Page 33 of The Invisible Hour

“Mia has the deed and I want it,” Joel Davis announced.

Sarah forced herself to meet his gaze. She thought of all the harm he’d done and all the lives he’d set off course and suddenly she didn’t feel the least bit afraid. A man like Joel fed off fear and insecurity. “For your information, Mia doesn’t live here anymore, so you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“I know where she lives in New York, and I know she’ll come back here to visit you. Maybe I’ll just stay for a while. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind, Sarah.”

It was the fact that he said her name, as if he knew her, and had power over her, that set her off. There was no way she would allow herself to be at his mercy.

“I’m calling the police,” she announced. Sarah had already taken her phone out of the pocket of her skirt, and behind her back she had already punched in 911. There was a crackle as the police dispatcher answered. “I’m being robbed,” Sarah said loudly before announcing her address. “Come right away.”

“I’m the one who’s been robbed,” Joel said in response. All the same, now that the police were on their way, he had no choice but to leave. “You tell Mia I want it back and I intend to get it. I’ll find her here, or in New York, or wherever the hell she goes.” He gave Sarah a long look before he got into his truck and took off.

Sarah had been so rattled that she didn’t think to take down the license plate number. Afterward, she’d had a talk with the police, and they had contacted the authorities in Blackwell. That was how she’d discovered there had indeed been a court case, and Joel had lost. The police had come to claim the land and arrest him for setting fire to several of the buildings, but right before they arrived, Joel Davis disappeared into the woods. He would rather have the buildings burn than have the town take them, and on the night of the burning there was so much smoke that deer were seen racing down Route 17, and a bear was found on the town green, hidden behind the bushes.

“The Blackwell authorities said the farm is mostly deserted now,” Sarah told Mia. “Most of the younger people have left, and Joel is angry about that. Nobody listens to him anymore.”

The story hour that Constance used to lead now let out and children ran across the lawn carrying copies of Magic by the Lake.

“They questioned a woman who said she’d been the schoolteacher,” Sarah added.

Evangeline.

“Did they?” Mia nodded, not at all surprised that Evangeline would be among those who had stayed on the farm. The tattletale, always so jealous of Ivy, who always had to be second in command, the one they had fooled when Ivy took the slip of paper from Mia and had eaten it rather than let Evangeline have proof that rules had been broken.

“She said you stole the deed that proves he owns the property. She said she was there in the office when you did it, and that you were always sneaky.”

“I was,” Mia admitted.

“No, you weren’t.” Sarah was firm on this. “You were a survivor.” Sarah handed over a leather satchel she’d brought along. “I think it would be wise if you relocated from your apartment for a while. I wish you could stay here, but it’s the first place he’ll look. He could still be in Concord waiting for you to show up. I should have come to New York, but there was something here I knew you would want.”

Inside the bag Sarah had brought was Mia’s copy of The Scarlet Letter. Ivy’s letter was folded inside, along with the watercolor she’d found in the Community files and the pearls that had belonged to Constance, and the gold earrings that had been a birthday gift. All of her treasures.

“Evangeline was right about me. I stole this book from the library in Blackwell.” Mia was admitting this for the first time.

“I know. I found your keepsake box years ago.” Sarah patted Mia’s arm with affection. “If not returning a book to the library is the worst you ever do, dear girl, then you’re an angel. ‘Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now’,” she said, quoting Thoreau. “This is your now. A treasure is a treasure if you think it is. The book is your treasure, and Joel thinks you have his treasure as well.”

Mia recalled the day she had worked in the office and found Carrie’s painting, hidden in the back of the file cabinet. She now turned the painting over to read the inscription. I leave my husband everything, all of my land as far as the eye can see.

“I never knew what this meant, but I do now,” Mia told Sarah. “It’s the deed. It’s what he’s been looking for all this time.”

Sarah brought a small paper grocery sack out of her purse. “He left this in the driveway.” Inside the bag were a dozen Look-No-Further apples, not yet ripe.

There was one place where he would never find Mia, and that was the place she’d always wanted to be. Now that she considered it, she thought Elizabeth was wrong, and that a fish could live with a sparrow after all. They would be in different elements yet remain close, as far away as a leaf, or a whisper, or a kiss. If she could have Nathaniel for her own, Mia didn’t care if she remained at the edges of his life, in a cottage in the woods, hidden away and invisible. She would not freeze during a cold winter as the previous tenant had; she would not care if no one from town ever spoke to her. As for Nathaniel, he could still live as he was meant to, be married, have children, write his books, but every now and then he could be hers. She could tell Nathaniel all he must do to make certain he would live the life he was meant to have and write the books he would have written if she’d never returned. She would show him lines and chapters if need be; she would recite his own words to him.

Sarah clasped the pearls around Mia’s throat, and they embraced, but they didn’t prolong their farewell. Goodbyes were too final, and so they said nothing at all, as they had when they drove to Concord all those years ago, when they both knew that Mia would never return to Blackwell. They understood there were things that a person must forsake when she was running away.

Mia walked across town. It was still hot, but the season would soon change, and purple September asters were already blooming in the fields and yards. In a few brief weeks, summer would be over, the air would be crisp and cool, and out in Blackwell the leaves would turn red. Mia quickly made her way to the north side of town, where there was a bus stop outside Crosby’s market. She didn’t dare return to the cemetery for fear that Joel was still in town, but if she had reached Nathaniel in the place where he’d been buried, she believed she could reach him again at the house where he’d been born, and that was her destination now. She was going to Salem.

When the bus arrived, Mia stepped on and paid her fare, then made her way to the rear. Only a few other passengers followed her on, a woman with a baby, a boy of sixteen or so, a man who buried his face in his copy of the Boston Globe, two girls chatting about school. Mia sat down, and as the bus set off, she began to read Nathaniel’s book for comfort. She was reminded that nothing was written in stone, and that fate could change, and that not everyone who filled her pockets with river rocks drowned. After a while, Mia stowed the book in the leather satchel and looked out at the road. Concord already seemed like a dream to her, and her apartment in New York might as well have been on the moon. She would go as far as she needed and she would never be found. She would walk invisible into a world in which impossible things had happened and would most certainly happen again.

IN SALEM, MIA EXITED at Bridge Street. She heard the shrill cry of a child being comforted in his mother’s arms and a teenage boy calling out to the friends who were meeting him, but all she thought of was her own destination as she made her way along the twisting streets, turning onto Williams Street. Finally, there was Washington Square, framed by eighteenth-century mansions. The route then took her to the House of the Seven Gables at Derby Street. Mia had visited the museum with Constance when she was in school, but now as she approached, she felt a wave of fear. It was what she’d always felt when Joel was near, and she didn’t understand until she looked over her shoulder.

There was the man who had been reading the newspaper on the bus following a block behind her. She hadn’t bothered to look at him before, but now she recognized Joel. She was instantly chilled, as if he had arisen from the underworld and brought winter with him. She might be walking through drifts of snow, or skating on the blue ice of the river with Ivy, nearly invisible, but not quite. Joel hadn’t aged well, he looked shrunken and bitter, but she knew him all the same. That was when she took off running. Her breath was shallow in her chest as she raced on, desperate to keep as much distance between herself and Joel as possible.

The grand sea captain’s house at the front of the museum had been built in 1668 and was purchased in 1782 by Samuel Ingersoll, a wealthy, well-known sea captain himself. His daughter Susanna, a second cousin of Hawthorne’s, inherited the property, which was said to be haunted. Mia knew that Nathaniel had visited Miss Susanna frequently and that the stories she’d told of his ancestors’ greed when some members of his family did their best to take the house from her would later inspire his novel The House of the Seven Gables.

Nathaniel’s birthplace was modest by comparison; originally built in 1750 on Union Street, it had been moved in 1958 to what was now a museum campus. Nathaniel had been born in a room above the parlor, and had lived there for four years, until his father died at sea. The gardens outside the houses were comparatively new, having been laid out in 1909 in the Jacobean style, with four centuries of garden varieties, gray-green in tone, planted with herbs used for healing, and masses of flowers, including lavender, artemisia, tarragon, bee balm, and thyme. There were snapdragons and impatiens, coral bells and delphinium, hollyhocks, Canterbury bells, and an extraordinary arbor of twisting wisteria of a variety introduced to Massachusetts during the nineteenth-century China trade. Visiting hours were over, but Mia saw a young man readying the museum for closing and she urgently signaled to him.

“Hello!” Mia called. Her hands were wrapped around the gate posts. She thought of the day when her mother’s body was carried across the field and then of how Joel had locked her in the barn. Her heart was beating too fast. “I’ve lost something. Please! Hurry!”