had looked out the window of her earth science class and had spied smoke. Right away, she guessed what had happened. Fire stations from three neighboring towns were called in, along with the Unity division, which some people say was founded by Leonie Sparrow, who could take burning-hot bread from the oven bare-handed and walk through fire without being scorched.