BY THE TIME THE ODD RAINS BEGAN, Anna had made it through a sort of spring. After she’d called on Murdock and lugged home, like booty, the iron gifts, she had joined a few—the tongs, closed into a heart shape, and hooks and rings and chains—into a sculpture, and set it on her back porch announcing, she liked to think, a connection, a shared totem, a mysterious effigy no one could ignore: Anna Starling lives here. The last of the shaded snow, granular and sallow beneath trees and brush, shrank away into the black duff and the soaked, purplish carpet of last year’s leaves, nothing left of their autumn blaze. Shoots of hay, fine and wind-fanned like flames, began to green the dun fields, and although it seemed late and slow, the hardwoods lost their grey filigree of winter and joined the conifers in darkening the woods of the mountain and the hills of St. Aubin across the water, emboldening deer to come down from higher ground. A doe had peered at her out of the trees one morning, still as a tree herself, and they exchanged appraisals through the curling mist until Anna reached for her camera: a buck she could not see snorted and the doe bolted away with him, crashing out of sight.
