The Night Strangers (27 page)

“Mommy?”

She looked over at Garnet. “Yes, dear?”

“What were you thinking?”

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

“I wasn’t thinking about the words, either.”

“No?”

“No. I want to move back to Pennsylvania.”

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

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

“Then we might move back?” Garnet was saying. “There’s a chance?”

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

“You
loved
West Chester,” Garnet corrected her. “You were, like, the most popular girl in the class!”

“I was not!”

“You were! You totally were!”

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

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

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

“Good evening, ma’am. Is this Emily Linton?”

“Yes.” She didn’t recognize the male voice.

“My name is Sergeant Dennis Holcomb, I was one of the investigators from the Major Crime Unit who examined the remains your daughter found in your basement. We met your husband, the captain, that morning.”

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

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

“So what does that mean?”

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

“So we’re done?” she asked.

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nevertheless: We have got to get back to Paris.”

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

“Once we’re revived?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was doing fine here at school and at dance class. I was making friends just like you until Daddy …” She didn’t finish the sentence, though she really didn’t have to.
Until Daddy freaked out Molly Francoeur
.

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

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

“Reseda’s not middle-aged. Holly’s not middle-aged.”

“The rest are like grandmothers.”

“You really don’t like them?”

“No,” Garnet said firmly. “I don’t.”