A woman answered. There was the sound of a TV blaring in the background. “Hello?”
Sherry swallowed. “Linda? This is Sherry.”
Part of Sherry expected her to say,Wrong number. Shehopedfor it. Instead, she said, “Sherry?God, it’s been years. How are you?Whereare you? I heard that you moved to New York City.”
It was like getting into a time machine. Linda’s voice had barely changed, the same warm smoker’s rasp. “I did, for a while,” Sherry said. “Then I left.” The city had been awful. She’d never been the sort of woman who stood out, but the city had made her more invisible than she’d ever been. Men kept walking straight into her on the street. She’d wanted to live somewhere where she wouldn’t be looked through with the same blank-faced not-quite hostility that she’d seen directed at a gentleman ostentatiously playing the panpipes on the subway platform. “It wasn’t for me,” she said. “I’m upstate now. Up in the Adirondacks.”
“Upstate,” Linda said, in the same way she might have saidTokyo. Linda, as far as Sherry knew, had never been farther north than Tallahassee. “Is it freezing?”
An unpleasant part of Sherry was tempted to say something like,No, it’s sweltering. I’m wearing shorts on the piazza right now.“It was just about freezing today,” she said instead. “It’s warming up. Last month it got down to twenty below.”
“What does thatfeellike?” Linda asked, and Sherry found herself unable to resist trying to describe it: how she had to wear tights underneath her pants to keep her thighs from going numb, and the essential nature of thick socks, and how on really cold mornings she had to cover her face so that the snot wouldn’t freeze inside her nose. She’d never had the chance to explain her new world to someone from back home before.She’d made too clean a break. It felt better than she’d imagined it would.
Eventually, though, Sherry had to bring things around to her reason for having called. “I was hoping to get back in touch with Caroline,” she said. “Do you have any contact information for her?”
Linda didn’t say anything for a while. There was just the sound of the television in the background. A sitcom laugh track. “Maybe she doesn’t want you to talk to her,” she said finally. “If she didn’t give you her number herself.”
“She couldn’t have,” Sherry said patiently. “I moved just after she…left. Remember? I don’t know where she is, but she doesn’t know where I am, either.” She frowned into the phone. An issue had just occurred to her. “Doyouknow where she is?”
“I’m hersister, Sherry,” Linda said, as if she was offended. Then she abruptly changed her tone. “Aw, Christ, you knowCaroline. She won’t tell me. I think it might be Costa Rica, though. Her plane was headed for Mexico, but I don’t think she’d stay there with the authorities knowing she’d been there. She used to talk about wanting to go to Costa Rica.”
It was jarring hearing Linda so casually mention the authorities in regard to Caroline. Their two brothers and most of Linda’s boyfriends over the years had all had their run-ins with the law, but Caroline had always been the good daughter, the one who’d done everything right, up until the day she’d done absolutely everything wrong. “Costa Rica,” Sherry repeated. “I remember that, too.” It had been one of the things that had made her and Caroline friends: their fondness for shared daydreams about travel. When they were still in high school, they’d made dream collages from pictures they’d cutout of magazines, mostly pictures of gorgeous models posing in front of famous monuments or on romantic cobblestoned European streets. Costa Rica had come later, from TV nature documentaries. Caroline had wanted to see a howler monkey. Even after everything, part of Sherry was glad to think that Caroline had really, finally gotten away to somewhere better. Maybe she was drinking a cocktail on a beach somewhere right now, with howler monkeys crying out from the jungle just behind her. She cleared her throat. “You’re in contact with her, though?”
There was a sudden crackling sound from Linda sighing into the receiver. “I have a number for her,” she said. “It changes pretty often. I have to wait for her to call me first. Then when she calls, she always lets it ring three times and then hangs up, so I know it’s not a telemarketer and pick up the next time.”
“Wow,” Sherry said, impressed despite herself. “Like James Bond.”
“I know,” Linda said, sounding as if she was possibly a little more impressed than she’d admit, too. “It’s just like Caroline, isn’t it? She was always something else.”
Sherry made an agreeable noise. Caroline was certainlysomething. “Could you tell me the number? It sounds like with all of the spycraft I won’t be able to learn much about where she lives from it, anyway. And she could always choose to ignore the message, if she doesn’t want to speak to me. I promise not to harass her. I just want to talk to her about something, that’s all.”
Linda hesitated for a second. “Do you have a pen?”
Sherry did. Linda rattled off a number. Sherry wrote it down, then had her repeat it, just in case. She had the feeling that if she called back and asked for it again, she might get adifferent answer. Linda had always been prone to sudden shifts in mood. It had made her exciting to be around when they were teenagers, especially with the air of glamor and sophistication that had come from her having been learning to be a hairdresser while Sherry and Caroline were still in high school. “You should come up for a visit sometime,” she said spontaneously. “Escape the heat this summer. Or sometime around the holidays. You could see the snow. I have plenty of space here.”
The pause before Linda responded told Sherry the answer in advance. “That’s nice of you, Sherry,” she said. “Maybe I will.” She wouldn’t, of course. “It was good to hear from you.” She would probably never call Sherry back.
“It was good to hear from you, too,” Sherry said. Then she wished Linda good night and hung up.
Thirteen
The call with Linda left Sherry feeling strangely drained of energy. She knew that she should do what she’d set out to do and call Caroline. Instead, she pulled the yew branch out of her coat pocket and turned it around in her hands. It didn’t have the same air of menace in the warm light of her living room. Still, there was something about it.
She got the salt and poured a circle, like Lord Thomas had made her do the last time. Then she looked around for her cat. There was no sign of him. Of course there wasn’t. He was a cat, and she wanted to find him, so obviously he was nowhere to be found. “Lord Thomas?” she said aloud, feeling, as ever, self-conscious over the fact that she was speaking to her cat. “Lord Thomas Cromwell?”
A moment later a little orange head pushed itself out from under the sofa. “May I be of some assistance, Mistress Pinkwhistle?”
She smiled. She couldn’t help it. “What were you doing under the sofa, Lord Thomas?”
“I was at my repose,” the cat said with enormous dignity. “And I cannot cross your circle. You must lift me inside.”
She picked him up, avoiding eye contact—she felt suddenly, strangely aware of the fact that her cat wasn’t wearing pants—and set him quickly down again inside the circle of salt. He sat on his little haunches, his tail neatly curled around his front toes, and looked up at her. “You have need of me?”
“Y-es,” she said, though she felt uncertain now. “I was just wondering about this.” She gestured vaguely with her yew branch, feeling sillier than ever. “I was wondering—I don’t know. I think that maybe it hasresonances? But I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next.”
“You may not know,” the cat said. “But your hands are sure even as your mind is uncertain.”
“My hands?” Sherry asked, and looked down at the appendages in question. They looked normal. It took her a second to realize what he meant: she’d been fiddling with the branch, nervously stripping off the twigs and needles to turn it into a stick. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I’m just…fidgeting.”
