I stand up before our words tear apart the fragile air between us. Before he demands truths I can’t give. I never should have asked him why he came to Sparrow, unless I was willing to give up something of myself. Otis blinks at me from the gray cushion, stirred by my movement. I walk past Bo to the door, and for a moment I think he’s going to reach out for me, to stop me, but he never actually touches me, and my heart wrenches. Spills onto the floor, seeps into the cracks between the wood boards.
A burst of bright morning sun pours into the cottage when I open the door. Otis and Olga don’t even attempt to follow me. But before I can pull the door closed behind me, I hear something in the distance, beyond the edges of the island. There is no wind to carry it across the water, but the stillness makes it audible.
The bell at the marina in Sparrow is ringing.
A second body has been found.
TAVERN
The Swan sisters were never ordinary, even at birth.
All three were born on June first, exactly one year apart. First Marguerite, then came Aurora a year later, and Hazel the year after that. They did not share the same father, yet fate would bring them into this world on precisely the same day. Their mother had said they were destined for one another, bound by the stars to be sisters.
And so upon their birthday, during their first year in Sparrow, they closed up their shop early and strode down to the White Horse Inn and Tavern. They ordered pints and a bottle of brandy wine. The liquid was dark and red and bittersweet, and they passed it among them, drinking straight from the bottle. The men in the tavern shook their heads and whispered of the sisters’ boldness—women rarely entered the tavern, but the sisters were not like other women in town. They laughed and spilled wine onto the damp wood floor. They sang songs they had heard the fishermen bellow when heading out to sea, enticing the winds to be calm and kind. They tipped in their chairs. They toasted their mother, who they hardly remembered now, for bringing them into this world, one year apart from each other, but on precisely the same day.
The moon shone bright over the harbor, and the whale-oil lamps flickered from atop each table inside the tavern. Marguerite stood from her chair, scanning the musty room filled with fishermen and farmers and seamen who would be here for only a week or two before they set out again. She grinned, eyeing them with the heat of booze in her cheeks. “They all think we’re witches,” she hissed down to her sisters, waving the bottle of brandy wine around the room. The rumors had been seething through town for months, suspicion rooting itself in the framework of homes along the seaport, passing from lips to ears until each tale became more vile than the last. The people of Sparrow had begun to hate the sisters.
“Yes, witches.” Aurora laughed. She tilted her head back and nearly toppled from her chair.
“No, they don’t,” Hazel protested, frowning.
But Aurora and Marguerite laughed even harder, for they knew what their youngest sister didn’t want to believe: that the entire town had already decided they were witches. A coven of three sisters, come to Sparrow to unleash treachery and ill deeds.
“You all think we are witches, yes?” Marguerite shouted.
The men seated at the bar turned to look. The barkeep set down the bottle of whiskey in his hand. But no one answered her.
“Then I hex you all,” she announced, still smiling, lips ruddy from the wine. She circled a finger in the air then pointed it at a man seated at a nearby table. “You will grow a beard made of sea snakes.” She roared with laughter then swayed her finger to a man leaning against the wall. “You will trip and fall on your way home tonight, hit your head, and see your future death.” Her eyes, it would be said later, seemed alight with fire, like she was casting spells from an inferno that would burn alive anyone caught in her stare. “You will marry a mermaid,” she told another man. “You will taste fish, no matter what you eat, for the rest of your life,” she said to a man hunched over the bar. And as Marguerite’s finger waved around the room, calling out imaginary spells, the men began to flee, certain her hexes would come true. Aurora laughed from deep within her belly, watching her sister frighten even the toughest men in Sparrow. But Hazel, horrified by the looks on the men’s faces, grabbed her sisters and dragged them from the tavern as Marguerite continued to shout nonsense into the salty night air.
Once outside, the three sisters locked arms and even Hazel laughed as they staggered up Ocean Avenue, past the docks, to the small living space they shared behind the perfumery. “You can’t do that,” Hazel said through her laughter. “They’ll think us real witches.”
“They already do, my sweet sister,” Aurora told her.
“They just don’t understand us,” Hazel offered, and Marguerite kissed her on the cheek.
“Believe what you want,” Marguerite murmured, tilting her head to the starry sky, to the moon, which seemed to await her command. “But one day they will come for us.” They all fell silent, the wind brushing through their hair, making it weightless. “But until then, we drink.” She still had the bottle of wine and they passed it among them, letting the constellations guide them home.
Later, when Arthur Helm hit his head, he swore he saw his death as Marguerite predicted. Even though he didn’t actually fall on his way home from the tavern—he was struck in the jaw by his plow horse a week later—the town still believed Marguerite had caused it. And when Murrey Coats married a woman with long ribbons of hair the color of wheat, people said she was once a mermaid he had caught in his fishing net—proof of Marguerite’s spell coming true.
Four weeks later, on the summer solstice of 1823—a day chosen by the townspeople because a solstice was said to guarantee a witch’s death—the three sisters were drowned for their accused witchery. Marguerite was the oldest at nineteen on the day of her death, Aurora eighteen, Hazel seventeen.
Born on the same day. Died on the same day.
NINE
Bo appears behind me in the doorway just as the tolling bell from across the harbor begins to fade. “Another one?” he asks, hand lifted as if he could see out over the water all the way to the docks.
“Another one.”
He sidesteps around me, his shoulder grazing mine, then starts down the path.
“Where are you going?”
“Town,” he answers.
“You’re safer here,” I call after him, but he doesn’t stop. I have no choice but to follow—I can’t let him go alone. Marguerite is in the body of Olivia Greene. And this latest kill is likely Aurora’s. But I haven’t seen her yet—don’t yet know whose body she has stolen. So when Bo reaches the skiff, I climb in after him and start the motor.
A cluster of boats have gathered in the harbor just offshore from Coppers Beach.
I can’t see the body from this distance, but I know there must be one, newly discovered, floating, being pulled aboard one of the boats—so we motor over to the marina, Bo’s face hardened against the blustery wind.
We dock the skiff, and see that a crowd has already assembled on Ocean Avenue awaiting the return of the harbor police boats, cameras ready. There are signs at the top of the marina that read: DOCK MEMBERS ONLY, NO TOURISTS ALLOWED. But there are always people who ignore the signs and tromp down to the docks anyway, especially after the bell has been rung.