The Night Strangers Part 12

"And since the plane crash? How has he been as a dad since the accident?" he asked.

"Still great. He's a terrific parent. I mean, he's been a little s.p.a.cey. How could he not? And, as you know, he's been depressed. There was a period when I don't think he was getting dressed until the girls were about to get off the school bus in the afternoon."

"Here in New Hamps.h.i.+re?"

"No, this was in those months right after the crash. Back in Pennsylvania."

He rubbed at his eyes, and she guessed that he was probably as tired as she was.

"How is he doing now?" she asked.

"Well, he's sticking with his story that it was an accident. He fell. And I guess it is possible that he happened to have the knife with him when he took a tumble while going downstairs to check on the pilot light. Or maybe he fell and didn't fall on the knife. Then, as he was sitting on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor in the dark-he has no flashlight, remember-it all just overwhelms him: the accident, the move, the lack of purpose in his life right now. The flashbacks, the guilt. There is a lot going on inside his head. And so he hurts himself. I mean, we usually a.s.sociate cutting with teen girls and young women. But it can affect anyone."

"He'd never cut himself before tonight."

"And perhaps he never will again. But it's still going to take a bit of work to answer your question: Why did he do this? And we may never answer that question, at least not to our satisfaction. But your husband has no history of schizophrenia or mental illness or violence, correct?"

"No," she agreed. "None. Trust me, they don't let schizophrenics fly planes. They don't let people who are likely to take a knife to themselves pilot commercial jets."

"That's what I mean."

"But what about that thing he said about some girl on his flight-his last flight-needing a playmate? What was that about?"

"Oh, it could mean any one of a hundred things. What I found interesting is that he only brought that up after he had given you the knife and collapsed."

"He didn't give me the knife," she corrected him. "He pulled it out of his stomach and tossed it on to the floor. It was like it was something that repulsed him."

The doctor stretched his legs out straight in front of him. She noticed he was wearing black Converse sneakers. "Your husband's contrition is profound. He is calm but ashamed. Appalled at what he did tonight. He is devastated that his girls saw him that way. But he is also continuing to insist that the water in the sink seemed a little cool when the two of you were doing the dishes after dinner. He says you went to the dining room to continue clearing the table and he went downstairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt to see what was going on with the hot-water tank. But he tripped and fell. Then the lights went out." He paused, thinking, and then turned to her. "Did that ER doctor check for a head injury?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Before your husband goes home tomorrow-"

"If my husband goes home tomorrow-"

"Make sure he was checked for a concussion. There was no obvious sign of a head injury, but I wonder if maybe he hit the back or the side of his head in the dark and blacked out. It's just an idea."

Emily thought about this and about how Chip hadn't answered her when she had called out his name over and over, yelling for him as she went from floor to floor in the house. "Wouldn't the ER have looked into a concussion?" she asked.

"You had a pretty green doctor and nurse. I think he had graduated, oh, around three-thirty this afternoon. A lot would have depended on what he thought to ask your husband. And I'm not saying your husband even has a concussion. I'm only suggesting that he may have blacked out-if only briefly."

"You might be onto something," she said, and she told Richmond about her attempts to find Chip and how he hadn't responded when she had positively screamed for him during the blackout. She actually felt a little relieved at the idea that he may have been unconscious. "It would explain an awful lot," she told him when she was finished.

"See what I mean?" he said, and he gave her a small smile. "There are a lot of questions about what happened tonight that we'll never answer. Never. But some may have incredibly obvious solutions."

Reseda knew as well as anyone the stories-all suspect in her opinion-that Tansy Dunmore had not buried her son in the cemetery. The woman had feared that Clary or Sage or Anise or one of the herbalists long past would try again, even if it meant desecrating the boy's bloated corpse. Reseda gave little credence to the idea. Although Sawyer Dunmore had died before she was born (though only by half a decade, a reality that always made Reseda aware of her age since most of Bethel viewed Sawyer Dunmore's death as chronologically distant as the Peloponnesian War), she knew the women and she knew the tincture. She had always been confident that Sawyer Dunmore's body was in his casket in the family plot beside the two hydrangeas in the cemetery. It was only when the pilot had come to her office and mentioned that door in the bas.e.m.e.nt that she had begun to wonder if she was mistaken.

Now standing perfectly still, hunched over, in the muddy chamber that Chip Linton had opened with an ax, she decided that Tansy and Parnell Dunmore had indeed turned a corner of their bas.e.m.e.nt into a mausoleum. They had buried their child here, determined to keep even the soulless, rotting cadaver from the women. She had the sense that, if she took a shovel and dug, it wouldn't take long to find human remains. The notion filled her with despair for both of the parents, but particularly for Tansy. Her guilt just might have rivaled the pilot's.

Nevertheless, Reseda felt nothing attaching itself to her, nothing-no one-at all. If Sawyer Dunmore had remained here with his body (a distinct possibility, given how he died), he was now long gone. She ran her fingertips over the ravaged barnboard. It was appropriate that here was a doorway. A threshold. A liminal world.

She recalled the first time the dead had attached themselves to her and the trauma that had preceded it. She had understood even then, if only instinctively, how receptive the traumatized are to the dead. How open. Again, a doorway into one's aura-one's s.p.a.ce. The dead will always find a pa.s.sage. In hindsight, her twin sister had attached herself to her well before the police and the EMTs arrived. Reseda had been barely conscious and had presumed at first that she was dreaming: One minute she and Lucinda were walking on a path along Storrow Drive, and the next there was a man before them whom her sister clearly recognized and whose sudden presence she found terrifying. But all that had registered for Reseda was that he was wearing a New England Patriots knit cap and that he was ma.s.sive. It was late at night, and people would tell her later that they shouldn't have been out. But they were both juniors, Reseda at BC and Lucinda at BU. Soon they would be going home for Thanksgiving. Their family lived perhaps a mile from the ocean in Yarmouth, Maine. Lucinda had taken her sister's arm when she saw the man, but she had barely started to scream when he killed her. Just like that. Reared up like a stallion and stabbed her over and over in the chest and face. There had been so much of Lucinda's blood on Reseda's own white parka that initially the EMTs had been confused as they tried to find where she had been stabbed. And then he had attacked her. The next day in the hospital she would learn that her forearms had practically been skinned and the snow jacket sleeves shredded as she used her arms to ward off the knife blows and defend herself. A tendon in her hand had been sliced through, presumably because she grabbed at the blade while reaching for the knife. But the blade had neither hit her heart nor nicked her aorta, either of which in all likelihood would have been lethal. The knife had missed her liver and her spleen. She had lost a lot of blood, but she had suffered mostly puncture wounds, and nothing vital-no large-caliber veins-had been punctured. Unfortunately, in addition to gaping lesions along both arms and an especially cavernous maw on her right leg (had she kicked at her a.s.sailant as he stabbed her?), her left lung was collapsed.

And yet as she lay on the ground, her attacker disappearing into the night because he presumed she was as dead as her sister, almost right away she had the feeling that she wasn't alone. The sensation was so p.r.o.nounced that even when she was being loaded onto the backboard, her neck in a cervical collar, she thought Lucinda was being carried into the ambulance beside her. She wasn't. At one point Reseda glanced at the trauma dressings and wraparound gauze that made her arms look like a mummy's, and she could have sworn that she saw her sister's slim wrist and the Georg Jensen bracelet with the moonstones she always wore.

Two days later she would be identifying Lucinda's killer from a series of snapshots. He was a deeply disturbed custodian at the university lab where Lucinda worked and had had a crush on her that had gone horribly wrong. Somehow Reseda knew details of the relations.h.i.+p-and the strange ways the young man had stalked her sister-that Lucinda had never shared.

The incursion into her aura would prove, in some ways, to be a penetrating injury. And though her sister had meant her no harm (which Reseda knew now was usually, but not always, the case with the undead), Lucinda's presence was at once debilitating and disorienting. Everyone in her family and at school noticed the changes in Reseda, and even when her internal and external wounds had healed, it would be a long, long time until she was fully recovered-until she was, quite literally, herself again. Everyone attributed this to the trauma, and they were right-though not in the way they meant. Had Reseda not been so traumatized by the attack, she might have resisted her sister's invasion of her aura.

Which brought her back to Sawyer Dunmore and his crypt here in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It felt empty, save for whatever bones were somewhere in the dirt beneath her feet. Either he had made it to another plane or he had found another host on this earth. She presumed it was the former, since whatever was tormenting the pilot did not seem to reflect the little she knew about Sawyer. She wondered: Had Chip Linton found the bones? If so, he hadn't been thinking about them when he had been at her house for dinner. She hadn't sensed either Sawyer or a skeleton.

She circled back in her mind to the women. She thought of Anise. Of Clary. Of Ginger. Then she thought of John Hardin and Alexander Jackson. The original tincture was long gone, but now they had a fresh pair of twins at their disposal. The odds were good they would try again.

When she went upstairs, Holly and the girls were all sound asleep in the living room. She kissed each on the cheek and then perched herself on the deacon's bench in the kitchen, prepared to keep vigil until either Emily returned or the sun rose, whichever came first.

You know you are in a hospital bed. There are the metal rungs along the sides, there is a galaxy of small dots of light: distant stars, but not really distant at all. You listen to the sounds of the nurses, including the slim fellow with the immaculate, graying goatee, as they tend to you and whoever else is on this floor, pa.s.sing by your half-open door. How long ago was it that Michael Richmond was here? An hour? Two? Three? You believe you are alone, but you are not completely sure. You hear no one breathing in that second bed, and there had been n.o.body there when you were first brought here from the ER. You recall that earlier your stomach hurt, but no more. They have given you something, and this is your princ.i.p.al source of frustration at the moment. You should be in pain. You deserve to be in pain. When you recall what you were contemplating, you grow a little nauseous. Would you actually have turned the knife on a child? Your own child? Apparently. It was close.

You fear that you will never be able to look your children in the eyes again. You almost did the absolute worst thing a parent can do. And the fact that you failed (thank G.o.d) doesn't mean that you can be trusted. You can't. Your daughters should never trust you again. You will never trust yourself. Ever.

You wonder what time it is and scan the hospital room for a clock. There doesn't seem to be one amidst all those pinp.r.i.c.ks of light. But you presume that your girls are sound asleep right now. As is Emily.

At least you imagine that they are sound asleep. In your mind, however, you don't see them in their rooms on the third floor of the house. You hope, when you think about it, that they are not even in the structure: You like to believe that they have gone to a motel or an inn. That they are with John and Clary Hardin. Anywhere is better than that despicable place you now call your home. Three floors of malevolent timbers and plaster and pine board. k.n.o.b-and-tube wiring, every inch of which is as ominous as a snake. Rooms and corridors that are claustrophobic, wallpaper designed to make a man despair. Those sunflowers. The foxes. Weapons and cigarette lighters hidden throughout the house like Easter eggs, but evil. And then there is the bas.e.m.e.nt. The pit of despair. Doors that lead nowhere. Whatever led you to nearly take a knife to a child was sp.a.w.ned in that pit. You need to get out. You need to get your family out.

Or is this just the morphine or whatever painkiller they're giving you? Are you being melodramatic, trying to s.h.i.+ft blame? It's a house. It's not alive. Actually, it's a place that you are painstakingly making your own. You know people in Pennsylvania who would kill for a house just like this. The truth is, you are the problem. Not the house.

You have known all along that your future began to diminish last summer, on August 11. That was when the possibilities began to narrow. And now? Look at the way you are giving sentience and breath to bricks and mortar. You are becoming estranged from the world of the sane. You deserve nothing, and you have nothing.

You contemplate going home tomorrow and realize that you are afraid. The idea of being alone with your children terrifies you. What might you do when they climb off the school bus tomorrow afternoon-or the day after, or the day after that-while Emily is at work? Everyone fears you will hurt yourself. That should be the least of their concerns. Still, you find the notion of suicide growing real in your mind. You killed thirty-nine people back in August and nearly a fortieth this evening. You know this has to end. You tried to end it this evening, but wouldn't your death at your own hands scar your sweet girls even more? Of course it would. And look at the emotional wounds you have inflicted upon them already. Or would your death be a relief for everyone? In the long run, might it save your children's lives? Emily could take the girls back to Pennsylvania. Or raise them right here in Bethel with the help of Reseda and Holly and Anise. With John and Clary, with Peyton and Sage. Everyone here adores your daughters. They adore Emily. They say it takes a village to raise a child; well, this village loves your girls. So be it.

But you love them, too. You love Emily.

You stare at the horizontal blinds in the window and try to focus. A thought: You fly the plane until, pure and simple, you can't. Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. It's what you do. It's all about concentration.

Yes, tomorrow you will go home. You will try to stay away from the bas.e.m.e.nt. You will try not to curl into a ball in the bone-ridden dirt in your own little pit of despair.

Outside your hospital room, you hear the nurse with the goatee laughing gently with another of the nurses, the stout woman with the b.u.t.ton mushroom for a nose. She seemed very kind. They all seem very kind.

Yes, yes, the poor, dead Ashley Stearns does deserve friends. She does. But you can't do what it takes. You won't.

Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Fly the plane until you can't.

You close your eyes against the stars in your hospital room, and eventually you fall back to sleep.

Chapter Ten.

In the morning, John Hardin came to the house. The sun was up, and it was apparent that the last of the snow in the yard would be gone by lunchtime. There would still be snow in the woods, and a small, crunchy, knee-high ridge along the north wall of the carriage barn was likely to remain for at least a couple more days. And certainly more snow would fall at the end of March and into April. But the morning felt like spring when Emily opened the front door around seven-thirty. Holly and the twins were still asleep, but Reseda was upstairs showering. Emily had been so exhausted when she returned from the hospital that she hadn't bothered to climb into her nightgown and had instead simply collapsed on her bed in her clothes and pulled the quilt over her. She had somehow staggered to her feet when the alarm went off, and she had only set the alarm because she was a mother of ten-year-old girls who were going to need her rather badly when they awoke.

"Good morning," John said, his voice as cheerful as ever. She noticed that he was dressed more formally than usual. He was wearing a necktie with his tweed coat, and penny loafers instead of his usual L.L.Bean duck boots. She was impressed by how well rested he seemed; she hadn't glanced at herself in the mirror when she made her way from the bedroom to the kitchen, and so she presumed that she looked terrible-tired and messy and not even clean. But simply having made it awake and vertical seemed a monumental accomplishment at the moment-or, perhaps, a testimony to whatever antidepressant Michael Richmond had given her.

"Hi, John," she whispered, ushering him into the hallway and then into the kitchen. "The girls and Holly are still sound asleep in the living room."

He hunched his shoulders and nodded, as if making his body a little smaller would make him a little quieter. He sat down at the kitchen table in the seat nearest the counter with the coffeemaker as she started to brew a pot. "Giving the girls a day off from school?" he asked very quietly, enunciating each word with care. "I think that is an excellent plan."

"I wouldn't say it was a plan. It's just what's happening."

"Well, I hope you weren't intending on coming into the office today."

"No, I wasn't. I presume you don't mind."

"I would have sent you home the moment I heard you coming up the stairs. Your girls need you today. Chip needs you. What time are you getting him?"

"I thought I would call the hospital in a few minutes and see what's going on. But I guess I was hoping he would be back here by lunchtime or so."

"I want him to have the best care available," John said. "It's why I've come by. We both know in our hearts he didn't fall on that knife."

She closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed at her temples. She wanted this-whatever this was-to be a one-time aberration. She wanted Chip to come home and be fine and this latest phase in their nightmare to be behind them. "What do you have in mind?" she asked finally. "Is there a particular doctor or psychiatrist you would recommend?"

"I know Dr. Richmond spoke to him for a couple minutes last night-"

"Michael is his psychiatrist here in New Hamps.h.i.+re," she told him. "They have a relations.h.i.+p. It wasn't like he just dropped by the hospital."

"I understand. Not a problem at all. But there's another doctor I would love him to see, too. Her name is Valerian Wainscott, and you can have absolute faith in her. She's very, very good-an excellent therapist." He chuckled and shook his head slightly. "I remember watching her grow up."

"Any special reason you want Chip to see her?"

"Well, Valerian has a lot of experience with post-traumatic stress disorder. She works at the state psychiatric hospital two days a week," he explained. "Tell me: Has Chip been acting particularly odd lately-you know, before last night?"

"You mean more than the flashbacks?"

"And, I suppose, a measure of guilt and depression."

She watched the coffee drip into the gla.s.s pot and breathed in the aroma. "Yes. He has been a different person since the crash-which is to be expected."

"Anything specific?"

"He ..." She floundered for a moment, trying to find the right words. It had been much easier talking to the psychiatrist around midnight, when she was at once exhausted and in shock. When she resumed, she said, "As I told Michael last night, he went a little nuts on this door in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was just the old coal chute. But it was nailed shut, and he took an ax to it."

"It was a violent act?"

"An act with an ax usually is."

"I see your point."

"And I think he was more disturbed than I was by Tansy Dunmore's paranoia. At first I was pretty shaken-more than Chip. But I guess I got over it." The night before she had told John and Clary that the knife Chip had brought to the bas.e.m.e.nt was one of the items Tansy had left hidden in the house. "He was a little obsessed by it."

"Her paranoia."

"Yes."

John shook his head ruefully. "She was a very ill woman toward the end."

"So I gather."

"And Chip's therapist knew about all this?"

"Michael? Oh, absolutely."

"Good," he said, but the word caught just the tiniest bit in his throat. Then he smiled. "Tell me: How are the world's most adorable twins?"

Before Emily could answer, Reseda appeared in the kitchen entrance from the dining room, a towel on her head like a turban. "They're fine, John," she told him. "I just peered into the living room, and they're still sound asleep."

"Reseda, G.o.d bless you," John said, rising from his chair, a small eddy of laughter in his voice. "Well, I think that coffee is just about ready. May I help myself, Emily?"

"Go ahead."

"You were suggesting Valerian to Emily?" Reseda asked him.

"I was, I was. Doesn't this coffee smell heavenly? Ladies, may I pour? Reseda?"

"Thank you, John," Reseda said, "but I think I'll have tea."

"Of course you will," he murmured, "of course. You know, Emily, on the bright side, at least you're here in Bethel right now and not in West Chester. I don't know what sorts of friends or support group you had back there, but here you have a whole big family waiting to care for you and those two precious children of yours. Imagine: You had Reseda and Holly staying the night. You have Anise's magical cooking in your refrigerator. And you have people like my own lovely bride and Sage and Peyton at your disposal."

"And you, John," she said, taking the mug of coffee he was handing her. "Really, I'm so lucky to have you, too. You're such a gift."

He rolled his eyes. "Some folks would say I'm more of a curse. Wouldn't you agree, Reseda?" Her friend raised her eyebrows but otherwise didn't respond. "But, yes, I do try. We all try here in Bethel." He paused for a moment and then said with great earnestness, "It's a bit like all of you have come home to a big family, don't you think? It must feel a bit like coming home."

Garnet had seen greenhouses as large as this one, but they had all been commercial nurseries-not someone's personal greenhouse. There had been a nursery like this not too far from where they lived in Pennsylvania, and two or three times she and Hallie had gone there with their mother, and Garnet recalled trying (and failing) to convince Mom to buy one of the stone gargoyles or garden trolls the place sold. But she had never been inside a greenhouse this large in someone's backyard-or one that had grow lights on stands above many of the tables of plants. It struck her as longer than any of the ones she had seen from the roads as they drove between the highway and their new home. It belonged to Sage Messner, the older woman she and her sister had met at Mr. and Mrs. Hardin's house a couple of nights ago. Sat.u.r.day.

It was a little hard to believe that Sat.u.r.day night was only a couple of nights ago. It was Tuesday morning, but in some ways Sat.u.r.day night felt as far away as when her family had lived back in West Chester. Maybe it even felt as far away as before her dad's plane had crashed in the lake. She and Hallie hadn't been expected to go to school today, and now their mom was off meeting with doctors and bringing their dad home from the hospital, and Reseda had taken her sister and her here to Sage Messner's to see the greenhouse. Sage and Clary had been fussing over her and Hallie for over an hour, giving them lemonade with chlorophyll-the greenest beverage she had ever seen in her life, but it turned out to be pretty good-and chocolate brownies. Then Sage had shown them the guest bedrooms in the house, where she told them they could stay whenever they wanted. When she had shared the bedrooms with them, it was like when Mom and Dad had taken them last summer to Mount Vernon in Virginia, where George Was.h.i.+ngton had lived, and they had been shown his bedroom: Sage's enthusiasm was just about off-the-charts crazy as she went on and on about some amazing herbalist who had lived in the house before her. Garnet had half-expected the bedroom doorway to have a red velvet rope in front of it. Consequently, she had been a little relieved when Reseda had taken just her and her sister out here to the greenhouse, leaving Sage in the kitchen to make them yet another snack.

"And this is memoria," Reseda was saying, running the tips of her fingers gently along the purplish leaves of the plant. The memoria was about five inches high, the leaves the size of her thumb and roughly the shape of the spade on a playing card. There were seven of the plants side by side in small terra-cotta vases.

"Feel the leaves," she added, and so Garnet did and then Hallie followed.

"It feels like puppy fur," Hallie said, and Garnet thought this was the perfect description. Indeed, there was a light down on the leaves that felt like it should have been the coat on a cute little animal, not a plant. Garnet was wearing a small silver bracelet that resembled ivy around her wrist-Reseda had given it to her a few minutes ago-and Garnet noticed it once more when she gazed down at her fingertips against the memoria. She loved the bracelet as much as she had loved any jewelry she'd ever been given-even more, she realized, than the unicorn choker her parents had gotten her at Disney World just about two years ago now. It felt like a more adult piece of jewelry. Hallie had been given a bracelet, too, also silver, though the design on hers looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Garnet could tell that Hallie appreciated her gift as well.

"What do you do with it?" Garnet asked Reseda, referring to the memoria.

"It's a healing herb. Medicinal."