The scarf Nora tried to steal was woven of spider silk.
Translucent as a pool of water, it held blue-and-gray depths and was strong as steel but delicate as breath. It glittered like dewdrops in the light, and she just knew if she could hold it, the scarf would move like water in her hands.
That was what she was picturing when she started to get that feeling she sometimes got like she needed a thing. It could be any thing. A bag. A necklace. A small sculpture. Always expensive. A restless sort of pining would set her walking back and forth, as if the object itself had cast a spell on her. As if it had bewitched her, she found herself unable to focus on anything else until she had it.
She had a whole closet full of such things in the small, messy apartment she shared with her fiancé Ben, and she could have sold any one of them, the emerald ring, the diamond-faced watch, the luxury perfume, to pay down some of the bills she’d been wading through for as long as she could remember. Or she could have taken the sort of vacation her wealthier friends posted pictures of online.
But Nora’s treasures brought her something greater than money (not quite happiness, but close), so they weren’t for sale. Stealing them might have been a compulsion, but keeping them was a thing she did for herself.
Her fiancé Ben was the one who told her about the scarf.
Ben, a plumber, loved a good story, and while he didn’t normally listen in through the pipes to his clients’ privateconversations, sometimes he did. He had certainly been listening, one ear pressed to the drain of a very old sink, the day he went to work in the home of Ms. Martin on Laurel Street.
Everyone knew of Ms. Martin in the neighborhood where Nora and Ben grew up (the same neighborhood in which they continued to live, on the outskirts of the city, just before the woods), but neither of them had ever actually met the old woman or even seen her. All they knew of her was what they had been told as children, usually by other children.
She was a shut-in. She’d been rich once, or her family had; they must have been for her to live alone in such a large house, unemployed as far as anyone could tell, having all her groceries delivered.
No one had seen her, yet everyone knew someone who had. And they said she had long white hair and black eyes. Her back was stooped with age, but she was fast, much faster than a normal person. Hunched over like a bear, she ran not just with her feet but with her hands, bounding for long stretches that allowed her to overtake cats and dogs left outside at night. Which was how she caught the pets she stole. That was what the kids said whenever one went missing. Ms. Martin took it.
At twenty-seven, Nora no longer believed in witches. She didn’t believe in much aside from what she could see with her eyes and touch with her hands. Life had taught her this. She spent her days working behind the front desk of a plastic surgery clinic in the city. She was its face, the first person one saw upon walking in, hired because her features happened to match the looks the clinic was selling.
She spent most nights at her kitchen table, plotting her next theft, hours when she allowed Ben to assume she was on social media or shopping for the designer shoes she had so many of. She’d been stealing since she was twelve, starting with a bottle of gold nail polish snuck down her sleeve at the drugstore and escalating from there. A rhinestone barrette. A silver mood ring. By the time she was twenty, Nora was stealing handbags from department stores. And shoes, so many shoes.
From a gallery in the city, she’d recently stolen her first sculpture, a hyperrealistic slice of cake with white icing, chocolate sprinkles, and crushed bits of candy on top. The only visual clue as to its being art and not food was that the cake was a little too idyllic, more like a dream of cake, its icing a little too gleaming. Nora had immediately been drawn to the danger it posed, as anyone who tried to eat it would get a mouthful of glass.
She had never been caught, and until now had never seriously considered breaking into anyone’s home. But there was something about the spider silk scarf, an unshakable hold it exerted on her from the start, as if she’d been caught in an invisible web.
Looking back, she thought it seemed impossible for Ben not to have known of her secret compulsion, but if he did, he chose to look the other way. Never questioned the rare cognac she took out of her closet on special occasions, or the golden lighter she proffered when he brought a cigarette to his lips. If there was anyone in the world who could have stopped her from trying to steal the scarf, it was him. Instead, he was the one who told her about it.
She insisted.
“Well?” she asked the moment he walked in the door, her brown eyes bright with curiosity. She hadn’t thought aboutMs. Martin much since childhood and would have assumed the old woman had died until Ben got the call from her about a burst pipe, and now Nora had so many questions she could hardly get them out. “Did you see her?”
“I didn’t.”
“What? Why not? Who let you into her house, then?”
“Some guy. Our age or younger, maybe a grandkid, or an assistant. He showed me where the burst pipe was, paid me, then got the hell out.”
“Why? What’s the place like?”
“Hard to say since all I saw was the front hall, kitchen, and basement. Everything was old, the pipes, the fridge, the curtains, but it was normal. And quiet, so quiet I started to think I was alone there. But then, once I put my head to the drain and listened, that’s when I heard her talking in another part of the house.”
Ben changed out of his work clothes as he talked. Beneath his shirt, he had multiple tattoos, mostly logos of bands he’d played bass in. He pulled on his pajama pants, then went to the kitchen and poured them each a glass of red wine.
Nora followed him. “And? What was she saying?”
He took a long sip of wine and seemed to contemplate telling her, as if understanding where it could lead and wanting to protect her from her own worst impulses, yet also wanting to entertain her, see that sparkle in her eyes. And maybe if he were to reflect upon it, he’d see that he also liked the excitement, the beautiful things, the taste of rare cognac.
“Don’t make me beg,” she said, “or bite.” She was smiling but only half kidding, her teeth red with wine. Her heart was already beating faster, a rush coming on that she understood intellectually needed to be stopped before her control began to slip and she wound up doing something dangerous.
To his credit, Ben was silent a moment, as if leaving space for her to resist.
“Her voice wasn’t at all how you’d expect,” he said. “She sounded like a child, high pitched and sweet, but also really old at the same time. Shaky, sort of. She was on the phone with someone named Lee, and I got the impression this Lee worked for a museum in the city. It sounded like Ms. Martin was donating something to the museum’s collection, something worth a lot of money.”
Nora leaned toward Ben across the kitchen table. “What was it?”
“The only known garment in the world woven from the silk of black widow spiders. A scarf. Apparently the silk could only be extracted by hand, and it took twelve workers seven years to harvest that much silk. One of them died halfway through after being bitten. I heard her explain all this. Then she told Lee what it looked like, and the way she described it, it sounded so beautiful I just had to tell you. I want to go see it at the museum as soon as they put it on display.”
