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lettuce in his hands.
    Satan.
    Well, almost. Peter Shaw. Actually, he didn’t look exactly malevolent, only surprised. Maybe as surprised as I was.
    “Oh, Peter,” Hattie said breezily. “This is our new helper, Katy.”
    “Kaaaay,”
crooned a voice from behind him. It was a child, maybe ten or eleven years old, sitting in what looked like an oversized high chair.
    Something was wrong with him. His head lolled to one side. His eyes were crossed. His mouth hung open, and a line of drool ran down the side of his chin in a rough red gully. There were a few broken crayons on the tray in front of him, and a piece of paper with a drawing on it.
    “
Kaaaay
,” he repeated, thrusting the drawing toward me.
    Hattie dabbed at the drool with a tissue and put her arm around him. “That’s right, honey,” she said, giving the boy a kiss on the top of his head “This is Katy, our new friend. Katy, this is Peter’s brother, Eric. He lives here.”
    At the sound of his name, the boy kicked his legs and clapped his hands together. The drawing fell on the floor. I picked it up. And gasped.
    It was a drawing of birds flying over a lake, and might have been drawn by Michelangelo. The water shimmered. The crayon-colored sky looked so real that I could almost feel the wind moving. The birds themselves were magnificent, each tiny creature muscled and feathered, each sparkling, living eye minutely different from all the others.
    “This is unbeliev—” I began, but Eric was twisting around in his chair, shrieking and kicking furiously.
    Peter grabbed the drawing out of my hands and smoothed it out in front of his brother. “Leave him alone,” he said.
    I backed away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that he’s so . . .”
    “Brain damaged?” Peter spat. “But then, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
    “I . . . I . . .” I didn’t know what to say.
    “Hush, Peter,” Hattie interrupted. “She doesn’t know any such thing. Katy, dear, you go cut six tomatoes into slices, and take out some basil. I’ll show you what to do with it in a minute.”
    I scurried away to the large walk-in fridge, stealing glances at Eric and Peter from behind my shoulder.
    “Why
her
?” I heard Peter ask as I retreated.
    Hattie didn’t answer him.

C HAPTER
•
S EVEN

SIGILLUM
    By the last week in October I was an old hand in Hattie’s Kitchen, part of a three-person crew including Hattie, myself, and my new buddy Peter Shaw. Unlikely as it was, Peter and I managed to stay out of each other’s way as we knocked ourselves out to prepare for the annual community Halloween party. Apparently it was an old tradition in Whitfield, as well as the anniversary of the opening of Hattie’s, so Halloween was a big deal all around. We spent the week before cooking and freezing enough food for at least two hundred people, and that didn’t even count the salads and fruit and sauces and desserts that would have to be made fresh. Since there were only sixteen tables in the dining room, I had no idea how we were going to accommodate everyone.
    “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Hattie said, laughing. “There will be plenty of room, you’ll see.”
    I didn’t know how that would be possible, but I’d learned not to doubt anything Hattie said.
    It hadn’t taken long for me to get used to my job. Every day there’d be a new recipe for me to try, usually with some weird component as part of the mix: An antique silver spoon, a handful of rose petals, the branch of a willow tree, a string of glass beads. Even the music she played, I discovered, went into the food. Once Hattie had me cry real tears into a pot of bean soup. That wasn’t easy. I don’t like to cry. Still, for the sake of the menu, I worked up a few drops.
    Also, she was always making me think or concentrate on some emotion or other. “Pick it out of the air,” she’d say, as if things like curiosity and courage were just floating on the breeze, waiting to be