Free Falling In by Frances O'Roark Dowell

yard to check on a patch of silverweed she was cultivating by the woodpile. Does someone’s face look meaner when you’ve discovered their darkest secret? Sadder? The lines around their eyes and the corners of their mouth deeper now, more full of grief, rage, terror, horror?
    Even at a distance, Grete looked like Grete, older than Isabelle’s mother, younger than the old ladies she saw riding to the store on the bus, theirhands folded carefully atop their purses. Her eyes still looked kind, the skin of her cheeks still looked downy and soft. She didn’t appear the least bit like a—well, Isabelle could barely bring herself to think it.
    Isabelle looked up to the tops of the trees. She looked for the bones of children dangling from the branches, but saw none. She felt foolish.
    And then Isabelle looked at the picture she held in her hands. The trees no longer appeared happy, the moon no longer glowed.
    The hammock was empty.
    “I see you’ve been reading,” Grete said, remounting the steps to the porch. “Those stories of mine probably aren’t as exciting as the stories you’re used to, but you might learn something, you never know.”
    “You don’t ever know,” Isabelle agreed, shutting the book. She reached into her lap to slip the picture back between the book’s pages—
    But the picture was gone.
    Grete leaned her face next to Isabelle’s and whispered, “Don’t be afraid. But don’t say anything toHen. She’s a good girl, but she’s lived in fear a long time, and there’s no telling what she’ll do if she finds out.”
    Isabelle nodded.
    “We’ve things to talk about, you and I,” Grete said, and headed inside just as Hen came bounding into the yard, waving a bundle of leaves at Isabelle. “Goldenseal! It heals everything!”
    Hen went on for a few minutes about the miraculous properties of goldenseal, and while she did, Isabelle’s mind raced over possibilities and probabilities and practicalities. Grete, in her way, had just told Isabelle,
Yes, I am.
She had just told Isabelle,
Don’t tell.
Was that a threat? It hadn’t sounded like a threat, but now Isabelle wondered.
    She looked at Hen. Would Hen even believe her? Well, Hen
did
believe there was a witch, Isabelle reasoned, so it wouldn’t be like trying to make someone like Charley Bender believe. Charley Bender—who for all Isabelle knew was still standing at the door of the nurse’s office, waiting for Isabelle to pop back up—probably pooh-poohedthe very idea of witches, but Hen’s whole life had been lived in the shadow of one.
    Hen. At dinner the night before, a savory pumpkin pie seasoned with acorn shavings and lilyweed, she’d reminisced about the pumpkin soup her mother made on cold winter days. It was Hen who was sent to the root cellar to select two or three of the small, round pumpkins they’d stored there after the autumn harvest, because Hen knew from a look which pumpkins were best for soup and which were best for throwing out to the pigs.
    “You knew Mam had a mind set on pumpkin soup when she told Jacob to skim the cream off the top of the milk and bring it into the kitchen first thing instead of taking it to market to sell of a morning,” Hen told them, spooning a bite of pie into her mouth. “Cream and a dash of nutmeg is what gives Mam’s soup its flavor. Of course, there’s hours of stewing and stirring to be done first, to get the pumpkin meat soft as it can be. Sugar, she’s the one you give the spoon to. Four years old, but right sensible. Not like Artemis, who’s six but without astraight thought in his head. That one’s topsyturvy.”
    Hen had four brothers and one sister: Jacob, Callou, Artemis, Sugar, and Pip. Hen was in charge of the whole brigade, as her mother was always busy cooking and baking and laundering and fixing and patching and cooking and cooking and cooking. Her father was rarely home. “Da is a peddler on the road, selling his wares across the Five Villages and beyond. He’s home