Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 33

Trey uncrossed his arms and shoved his hands in his pockets. The reflection of the Coke logo from the illuminated vending machine flashed across the aquamarine blue of his eyes—the very same shade as Violet's.

"There's a garden at my grandmother's house. I mean, my house, the one where we live now. Ever since I was a little girl I can remember her tending to it in the morning whenever I was visiting her. The estate is enormous, so naturally she had a landscaping service, too, but there's one patch of the yard in the back, just outside the kitchen window, that was hers. It never occurred to me to wonder what she grew back there. I guess I always just thought that keeping a garden was a pretty typical thing for an old lady to do. But that's where I was wrong. This garden wasn't exactly typical, and her reason for planting it wasn't typical, either."

"My grandmother was an herbalist. She believed that consuming certain kinds of herbs, in particular amounts, particular mixtures, had health benefits. And..." Violet trailed off, daring to look over at me, "That some of them could be used for other purposes."

"Like witchcraft," I blurted out.

"No, no, no," Violet was quick to insist. "More like... influence decisions. To see things more clearly. Like, she used to keep small sachets of dried parsley around the house to ensure luck with money. Just the stuff of old wives' tales. Anyhow, when my parents got married, my mother had just graduated from law school and wanted to have kids young so that she could resume her law career before she got older. But she had a miscarriage. She's told me all of this herself; she was so miserable about losing her baby that she wanted to die, too. Then she had another miscarriage. She practically had a nervous breakdown and had to take a leave of absence from her law firm. My father wanted her to take a break from trying to get pregnant and just focus on her own physical health for a while, but it had become almost an obsession for her. She insisted that they go to every fertility specialist in Chicago. They even visited an expert in Boston. Every doctor she saw told her the same thing: there didn't appear to be any physical reason why she couldn't carry a baby to term."

"They went back to Weeping Willow to stay with my grandmother over a long weekend, and my grandmother told my mom that she was going to prepare some special herbs for her to take home that would help ease her nerves. But my mom got it into her head that my grandmother was some kind of witch, and that she had put some kind of a hex on her to keep her from having a child."

I was becoming supremely spooked out listening to Violet tell this story... especially because I'd been in that house. I'd baked cupcakes with Violet in that kitchen, the one that allegedly overlooked the garden. The ice blue eyes of Violet's grandmother had stared down upon me from the oil painting of the Simmons family that hung in the mansion's grand parlor.

"Now of course that was total crazy talk. My grandmother was just as eager to become a grandma as my mom was to have a baby. But my mom wasn't entirely in her right mind at that point both from grief and fear that she'd never become a mother. She made my father promise that they wouldn't visit her anymore, and my father reluctantly agreed. Meanwhile, my mother had a third miscarriage. Her doctor warned her that she really needed to give her body a rest because it was becoming dangerous for her to even try to carry another baby. All of this preoccupation with babies had put some serious stress on my parents' relationship. My dad told me that he wanted to go back to school to get his MBA and increase his earning potential, but honestly, I think he started teaching at the University of Chicago just to get away from my mother a few nights a week."

Trey shrugged. We were getting close to the part of the story that he and I already knew. "I already know about your dad and my mom. That's old news."

Henry's head snapped in my direction. "What is he talking about?"

I felt a small twinge of regret that we hadn't filled him in on the small detail of Trey's relationship to Violet. It had crossed my mind, but considering that Violet's first kill in Weeping Willow had been Henry's beloved sister, I didn't think the news would be too well received. "Just... let her keep telling it her way," I said.