“Well this isn’t right,” Carl said, his arms still empty.

  So it was that our three heroines walked the apple crates to the side of the road and moved them just off its edge, into a spread of massive ferns, their fronds growing up from the ground like too many webbed fingers reaching.

  As the heroines stood, a breeze stinking of rank ocean came through the trees and made them look into the woods beyond.

  Merritt saw it first.

  “What is that?” is all she asked. Now the others looked where her face was pointed and saw it, too.

  Though what it was they were seeing was unclear.

  It was a vertical shape, like a shadow made of static, maybe forty yards off into the trees and trees and darkness. It drifted behind trunks and back out again, hovering and pulsing.

  Now that they were silent and watching they each, to a person, could hear a kind of low hum emanating from it.

  “Jesus fuck,” Carl said between his teeth. “It’s a swarm of wasps.”

  “Yellow jackets,” Harper said like a reflex.

  “Let’s back it up slowly now.” Carl was already doing the thing he instructed—one step and then two.

  “Why are they going up and down like that?” Harper asked. She took the same number of steps Carl had taken, but instead she took them forward, into the woods, toward the drifting swarm.

  “Harper, you don’t mess with these,” Carl said, his voice sharp. “I’ve seen them take down a deer.” He’d now moved another few steps back and down the road in the direction of the SUV. “We can get a good look from behind the windows when we drive by.”

  “Yellow jackets,” Harper said like a reflex.

  “It isn’t coming toward us, I don’t think,” Merritt said. “It seems like it’s hovering.”

  “For now it is,” Carl said. “They can move whenever they want. Fast.”

  “Why are they in that shape?” Harper asked again. She was still walking, slow step by slow step toward the mass, and now a couple of yards off the road and into the woods.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Audrey said, letting panic infect her voice. “He’s saying it’s not safe. Please don’t go any closer.” Was that too much concern? Was she overdoing it?

  Even if it was too much, Harper seemed to listen. She stopped moving in the swarm’s direction but pulled out her phone again to start filming.

  Though the shape did not appear to drift any closer, its hum was somehow denser and stronger, the notes low and pulsing like plucked strings through the trees. Audrey could now feel that hum in her body, settling in her blood and bones where she did not want it to be.

  Carl wasn’t even with them anymore. He was back at their vehicle, climbing in.

  The shape drifted in and out of shadow. Sometimes its outline was clear and sharp, then it would muddle and fuzz, its contours smudged. It seemed to make the very air around it vibrate.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this here,” Merritt said. They were standing close now, Audrey and Merritt, shoulders brushing—with Harper those couple of yards in front of them, in the woods. Carl was, for the moment, forgotten.

  “I thought there were always yellow jackets here,” Audrey said in a near whisper.

  “There are,” Merritt said. “But I’ve never seen anything like this here. Not firsthand.”

  The hum churned on like an incantation while the smell of sick seawater clogged their noses.

  And then—

  The SUV’s ignition startled them. By the time they turned to look, Carl had it nearly behind them. As the passenger-side window rolled down he said, “Your ride, ladies.”

  Merritt did not wait for further instruction to climb in, and Audrey, without her phone, didn’t know if she was supposed to or not. So she did. Just in case it wasn’t a Bo trick. (But it had to be. Of course it was.)

  “We go now, Harper,” Carl said, his voice raised and firm. “Please—I’m asking you.”

  Harper lowered her phone after he added the please and turned and walked to the car, too—though she took another couple of apples from one of the crates as she passed.

  “God, I hope my video turned out,” she said when she got in. “That was bananas.” Harper set the apples she’d grabbed in the front cupholders and turned around in her seat to face Merritt and Audrey. “My heart’s going a mile a minute. Did you see its arm?”

  “What do you mean arm?” Merritt asked.

  “That thing, like, raised its arm at us—like it was saying Come here.” Harper’s face was flushed and her eyes seemed even bluer than usual, glittery with excitement.

  “How does a swarm of yellow jackets raise its arm?” Merritt asked.

  “How did you not see it do it?” Harper asked. “Audrey, tell me you’ve got me here.”

  “I couldn’t really see it that well,” Audrey said. “I mean, I didn’t see any arms but—”

  “Oh come on,” Harper said. “Come. On. Fine. I can show you.” She climbed over the armrest and into the back and found a perch between Merritt and Audrey.

  “Not safe,” Carl said.

  “Look, look, I’m buckling in,” she said as she did. “Sorry, Carl.” Harper grinned as she held out her phone and hit Play.

  They must have watched the video a dozen times. They watched it until they had just about arrived at the strip mall that was the reason for the trip. They watched it until Harper and Merritt agreed to disagree about what they were witnessing—the beckoning arm Merritt refused to see, no matter how many times Harper pointed it out or even traced it for her on the screen. Audrey thought she could kind of see it—or at least see what Harper meant—if she let herself see it, that is.

  They watched until Harper finally had enough cell service to post it. Well, to post the apple crates that had come before the swarm first, and then to post the more frightening thing.

  Her caption: After we moved the crates, this happened. Turn your volume waaaaaaay up and tell me those yellow jackets don’t look like a floating woman in a dress telling you to “Come here, child. Come here.”

  Tell me you don’t see her arm reaching toward you through the screen.

  “Pure poetry,” Merritt said, reading Harper’s post from her own phone’s Instagram feed.

  “So you’re gonna treat this like you did the orange trees?” Harper said.

  “Oh my God,” Merritt said, throwing up her hands in overdone exasperation. “Please get over the fucking orange trees.”

  “I can’t,” Harper said. “I was there. I know what I saw. And so I know what you saw, too.”

  “I saw sickly trees get better with appropriate care,” Merritt said. “I’m sorry, but there’s no magic in that. It’s basic botany—take a plant off the back of a windowless truck and give it some good light and water and it grows. Jinkies, Daphne! Must be the work of a ghost!”

  “Audrey, please chime in here anytime,” Harper said.

  Audrey did not want to chime in. Audrey had already done so, several times during the days previous, since the very day, in fact, when the orange trees that had been brought into The Orangerie as brown sticks had been found bursting with leaves and flowers and, on two of them, the green pearls of newborn fruit. She hadn’t paid all that much attention to the trees when they’d come off the trucks—she hadn’t been the one hauling them in like Harper had—but she had seen Bo’s anger about them being dead, and so agreed that their unexpected health and vibrancy was, well, unexpected. She’d agreed to that despite Merritt’s eye-rolling and shoulder-shrugging. Audrey was pretty sure this miraculous botanical recovery was another Bo Dhillon touch. She couldn’t be certain, of course, but it did have the feel.

  “Those trees were dead, now they’re not. How many things like this have to happen before we melt your frozen, unbelieving heart?” Harper asked Merritt.

  “Things like what?” Merritt said.

  “Unexplained occurrences,” Harper said.

  “How about one thing that really does defy explanation?” Merritt said. “Let’s set the bar at one real thing.”

  Carl was now parking them halfway between the pizza place and the convenience store with the Icee machine. Before they got out, and without much hope, Audrey checked her phone again. It still wouldn’t turn on.

  So much for further instructions on this night, Readers.

  Trifle with the Trifle

  Alex sat alone at one end of the long table not eating her supper. She was the only living thing then in the dining room.

  The bouquet of purple freesia she’d brought home from The Orangerie the day before and placed at the center of the table (in Libbie’s crystal wedding vase) had already died. Not drooped or wilted. Died. Some of the bouquet’s dumped appendages now lay shriveled across the table’s surface, which was so painstakingly polished by Hanna that it would cast your phantom reflection as you passed by. Alex told herself that the carriage ride in the cold could have contributed to the freesia’s demise, but she didn’t really think so. She felt it more likely that anything just then thriving in The Orangerie simply could not live beyond its cloister.

  It was peculiar, though, that Hanna had not yet seen to remove the bouquet and its mess.

  This night, Alex had been served haddock. She was not an admirer, but she wasn’t hungry anyway. Hanna was clanging things around in the kitchen next door, and if Alex listened intently, she could hear the voices above her in Spite Tower, where Libbie and Adelaide were having their Thursday evening tutoring session.

  Why there should be so much laughter during a rigorous discussion of Macbeth, Alex could not say.

  This was now the way of Spite Manor on Tuesdays and Thursdays. After a ride like the one they’d had that day—silence save for the noise of the horses and road, and the awful scrape of branches across the carriage top when they passed through the woods—they would arrive home. Alex would then sit down to supper alone in the dining room and Adelaide would bring a tray for two up to Libbie’s office, there atop her terrible tower.

  A tray for the two of them, that is—for Libbie and Adelaide.

  For several weeks, all during Adelaide’s prolonged recovery from her strange and sudden illness, Libbie had been tutoring her in the tower. Even with the Brookhants enrollment at its dismal 35 percent, Alex had expressed her strong disinclination to allow Adelaide to attend classes on campus—as Libbie had guessed she would—and so they’d come up with this arrangement instead. Although now that she had accrued a pile of lonely suppers, Alex would have preferred the former. And would have most preferred for Adelaide not to be tutored at all, though her best arguments went limp against Libbie’s reasoning that with so few students currently at Brookhants, she had plenty of time to teach anyone who wanted to learn. And Addie, she said, so wanted to learn. And had the mind for it!

  Alex hadn’t personally witnessed any evidence of Adelaide’s impressive aptitude, but Libbie seemed lately convinced that they were employing some kind of undiscovered savant as one of their maids.

  Alex poked at the fleshy haddock. It had gone cold in its wan puddle of oil and its smell was most unappetizing, particularly when mixed with the fetor from the murky freesia water sitting spoiled in the vase. She pushed her plate away, running it into and over some of the discarded flower droppings. She scanned the room’s dark corners. The whole expanse, starting from the Turkish rug on the floor and pressing up to the coffered ceiling, seemed to her now clouded with the miasma of decay, thick and nearly as vaporous as Tricky Thicket gas.

  She caught the trickle of a tune she recognized but could not place. Hanna was humming to herself as she worked in the kitchen. Strange, Alex couldn’t recall having ever heard Hanna do that before. Not once in seven years.

  Hanna, Alex believed, did not like this tutoring arrangement between Adelaide and Libbie any better than she did, though certainly Hanna had her own reasons for that. Probably they had to do with Addie’s (sudden) convergence of peculiar ailments—ailments that apparently overtook her completely before they seemed to retreat just as fast.

  After the queer night in the bathroom—Adelaide’s snowshoes, the black algae scum in the tub, the six yellow jacket carcasses Alex later found strewn on the floor like ominous confetti—Libbie had insisted that Adelaide stay in her bed at least until the roads were cleared and they could send for the doctor. Libbie had not thought to consult Alex in this decision, despite the fact that for the past seven years she had also been sleeping in that bed. That Alex technically had her own room down the hall, where her clothing and belongings were stored, and where Hanna regularly changed bedding that had not been slept upon, was not the point.

  Libbie had decided, and so it was that in her bed Adelaide remained, sleeping on Alex’s side—and also sometimes giggling, moaning, and talking nonsense—for two days. During this time, Alex and Libbie slept apart, Libbie in a guest room and Alex in her technical bedroom. This was primarily because Hanna had unexpectedly stayed on at Spite Manor as well, tending to Adelaide and seeing everything, always. (Except, Alex thought, when she found it convenient not to.)

  When Alex checked on Adelaide the first morning of her confinement, she did so early enough that she thought only Hanna would be about. She found Libbie instead. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the maid’s hand while the two of them talked quietly about something, likely about what had really gone on in the bathroom the night before. But Alex couldn’t be certain of this, because they stopped talking once they’d noticed her in the doorway. And then Max had come in right after, pushing past her with a bowl of snow he’d just gathered. They’d been using it to numb the swollen portions of Adelaide’s face. Max was ruddy with concern for his wife, and in the wound dressing and general fussing that had followed, Alex couldn’t seem to find the right moment to ask Libbie and Adelaide what they’d been so intently discussing.

  As soon as the roads were passable, Caspar had gone for the doctor. By the time he arrived back at Spite Manor with him, Adelaide was already sitting up and drinking bone broth and behaving just about as she should. She claimed her fever had finally broken and that she was now feeling so much more like herself. And she had looked rather beautifully pale and serene right then, Readers, propped there against Alex’s own pillows like some fresco of a wounded angel done on a crumbling plaster wall. Addie’s face—especially her lip and eye—was still swollen, though far less so than it’d been the night it had happened. And the intense reds and purples then tinting her skin had settled to an almost-fetching pink.

  Adelaide had little to say about the cause of her injuries. She claimed that she couldn’t remember putting on the snowshoes, leaving the cottage, startling Libbie in the bathroom with her strange approach and even stranger speech. She said those fever-dream hours were lost to her, that she couldn’t quite believe everyone when they told her what had happened, what she’d done.

  The doctor, for his part, believed her facial injuries to have been caused by an insect, probably an arachnid. He said that despite it being winter, he wouldn’t rule out some particularly aggressive poisonous spider lurking in their cottage’s floorboards and suggested that Max complete a thorough inspection for nests or webs.

  But, as Alex recalled, the doctor couldn’t seem to find much else wrong with her.

  Thinking of her propped there on Alex’s side of the bed, surrounded by her doting attendees, pinched at Alex as she now sat alone in the dining room with her spongy haddock. She strained to hear fresh sounds from the tutoring lesson in the tower, but couldn’t make any out over Hanna’s song, which had grown notably louder. In fact, it was right on the other side of the door, coming toward her.

  Alex almost had it—the tune—dunnn-du-dun du du du du-un—it was . . .

  The song cut off as Hanna pushed open the door and came into the room carrying what appeared to be an unnecessarily large serving of trifle. “We used Brookhants’s own apples for this,” she said as she placed the towering portion on the table before Alex and cleared the fish plate.

  Alex watched as a hunk of the fruit-and-nut mixture, sticky with syrup and flecked with so many dark spices, slid down the side of the serving to land in a mass of thick yellow cream. She thought she might be sick if she continued to look at it.

  “Was the fish not good, miss?” Hanna asked from the doorway, her question clearly an afterthought.

  “It was cooked well,” Alex said. “I’m afraid I have no appetite this evening.”

  “That’s been the case all week, Miss Trills.”

  “Has it?” Alex asked. She couldn’t remember if she’d been eating or not.

  “That’s why Addie asked if I would make trifle for you,” Hanna said, nodding at the dish. “I know if there’s one thing you have a taste for, it’s trifle made with my almond cake. I didn’t have the time for it today, so Adelaide made it for you herself. It’s what’s there with the apples.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Alex said, refusing to look at her serving. “This will be the thing, then.”

  Hanna nodded. She turned to leave.

  “Hanna, what song is that you’ve been humming?”

  “I didn’t mean for you to hear me,” Hanna said, turning back around again. “Didn’t know I was so loud.”

  “You weren’t at all. It’s just that the house is quiet tonight.”

  “It is,” Hanna said. “And if I hear that song even once, it’s with me for a month.”

  “Which is it?” Alex asked again.

  “‘Annie Lisle.’* I can’t imagine where I heard it.”

  Hanna had the kitchen door pushed open and was partway through when Alex asked, suddenly, “Hanna, where did you hear it, do you think?”

  Her face, now only partially turned toward Alex, was caught between the dim light of the kitchen and the even dimmer light of the dining room, washing it in shadow. Alex could not read her features as she said, “I really couldn’t say for certain, Miss Trills. Must be Adelaide. Max calls her his songbird.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Alex said.

  “Oh yes, she’s always with a tune in her mouth,” Hanna said. Then she kept on to the kitchen, letting the door whish closed behind her.