The Night Strangers (11 page)

This is an enormous amount of information to try to make sense of: There is, as Emily would say, text and subtext. No one can use the words
goose
and
geese
around you without knowing that they connote profoundly disturbing images. They do not provoke a PTSD sort of flashback—you do not find yourself sweating when you hear them, they do not induce heart palpitations—but they do conjure for you the destruction of your airplane and the deaths of thirty-nine people. Thirty-six adults, three children. Including one with a doll dressed as a cheerleader. That, too, wound up floating in Lake Champlain, the eyes open, the hair the color of corn silk fanning out like seaweed in the waves. And then there was the girl with the Dora the Explorer backpack. All of the children were, you would learn later, younger than Hallie and Garnet.

At the same time, there is that dinner invitation, proffered out of the blue. An unexpected kindness.

You are not at all sure what to make of the juxtaposition. Was the invitation a spontaneous gesture provoked by guilt? Had she brought up the birds without thinking and then, after realizing what she had done, hoped to make amends with dinner?

“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” you hear yourself murmuring. “Thank you. Let me check with Emily and get back to you.”

“It will be very casual. Maybe some others will come.”

“I’m free!” says Holly from behind her desk, though she doesn’t look up when you glance back at her. “I want to come!”

“Of course,” says Reseda.

You find yourself struck by the names of all of these women around you. Reseda. Holly. Anise. You decide that either you have stumbled upon a secret society of florists or gardeners or all of their parents were hippies. Or, perhaps, they’re part of a coven. You are bemused by that notion in particular and conclude the synaptic link was triggered by the mention, a few minutes ago, of Salem. You always think of witches when you hear the name of that small city. Everyone does. The burning times. The hangings. The women (and men) pressed to death by stones.

“You’re grinning,” says Reseda.

“I just had a funny thought.”

“Can you share it?”

“I like your name. I like all of your names here.”

“The reseda is among the most enticing and fragrant flowers in the world,” she says, and you realize that you’re not in the slightest bit surprised.

When you leave a few minutes later, you have in one hand Gerard’s phone number and in the other a thick espresso-chip cookie from a batch that Anise had baked that very morning and dropped off at the real estate agency. You doubt you will ever call Gerard, at least about that door. But you are glad that you have the cookie. It’s delicious. You hadn’t realized how hungry you were.

Chapter Five

A
bird became trapped in the woodstove. It flew in through the top of the chimney just as the late winter sun was starting to thaw the thin skins of ice on the shallow puddles in the driveway. No one was awake in the house. The animal worked its way lower and lower in the Metalbestos prefabricated chimney—a sparkling, cylindrical metal tube that was nine inches wide—from the opening nearly four feet above the twelve-by-twelve pitch made of slate and through the tube that cut through the attic and the second floor, darting finally through the rectangular vent to the catalytic converter and then into the soapstone stove with its regal glass windows. The windows were caked over with soot from fires long ago as well as from the few logs the Lintons had burned, and so the bird flew around and around in the near total dark, its wings frequently clipping the iron walls or the black stains on the glass. Desdemona, the Lintons’ cat, was aware of the animal before anyone else, and she stared alertly at the stove, her haunches raised ever so slightly and her tail occasionally brushing the floor.

Emily was the first one downstairs that morning, and when she saw the cat watching the stove as if it were a mole hole in the yard back in Pennsylvania, she didn’t know what to think. But she switched on the lamp beside the couch and two heavy boxes of unpacked books, and instantly the poor bird made another effort to escape, thwapping into the door because the flue was open just enough to create thin slats of light. Emily knew instantly then what was so interesting to Desdemona. She screamed upstairs to Chip because she was afraid of birds and knew that, once she opened the woodstove door and the bird flew out into the room, she would be utterly useless. And yet it was only when she heard him on the stairs, asking her what was wrong, that she knew how strange and inconsiderate it would be to tell him her panic had been caused by a bird. One small bird. But with the competence that formerly she had taken for granted, he opened the window nearest the stove and closed the door between the living room and the dining room—the room with, perhaps, the strangest, darkest wallpaper, a series of sunflowers that grew from the hardwood floor to the height of a grown man and, over time, had become brown with age and made her think of the elongated, damned souls in an El Greco painting—and used a bath towel to whisk the bird in the direction of the open window. It was a chickadee. She noticed a little black soot on its gray wings and the white of its nape. Instead of flying through the open half of the window, however, the bird darted straight into the solid pane above it, breaking its neck and falling dead onto the carpet.

As Chip gently picked it up, using his fingers to sweep it into the palm of his hand before Desdemona could cart it away in her mouth, Emily started to cry. She thought on some level it was just because it was so small, so very small, but she knew in her heart that there was more to it than that. Much more. Chip brought the bird outside, though where she didn’t know, and then he came back inside and sat down beside her. He put his arm around her. He didn’t say a word, he just rocked her a little bit and sighed, and she let her tears fall against the plaid top of his pajamas until they both heard their girls on the stairs. Abruptly they stood, and she told the children that she had been crying because the bird in the woodstove was just so little, but she was fine now. She was, she really was. They were all just fine.

Y
ou stand in blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the logo of your old airline emblazoned across the front and shovel coal for nearly thirty minutes, moving the pile a solid five feet from that basement door. It was possible to stand amidst the coal earlier this month when you were merely tinkering with one of the carriage bolts. But if you’re going to get medieval on that door with an ax this morning, you need a little more space. A little more room. Before you know it, you’re sweating, even though it is the first week in March and you are working in a dank basement in a badly insulated house that’s nearly a century and a quarter old. But the furnace emits a little heat, even here, and it’s no more than a dozen feet away.

When you have finally redistributed the coal, you sit on the basement steps to rest and sip from the plastic bottle of soda that has grown warm. Your heart is thumping from the exertion as you study the door and the bolts and wonder what precisely you will find behind it. You didn’t tell Emily you were going to do this when she left for work this morning, you didn’t mention it to the girls before school. You weren’t sure this really was a part of your agenda. You had expected you would tape the doorframes and windowsills and paint another wall in the kitchen. Roll that soothing sienna Emily picked out over the freshly spackled Sheetrock.

You find it interesting that the ax you are going to use to bring down this door came with the house. It’s the one Emily found hidden behind the ancient cleaning supplies in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink. You could have used the ax you had brought with you along with a litany of other gardening tools from Pennsylvania: the rake and the hoe and the shears and the wheelbarrow. The clippers. The netting for the blueberry bushes. After all, you wandered out to the barn to retrieve the shovel you’re using now and you could have carried the ax back inside the house, too. But instead you pulled down the trapdoor and climbed up into the attic and found the box where Emily had stored those three, strange implements of self-defense: The crowbar. The knife. The ax. For reasons neither of you could precisely articulate, you couldn’t bring yourselves to cart those old items to the dump. But neither had you any desire to leave them where they were or to use them yourselves. Until now. Until you realized you needed an ax for this morning’s project.

And you like the symmetry. It’s as if the Dunmores left you this ax for precisely this purpose—which, of course, means there might be purposes as well for the crowbar and the knife. Now there’s a macabre thought.

This coming Sunday night, two days from now, you and Emily and the girls are having dinner with Reseda and Holly and whomever else the real estate agent will invite. You sip that cola and contemplate how satisfying it will be to inform them that you took the door down on your own—no need for this Gerard character that Reseda recommended—and found behind it … what?

You just can’t imagine. You have absolutely no idea what might be back there.

E
mily’s mood had been sinking for days, ever since that chickadee died on their living room rug (though she told herself that there was no connection; her mood was going to deteriorate regardless of whether that bird made it out of the house). She knew it was never a good sign when she found herself poring over the obituaries she found in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
or—now that she and her family were ensconced in northern New Hampshire—in the weekly edition of the
Littleton Courier
. The old and the middle-aged and, in some disturbing or terrifying cases, the young. The faces in the photographs that were now being worked on by a mortician or moldering in a grave. Or cremated. It was the first thing Emily did this morning when she arrived at work and sat down at her desk in the room that not all that long ago had probably been someone’s bedroom. She sipped her coffee and thought of how she had uprooted her children and how her husband was a shell of the man he had been a mere seven months earlier. She thought of her friends she missed—those at the large firm where she had risen to partner, and those in the ridiculous, narcissistic, but bighearted theater community that offered such a wondrous change from her legal practice—and she contemplated how it had all come to this: a dusky office with three other lawyers she barely knew, a sweet young paralegal named Eve, and a secretary her own age named Violet, whom the lawyers shared and was dauntingly competent and not a little intimidating. She thought of how the days just didn’t get long fast enough here in northern New England. Right now back in West Chester, people were having their ride-on mowers tuned up.

On the stairway she heard footsteps, and a moment later she looked up and saw John Hardin peering in. John’s name was first on the firm’s shingle. He was over seventy, but he had the big hair of a Russian commissar. It was entirely white now, but he was a vigorous man who still skied and jogged and seemed to have no plans to retire. He didn’t work all that hard—none of them did—but they also didn’t make all that much money. In theory, however, that was precisely the point of living here rather than in, say, a suburb of Philadelphia like West Chester. Your paycheck was considerably smaller but your quality of life was so much better. You could age with the grace of John Hardin—though Emily knew that her and Chip’s dotage might not be quite so serene if either she didn’t find a way to make a little more money than she was earning now or Chip didn’t find a second career. The reality was that she had earned considerably more than her husband when they lived in Pennsylvania: Estate law was vastly more lucrative than commercial aviation in this day and age. Now that her income had taken a severe nosedive and his was—at the moment, anyway—nonexistent, they had not put a penny into their girls’ college funds in nine months and their savings would be long depleted by the time they were receiving their first solicitations from AARP. (And even that assumed the annual needs of a cranky old house on a hill in a frigid corner of northern New Hampshire did not grow particularly onerous in the coming decade and change.)

This morning, perhaps because it was a Friday and the fashion bar at the firm fell even lower, John was wearing blue jeans that were a little baggy, a gray tweed blazer, and a novelty T-shirt from the town in Mississippi that claimed the world’s largest aluminum and concrete catfish. Apparently, based on the photo on the shirt, you could walk inside the attraction and “Live Just Like Jonah!” The T-shirt was neon yellow and blue and clashed mightily with the jacket: It was like he had wrapped the Swedish flag around his torso. His parka was slung over his shoulder, and he was holding a paper cup of coffee in his free hand.

“It’s going to snow tonight,” he said, and the prospect clearly delighted him.

“And tomorrow?”

“Skiing.”

“Okay, then.”

“How are you doing, Emily? Honestly?” He had paused on the far side of her desk, and his voice took on the cast that she imagined he used when, before settling into a practice that revolved around real estate closings and trust modifications, he wanted to convey an avuncular sincerity to a jury. Convey to them how he could only represent a client who was innocent. She could tell he had noticed that her newspaper was open to the obituaries.

“No complaints,” she lied, shrugging.

He peered over her desk and pointed at the face of the teenage boy who had died in a snowmobile accident. “There’s little in this world worse than the death of a child,” he murmured.

“I agree.”

“I think everyone would. And yet it’s the damnedest thing: History is filled with human sacrifice—child sacrifice. Can you image? Anise and Reseda have come across some of the strangest cults and traditions in their botanical and shamanic research,” he said.

“Anise and Reseda? I know they grow a lot of bizarre plants. I know Reseda has introduced some very exotic flowers to this area. But human sacrifice? Where in the world does that fit in?” She wondered at the connection in John’s mind that would lead him to link the death of a boy in a snowmobile accident with human sacrifice.

“Well, it isn’t their specialty,” he said, and he raised his eyebrows mischievously.

“That’s a relief: No one likes to learn that one’s new friends are into human sacrifice.”

“I just meant that Reseda’s other work—her shamanic work—has led her to hear of ideas from other parts of the world that most people around here would find rather disturbing. Anise has, too.”

“Are Anise and Reseda both … shamans?”

“Oh, no.”

“Just Reseda?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Of course, even in this corner of the globe we’ve had our share of strange doings. Trust me: Some people think the woods around here are just filled with witches.” He shook his head a little ruefully and then smiled. “Tell me, do you and Chip have anything special planned this weekend?”

“I think we’ll do something different and scrape some wallpaper. Maybe unpack a few boxes. And, as a matter of fact, we’re having dinner with Reseda on Sunday.”

“How’s it coming? All that scraping and unpacking?”

“Just fine.”

He nodded. Then: “Do you have dinner plans on Saturday, too?”

They didn’t, but she wasn’t sure whether she felt up to two dinner parties in two days. She also understood, however, that it would probably do both her and Chip some good to get out tomorrow night and spend some time with this partner in the firm and his wife and whomever else he decided to invite at the very last minute.

“No.”

“Then come to Clary’s and my house for supper. Nothing fancy. We should have had you over weeks and weeks ago. We’re derelict. I’m derelict.”

Supper
. A quaint word. Provincial, but sweet. She heard herself murmuring that yes, they would like that, thank you, but only if they could bring the girls because they didn’t really have a babysitter yet.

“Of course,” he said. “We can set them up in the playroom upstairs and they’ll be happy as can be. We already have an awful lot of high-tech toys and video games up there for our own grandchildren. Or, if the girls would be more comfortable, they can be downstairs with us.”

“Okay, then. Thank you. What can we bring?”

“Smiles. That’s absolutely it.”

“A bottle of wine?”

“Sure. I will never say no to a bottle of wine. That would be perfect.”

It all sounded so civilized, she thought. So … normal.

Unfortunately, it also sounded now as if she were hearing both of their voices underwater. And that, she knew, was not a good sign. She feared that it would take more than two dinner parties in two days to pull her back from the lip of depression. Two in two days might be precisely the sort of push that would send her spiraling over the edge.