“Kylie is confused.” Antonia gazed at the photograph of her sister as cars raced past on the highway. The baby was moving inside of her and she felt so comforted whenever that happened. “Let her know where you are so she can find you,” Antonia told her mother. “Bake an apple pie and put it in the window.”
“Here? We’re at an inn. Why a pie?”
“It’s Jet’s advice. The Reverend told me. I made one myself, and she phoned me less than an hour later.”
“You’re seeing the Reverend?”
It was ridiculous for Antonia to have such affection for the old man who had caused so much trouble for Jet long ago. Why, she’d heard that long before Jet and Franny and Vincent ever came to the house on Magnolia Street, the Reverend had started a petition to keep members of the Owens family out of town. That didn’t at all seem like the benevolent geezer she visited, but then again, Antonia barely knew him. All the same, she hoped his pulse rate had gone down. “Jet told him about a Lost Daughter spell. Make the pie.”
When they hung up, Sally went down the hall and told her sister they had to bake a pie. Gillian slipped on her shoes and said, “What are we waiting for?”
No questions were asked. That was one of the many things Sally had come to appreciate about her sister, she didn’t have to know every detail before she jumped in to help. They went down to the kitchen in their nightgowns. There was a bin of apples, and a canister of flour in the cabinet, and pie plates in the bureau. Sally could make quite a good crust, she liked to add rosemary, and although the pub’s kitchen was basic, she found a good amount of that fragrant herb in a tin on the counter, along with cinnamon and nutmeg. When they cut up the apples, the flesh of the fruit turned from white to red, just as some roses do, with pale buds turning scarlet once fully opened. It was not an ordinary pie. It was baked with love to call a daughter home. They had tea while the pie baked, Courage, which Franny had brought along. When the cook came at daybreak, a fellow named Lester, he would be surprised to find them sitting there in their nightgowns, sharing a plate of buttered toast, with the pie already cooling on the windowsill so that people in the village awoke thinking they were young again, and many came outside in their nightclothes to stand in their gardens and watch the morning sky lighten, for it was a beautiful day, without a sign of the rain to come.
PART FIVE
The Book of Dreams
I.
Ian found an account of Hannah Owens’s trial in a cardboard box stored in Cat’s Library, a dismissive report sentencing her to jail for witchery. It was not yet six a.m. when he made his discovery, for he hadn’t waited for the library to officially open. He might have broken in, he knew it was easy enough to go through the bathroom window, accomplished as a teenaged thief when he snatched cash from the drawer beneath the circulation desk. Fortunately, there was no need to break in. The librarian, Mrs. Philips, a longtime acquaintance of his mother, had been phoned and politely asked if Ian could do a bit of research. Everyone in town knew he was constantly working on his book, not that anyone thought he would finish it, and it had come as quite a surprise to one and all when Margaret Wright announced that his book was to be published the following spring by Bradbury Press, a small American publisher in a town called Waukegan, Illinois, a place no one had ever heard of and that some people guessed was a figment of Margaret’s imagination, since she’d been through so much with that son of hers, who had turned out perfectly fine after all.
Since the librarian usually awoke at four a.m. anyway, to read in bed, she met Ian at the library with a coat thrown over her nightgown, unlocked the door, patted him on the shoulder and went back to bed with a pile of books, as per usual, allowing him to have the stacks to himself. In the town records, stored in the attic, Ian found what he wanted. Hannah Owens had been accused of all manner of evildoings by a witness who had testified that she spoke with Satan and had a tail like a common beast. She was a healer, unmarried, with no issue, all marks against her from the start. Her crimes were imaginary, but her punishment was not. And there was one aspect about Hannah that was quite unusual. Ian brought this information to the inn later in the morning for the Owens family to see. The air smelled sweet and reminded him of picking apples when he was a boy, the sweet-tasting variety called Witchery, a fruit that only grew out by Lockland Manor.