The Night Strangers Part 25

"Really?"

"Yes! Just till we know. We could hide in the attic. Through that hole in the wall. It's there for a reason."

"The attic scares me," Hallie said, a rare quiver in her voice.

"It's just dusty and cold," Garnet rea.s.sured her. "That's all."

She could tell that Hallie was starting to think about this, and then they both heard a small thud in the dark two floors below them and her sister crinkled her nose. Hallie, too, was smelling the cool, damp air. "Maybe that was Mom," she whispered, but it was clear that she wasn't confident.

"Come on," Garnet urged her, and Hallie nodded and climbed from her bed. For one of the few times in the sisters' lives, she followed her redheaded twin. The girls returned to Garnet's bedroom, where Garnet pushed her bureau a few inches toward the window and then knelt and pulled open the door to the pa.s.sageway. She pushed Hallie through it first and then followed her sister into the dark of the attic. As she was on her stomach on the attic floor, pulling the door back into its slot with the twine so it would disappear into the wallpaper, she could feel the vibrations of someone-some people, she thought-walking just a few feet away on the other side. Then, somewhere far off, she heard her mother calling out both her and her sister's names. She didn't believe the people in her bedroom were friends; she didn't believe her mother even knew they were there. She wished there was a way she could warn her.

You are surrounded by the sounds of the chimes. Here they are once again, the relentless tweets and rings you heard (but only vaguely at the time) in the c.o.c.kpit as Flight 1611 descended inexorably back to earth. They are meant to alert you that the ground is rising up toward the aircraft. As if you don't know. As if you need a synthetic voice urging you to "pull up, pull up, pull up." Or another one informing you that you are too low, too low, too low. That there is terrain. You know as well as anyone that there is terrain, as the small boats on the lake grow more distinct and the forests on the foothills of the Adirondacks on the New York side of the water come into focus and suddenly seem to be higher than the wings of your plane. And yet somehow you and Amy Lynch remained more focused than you would have thought possible when you listened to the c.o.c.kpit voice recordings with the NTSB. Somehow, despite the noise from the automated warning systems and the radio traffic that filled your small s.p.a.ce at the front of the doomed aircraft, you worked the problem until, it seemed, you had solved it. And then there was that wave from the ferry and you were done.

Now it is all back, including the chimes. It is all before you once more, including the sound of Amy's voice, an unmistakable but absolutely understandable tremor coursing through each syllable. But like you, she worked the problem. She skimmed through the emergency handbook, she tried to reignite the engines, she implemented the ditching procedures.

You couldn't save her.

Now you try to open your eyes, but you can't, and it takes you a long moment to recall where you are. Slowly the details of the pentagonal greenhouse become clear in your mind's eye, despite the strange mugginess that has engulfed you. You wonder what was in the sweet tea you drank and then the bitter tincture you swallowed immediately after it in two great spoonfuls. The greenhouse had been illuminated by long rows of grow lights, and at one point it was so bright that you found yourself squinting as your eyes adjusted. You remember turning your head and gazing at Baphomet, at his beard and his wings, and you inhaled what you thought was incense. Your fingertips felt for the edge of the gurney. No, it wasn't a gurney. Nor was it a ma.s.sage table. It was a long, antique pumpkin pine table, on which the plants had been replaced with a futon.

You sigh. You decide that what you just experienced of Flight 1611 was a dream, not a flashback. This distinction seems to matter, even now.

"Where is Sandra?"

You turn your head the other way-at least you believe you do-toward the sound of Reseda's voice, and you have the sense that Holly is standing beside her. Perhaps it is the aroma of lilacs that reminds you Holly is a.s.sisting Reseda. Doesn't the woman always smell slightly of lilacs? You cannot recall what the three of you might have discussed when Reseda was steeping that strange tea in the kitchen. When you first lay down here in the greenhouse, over Holly's shoulder was a pipe with hanging plants, the leaves of which were shaped like Valentine hearts; the colors were an orange and a purple more vibrant than your twins' Magic Markers.

"Where is Sandra?" Reseda asks again.

You try to find your voice, to tell her you don't know, you don't feel the specific pain you a.s.sociate with Sandra's presence, when out of nowhere you hear her. You hear Sandra. You hear her with the same perfect clarity that you heard her that first time she spoke to you in your bas.e.m.e.nt.

Here, she says simply.

"When did you join the captain?" Reseda asks, and you realize that Reseda heard her voice, too. Or did she hear yours? You have read about out-of-body experiences and you long for one now. You want to be both in and above that former pilot on the pumpkin pine table, because you want to witness this. You want to see where Sandra is standing this second. Is she visible to the two other women?

I don't know, she is telling Reseda, but I think I joined him in the water. I couldn't breathe.

You try to sit up, to find her. But you can't. You recall the mind-altering crumpets infused with G.o.d-alone-knows-what that Anise and Valerian had been feeding you and start to panic that now Reseda and Holly have paralyzed you from the neck down. Is this, you wonder, what it is like to be hypnotized? Or is this something else entirely?

"Shhhh, you're not paralyzed," Reseda says. "Don't struggle. Let Sandra speak."

You try to relax, at least a little. Do you nod? You believe that you do, but, again, you are not completely sure. No matter. No ... matter.

Reseda runs a clay pestle under your nose with a shallow puddle of hot oil bubbling inside it, and you inhale what might be juniper. Then Holly-yes, you can hear her and sense her-is lining the head of the table, just beyond the futon, with burning votives. Each time she places one on the pine, Reseda dips her fingers into the hot wax and presses a single drop onto your forehead and murmurs a name you recognize from the pa.s.senger manifest. The sensation is not unpleasant, and you wonder if she will do it forty-eight times. She stops at twelve, however, listing the names of the nine survivors (including yours) and the names of the three people who died but have attached themselves to you. The melting wax in the votives is flecked with aromatic herbs, but the scent is unfamiliar to you. Again she asks Sandra a question, and you are listening to the woman's response when suddenly there is the water from Lake Champlain that awful August afternoon starting to wash over you in a single great wave. And so you take a deep breath, your cheeks ballooning like a toddler's, though the air in those pockets is largely irrelevant. And then, before you know it, you are upside down and the lake water is in your nose, the pain stinging, and you are desperate for air, desperate. When you open your eyes to see where you are, you are completely underwater. It happened that fast-the blink of an eye. You are vaguely aware of the blue leather on the seat ahead of you, of slick emergency information cards, glossy in-flight magazines, digital reading devices, and paperback books floating amidst the bubbles like tropical fish, and the way the fuselage is falling, falling, falling through the lake. You see the wide-open eyes of the young businessman in the brown suit, his hair floating up in the water like saw gra.s.s, his arms frantically las.h.i.+ng out as he tries to swim. Then he turns away, kicking you with his wingtip shoe. You release your seat belt-not a five-point shoulder harness, a mere steel buckle linking a thick nylon ribbon-and abruptly the eddies of whoos.h.i.+ng water slam you hard into first an armrest and next the jagged floor of the jet, which somehow is above you. You probably would have been forced by the pain in your chest to open your mouth in another second anyway, but when the side of your head is cleavered by whatever is protruding from the floor, reflexively your lips part into a wide, silent O, and the lake water pours in, and your throat spasms shut-the laryngeal cords trying desperately to keep all that water out of your lungs. It is an agony more p.r.o.nounced than anything you have experienced in your life or, now, ever will. And it seems to last an eternity. You want this over, you want to die now rather than in minutes-because you are conscious of the reality that you are indeed going to perish, there will be no miracle-but it takes time for the brain to black out. The last thing you see before the pain and terror and whiteness obliterates all thought? The white s.h.i.+rt of, you believe, the captain of the aircraft.

The idea crossed Emily's mind to get in the car and drive for help, but that would demand that she stop searching for her girls. And because there didn't seem to be a strange vehicle on the property now and she hadn't heard one earlier, she told herself that the girls were somewhere nearby. They had to be. And so she raced downstairs and screamed once more for Hallie and Garnet, shouting their names into the storm from the front hallway, the screams desperate, biblical wails that made her throat hurt. Only when her voice had grown hoa.r.s.e did she finally grab her keys and run for her car, stumbling once on the slate walkway and feeling the sting acutely on the hand that already was cut. But it barely slowed her. She was hysterical and she didn't care. She climbed into her car and switched on the headlights and the wipers and was just about to throw the Volvo into reverse and glance behind her when she saw it. She saw it for just a fleeting second, and she saw it only because the car had been facing the greenhouse and all that gla.s.s acted like a mirror, causing her to look away from the solarlike luminescence of the vehicle's headlights. She flinched and reflexively turned to her left, back toward the house. And in a window on the second floor, the guest room down the corridor from her and Chip's bedroom, she saw the halo from a flashlight. It moved briefly but clearly, and she was reminded of the ma.s.sive fog lights that would cut through the mist at airports. It was that distinct. And then it was gone.

An idea crossed her mind, cryptic but meaningful: This was why Tansy Dunmore had kept a small a.r.s.enal hidden throughout the house. This explained the crowbar, the knife, and the ax.

Well, she had weapons, too. She had knives. In the kitchen.

For a moment she watched the wipers and tried to think. If someone was in the house right now, they had known she was there, too, because of the way she had been frantically screaming and searching for her girls. But they had left her alone. They hadn't hurt her. They hadn't drugged or sedated her. Apparently, they hadn't even been interested in her. They had only been interested in her children: It was Hallie and Garnet they wanted. And if someone was still inside her home, then perhaps her girls had hidden themselves somewhere in the house or in the woods and hadn't been discovered yet.

And so she kept the car running and the headlights on, figuring that whoever was inside might presume for a few more seconds that she was still in the vehicle. At the same time, if she could find the twins, they could race into the station wagon and speed off the property. Leave this despicable house and this despicable town ... forever. So she closed the car door as softly as she could and ran back through the rain into the house.

A thought crossed her mind: I am like a firefighter. I am running into a burning building. But it pa.s.sed quickly as she tried to imagine where her girls might be hiding.

Far below them, Hallie and Garnet saw the station wagon headlights bounce against the greenhouse and then watched their mother emerge from the car, barely shutting the door as she returned to the house. They had been sitting absolutely still, curled into small b.a.l.l.s, when the strangers were just across the wall from them in Garnet's bedroom, barely daring to exhale until they heard the sounds move away from them into Hallie's bedroom and then down the stairs to the second floor. Only then had they stood up and moved to the window, where they waited now, surveying the world below them.

"They're in the guest room," Garnet murmured.

"I know," Hallie agreed. "I hear them."

"I'm scared."

"Me, too."

"How many are there?"

"I don't know. Two, I think. But maybe three," Hallie answered. The attic floorboards were cold and her toes were starting to freeze.

"I was hoping it was just one person," Garnet said. Then: "Think they'll hurt Mom if they catch her?"

"They haven't yet."

"No. I guess not."

"It must be us who they want," Hallie said. "I think they want to kidnap us."

Garnet thought about this, and she realized something she should have understood earlier-the moment she had heard the strangers inside the house. "No, that's not it," she said. "It's not like they're strangers who want to kidnap us for money. It's Anise."

"What?"

"Well, maybe not Anise herself. I don't know. But it's the plant ladies. They've come for us. I know it."

"Then why wouldn't they have just taken us any of the times we've been at their houses or greenhouses-or when they've been over here in the past? And why would they come in the middle of the night? Why would they be sneaking around? There aren't any other cars outside."

"I don't know. But we can't just stay up here if Mom's looking for us downstairs," Garnet said, and she heard her voice growing a little more urgent. Hallie pushed a finger against her lips to shush her. "We have to help her," Garnet whispered. "We have to do something."

They could no longer feel anyone moving anywhere inside the house: not the strangers in the guest bedroom below them or their mother in some other corner or on the stairs. The house went absolutely still. And so for a moment they both stood where they were, staring out the attic window at the storm and contemplating what they should do. Just then the trapdoor was yanked open from the second floor and a flashlight beam rose like a waterspout into the attic.

This time, the captain's white s.h.i.+rt starts to fall away. Or, to be precise, you fall away. You drift, swaying as if the wrecked fuselage of the jet were a hammock, rocking you, as you and the others descend toward the muddy bottom of Lake Champlain, your back against the aircraft aisle floor. Once before you grabbed that white s.h.i.+rt and clung to it. Not this time. Someone in the distance is calling to you. Urging you to go home. Someone else-your grandfather-is leaning against his vintage white Mustang with the black vinyl hardtop. Tony the Pony he called that car, and you would laugh and sink deep into the vehicle's red leather seats. You sat on his lap when you were a little girl in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and other times you would sit beside him on the couch when he would read to you, while your grandmother sat near you both, doing her crewelwork. Their home often had the welcoming aroma of your grandmother's homemade Swedish meatb.a.l.l.s or, as Christmas neared, her holiday sugar cookies. After your grandfather retired, he played an organ at Macy's in the weeks before Christmas. That was how he would spend his Decembers: playing Christmas carols. He died in his sleep when you were in the second grade, and you cried at his funeral-the first you ever attended-but he and his Mustang are considerably closer to you now than that other voice, the woman encouraging you to go home. Soon that captain's s.h.i.+rt is above you, far above you and growing small, and then it is gone completely and all that remains is blackness and the beckoning sound of the department store organ.

Emily had switched off her flashlight and now held it against her thigh like a club. She pressed herself flat against the kitchen wall beside the pantry and waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. She held her breath and listened, trying to hear or feel movement anywhere in the house, but heard and felt nothing. When she could make out the details of the kitchen more exactly, she gazed at the counter with the wooden block with the knives. She couldn't tell if they all were there, but she saw at least three long handles, and so she knew the most dangerous ones were still in place. She moved quietly across the kitchen and pulled out the carving knife. Then she paused once more, waiting. Above her she thought she heard the groan of the trapdoor to the attic-a prolonged creaking that accompanied the descent of the stairs-but she wasn't sure. It might simply have been the house shuddering in the wind. She considered taking her knife and going straight up the stairs and challenging whoever was there-a.s.suming someone had indeed just opened the door to the attic-but even if she made it to the second-floor landing without being heard, she would lose all surprise when she ran down the corridor toward the trapdoor. She needed another approach.

And the answer, she realized, was that bizarre back stairway at the other end of the kitchen. She almost never used it. She had ascended it exactly two times since they had moved in-the second time only because Chip wanted to show her how he'd replaced the worst of the steps-but it was still windowless, unlit, and too thin to be of practical use if you were carrying anything of any size. It still felt half-finished. But now it might offer the element of surprise, and so silently she opened the door and started up those steps, the flashlight in her left hand and the carving knife in her right.

The primary impact rarely kills everyone in a plane crash. This is especially true in the case of a planned water ditching. Reseda recalled Chip telling her in a voice that was almost numbingly clinical that underwater disorientation, drowning, disorderly evacuation, and injuries from not bracing properly were what killed many people, and Flight 1611 was tragically typical in that regard. Moreover, he feared it was likely that some pa.s.sengers had an unreasonable faith that they would walk away from the disaster as easily as had the pa.s.sengers on Flight 1549, Sully Sullenberger's successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River, and those individuals may not even have braced properly. They had, he presumed, been staring enrapt out the windows, as if this were a mere carnival ride.

He had no idea whether Ashley Stearns had braced properly, he said, but it probably wouldn't have mattered: If Sandra Durant was one of those who did not die on primary impact, then Ashley was one of those who did. Compared to Sandra, she was fortunate, in that her death was almost instant. From what Reseda could see in Chip's mind and from what he had told her of his encounters with the child, the girl had been all but cut in half-imagine a guillotine blade slicing through the abdomen-by a part of the aircraft when it finished its somersault and slammed upside down into the lake. Based on the airline's colors and the portion of logo Chip could see on the metal, he had presumed it was either a part of the rear fuselage or a piece of the vertical stabilizer. There was so much more that he could have told her, but he didn't. He didn't have to. He didn't have to tell her of the child's eyes, open but listless, the light of the living there gone, because she saw the girl in his mind. Ashley's skin was waxen, a ghost's right away. The gaping wound-chasmlike, the great, triangular shard ripping through muscle, intestine, and kidney (the blood and urine rising amidst the bubbles like ribbons), until finally it severed even the vertebrae and spinal cord-reminded her of a painting she'd seen once in a San Gimignano torture museum of a specific medieval form of execution: A person would be suspended upside down so there would be as much blood flowing to the brain as possible, and thus the victim would remain conscious through far more of the agony. The heretic's or prisoner's ankles would be bound to separate posts to shape the body into a Y. Then he would be cut in half with a two-person saw, the blade starting in the groin and slicing first through the perineum. The difference for Ashley? She had been killed in a heartbeat. Thank G.o.d.

She deserves friends, someone said bitterly, and Reseda knew this was the girl's father. Even now he was out there somewhere, angry and poised for a fight.

"This will be a long evening," Holly murmured, her voice a wisp, and Reseda nodded. She had been so focused on Ashley Stearns's imminent death that she had nearly forgotten Holly was beside her and might hear Ethan, too. Still, Reseda opened a vial with an oil composed of valerian leaves and retreatus and put a line of drops along the captain's upper lip so he would inhale the potion as he breathed. She pressed her fingers against his temples and asked to speak to Ashley. She feared briefly that the girl's father was going to act as a buffer spirit, a barrier, and he might have tried, but the child had heard her instantly and come forward.

I can't talk to most breathers, she said.

"You can talk to me," Reseda said gently.

If Ashley's mother had died in the crash with her, Reseda would have sent the child to her-instructed her to go home with her. But her mother had survived, and that was a part of the problem. And while her father had died that afternoon, he may have been the very reason why the girl had not gone on but had instead remained attached to the pilot; her father had stayed, and so she had stayed with him. Consequently, that afternoon Holly had researched which of the child's grandparents were living and which ones were dead. She'd learned that Ethan's mother had pa.s.sed away from cancer last year, which meant that Ashley had known her. That woman might be the spirit guide the child needed, the escort who could take Ashley by the hand and lead her to her destined next life. So Reseda had Holly fill the air of the greenhouse with fresh, pungent ayahuasca and enticium leaves, sprinkling the plants like confetti, while she summoned the spirit of Ashley Stearns's grandmother.

It might have been possible to find places to hide in the attic if they had had more time. There were boxes, some empty and some filled with old blankets and quilts or half-filled with ancient high school yearbooks and aviation manuals. Perhaps they could have buried themselves in a couple of them. But it hadn't crossed either of the girls' minds that whoever was in the house would think to search the attic. And so the best they could do now was to crouch together behind a tall cardboard wardrobe container near the window where they had been standing. They both understood it wouldn't take long for them to be found.

And then? Garnet didn't imagine she would fight, but she thought Hallie might. And as scared as she was, she believed that struggling was a bad idea. As she had told her sister earlier, the women-and whoever was now in the house-wanted them. They needed them. It didn't make sense that they would hurt them. But, then, there seemed to be a whole world of things swirling just beyond their understanding. She saw in her mind the jawbone and the skull she had found in the bas.e.m.e.nt in this very house, three floors below them. She wondered where her mother was now; she was no longer yelling out their names, which might mean that she also knew there were intruders in their home.

"You're s.h.i.+vering," Hallie whispered.

Garnet nodded. Her teeth were chattering, too, and her bracelet was vibrating against the tall cardboard box. She wrapped her other hand around it.

"What do we do?" her sister asked.

She saw Hallie was watching her, wide-eyed, her cheek pressed against the wardrobe. Her sister was so scared that she was panting, and just as Hallie had shushed her with a single finger a few minutes ago, now Garnet silenced her. She clenched her teeth to stop them from clicking. Then she puffed out her cheeks to convey the idea that they both should be holding their breath. They listened, aware that any moment they would hear someone or some people climbing the steps and the light in the attic would grow brighter. They would be discovered and then ...

And there Garnet's imagination failed her. She tried to rea.s.sure herself that the plant ladies couldn't possibly want to harm them.

But the attic didn't fill with light. Instead they heard below them what sounded like someone grunting-gasping, perhaps-and the attic went completely dark as they heard something fall to the pinewood floor, a thump so heavy that, even a floor above, they felt a slight quiver along the crude wooden planks on which they were cowering.

Reseda knew that her own energy was starting to flag. She had felt the agony in her throat and chest and had nearly blacked out herself before Sandra Durant's soul found its way beyond Chip Linton, and she had wound up gasping and then reduced to whimpers as she experienced Ashley Stearns's sudden evisceration when the CRJ broke apart in the lake. She wondered how the captain had lived with it all for so long and whether the physical agony was actually worse than the psychological torment of myriad second guesses and what-ifs, of having not gone down with his s.h.i.+p-of having lived when so many of his pa.s.sengers had died. Nevertheless, she kept searching for the girl's grandmother, entreating the spirit to guide her young granddaughter home. Finally, there in the fog, she saw a heavyset older woman in a leopard-print bathing suit and a diaphanous beach cover-up, barefoot. The powdery white beach on which she was walking was dotted with sand dollars and sh.e.l.ls from sea urchins, slippers, and fighting conchs. She had a whelk sh.e.l.l in one hand but was beckoning toward someone else with the other, smiling. She was wearing dark sungla.s.ses because recently she had had a cataract removed from her right eye. Then she took Ashley's small hand in hers. Ashley, it seemed, was whom she was waiting for. The child was in a bathing suit, too, a little girl's two-piece patterned with cartoon b.u.t.terflies, and she was no longer impaled on the jagged remains of a wrecked airplane. She gazed quizzically up at her grandmother, a little confused, but then she rested her head against her grandmother's arm as they walked down the beach, the low tide lapping at the sand a dozen or so yards away, while the whitest sun Reseda had ever seen burned off the last of the early morning fog.

"Verbena, no! No, no, no! That was a monumental mistake."

Emily was on the floor, kneeling over the broad-shouldered stranger in the wool cap and the yellow slicker she had just attacked, and there before her-towering over her, it felt-were Anise and John. Emily was almost hyperventilating, and she wasn't precisely sure where she had stabbed the fellow: She had seen him from the top of the back stairs no more than three or four feet away and leapt at him, trying to plunge the knife into him. And now the man was facedown and Emily could see a great streak of blood along one of the jacket shoulders.

"We were going to fetch the girls and then you," John continued, the irritation evident in his usually avuncular voice. "Really, what in heaven's name would possess you to a.s.sault a person like that?"

"Where's Hallie? Where's Garnet? What have you done with my children?" She spat the words out in a frenzy as she rose to her feet, and now she held up the knife, pointing the tip at John as if it were a fencing foil. She saw that Anise looked every bit as perturbed as the older lawyer-perhaps more so. She was wearing a parka so wet that it glistened in the beam of the flashlight. "Tell me right now or I will kill you just like I killed him," Emily continued, motioning at the body on the floor.

Anise rubbed her eyes with her fingers, clearly exasperated and tired. "No, I don't think you will. Especially since, thank G.o.d, you didn't kill Alexander," she said. And just as the realization was registering in Emily's mind that she hadn't recognized the powerfully built older man because of his wool cap, she felt her bare ankles being grabbed and her legs pulled out from underneath her. She lost the flashlight as she fell onto her knees, the bones thumping hard on the wooden floor, but she might have been able to hang on to the knife if John hadn't grabbed her arm and whisked it from her fingers. Then Alexander rolled her onto her back and knelt on her chest, one of his knees pressing hard against her sternum. She barely could breathe beneath his weight.

"That's fine, Alexander," John said. "That's enough. Are you badly hurt?"

"Well, I could bore you with the details of what could have been the damage to my rotator cuff," he answered, grimacing. "But I won't. Shoulder wounds can be nasty, so suffice to say I dodged a bullet-or, in this case, a knife. I have a bulky sweater under my raincoat, and that helped. She only got my upper arm. I'm bleeding, but mostly she knocked the wind out of me."

"We'll be sure to tend to your wounds," Anise said as she crouched before Emily.

"I'll be fine," he said simply in response.

"Trust me, Verbena, this will all go so much easier if you just tell us where Cali and Rosemary are hiding," John said. "Will you do that, for us-for them?"

"They're in the attic," Alexander said. "At least I think they are. I thought I heard them scurrying around up there when I pulled open the trapdoor."

"I hope so. Really, I do. I hope it wasn't just a couple of very large mice," John muttered. "Verbena, call your girls. Tell them to come down."

"I won't," she grunted. "I can't yell with him on me anyway," she stammered.

"If I ease up, you'll call them?" Alexander asked.

They beamed a flashlight onto her face, and she shook her head no.

"Good Lord, what do you think we plan to do with them?" John asked. "Cook them in a stewpot?"

And so Alexander sat back on his heels so she could breathe deeply and yell, and Emily did call out to the girls. But she screamed precisely the opposite of what John and Anise desired. "Hallie, Garnet, wherever you are, stay hidden!" she screamed as loud as she could. "Don't let them find you!"

Alexander cupped his hand over her mouth, and Emily was astonished at the fellow's strength. "All you are doing is postponing the inevitable," John said to her. Then he turned his gaze upon Alexander. "I think you can let her go. Really, I do. She's not leaving. But would you mind going up to the attic and retrieving the children? Anise, you, too? Give me the knife and I'll wait here with Verbena. This already has taken far, far too long. We have people waiting."

"And it has been a long wait," said Anise, and Emily understood that the woman was speaking of something entirely different from what John Hardin had meant.

But the partner in her law firm smiled at Anise's remark and added, "Indeed, it has." Then he looked straight into Emily's eyes and told her, "We've been waiting since Sawyer Dunmore died. Now: Let's go get the girls from the attic. Shall we?"

There is nothing you would not do for your daughter. Nothing.

Or is it daughters? You find yourself watching the CRJ descend toward Lake Champlain, but the view is not from the flight deck, it's from one of the pa.s.senger cabin windows toward the left rear of the aircraft. Meanwhile, you struggle with this one strangely unanswerable but profoundly important question: Where on the aircraft is your daughter? Or, again, daughters? You see in your mind the round face and blond spit curls of one girl, but shouldn't there be a second child? Or (and here the mind feels truly unmoored) a third? Briefly you envision a girl with red hair, but the image grows hazy fast. And then it is gone. She's gone.

The seat beside you is empty, but you are absolutely certain that your daughter-the blond girl-was there just a moment ago. She was in that window seat. Her Dora the Explorer backpack is still nearby, one of its straps and a nylon handle peering out from underneath the seat ahead of you. But that little girl? Gone. You scan the rows of people in the seats before you, but there is absolutely no sign of her. There is absolutely no sign of any children at all.

At the very least, you must find the child with the blond hair before the plane belly flops into the lake and-as somehow you know it will-breaks apart. You must, because you love her and she needs you and there is no more powerful, more poignant cord. But then the plane is down and for the barest of seconds seems to be skimming along the surface of the lake. This may, in the end, turn out all right. Suddenly, however, the aircraft plows into a surface as solid as a medieval castle wall and is stood upright on its nose, and your head is whipped into the seat before you and then, as the fuselage crashes back into the water, into the collapsing ceiling. Or is it the floor? You have no idea. You know only that the cabin has come alive with the sounds of screaming and ripping metal, and already you can smell the lake water that is rolling like a tsunami down the aisle, and-this doesn't seem possible, this can't possibly have happened-a metal pike has pierced your skull like an arrow. You run the fingers of your right hand over the shard, and they come away bloodied. And then you try to take a breath, but already the water is over your mouth and nose and you start to gag.

So you struggle, you thrash, even as you grow weak, even as the water is flooding your nose and you are aware that you will never survive your head wound. You try to rip the seat belt in half because something has dented the metal buckle and now it won't open. And somewhere very far away someone is calling your name. Someone closer is, too.

But, still, you have no idea what happened to your daughter. Or those other girls. Twins? Yes, twins. You know for sure only one thing: Your daughter didn't deserve this, and the realization has you enraged. She didn't deserve to die this way. She deserved more than eight years. She deserved a lifetime. She deserved friends.

And so, once again, you lash out, even though it is futile, even though there is absolutely nothing that can be done.

But the anger is all and so you fight.

Holly tried holding down the captain's left arm and shoulder and Reseda his right, but he was thras.h.i.+ng violently-great, convulsive heaves-and the greenhouse was filled with Ethan Stearns's rage as he died once more in the warm August water of Lake Champlain.

"Go, you have people waiting for you!" Reseda tried to rea.s.sure him, the words rushed and, she knew, slightly fearful. He would have none of it. "She's gone. Your daughter is gone. You can't stay. You shouldn't stay, your daughter is waiting-" she said, and she would have continued, Your daughter has gone home, she has gone to her grandmother, she has gone where she belongs and is happy, but she never got to finish the sentence. He broke free and slammed the back of his hand hard into the side of her face and her ears registered the hollow bang of his knuckles on the bones in her cheek, and she was reeling, falling into a table beside her, toppling the plants, one of the clay pots shattering and another spilling its dirt and the small, pink hysterium that was just starting to bloom. From the floor she saw him sitting up and Holly desperately trying to push him back down, but her ears were ringing from the blow and it was as if she were suddenly deaf or watching a movie with the sound off. Then he was on his feet, standing, and, with more strength than she had imagined he had, he was lifting Holly under her arms and hurling her into the gla.s.s wall, shattering it into thousands of pieces. Reseda pulled herself off the ground and tried to grab him, but already he was running toward the greenhouse entrance, angrily toppling Baphomet as he wheeled among the statuary and tables, one of the statue's horns breaking off when it crashed to the dirt. He grabbed something on his way out, but she couldn't see what it was. She crawled like a crab to Holly and found the woman's hands and arms were bleeding where reflexively she had tried to s.h.i.+eld her head from the gla.s.s. The rain and cold air whipped inside and stung the side of her face. Holly was breathing rapidly, and she sat upright and stammered, "He was out like a light, wasn't he? I mean, where did that come from? I thought he was practically paralyzed."

Reseda examined the woman's wounds. They were b.l.o.o.d.y, but they weren't deep. "He was," she said, aware that her own words sounded slightly garbled because it hurt so much to speak. Her face still smarted where he had struck her. "But it wore off. It's been a long night. There were three of them."

"Can you stop him?" she asked.

"I don't know," she said.

"Go," Holly insisted, "go!" She rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and added, "I think he took my bag."

And Reseda understood instantly what the captain had grabbed on his way out-and why. "Call Emily right now!" she said. "Tell them to leave the house right this second." Then she stood, but already she heard a vehicle engine starting and outside she saw its headlights illuminating the trees. A second later, Chip was spinning Holly's car into reverse, the trees went dark, and he was gone.