Chapter One

Late in August, three crows took up residence in the chimney of the corner house on Hemlock Street. In the mornings they set up a racket that could wake the dead. They picked up stones in their beaks and tossed them down at picture windows; they plucked out their feathers, which would surface all day long in odd places, in bowls of Cheerios, in the pockets of shirts drying on laundry lines, inside glass milk bottles delivered at dawn.
This corner house was the only one to have been vacated since the subdivision was carved out of a potato farm, six years earlier. Before the builders began working, the town was nothing more than a post office up on Harvey's Turnpike, surrounded by farms. All that first spring renegade potatoes were unearthed when the men on Hemlock Street put down their lawns and planted mimosas and poplars; on trash day there would be heaps of potatoes alongside the aluminum cans. Everything in the neighborhood was brand new, the elementary school, the high school, the A&P, the police station on the Turnpike. The air itself seemed new; it could make you dizzy if you weren't used to it, and relatives visiting from Brooklyn or Queens often had to lie down on a couch with a damp handkerchief pressed to their temples. The bark on the trees left fresh, green patches on your hands if you dared to climb the thin, wavering branches. Each house in the subdivision was the same, and for the longest time husbands pulled into the wrong driveways after work; children wandered into the wrong houses for cookies and milk; young mothers who took their babies out for walks in their new carriages found themselves wandering past identical houses, on identical streets, lost until twilight, when the ice-cream man's truck appeared, and they could follow the sound of his bell, which traced his reliable route past their doorsteps.

To outsiders, the houses might still seem identical, but after six years those who lived here could now easily tell the difference by the color of the trim on the brick fronts, by the flower boxes or the lawn statues or the hedges beside the driveways. Now when the children played kickball on summer nights, they knew exactly which screen door to swing open, and which bedroom was theirs to throw off their damp, sweaty clothes. Mothers no longer tied address tags to their babies' wrists when they set them out to play in backyards. Even the dogs, who were so confused that first year they huddled together on street corners to howl at noon, now knew precisely where their bones were buried, and where they would stretch out for the night.

To have peace with your neighbors you needed to adhere to two unspoken rules: mind your own business and keep up your lawn. And because they all came from the same circumstances, because this was the first house they, and most likely anyone in their family, had ever owned, the unspoken agreement was keptñuntil Mr. Olivera violated the pact by dying. One day in November, when the sky turned black at four thirty and the children dragged their sleds over to Dead Man's Hill on the other side of the parkway at the first hint of snow, Mr. Olivera climbed into bed, beneath two wool blankets. He turned on his side, breathed deeply three times, thought about adding antifreeze to the radiator of his Chrysler, then went to sleep and never woke up again.

Olivera's wife, who was old-fashioned and made Jam from the grapes her husband grew by the side of the house, immediately went to Virginia to stay with her married daughter. While Mrs. Olivera was deciding whether to stay with her daughter or move back to a neighborhood where she would be the only woman over sixty, widowed or not, the house, for reasons no one could fathom, began to fall apart. By Christmas the shutters had split and come off their hinges. By February the concrete along the front stoop was crumbling. Late in the spring, the grass in the front yard grew so tall people swore mosquitoes were breeding there, and they crossed over to the other side of the street so they wouldn't have to pass by. Joe Hennessy, who had been on the Nassau County police force for five years and was up for review, finally dragged out his new power mower and went across the street. Hennessy was six-foot-two, with strong muscles in his back and arms, but after he had cut half the front yard he was so exhausted he had to sit down on the front stoop just to catch his breath. By July, when Mrs. Olivera decided to sell the house, it was too late. By then there was a peculiar smell emanating from it, even though the windows were closed tightly and locked, and the overripe odor, which made people in the neighborhood wonder if a pot of jam had been cooked too long and then forgotten on the rear burner of the stove, drove prospective buyers away. All through the summer the smell persisted; it grew riper and sweeter each day. The women on the block bought Airwick and they washed their floors with Lysol, but the smell came in through the screen windows and seemed to slap them in the face. Ace McCarthy, who was seventeen and scared of very little in this world, lived right next door to the Olivera place, and although he would never have told anyone, there were times, late at night, after he had turned off his transistor radio, when he swore he could hear someone groaning. Some jokester on another block, on Poplar or Pine, started the rumor that the house was haunted, and on Saturday nights carloads of teenagers parked outside. The boys honked their horns and dared each other to spend the night in the Olivera house; they called each other chicken and kissed each other's girlfriends, and they wouldn't budge until Joe Hennessy went out, opened the door of his squad car, and let the siren rip.

Why this should happen on their block, of all places, no one was sure. Hadn't they raked all their dead leaves into heaps they burned along the curb each October? Hadn't they brought lemon pound cakes and brownies with walnuts to the bake sales at the elementary school? Their children were rowdy, but good-natured; the worst their teenaged daughters would do was slip a tube of lipstick into their pocketbooks in the drugstore, or eat an entire bag of chips while they baby-sat. The neighbors looked to those around them for an explanation. A punishment of some sort had befallen them, but who was it directed toward? Not John McCarthy, who owned the Texaco station up on Harvey's Turnpike, even though he was the most logical candidate since his house was right next door to Olivera's; but perhaps the curse was aimed at his two wild sons, Jackie and Ace, who called their father the Saint behind his back. The Shapiros, on the other side of the McCarthys, certainly deserved something that would knock them off their high horse. They'd been suspiciously lucky with their children; Danny was too smart for his own good, and Rickie liked to comb her red hair right in front of you, just to show off. It was unlikely that the punishment was directed at the Durgins—Donna Durgin's house was so clean she put everyone else to shame—or the Winemans, whose crab apple trees formed a bower of pink blossoms each spring; and certainly it was not directed at Joe Hennessy; you could tell Joe was a good husband and father just by looking at him, you were lucky to have someone like Joe living on your block.

But there it was, punishment all the same, and no one was the least surprised when the crows appeared from the south. People turned off their TV sets and their radios and went out to stand on their lawns just to watch. They were big birds, with eyes like rubies, brave enough to chase cocker spaniels and Irish setters out of the Oliveras' yard. When the Hennessys' boy, Stevie, shot at one of them with his BB gun, the largest of the crows caught the BB in its beak, then chased Stevie across the street, managing to tear a patch out of his blue jeans before the boy could escape into his house, crying for his mother. Ellen Hennessy swooped Stevie into her arms, and after she was sure he hadn't been wounded, she ran into the street, waving her apron at the crow, but the bird simply ignored her and went right back to perch on the Oliveras' chimney.