The Night Strangers Part 7

"A magician never reveals the secret behind an illusion. And notice I did not use the word trick."

"Any special reason?" Emily asked.

"A trick suggests I have taken advantage of people or fooled them. Played a joke of some sort on them. I prefer to leave that sort of bad behavior to my work as an attorney."

"Just so long as it's not an herbal narcotic or magic hallucinogen of some kind," Chip remarked. "Drink up, girls."

Everyone turned to him, a little nonplussed by the inappropriateness of the comment. But he simply raised his winegla.s.s in a silent toast and took a sip. "You were right, Peyton. This is a delightful wine. A great selection."

And Peyton nodded and the girls sipped their s.h.i.+rley Temples, a little tentatively at first but then voraciously, as Peyton told the grown-ups how he and Sage had discovered the vineyard on a tasting tour in Northern California last year, and how the Malbec was a new varietal for these wine growers. Chip's strange admonition was ignored, and the small party quickly regained its footing. Emily was relieved. She had the sense that everyone was. Before the children had finished their s.h.i.+rley Temples, John was escorting them up the stairs to the playroom, and Emily told herself that Sage and Clary were only following her daughters with their eyes because the girls were twins and they were indeed adorable. There was nothing more to it than that.

"So, tell me," Chip was saying. "What's Clary short for? Clarice?"

"Oh, it's not short for anything at all," the woman said, pus.h.i.+ng herself to her feet and then sitting on the spot on the pouf that Hallie had vacated. "It's just Clary. I was named after the herb."

"Clary? I don't believe I know that herb," Emily confessed.

"Treats women's problems," Peyton said, and he laughed, even rolling his eyes.

"Oh, stop it, Peyton, you know it does much more than that," Clary chastised him, though it was evident that this was a long-running joke between the two friends.

"I do. I do, indeed," he agreed.

There was a short lull in the conversation, and in the pause Emily listened to the low murmur of John's voice upstairs as he showed the girls how to work the DVD player and then she heard the sound of the television. She couldn't make out the program, but the girls laughed either at something the lawyer had said or at something on the screen. It really didn't matter which. They sounded content enough, and so she turned her attention to her hostess and her new friends and settled in for the evening.

You wake up when you hear the murmuring voices. You pull your way like a swimmer from the torrents of another sleep burdened by dreams of airplanes cras.h.i.+ng hard into the earth, and you sit up in bed. There beside you, your wife slumbers soundlessly. She is curled on her side and has heard nothing. It doesn't strike you as the slightest bit odd that you are confident the voices are neither burglars nor intruders. Almost abstractedly, you scan this room in the foothills along the western spine of the White Mountains, your bedroom-but still not a room that offers even a shadow of the familiarity and intimacy you a.s.sociate with that word: bedroom. This still is but a room with a bed. The digital clock on Emily's dresser reads 2:55. Not quite three in the morning. You left the Hardins' about eleven and were in bed by midnight. Asleep then by 12:15. You still have the faint taste in your mouth of Peyton's wines from Sonoma and the special canapes that Clary kept pa.s.sing to you. (I know you will like these, Chip. I just know it.) The voices are coming from someplace in the house below you, not from the floor above. And so it seems that the speakers are not Hallie and Garnet. Besides, they're grown-ups. You knew that the moment you awoke. Still, isn't it conceivable that the girls are watching something on television at three in the morning and the grown-ups are characters in a movie or Disney Channel sitcom or whatever is being beamed into your house that moment via a satellite and a dish? But then you remember: You don't have a dish yet. You had one in West Chester. Not here. You have one on order, but it is not going to be installed until this coming Tuesday morning. And so if these sounds are indeed grown-ups, then the girls must be watching a DVD.

And yet that wouldn't be like your daughters. Not at all. They're ten-still four months shy of eleven. You really can't imagine them tiptoeing down these strange stairs in this strange house in the middle of the night to watch a DVD. Besides, the distant murmuring doesn't sound like typical sitcom fare: It sounds like a woman and a man who are embroiled in a dispute. Arguing about something, and not in a playful, comedic, all-problems-will-be-solved-in-twenty-two-minutes-of-television sort of way.

Your plane always had a low alt.i.tude warning system on the altimeter: Whenever you were a mere thousand feet above the earth, even on a normal approach to a normal landing, it would tweet three times. You wish now your brain had a similar warning system, a way of alerting you that you were about to experience another of these ... visions. Or, perhaps, visitations. After the accident, you had been warned of the flashbacks and the sleeplessness and the loss of appet.i.te. The nightmares and the guilt. The inability to focus. But no one had told you of the visitations.

Now you climb from beneath the quilt, a little nonplussed by how cold the room is. For a brief moment you wonder if the furnace is out and you will need to relight the pilot. (You see in your mind an image of yourself in your captain's uniform and wonder: Why is it called a pilot light?) Your feet are bare, and the floor feels a little rough and chilly on them. When you were a child, you had pancake-flat feet. Not an arch to be found. And so from an early age you wore special orthopedic shoes; as a toddler and a small boy, you slept with a steel bar linking your ankles. You had to hop instead of walk when you awoke in the night, and you hopped in your bare feet. There was a wooden floor in the house just like this one. It was the room in your parents' house that they (and you, eventually) called the playroom. When you were a boy, once a month you would visit your orthopedist in Stamford and strip down to nothing but a pair of white underpants, and the doctor would roll marbles down a long corridor that ended in his practice's waiting room. While he watched your feet and your ankles and your hips, you would run after those marbles. That corridor had a carpet that was thick but firm. At first you weren't shy about running in nothing but underpants into that waiting room, chasing after marbles that were white as cue b.a.l.l.s and s.h.i.+ny like ice. Eventually, however, the indignity of the practice began to dawn on you and you grew hesitant. Then diffident. Still, the doctor always convinced your mother to persuade you to run, and so there you were, even in the first and second grade, being run like a monkey down a hall until you emerged into a roomful of strangers in nothing but underpants. Your feet never developed perfect arches, but whatever that doctor did was not ineffective. By the time you stopped scampering after marbles, your arches were at least good enough. Oh, you were never going to be a fighter jock, but when you chose to become a commercial pilot, your feet were never an issue.

The discussion below you has grown a little more agitated, and you pause in your pajamas in the frame of your bedroom door. The hallway is lit by the moon through the corridor windows. You ponder the narrow stairs up to Hallie's and Garnet's bedrooms and wonder if you should check on the twins before going downstairs: see if they are indeed in their beds, because if they are, then it's clear that the voices below you are not coming from a DVD.

And so you move slowly and quietly up that thin stairway to the cozy and snug third floor of your house. You press your fingers against the wall for balance because this stairwell is so cramped that there is neither a handrail nor a banister. The girls' doors are both open, and you peer into each room for a long moment, watching each child sleep in the red glow of her night-light. You have always loved watching your children sleep. Some nights in Pennsylvania-before the crash, when life was filled with only routine and promise-you and your wife would stand in the doorway and watch first Garnet and then Hallie sleep, your souls warmed by the uncomplicated domesticity conveyed by the perfume in a baby shampoo. You would watch the way Garnet's small hands would be embracing a stuffed teddy bear she had named Scraggles, or the way Hallie would be lying flat on her stomach, her arms burrowed deep beneath her pillow. In the winter, the girls often slept in red and white Lanz nightgowns that matched one of their mother's. Tonight they are sleeping in pajamas: Garnet's are patterned with evergreen trees and Hallie's with j.a.panese lotus flowers. Now, at three in the morning, you wander as silently as you can into each child's room, first pulling the comforter back up and over Garnet's shoulders and then placing the stuffed gray rabbit Hallie named Smokey beside her on her bed. The bunny had fallen to the floor.

Up here, the voices are the same indecipherable buzz they were on the second floor. This strikes you as interesting. You would have expected the sound to be more m.u.f.fled-perhaps even inaudible-when you are another floor higher. Here you may even have heard what sounded a bit like a laugh: a mean-spirited little chuckle at someone's expense.

And so you start back down that narrow stairwell and then along the second-floor corridor, pa.s.sing your and your wife's bedroom. At the top of the stairs to the first floor, you reach for the flashlight you keep upright beside the trim, but you do not switch it on until you have reached the bottom step because you do not want to risk waking Emily. But when you are on the ground floor, you turn it on and spray the rooms. There in the living room is that wallpaper with the fox that looks like an eel, the image repeated over and over. There in the dining room are the walls of statuesque but sickly sunflowers, as well as the two sawhorses and the piece of plywood on which you drape sheets of wallpaper and then slather them with paste; in this light, with a curtainless vertical window just beyond the sawhorses, the image resembles a guillotine. (You built a plastic one from a modeling kit when you were a boy. It actually came with the pieces for a plastic n.o.bleman with a detachable head. You were meticulous and glued the device and the victim together with the same care you brought to your models of jet airplanes and battles.h.i.+ps.) There, in a corner of the hallway, is a stepladder with a gallon of paint on the top step, and for just a fraction of a second you are sure it's a man.

And, finally, there is the door to the bas.e.m.e.nt, and you find you are nodding to yourself that it is open. The door to the bas.e.m.e.nt is never open. You keep it closed because why would you want the smell of the dirt floor wafting up into the house? Why would you want the heat from the radiators or the woodstove to drift there?

Ah, but it is ajar now. Of course. It has been opened for you. It is open now because that's where the voices are coming from and whoever is down there wanted to be sure that you heard them.

You see in your mind a book jacket: How to Live in a Haunted House. No, that's not right: It should be How Not to Live in a Haunted House. But then you decide that this construction is wrong, too. All wrong. Both books sound like real estate guides: The first is a manual for finding a house with a history; the second is a handbook for avoiding one. What you are after is an instruction booklet alive with advice for cohabiting with the dead. What to expect. How to cope with the voices that fill the night and the doors that mysteriously open. How to make sense of a house with bones in its bas.e.m.e.nt. Unfortunately, that t.i.tle eludes you. It hovers like a wisp just beyond your mind's reach.

Perhaps that's because you don't really believe in ghosts. You tell yourself you are not in a ghost story. These voices have woken no one but you. In all likelihood, a draft opened the bas.e.m.e.nt door. Or you left it open yourself: Either you forgot to close it or you left it like this subconsciously. Your therapist would love that. And this conversation below you is only in your head, another invisible wound from the disaster that marked your last flight.

"h.e.l.lo?" The sound of your own voice surprises you. You hear a slight tremor in it, an uncharacteristic hitch in those two syllables. This is not the tone that told pa.s.sengers cruising alt.i.tudes or directed them to gaze out their windows at the majesty of the Manhattan skyline and New York Harbor or the unexpected expanse of Lake Michigan. This is not the voice that one time (and one time only) told them to brace for impact. Instantly the discussion in the bas.e.m.e.nt grows quiet. "h.e.l.lo?" you call again, a little louder, a little more confident. Still, there is nothing but silence. You beam the light down the stairs at the stones in the wall at the bottom, at the coils of hose the moving men happened to dump just to the side of the banister. At the wooden pallets you rounded up the other day and on which you have stacked great jugs of cat sand and cases of soda and juice you bought at the warehouse store in Littleton. You feel for the switch at the top of the stairs that flips on the two naked, sixty-watt bulbs in the bas.e.m.e.nt ceiling-really just pillows of insulation amidst thick wooden beams-and, after the bas.e.m.e.nt is awash in the dim half-light, you start down, your feet still bare. You wish you had thought to put on your slippers. Then again, perhaps not. You can clean your feet under the spigot in the bathtub before climbing back into bed. The slippers would have to go into the wash. You never go into the bas.e.m.e.nt without the sorts of shoes you are likely to wear only outdoors.

At the bottom of the stairs you pause, the flashlight at your side, and then turn slowly toward the pile of coal and the doorway behind which you found the bones. Instantly you recognize the pair of adults standing between the doorway and the coal, and you go to them, switching the flashlight from your right to your left hand so you can shake their wet hands if they choose to extend their wet arms to you. And the man does, even though it is painfully clear that you have interrupted a fight he has been having with the woman. A squabble. You wonder: Perhaps you were mistaken; perhaps you were not supposed to hear them.

"Captain," the man says, but the woman only gazes at you with a worried look in her eyes. A chasmlike gash disfigures the right side of her face, and blood is pooling on the shoulder of her blouse. She is fortunate that she wasn't one of the three pa.s.sengers on the plane who were decapitated. Her name is Sandra Durant, though her hair-which was honey in the snapshot photos you saw in the newspaper-has been darkened by lake water and muddied by blood: thirty-two years old, a single woman who you learned in the weeks after the disaster had been on your plane because she had just interviewed for a job in Vermont. She worked at a computer company in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and was considering a job at IBM's Ess.e.x Junction facility. She was a public relations manager. Had a boyfriend, parents, two brothers. A cat named Ozzie.

The man is a strong, well-built fellow about forty, and he, too, suffered a horrific head wound: His forehead looks as if someone drilled a hole in it the size of a flute. His biceps stretch the fabric of his green short-sleeved polo s.h.i.+rt. His handshake is solid.

"You're Ashley's dad," you say, referring to the child with the Dora the Explorer backpack. Again, you saw a photo in the newspaper. After he releases your hand, you glance down at the drops of lake water that Ethan Stearns has left on your fingers and palm.

"That's right."

Ashley's mother is alive in a suburb of Burlington, Vermont. You believe it's called Monkton. Ashley and her parents were traveling to Florida to visit an aunt and uncle there before school resumed in September. They would have changed planes in Philadelphia. You recall the voice of Ashley's mother as she screamed her daughter's name in the waves and dove under the surface of Lake Champlain over and over in the seconds after the aircraft broke apart and jet fuel coated the surface like olive oil.

"I'm sorry about Ashley," you tell him. "I'm sorry about everything," you tell them both.

"It wasn't your fault," says Sandra Durant.

"We were so close to being all right," you tell her. "You know that, don't you?" You consider adding, It was the birds that brought us down, but it was the wake from a boat that did us in. But you will never know that for certain. What if you had kept the aircraft nose a single degree higher above the horizon? Or, perhaps, a single degree lower? Would a wave still have pitchpoled your plane and killed thirty-nine of your pa.s.sengers?

The woman looks at Ethan, a little frightened. Behind you the furnace kicks on. This sudden rumbling, a reminder of the bricks and mortar and horsehair tangibility of the house, takes you back to the reality that you are standing in cold dirt and coal dust. You gaze for a moment at the splintered pieces of wood from the door that once had been sealed shut with thirty-nine carriage bolts. Thirty-nine. A day or two after you had counted them for the first time, you returned to the bas.e.m.e.nt and envisioned the door was the diagram for a CRJ700, your old plane. You touched each of the bolts with the tips of your fingers. You worked your way back to the rear of the cabin, attaching names to the bolts wherever you could. When you finally smashed in the door, you wanted to be sure that you did not dislodge the bolts from their spots in the wood. If you managed to break through the barnboard without inadvertently dislodging one, you pretended, you would ditch the plane without a single casualty. Everyone would get out alive. You knew you couldn't rewrite history this way or bring back the dead, but it wasn't precisely a game, either.

"Ashley was smart and beautiful and she had a huge heart," says Ethan Stearns. "She was a kid with unbelievable promise. She was a ballerina."

"All little girls are ballerinas," you tell him. What you meant was, I know what you mean. I have twins and they're dancers, too. But the words hang out there wrong in the air, all wrong; they sound antagonistic, challenging-as if you are disputing this angry, grieving dead man in your bas.e.m.e.nt. Impugning his lovely little girl's talents.

"You have no idea what she would have done with her life," he says, his tone the confrontational murmur that first drew you from sleep. His hatred for you permeates every syllable. He blames you for his child's death. The fact that he is dead, too, is irrelevant. This is a good man, you conclude. You would be just as irate if, G.o.d forbid, something happened to either of your girls and you found yourself face-to-face with the person you held responsible for the child's death.

"No, I don't," you tell him simply, and though it sounds like a confession, you do not bow your head. You meet him eye to eye. Father to father.

"But it's not just all that potential that's gone," he says. He takes a deep breath and exhales through his nose. The steam rises like mist in the chill of the bas.e.m.e.nt. "It's that she has no one her age. She has-"

"Ethan, stop it," says Sandra Durant, her tone at once determined and pleading. How is it, you wonder, that she hasn't yet finished bleeding out? Her blouse and her skirt have become indistinguishable, one long, saturated tunic the color of those wines Peyton kept opening earlier that evening.

"I won't," Ethan insists. "I want my daughter to have friends again. I want her to have little girls to play with."

"That's cruel!"

"That's fair! She deserves friends!" he snaps back. And that's when you first understand what this pair has been fighting about. They have been arguing over your girls. Hallie and Garnet, the two of them asleep right now in their rooms on the third floor. Ethan holds you responsible for the death of his daughter. For killing Ashley and leaving her with no one to play with. You know you would feel precisely the same way.

"Would you like me to introduce my girls to Ashley?" you ask this father, this man just like you. "They seem to be a little older, but they're good girls, Ethan. Very good girls. Very kind, both of them. They'd be good playmates-and role models."

"Yes, I would like that," he tells you. "Do what it takes." His scowl lessens appreciably, but then Sandra slaps him hard, whatever fear she has of him subsumed by her apparent worry for your daughters, and you feel the spray from the lake on your own face. You bring your fingertips to your cheek and then gaze at the drops of water there that a moment ago were on Ethan Stearns's cheek.

"Chip?" You turn toward the stairs when you hear Emily's voice. She is calling down into the bas.e.m.e.nt from the top of the steps, her concern for you permeating your name. When you turn back to Ethan and Sandra, the two of them are gone.

"I'm here, sweetheart," you call up to Emily.

"What are you doing?"

"I was checking the pilot light on the furnace." Yes, that's it. What else would you have been doing? Then you walk in your bare feet across the moist dirt of the bas.e.m.e.nt and up the steps to your wife, telling her that the pilot is fine and the furnace is fine and the bas.e.m.e.nt is fine. Everything is fine.

Yes, it is. Everything is just fine. Even the pilot.

She deserves friends. Do what it takes.

You kiss her on the cheek and meet her worried eyes. You smile. Then you flip off the light to the bas.e.m.e.nt and grab a wad of paper towels for your feet. No sense in tracking mud between here and the bathtub.

Chapter Seven.

The girl was another fifth-grader named Molly Francoeur, and Hallie had figured out right away-in her very first hours in the new cla.s.sroom-that the child was not one of the school's popular kids. She was big for her age, already five and a half feet tall, and she towered over the boys and the girls. As a result, she was gangly, awkward, and could be very shy in the cla.s.sroom and at recess. She wore a tractor green John Deere sweats.h.i.+rt most days and reminded Hallie of a Sesame Street character. Her father had run off years earlier, and her mother worked a s.h.i.+ft behind the register at the gas station and convenience store by the entrance to the interstate. She had a sister in second grade and a brother in ninth grade, at the high school, a boy who had already gotten into trouble for drugs and "borrowing" a car that belonged to a teacher's aide. But Molly was also much smarter than Hallie had expected when Mrs. Collier was introducing the twins to the cla.s.s and she sat Hallie down at the table with Molly and two boys. Hallie had slowly gotten to know the girl, and she realized that the kid had been besieged by bad luck since the day she'd been born.

At first, Hallie had feared that she herself wouldn't have a lot of clout in whatever pecking order existed here in northern New Hamps.h.i.+re: She was new, her father was the pilot who crashed the plane into the lake (even if it wasn't his fault), and she was twins with a girl with the freakiest red hair on the planet. It was why she had invited Molly over to their house the first time: She'd figured that beggars really couldn't be choosers. It was only when Hallie had been in the school a few days and realized that Mrs. Collier was strangely excited by the idea that she was a twin and that the grown-ups in this town actually liked the color of Garnet's hair that she began to understand it wouldn't be long before she had reestablished herself as one of the cooler kids in the cla.s.s. And this mattered to Hallie.

By then, however, she had already become friends with Molly Francoeur and, happily, learned that she might have underestimated this other child. Now it was early Sunday afternoon, and Molly had just been dropped off at their house for another playdate. Hallie and Garnet had taken the girl out to the greenhouse this time. The snow that had fallen the other night had melted off the roof, and the early March sun was warming the structure, but they still kept on their snow jackets. The three fifth-graders were creating a tableau with Hallie and Garnet's large American Girl dolls and furniture, not especially troubled by the reality that some of the dolls' clothing and tables and beds were supposed to look like they were from eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia while the other accessories were supposed to replicate the Northern Plains a hundred years later. Molly spoke with the laconic cadences that Hallie and Garnet had come to recognize from many (though not all) of the people they ran into at school, at the dance studio, or with their mom and dad at the supermarket or the hardware store.

They had just decided that the three dolls would be sisters-three beds and three dressers in a row, the dolls in their beds for the night-when Molly folded her fingers under her arms to warm them and said, "Maybe they should be triplets."

"And maybe they're orphans," Garnet said, and Hallie had to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. Garnet loved building games around orphans. Over the years, she had made Beanie Babies, Barbies, and trolls into orphans. It didn't surprise Hallie that now she wanted to make their American Girl dolls orphans, too. Usually Garnet's orphan scenario was straight out of Annie or A Little Princess. There was an evil lady running an orphanage, and out of the blue a loving and spectacularly wealthy guardian angel would exact revenge on the orphanage director and whisk the Beanie Babies, Barbies, or trolls off to a life of luxury and unimaginable happiness. Sometimes the angel would be a prince, and sometimes there would be two angels-the orphans' parents come to rescue them.

"Okay," agreed Molly, and Hallie decided there was no reason for the dolls not to be orphans. The game would be a little predictable, but it was Sunday afternoon, she was tired from going to Mom's boss's house last night, and she didn't have a better idea. "And maybe they're cursed," Molly added.

Hallie thought about this: It was definitely a new wrinkle. She and Garnet had never put a curse on their American Girl dolls. The closest they had come to using a curse as a device in any of their games had been a brief phase so long ago that Hallie had only the dimmest recollection. It had something to do with a couple of their "ball gown" Barbies and the two Disney princesses who wind up out like a light: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. "What's the curse?" she asked Molly.

The child's lips were chapped from months of cold weather, and she curled them together while she formulated a response. Garnet looked back and forth between Molly and her, waiting. Hallie had the sense that her sister didn't want to deviate too far from the orphan game. Finally Molly unpuckered her lips and said, "They've been poisoned."

"With an apple?" Garnet asked.

"No, that's too boring," Molly said, and Hallie agreed. The girl pulled her hands out from under her arms and with one of her hands pointed at the greenhouse walls around them. "Maybe something poisonous was grown in here. What's a good poisonous plant?"

"Poison ivy," Garnet suggested, but she crinkled her nose immediately after she spoke, and Hallie could tell it was because Garnet understood that this wasn't at all what they were looking for. She was just brainstorming. They didn't need a poison that made your skin itch; they needed a poison that might kill you.

"It needs to be much worse than that," said Hallie.

"It does," Molly agreed. "What would those freaky women around here have used? Maybe the lady who lived here before you brought weird poison plants back from Australia or South America. A lot of the women do that."

The twins turned to each other simultaneously, and Hallie could see the surprise she was feeling mirrored in her sister's eyes. What in the world would the lady who once lived here have known about poison? From the way their parents talked about the woman, it sounded like she practically never left Bethel. Why would Molly think she knew anything at all? Instead of answering Molly, Hallie asked, "What are you talking about?"

"You know, the woman who lived here. She was a witch. They all are. If there's a greenhouse, there's a witch. That's how you can tell. And this one? Very scary. My mom says her son killed himself."

"She was a witch?" Hallie said.

"I mean she wasn't a real witch. They're not like that. They don't think they can fly through the air on broomsticks or something. They don't run around in those pointy Halloween hats. But they are, like, into witchcraft. Witch stuff. My mom said they make potions out of plants that usually only grow in jungles and deserts. They're all known around here for growing stuff."

"Yeah, like herbs," Garnet said.

"Much more," said Molly.

"Look, I'm sure they grow vegetables and herbs and I guess some flowers," Hallie told her. "You know, tomatoes. Parsley. Daffodils. Not ..." And she stopped speaking because she had no idea what sorts of things a witch grew.

"It's not like the woman was a real witch," Molly said again. "It's not like any of them are."

"They're herbalists," Garnet told the girl, speaking the word very slowly because she had heard her parents using it one night after dinner, and she had never before said it aloud. It was, she decided, a mouthful.

"What's that?" Molly asked.

Garnet shrugged because she wasn't completely certain. "I guess it's a person who uses herbs for stuff. But for more than cooking, because everyone uses herbs in cooking. Right?"

"What else did your mom say about the woman who used to live here?" Hallie asked.

Molly went to one of the dolls and adjusted the quilt. She's stalling, Hallie thought, because she doesn't know what to say. She wishes she hadn't brought any of this up.

Finally Molly answered, "She said she was kind of weird. She and some of her friends. They scared people. There were all kinds of rumors about them, and it was like they were hippies, but older. At least most of them were. Not all. But all of them were women."

Hallie thought of the pictures she had seen of hippies: the kaleidoscopic-colored T-s.h.i.+rts, the long hair. The ripped bell-bottom pants. The beads and the peace signs. The marijuana. "Do you mean she grew marijuana?" she asked Molly. "Marijuana's an herb, right?"

The child shrugged her shoulders, which looked even broader and more substantial in her snow jacket. "I don't know. But I don't think that's what my mom meant."

"Then what did she mean?" Hallie demanded, and she knew there was a bullying quality to her voice that teachers would never approve of, but she couldn't stop herself and she really didn't care.

"Well, my mom said that the lady who used to live here and her friends all had these little garden plots or greenhouses where they grew the stuff for their potions. It was all very hush-hush. A lot of people didn't like them, but I guess a lot of others did."

"What kinds of potions did they make?" Garnet asked.

"I don't know."

"Did they make poisons?"

"I said, I don't know! But here's the scariest part. She had twins."

Hallie knew this on some vague level, but because her parents had only mentioned one and he lived in St. Johnsbury, she'd never really thought about it. There was so much other information to try to understand. But now the idea that there had been twins long ago in this house grew more real.

"They were boys," Molly continued. "And one killed himself. At least that's what everyone says. But my mom thinks he was murdered by the women. The police never arrested the lady, and she ended up shutting down her greenhouse-this greenhouse. But my mom says the women killed him."

"How old was he? Our age?" Hallie asked.

"A little older. He was, like, twelve or thirteen," she said, and suddenly this big girl bowed her head and her body seemed to collapse into itself, the child almost shrinking before the twins' very eyes. She was, Hallie realized, on the verge of tears. "I wasn't supposed to tell you any of this stuff. My mom made me promise."

"But you did," Garnet said.

"It all just came out," she murmured. "Maybe it's not true. I don't know. But you can't tell anyone I told you." Then: "I want to go home. I should go home. Can I call my mom?" The last of her sentence was smothered by a few pathetic sniffles, and she ran her bare hand across her mouth and under her nose. Garnet reached out to pat the girl's arm, but Molly jerked away and wouldn't look at them. Garnet had the sense that the child was scared-really and truly terrified, despite the reality that it was the middle of a Sunday afternoon and the sun was high overhead.