George asked the question once more. At last Caleb told him what August had done.
CHAPTER 16
As night fell, George heated water for a bath. He asked Isabelle to let him know if Prentiss left the barn, if Caleb emerged from his room （where he had been since their conversation concluded）， or if the sheriff arrived. She sat in the dining room, following his wishes. She knew Caleb would not come downstairs, seeing as he had refused to open his door for over an hour. It was deathly quiet. Every creak of the house or whine of the wind brought her to attention, but not a soul appeared. She was growing restless when George called out her name from the bathroom.
“Yes?” she said, walking over.
“Could you come closer to the door, so we might speak?”
She retrieved a chair from the kitchen table and put it beside the door.
“Are you there?” he asked.
“I’m here. But I cannot see outside from my seat, George.”
He let it pass unremarked.
“I suppose everyone is asleep,” she said. “It’s quite late.”
There was no light except the candle on the windowsill. She found the shadows of the house, each specific slant of darkness, intensely familiar: they fell upon the living room like patterned echoes of the furniture, as if the night, in conversation with her designs, was offering its own interpretation.
“We will need a coffin,” George said.
She opened the door slightly. A candle was lit there, too, yet the room was still lost to the steam of the bath. She could make out only the sodden strands of George’s hair and the slope of his shoulders before his body merged with the lip of the tub.
“It should be sweet birch,” she said. “It has a hint of wintergreen but…stronger notes. Bolder. I think of peppermint.”
“Peppermint?” George said.
She turned away from him, back toward the shadows.
“I know it sounds silly. But my uncle was buried in a birch casket. They delivered it while he was still alive. Seems odd, doesn’t it? But my aunt was nothing if not prepared. She had it stored in the cellar while he was expiring upstairs. Silas and I went down there to see it, and it had the most delightful smell. Bear in mind the cellar was perhaps the most odious place on their entire property. I recall having Silas take the top off so I could lie in it. It was roomy, all in all. He objected to putting the top on while I was still inside, but eventually he did, and I lay there in silence, alone with myself. It was peculiar. The inside smelled like nothing. As if they had somehow managed to keep the scent on the outside of the coffin. Which I don’t find possible.”
“You were grieving,” George said after a time. “Perhaps there was no smell at all. Inside or out.”
His voice was muffled by the door and so she entered the bathroom. The room swirled with the steam of the bath, great clouds of heat. She placed her chair a few feet behind him and then came forward, grabbed George’s towel, and dabbed her face before dropping it back on the stool at his side. After a pause she grabbed it once more, refolded it properly, and placed it there again.
“Will you tell Prentiss?” she asked.
George sank lower into the tub. He’d told her what Caleb had confessed. There were so many horrific elements to the tale that she had trouble separating her emotions: those toward her son, and those toward Prentiss for what had befallen Landry. Not to mention her hatred of the Weblers, long suppressed but now overpowering.
“What do you think?” George asked. “What should we do?”
She could not recall a time in recent memory when he had asked her opinion on anything of such significance. The shallowest part of her took it as a weakness—as if her husband, in his increasing frailty, now had to look to his wife for help in ways he never had before. Yet the truest part of her relished his need for her.
“You must tell him,” she said. “Any omission of truth would only injure him further.”
“Yet if he was to seek revenge…”
“We must do our best to deter him from any such inclination. Perhaps you wait a time to tell him. Let the anger subside.”
“No more than a day.”
“Any longer would be wrong,” she agreed. “And what of the sheriff?”
George said he believed that Osborne, who had a spine, unlike most everyone else in the county, was levelheaded enough to take this seriously. He wanted to do all he could to avoid involving the army, given that the town hated them enough already without them proclaiming their allegiance to the other side once and for all.