The Night Strangers Part 16

"Perhaps. But it's not like they're hash brownies. Anything special in them would demand, well, repeat exposures."

"Hallie had nightmares."

"We all have nightmares," Anise said, dismissing her concern. "I find both girls very interesting. Don't you? I find them curious. Or do only the dead inspire you these days?"

"I worry about them," she said, ignoring the dig. "They have endured an awful lot."

"I agree. And that's what makes them so ... special. So receptive. It changes the brain chemicals. You know that as well as anyone."

"You're not trying to up the level of trauma?"

"Maybe a little. But mostly I'm just an observer. I've been watching them. We all have. I had them working at the communal greenhouse again this afternoon. And I know you've been watching them, too," Anise said, and she turned to Reseda, though she did not meet her eyes. "Oh, don't look at me like that. You pretend you're above that sort of thing: It's too dark, it's evil, it's cruel."

"A boy died. That seems to me far too high a price."

"You weren't there. You don't know what happened. You've only heard the story from Clary and Ginger."

Reseda gazed at a pair of water droplets descending the gla.s.s window near the steamer. "I know what Clary saw," she said.

"You know what Clary thinks she saw," Anise corrected her. "You know what Clary recalls. There is a big difference, Reseda. Remember, I was there, too; you weren't."

"I don't want you to try again. They're little girls."

"If it makes you feel any better, I don't even know which one we would use. I really don't," Anise said, and she strolled over to a long table with cooking spices, inhaling the aroma from the basil. "But you know something?"

Reseda waited.

"If you were my age-good heavens, if you were Clary's and Ginger's and Sage's age-you would view the twins more the way I do. You really would. It's human nature."

"Tell me: What are you feeding the captain?"

Anise smiled, but then she shook her head and her eyes grew narrow and reptilian. "You really think I'm a witch, don't you?"

"Are you?"

"I just like to bake," she said, refusing to answer the question. "That's all. I just like to bake."

Garnet had both books that Anise had given her sister and her open on the rug in the living room. She was lying on her stomach before them, near the warmth from the radiator, resting her chin in both hands. The books were so old and so heavy that the pages wouldn't flip shut when she laid them flat on the floor. Whole sections had thick pages with nothing but handwriting-somebody's cursive lettering. Recipes and formulas and diagrams, and some beautiful watercolor ill.u.s.trations of flowers and ferns. They were more like sc.r.a.pbooks than published books, she decided. They smelled a little musty and a little like one of the plants from Sage Messner's greenhouse: maybe the one that had the red leaves that were shaped like the points on the wrought-iron fence by the cemetery. She found a picture of it in the book that had been presented to her, The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs, but it didn't appear in the botany book that had been given to Hallie. The plant was called Phantasia. Much of the biology in her book was over her head, but Garnet found the elegant and precise drawings more interesting than she might have expected and the uses for the plants absolutely fascinating. She had, of course, thought about flowers as decorations and gifts; she had been aware that her mother used herbs as seasonings when she cooked; and certainly she understood the role that fruits and vegetables played in her health. But this was completely different: It was as if some plants and some herbs were medicines. It was as if others were-and the word lodged itself in her mind-magic. They affected how people behaved if they ate them or drank them. But it wasn't like the way alcohol or drugs might change your behavior; that was random and unpredictable. She had seen adults drunk at her parents' parties, and she had seen what alcohol did to people on TV shows and in movies. According to this book, however, some plants or combinations of plants, properly cured or steeped, could make people fall in love. Grow violent. Have visions. The book talked about making people act on their dreams, and dreams in this case had nothing to do with ambition. It was as if, with the right herbs in the right doses-the right tinctures-you could make someone's nightmares feel real by the light of day.

Moreover, she realized that her book was part of a small encyclopedia. It said VOLUME I on the spine. She went to the back of the book to see how many volumes there might be and had to read something twice because it looked so strange. It seemed there was at least a second book. This one was called The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. It was Volume II. She made a mental note to ask Anise about that, if she ever got out of Anise's doghouse. These women seemed to be interested only in plants-just look at all those greenhouses. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe they did have other ... interests.

Over her shoulder she heard Hallie coming down the stairs in her clogs and then joining her in the living room. Her sister sat on the carpet beside her and glanced at the books, but she wasn't especially interested. She rolled her fingers around her bracelet and then touched Garnet's wrist.

"How come you're not wearing your bracelet?" she asked.

"I don't know. I'm just not."

"You should."

Garnet put her forehead down on the rug and closed her eyes. She breathed in the aroma of the books. She was home, the women weren't here right now. What did it matter if she wasn't wearing her bracelet?

"How does Dad seem to you?" Hallie asked. "He seems to talk less than ever."

"I know."

"He talks even less now than he did, like, two or three weeks ago," said Hallie.

"Since the night he got hurt in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

"Yup. But you know what's weird?"

Garnet waited. Everything these days was weird.

"He's changed, but maybe it's just who he is now. I'm getting used to it. In some ways, it's like when he was still flying planes and gone a lot of the time. Know what I mean?"

Garnet knew precisely what Hallie meant. Before Flight 1611 had crashed, it was more normal having their father gone than it was having him home. Or, at least, it was as normal. The reality was that, for most of their childhoods, their father had been away from home three or four days a week. They-Mom and Hallie and she-were accustomed to being a household of three, and their mother had the single-mom drill down to a science. She knew how to run the house just fine when Dad was flying. In some ways, things even went a little easier when it was just the three girls. Dad wouldn't suddenly be there wanting to bring them to and from dance cla.s.s when their friend Samantha's mom was already planning to pick them up at school and bring them to her house until Emily was finished at work. Dad wouldn't suddenly want dinner to be a perfect replica of what the school nurse said dinner was supposed to look like, with just the right combination of meat and vegetables and grains. They could eat dinner in the den and watch TV. And Dad wouldn't suddenly be checking to make sure they had made their beds before going to school or practiced the violin or the flute before going to sleep. The truth was, regardless of whether Dad was flying or he was sitting silently at the table and staring at something no one else seemed to see, the three females had figured out long ago how to manage.

Still, Garnet felt guilty even thinking such things, and so she found herself answering, "I know what you mean. But Mom says it just takes time. He'll get better. You think he will, right?"

"Yeah. I'm sure he will," Hallie said, but she sounded dubious. Then: "Want me to get you your bracelet?"

Garnet pushed herself to a sitting position. "Fine. Get me my bracelet. It's on the top of my-"

But before she could finish, Hallie handed it to her. She had already retrieved it and brought it downstairs. "I saw it on top of your bureau," she said. "And I figured you should be wearing it. You just never know when Reseda or Anise or someone is going to drop by the house."

It had been clear to Emily throughout dinner that something was troubling the girls, though Garnet had seemed more out of sorts than her sister. (But wouldn't it be worse, she asked herself, if something wasn't troubling her children?) She watched them pick at their food, Garnet always seeming on the verge of bringing something up. Now Emily was going through their vocabulary words with them in Hallie's bedroom on the third floor, helping them complete the workbook pages they had been a.s.signed as homework. Chip was downstairs taping the frames of the doors in the entry foyer, because he was planning to paint it tomorrow. His stomach, he insisted, felt pretty good.

But she studied her girls as they worked. Hallie was sitting on her bed, while she and Garnet sat on the floor with their backs against it. She tried to focus, but as she watched the twins together in a moment of such comforting normalcy-upstairs in a bedroom doing their homework-she found herself wondering how so much of their life as a family had gone so terribly wrong. Actually, not how. The how was easy. It was the why. The why seemed almost Job-like. Inexplicable. Unreasonable. But the how? A person could trace the steps with ease. There was the plane crash, of course, that was where it all began. It was Flight 1611 that had led to Chip's depression and PTSD, which in turn had resulted in their moving to northern New Hampshire. And then it was here in Bethel that his mental illness had worsened, perhaps-according to Valerian-because of the solitude. Not that taking a yoga cla.s.s or volunteering at the library would have made a difference. But all those hours alone in this house sc.r.a.ping wallpaper and slathering paint on kitchen walls? It had exacerbated his disconnection from people other than his wife and his daughters. And so whatever demons he already had were transformed into the self-loathing that had led him to hurt himself.

And then Garnet had found the bones. Good G.o.d, her children would have had to have been mannequins not to have been out of sorts. It was a miracle that they could put one foot in front of the other and function at all.

No, it wasn't precisely a miracle. It was Reseda. Anise. Holly. Clary. Ginger. Sage. It was all those remarkable women. It was John Hardin. It was all those remarkable people. They were strange, there was no doubt about it. They were obsessed with their greenhouses and gardens and quaint little remedies. But they were caring and giving and intellectually engaged. While the girls might feel a little ostracized at the moment by their cla.s.smates-though Emily honestly was convinced this would improve over time-they had been embraced by the most interesting women of Bethel. Verbena. This was the name that Clary and Anise were calling her now. John was, too, though for some reason she found his use of it a little troubling: It suggested a more public transformation than she was prepared to make at the moment, because he wanted to call her that at work. Moreover, she wasn't enamored of the name-the connotation in her mind was the men's talc.u.m and soap she had sometimes placed under the Christmas tree for Chip, though Anise had rea.s.sured her that it had a long and rich feminine history as well. A mystical history. Anise had told her that another term for verbena was Juno's tears, and she thought it might be a fitting name for Emily as she coped with the heartbreaking loss of Flight 1611 and her reawakening into a future she had never antic.i.p.ated.

When Emily had told Reseda that some of the women now wanted to call her Verbena, her friend had shown absolutely no emotion, and for a moment she thought that perhaps Reseda didn't approve-which made her fear that perhaps Reseda didn't believe she was worthy of having a new name. Of becoming one of them. But then Reseda had nodded and said, "Yes, of course. We should have a christening. A rebirth into Verbena. It might be fun. We'll view it as an excuse for a party."

"Mommy?"

She looked over at Garnet. "Yes, dear?"

"What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking about vocabulary words. At least I should have been. Sorry."

"I wasn't thinking about the words, either."

"No?"

"No. I want to move back to Pennsylvania."

Emily rested her hand on her daughter's shoulder and rubbed it softly. She was surprised by both the bluntness and the suddenness of her daughter's request. "Sometimes I do, too," she said, and she was about to say more: explain why that idea had its appeal but why, in the end, she would prefer to stay here in Bethel. At least for now. The reality was that there was a support group here. Moreover, she didn't believe that her husband-their father-was capable of uprooting his life once again. In some ways, the man she had fallen in love with and married and raised the two of them with had died that awful afternoon last August. He had become a ghost of his former self, a wisp: He had become, sadly, the pilot who wasn't Sully Sullenberger.

Meanwhile, she wasn't even sure she was capable-not emotionally, not intellectually-of returning to a practice as demanding as the one she had left behind in Philadelphia.

"Then we might move back?" Garnet was saying. "There's a chance?"

"I don't want to," said Hallie, and she glared down at her sister from the bed. "I know things have been kind of weird here. But it's not like West Chester was so great."

"You loved West Chester," Garnet corrected her. "You were, like, the most popular girl in the cla.s.s!"

"I was not!"

"You were! You totally were!"

Hallie sat back against her headboard and folded her arms across her chest.

"Let's talk about this calmly," Emily said. She gazed back and forth at her daughters and recognized in the two of them the odd penumbra of resemblance that strangers noted when they first met the girls. "Garnet, you go first. Why do you want to move back to Pennsylvania? And then Hallie, you can tell us why you don't. Okay?"

Hallie gazed angrily out the window into the night, and Garnet nodded slowly, marshaling her ideas. Before she started to speak, however, the phone rang and Emily made a T with her hands, signaling a time-out. "Hold your thoughts," she said to Garnet, and then she rose and ran down the stairs to the second floor to get the phone in her and Chip's bedroom. She figured she reached it about a half second before the answering machine would have picked up.

"Good evening, ma'am. Is this Emily Linton?"

"Yes." She didn't recognize the male voice.

"My name is Sergeant Dennis Holcomb, I was one of the investigators from the Major Crime Unit who examined the remains your daughter found in your bas.e.m.e.nt. We met your husband, the captain, that morning."

"Yes. Of course." She felt her heart thrumming in her chest; she feared this could only be more bad news.

"Well, we went and got a DNA swab from Hewitt Dunmore. There's a match. He still claims he had no idea that his twin brother had been buried down there. Insists the bones must have preceded his family's purchase of the house: Abenaki remains or fur trappers or loggers. He still says that door was just the old coal chute. But it's pretty evident the remains are Sawyer Dunmore."

"So what does that mean?"

"It means the case is closed. The twelve-year-old's death was ruled a suicide years ago; there was never any suggestion there may have been foul play. And New Hampshire law allows for burial on private property. Why the parents wanted the world to think they buried their boy in the cemetery-and how the mortician was or wasn't involved-is anyone's guess. But they're all dead, and no laws were broken."

"So we're done?" she asked.

"More or less. I will tell you this: The medical examiner's office said some of the bones are still somewhere in your bas.e.m.e.nt-in that homemade vault. They couldn't build a whole skeleton. So, you might want to discourage your little girls from playing down there. I know I wouldn't want my little boy digging around that cellar."

"Thank you."

"You're very welcome, ma'am," he said, and then he gave her his number in case she ever had any more questions. She, in turn, murmured her grat.i.tude and hung up. When she went back upstairs to Hallie's bedroom, both girls were sulking-clearly they had bickered while she had been gone-and neither wanted to discuss the pros and cons of leaving Bethel.

You hang up the kitchen phone only after both Emily and Sergeant Holcomb have hung up their receivers. You make sure that there is no one on the line to hear your click. Then you lean against the counter beside the oven. You glance down. The knife that Tansy left you is still underneath it. One time Desdemona pawed at a dust bunny there and Emily watched the cat while she was chopping an onion, but otherwise you have had little fear that someone will notice it there. Nevertheless, you are relieved the sergeant didn't ask about it-that he didn't ask Emily whether it had turned up. He might have. He might have said something as simple as We'll get that crowbar and that ax back to you soon enough. They weren't murder weapons, so we don't need them. Or, Did you or your husband ever find that knife? Just curious. And then Emily would have asked you where the knife was, since clearly it wasn't with the State Police. Yes, you were lucky. She might not have trusted you after that.

You hear a noise in the den and stroll there. As you expected, Ashley is playing with your daughters' dolls, while Ethan watches. He glances at you and then back at his little girl. He tries not to share with her his utter contempt for you. But he is relentless, his judgment unforgiving and harsh. Why is it that the presence of this other father and daughter causes you such intense physical pain? It is not merely sympathy for all they have endured and all they have lost. For their unspeakable loneliness. It is the racking pain in your head, your abdomen, and lower back that causes you to close your eyes and breathe in deeply and slowly until the Advil kicks in and takes the edge off.

Ashley looks up at you and then drops the doll in the Civil Warera smock near the brick hearth for the woodstove. She looks a little disgusted, a little sad.

She deserves friends. She does. Yes. She does ...

Clary Hardin switched on the dining room light in her home and heard the loud pop. She knew instantly that one of the bulbs had burned out and hoped it wasn't the smiling cherub. They had absolutely no smiling cherubs left. When she surveyed the chandelier, however, she saw that it was indeed one of those bulbs that had blown. They'd have to replace it with one of their two remaining faces of despair.

"Another bulb go?" her husband asked, when he saw her standing underneath the chandelier, staring, her hands on her hips. He stood behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist, and she allowed her arms to fall to her sides.

"Yes," she said. "We have got to get back to Paris."

"Honey, you know that store closed in 1941. It was never going to survive the occupation. It was never going to survive the war."

"Nevertheless: We have got to get back to Paris."

"I know." They had gone there on their honeymoon in 1934 and brought back that chandelier with them on the boat. It had dominated their first home, a two-bedroom apartment near the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. "Tell you what: We'll go this autumn?"

"Once we're revived?"

"Absolutely," John agreed, and he kissed her on the back of her neck.

At night, after their parents had tucked her sister and her in and gone back downstairs to the second floor to get ready for bed themselves, Garnet watched the cold spring rain slap against a windowpane in her bedroom. She tried to study each of the water droplets as they ran down the gla.s.s, hoping to clear her mind of the moment when Anise had chastised her once again in Sage Messner's kitchen. But she couldn't escape the memory. It wasn't merely that she didn't want to be called Cali. It seemed like she was always getting in trouble. It wasn't merely that she was jealous of the idea that these women wanted to call Hallie something normal like Rosemary. It was that she didn't like the way the women looked at Hallie and her. She didn't like the way they wanted her sister and her to be so interested in plants. And it seemed like Anise wanted to scare her-and, yes, that the woman usually succeeded. She realized that she was frightened of Anise, which was precisely why she hadn't told her mother what sometimes occurred in the greenhouse. Before dinner she had considered telling her, but Hallie had argued successfully that this could only get the two of them in even more trouble when their mother confronted Anise-and, in a way that Garnet couldn't quite fathom, she understood that this would endanger their whole family. The closest she could come to the issue was asking if they might move back to Pennsylvania. They couldn't have their old house back, but maybe there was something for sale in a neighborhood just like the one they'd lived in most of her life. Maybe there was a nice house available somewhere that was far away from this creepy Victorian and Bethel and Anise. From all those kooky women.

For a long moment she stared at her dresser. She knew what was behind it. She had found it. Or, more accurately, Desdemona had found it. It was a small door-a hole, really-in the wall that connected to the attic on the other side. A few days earlier, Garnet had watched the cat sniffing there and then pawing at the edge. When she went to see what was so interesting to the animal, she had noticed it. It was a rectangle and it was just big enough for her to crawl through, but she only discovered it with Desdemona's help because the edges were cut to blend into the red and green plaid of the wallpaper. And still, she had to slip a wooden ruler into the seam to dislodge the square, discovering that someone had cut away the plaster and horsehair and even sawed off a part of a beam, but the result was a pa.s.sage into the attic. There was a six-inch length of twine stapled to the attic side of the doorway that served as a handle: Once inside the attic, a person could yank the block into place so it would blend into the wallpaper. The afternoon she found the small door, she had crawled through on her elbows and stood up in the attic. What struck her most wasn't the idea that here was yet another disturbing quirk in the house-up there with those rickety back stairs from the kitchen and the door in the bas.e.m.e.nt behind which she'd found the bones; rather it was how frigid the attic was compared to the rest of the house. After all, it wasn't heated. So she had stood there with her arms around her chest, noting their old moving boxes, their old living room carpet rolled up in a tube, and that monster of an antique sewing machine that came with the house, and then crawled back through the pa.s.sageway into her bedroom. Her instincts told her that this was, in some fashion, an escape hatch: A person would only travel from the bedroom to the attic this way, never the reverse. And it was nowhere near wide enough or tall enough to move anything from the attic to the bedroom. Nevertheless, once she was back in her bedroom that day, she had moved her dresser nearly two feet farther down the wall, so the door would be blocked by the piece of furniture. It threw off the symmetry of the room, but her mom clearly had enough on her mind that she hadn't asked why her daughter had ever so slightly rearranged the furniture. And although the pa.s.sageway was a little frightening, it was also interesting. A little magic. She had decided she would share its discovery with Hallie, but not yet with their mother.

Now she kicked off the comforter and climbed from bed and walked down the short hallway to Hallie's room. They slept with their doors open and the hall light on these days, and so she figured that, if Hallie was awake, she was already aware that her sister was on the way to her bedroom. Just in case, she stood for a moment in the doorway, watching the shape of her twin huddled underneath her own quilt.

"Hallie?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. "You awake?"

The body didn't move, but she heard her sister grumble. "I am," she said. "And I told you that, when it's just us, I want you to call me Rosemary. Anise said it would help me get used to it. And you should start trying to be Cali."

Garnet knew that Hallie was not going to be receptive at all to what she wanted to discuss, and she feared that she would probably wind up retreating to her own bedroom with her feelings hurt. But she also knew that she didn't want to "start trying to be Cali," and so she crossed the bedroom floor and climbed into bed beside her sister.

"I don't want to be Cali," she said once she was settled there, wrapping herself in a section of the quilt. Hallie sat up and yanked a part of the comforter back over her own shoulders. Garnet couldn't quite make out her sister's face in the dark, but she could tell that Hallie was glaring at her.

"Don't be a pill. You don't want to be left out again. Don't make me have to take care of you here, too."

Garnet knew what Hallie meant; she understood the lengths to which her sister had gone to include her in West Chester-to make sure that she was neither ignored nor picked on. But she also knew that her sister derived a measure of satisfaction from looking out for her. Hallie was going to grow into either one of those adults who took great pride in being needed or a mean girl who took pleasure in the fealty of her friends.

"I was doing fine here at school and at dance cla.s.s. I was making friends just like you until Daddy ..." She didn't finish the sentence, though she really didn't have to. Until Daddy freaked out Molly Francoeur.

"Well, none of that means anything anymore. We don't have a lot of friends at school. We don't have a lot of friends at dance cla.s.s. We really don't have anyone but the plant ladies. No one. Those people are our friends right now, they're what we've got."

"Great. A group of middle-aged and old ladies as friends. I'm so glad we live here. Let's stay here forever."

"Reseda's not middle-aged. Holly's not middle-aged."

"The rest are like grandmothers."

"You really don't like them?"

"No," Garnet said firmly. "I don't."

"Well, you're making a mistake. I do like them. I want to be one of them."