about it, but hearing the girls bicker as they counted them felt like a return to normalcy after yesterday afternoon’s and last night’s conversations about the lighter and what, as a family, they should do about it. The conversations had seemed endless. She and Chip had both had to speak to Mrs. Collier on the telephone, and then the two of them alone had debated what to do. She had come home from work early, and they had talked to Garnet soon after she got off the school bus. Then they had spoken with Garnet and Hallie together. Both girls had always been so well behaved that she and Chip really didn’t have a lot of history with discipline: Even when the girls had been toddlers, neither she nor Chip had sent either child to the “time-out chair”—one of the ladder-back chairs that was actually a part of their regular dining room furniture—more than two or three times. Good Lord, Garnet had been more likely to send herself to the time-out chair, which she had done at least twice when Emily was alone with the girls while Chip was flying. It was as if Garnet had somehow deduced that her mother was not merely outnumbered, she was outmatched by three-year-old twins and had reached the breaking point: She needed one of the girls to sit still for a few minutes while she tried to straighten up the board books and stuffed animals and baby dolls (and baby doll clothing) that coated the floor of the house like fallen leaves in October, or make a dent in the shaky skyscraper of disgusting dishes that rose high from the kitchen sink. In the end, Emily and Chip had chosen not to discipline Garnet for hiding her discovery of the lighter from them—and from Hallie—and then for bringing it with her to school: Between the plane crash and being uprooted and brought to New Hampshire, it was a wonder that there hadn’t been far more and far worse instances of acting out. She wished that Garnet had evidenced more contrition, but clearly her daughter accepted that she had made a mistake. And even the girl’s schoolteacher seemed to believe that the boy who had drawn the picture of the plane was just asking for some sort of off-the-grid reaction.
“And the greenhouses are all in Bethel. Not in Littleton or Franconia,” Hallie was saying. “You see one almost the second you get off the highway.”
“And then another and another,” Garnet added.
“Well, winters are long here,” Emily said, speaking as much to try to make sense of it to herself as to try to explain it to her daughters. “And that means the growing seasons are short. You want to start plants as early as you can in a greenhouse and then give them as long a growing season as possible.”
“But why just here?” Garnet asked her.
This was a perfectly reasonable question, and she wished she had a good answer. She recalled that woman from the diner, Becky Davis, and how Becky had referred to the local women as the herbalists—as if they were a cult. Emily presumed that each of those women had a greenhouse. And that group, apparently, included Anise and Reseda and Ginger Jackson and John Hardin’s wife, Clary, since she knew that all four of them owned greenhouses. And that also meant, perhaps, that even Tansy Dunmore at some point had been one of them—whoever they were—because she and Chip now owned a house with a greenhouse.
Of course, as loopy as all those women might be about vegetables and herbs, Becky herself hadn’t seemed a paragon of stability that afternoon in the diner.
“Well,” Emily said, trying to focus on Garnet’s question, “it could be as simple as the fact that someone around here builds greenhouses. You know, maybe someone in the community owns a company that makes them. That’s all. Or it could be a … a club.”
“Even Mrs. Collier owns one,” Hallie added, referring to the girls’ schoolteacher. Emily felt Hallie tapping the back of her seat with her foot absentmindedly. It drove her a little crazy some days, but now she was taking comfort in the idea that her daughter had kicked off her snow boots when she climbed into the car and so at least she wasn’t leaving brown marks from road sand