The Night Strangers (3 page)

I
t would be the captain’s wife, a lawyer two years younger than the captain who specialized in estate planning and did the heavy lifting when it came to raising their twin girls, who would see the advantages of finding a house that offered both relative seclusion and vistas that might feed her husband’s battered soul. Emily Linton was two years shy of forty when Flight 1611 flipped onto its back like a killer whale at a SeaWorld performance. Her husband was not deemed responsible for the tragedy (that onus would be hung round the remains of the cooked birds), but neither was he Sully Sullenberger. The media’s interest in him would wane once it was clear that he hadn’t made an egregious mistake but neither had he successfully ditched a commercial jet on the water. And their lack of attention was precisely what he desired as he mourned the dead in the lake and pondered the long, painful litany of might-have-beens. Chip Linton would second-guess this critical three minutes of his life for as long as he lived, aware always that he was not Sully Sullenberger. He would, Emily knew, compare himself to that older pilot he had never met and always come up lacking. The psychiatrist from the pilots’ union and a preternaturally serene young woman from the Critical Incident Response Team warned them both of this; they seemed to want to counsel both her husband and her, and she was grateful.

Their children were fifth-graders named Hallie and Garnet: Garnet because her newborn hair had been the deep red it was even now and Hallie because it was the name of the infant’s grandmother—Emily’s mother. Hallie and Garnet were not identical twins, though they certainly were close and took pride in their sisterly camaraderie. They were each other’s best friend. The family had lived outside of Philadelphia, in the mannered suburb of West Chester, but at different points in their lives both Emily and Chip had spent sizable chunks of time in New England. Emily’s grandparents had had a summerhouse in Meredith, New Hampshire, and she had fond childhood memories of Julys and Augusts in the brisk waters of Lake Winnipesaukee. Chip had spent four years in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts, though by his senior year he was spending far more time at the Northampton Airport than he was in classes: He would devote whatever money he made working overnight at the university switchboard to flying lessons there in Pipers and Cessnas and, eventually, in a twin-engine Beechcraft Duchess. The first mountains he flew over—foothills in all but name—were the thousand-foot peak of Hitchcock and the eleven-hundred-foot summit of Norwottuck, which were no more than five miles from the edge of the runway.

Consequently, the idea of retreating to New England after the disastrous water landing grew slowly but inexorably—rather like a seed germinating in water in a bathroom glass—in the minds of both the captain and his wife. Any state but Vermont, the site of the crash, would do. Neither of them particularly liked the idea of uprooting their children, but they also didn’t believe that remaining in Pennsylvania was an option after the captain’s sudden retirement from flying. They needed to start fresh someplace new. Emily thought she could take the bar wherever they resettled, and Chip presumed it didn’t matter at forty whether he started a new career in New England or the Mid-Atlantic. The girls would make friends wherever they found themselves. Children were resilient. Didn’t families move all the time?

Still, they had barely begun to search the Web for possible homes in New England when they heard from a real estate agent. A fellow named Sheldon Carter called, describing some town they had never heard of in northern New Hampshire. Bethel. Sheldon, of course, along with every other sentient adult in the country, was aware of Flight 1611 and the captain who wasn’t Sully Sullenberger. He knew precisely who Emily was. He said that he had seen her name among the possible buyers who requested more information on the agency’s Web site in Littleton, New Hampshire, and that he had the perfect house for them. His voice was serene and warm, and it sounded as if he really did have an intuitive sense of what the Linton family needed: a world where they would be far from both the stares—some judgmental, some pitying—and the averted eyes. A world where people were not defined by their successes and failures. A world that was, in some ways, oblivious to the inexorable media—the twenty-four-hour news cycles, the relentless blogs, the wonder walls of gossip and innuendo and supposition on the Web—that constantly had stories likely to trigger self-hatred and despair in the captain, even though it wasn’t his fault.

The house he had in mind, the Realtor said, had character, space, and absolutely spectacular views. It sat alone on a hill up the road from the village. And the town had a first-rate public school system. Sheldon actually described the property as regal before sending Emily a link to it on the agency’s Web site.

Consequently, the Lintons agreed to visit Bethel, New Hampshire. They drove, though the captain insisted he had no fear of flying. They drove because this way they could look at four other possible houses along the Connecticut River, two in western Massachusetts and two in New Hampshire.

All of those houses were intriguing in some fashion, and all of them felt more authentically Yankee than the development Colonial in which they lived in Pennsylvania—a house that wasn’t that much older than the stadium where the Phillies played baseball. But none of them cast a spell over Emily or Chip or their girls. They were too small or too damp or simply not as interesting as they had seemed on the Web sites. Two of them were in a condition that was almost too good. It felt to Emily as if they were strolling inside the pages of
Martha Stewart Living
and there was no need to fix the place up and make it their own. It seemed like someone was about to walk in the door and ask them to take their shoes off. Consequently, the Lintons’ expectations were not especially high when they finally reached a sparsely populated corner of northwestern New Hampshire and met the real estate agent in the driveway of the house just outside of Bethel. The Canadian border, Chip realized, couldn’t have been more than forty-five or fifty miles distant.

Sheldon was delightful and he was obese. His stomach pillowed over his belt like a beanbag chair and he walked with a cane. He said he was sixty-eight, but he was diabetic and Emily doubted he’d reach seventy. But he was charming, and immediately he commented upon young Hallie’s remarkable cheekbones and Garnet’s thick mane of red hair. Emily presumed this was his way of trying to build commonality with prospective buyers. And if she was being manipulated, Emily decided that she didn’t mind; anyone who complimented her daughters made her happy. But the girls were far more interested in the greenhouse and the barn on the property than they were in the kind words of a grandfatherly real estate agent. They were intrigued by the idea that the house came with a carriage barn. Then the whole family wandered through the Victorian’s three floors, the rooms and the corridors handsome, though even Sheldon admitted that they were a little dark once they went beyond the entry foyer. The air was particularly musty in the bedrooms, but it was thick everywhere with emptiness and disuse. They listened attentively as the real estate agent explained how it would be deceptively easy to lay down a concrete pad across the entire basement floor, and how the three stories above were not nearly the fiscal nightmare to heat in the winter that a person might fear they would be. There was, for instance, that beautiful soapstone woodstove in the den. Supposedly, it alone heated the den, the kitchen, and the dining room.

But neither the captain nor his wife was troubled by the basement with its dirt floor and low ceiling or how costly it might be to heat the massive structure above it. They saw only a magnificent three-story Victorian with that gingerbread trim and its fish-scale clapboards along the three porches. They saw only its carriage barn and that greenhouse. They saw only its views of Mount Lafayette and the cannonball-shaped foothills that rippled beneath the mountain’s tectonic heft, and the house’s proximity to a village green with a gazebo and a Civil War cannon, an immaculate white clapboard firehouse for the volunteer firefighters, and an iconic, squat brick library built with Carnegie money in 1911.

If they noticed a door with thirty-nine carriage bolts partially hidden by a moldering pile of coal, the image never registered in either of their minds. It certainly didn’t register in the minds of their daughters. And so the Lintons offered more or less what the absentee owner was asking for the property—they chalked up his unwillingness to budge much on the price to the fact that he had grown up in the house, and with both parents and his lone sibling dead attributed profound sentimental value to the brown and red clapboard walls and elegant slate roof—and he accepted. The very next day, Sheldon Carter died of a heart attack. But the closing was still seamless, and the Lintons moved in on Groundhog Day.

It was only on their third afternoon there, when Chip Linton descended the basement steps with their first ever load of laundry in their new home, that he would sense something from the corner of his eye and turn toward it, realizing as the hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle that behind all that coal in the corner was a door.

Chapter One

Y
ou see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words
GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS
painted in billboard-size letters along the side. You recognize it as Burlington’s runway 33, facing to the northwest. When your first officer lifts your plane off the ground, you know there will be a slight bump in about eight or nine seconds as you rise up and cross over the ravine churned out by the Winooski River. There is always a slight updraft there, even on a muggy afternoon such as today’s. The sun has begun its descent in the west but is still high above the Adirondacks.

Already, however, you feel yourself sweating, and so you know on some level this must be a dream. But, unfortunately, you don’t know how to wake yourself up. No idea. Emily, your wife, can do that, but not you. Still, you wouldn’t be sweating unless this were a dream because in reality you never broke a sweat when you were flying. Why would you? And if it is a dream—
that dream
—you know what’s next. Your heart starts pummeling your ribs even before they appear. And then there they are. The geese. You are upon them or they are upon you. Doesn’t matter. You’re somewhere between two and two and a half thousand feet above the ground, and there are the Bonnie and Clyde–like machine-gun blasts as you plow through them. (Why Bonnie and Clyde? You’re unclear on this, too, but your therapist has told you with a smile what an odd place the unconscious world is. And so it is Bonnie and Clyde’s Browning automatic rifles that you think of when you think of that sound.) Your engines will go—one in flames, one with grinding, steel-cutting-steel immolation, in both cases the nine-, ten-, even eleven-pound birds displacing the compressor blades and sending them spinning like shrapnel through the engines—although your forward thrust will bring you to about twenty-five hundred feet before you will begin your glide and start to lose altitude.

By then, of course, it is your plane. At least it was in reality. You had taken the controls.

So why is it now that it isn’t—why is it that you aren’t flying the jet? In this strange, dreamy version, no one is flying the aircraft, not even Amy Lynch, your first officer. Instead, the jet is immobile in the air, as if teetering on a high wire or balanced on its belly on the top of a great triangular obelisk. And then it becomes—and here is that expression a friend of yours who is in the Air National Guard and flies F-16s uses to convey his own fighter’s absolute lack of glide prowess—a lawn dart. The nose turns down, straight down, still well east of the lake, and you are looking down at trees and grass and death in the sort of cataclysmic fireball after which only small fragments of body are ever recovered and identified. A finger with a wedding band. A foot as far as an ankle, still strangely wearing a black Converse sneaker. A quarter of a jaw with a few bottom teeth.

Only then do you wake up. Apparently, you really can’t die in a plane crash in your dreams. A myth proves accurate. You find yourself cradled in Emily’s arms in the small hours of the night, your whole body wet with sweat and your heart that relentless jackhammer.

When your Philadelphia therapist refers to this as a flashback, you wonder if you should correct her. It’s a nightmare, not a flashback. In reality, you didn’t actually auger into the ground.

T
hey decided they would take a break from the boxes they had been unpacking and the wallpaper they had been scraping to go skiing and snowboarding. It was the Lintons’ first Sunday in New Hampshire, and they woke, took their equipment from the massive pile of athletic gear they had deposited unceremoniously in the mudroom off the front entryway, and Chip hooked everything into the rack on the top of the station wagon or wedged it into the back. They would drive to Cannon Mountain, where they would buy day passes for the family. Emily would snowboard with the girls while Chip skied alone. After five days of steady work, the stacks of boxes had begun to shrink and the corridors composed of cardboard had begun to diminish in both height and length. The cartons marked
HALLIE
and
GARNET
and
KITCHEN
were largely (but not entirely) gone, flattened and taken yesterday to the transfer station. On the other hand, they hadn’t even started on the boxes in the living room because they had made the decision that the wallpaper there—a repeating image of horses and hounds and a fox that looked disturbingly like an eel with fur—had to go and they might as well deal with it sooner rather than later. Nor had they started on the boxes in the dining room or the guest bedrooms. In the other rooms (and this house, they realized, really did have a lot of rooms) they had made varying degrees of progress, though all still had at least two or three unopened moving cartons.

Emily found herself fascinated by the traces that remained of the family who had lived in the house before them: Sometimes she was bemused, other times slightly disturbed. Parnell Dunmore had been buried nearly seven years now in the cemetery a mile away with the elegant wrought-iron fencing and the gates with the ornate trelliswork, and his wife, Tansy, had been in that graveyard almost four. Tansy had lived in the house not quite fifty years and, with Parnell, raised two sons there. Twins, which Emily viewed as either an irony or a coincidence. One of the sons had taken his own life as a twelve-year-old decades earlier, but his brother, now an ornery fifty-four-year-old named Hewitt, lived about forty minutes away in St. Johnsbury. Though almost all of the Dunmores’ furniture had long been cleared by the time the Lintons moved in, a certain amount of detritus remained that either the son had forgotten or hadn’t bothered to pack—or, in some way, was inextricably linked to the house. Sometimes Emily would find the sort of thing you might discover in the back of an antiques store, such as the broken but handsome sewing machine from the late nineteenth century. It was made of cast iron and mahogany and had a treadle in the bottom of the cabinet that demanded both feet to operate. It looked like a desk and might have weighed as much as a small car. Emily found it in the attic and couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly have carted it up the rickety steps that descended from a trapdoor in the second-floor ceiling and was the only link between the attic and the rest of the house. Not far from the sewing machine were rows of old wine bottles—over two dozen—with either plastic flowers or melted candles emerging from the tops. Some were forty years old. Among the items they found in the basement (all far from the corner with that peculiar door) were old wooden sap buckets, great coils of deteriorating rubber garden hose, a plastic model of an Apollo rocket, a brass door knocker, and three separate birdhouses. The girls found a couple of old teacups hanging from hooks in the very back of a cabinet in a dining room wall and porcelain figurines of elves and trolls and skiers in a box in a corner of the walk-in closet on the third floor.

Meanwhile, the carriage barn had everything from long lengths of rusted barbed wire to a Betty Crocker wall calendar made of canvas from 1973. There were empty paint cans and barrels of bobbins because once, decades and decades ago, there had been a bobbin mill along the river at the base of the hill on which the house sat. Apparently, every house in Bethel had barrels of bobbins. There were a boy’s bow and a quiver of arrows, the tips blunt, and tall piles of what might have been the house’s original shutters (there must have been fifty of them). There was a collar for a draft horse. Emily phoned Hewitt Dunmore in St. Johnsbury and asked about this miscellaneous silt from the house and the barn, even offering to drive the articles (including, somehow, that sewing machine) to his home, but Hewitt raged that he couldn’t have been expected to empty the house completely, not with a back as bad as his and with knees that were cranky at best. He suggested they keep whatever they liked and bring to the dump whatever they didn’t.

Even the small greenhouse hadn’t been fully emptied. It still had its four wooden tables for plants, and the girls seemed to view it as their playhouse, even though it really wasn’t all that warm right now; in fact, Emily was quite sure that the temperature was no more than four or five degrees warmer than outside. But the twins already had swept off the tables and deposited their American Girl dolls there, as well as most of the dolls’ furniture. They had carted their bins with dress-up clothes there, too, as well as their plastic trolls (which they insisted they had outgrown years earlier but nonetheless had brought with them to New Hampshire). The cat, meanwhile, seemed to spend her time in the barn. She hadn’t caught anything, as far as they knew, but she seemed to be stalking mice there.

The items that left Emily troubled were the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. She found their presence alarming and was relieved that it was she who had come across them, rather than Hallie or Garnet. She found the crowbar in the back of the closet of the second-floor bedroom that once had belonged to one of the Dunmore boys, a room that was going to be a guest bedroom now. It was upright in a corner and might merely have been there for years, forgotten. The knife was a carving knife with a pearl handle, and while the handle was discolored with age, the blade, though rusted, was sharp as new. Emily found it underneath a wrought-iron heating grate in the master bedroom—what was now her and Chip’s bedroom—and she only noticed it because she was considering replacing the dingy black grille with something more attractive from a home restoration catalog. And so she happened to spin the grate and there it was. Some of the metal latticework had been sawed off, allowing the knife to be slipped into place—and quickly removed. And, finally, there was that ax—a hatchet, really. She found it behind some ancient (and scarily toxic) cleaning supplies that Hewitt Dunmore had left underneath the kitchen sink. It was the length of her arm from her elbow to the tip of her finger.

She showed each of the items—the crowbar, the knife, and the ax—to Chip as soon as she found them. He suggested that perhaps Tansy Dunmore had been especially unnerved by the murders, some years earlier, of a pair of Dartmouth College professors by some local teen boys. Dartmouth was a ninety-minute drive to the south, and the double homicide had left everyone in Vermont and New Hampshire on edge. Or, perhaps, Tansy had always been easily frightened.

“But we know that Parnell Dunmore had a hunting rifle,” she replied, and he, in turn, surmised that she probably didn’t know how to shoot.

“Trust me, most women aren’t Lizzie Borden,” Emily argued. “If a woman has a choice between killing someone at close range with a carving knife or an ax or shooting that person with a rifle, she is always going to pick the gun.” But she saw that Chip was unconvinced. He remained more baffled than alarmed.

And, soon enough, her alarm passed, too, or perhaps she was so fixated on the day-to-day logistics of anchoring her family. Registering the twins for dance classes and school. Finding Hallie a new teacher for the flute and one for Garnet for the violin. Doing what she could to get them acclimated to their new classroom and teacher and (she hoped) friends. And then there was the ongoing vigilance when it came to Garnet’s seizures. In most ways, they were minor: She would go into a trance and leave them for perhaps half an hour. Sometimes it would be less, sometimes more. It was a variant of epilepsy: Electrostatic discharges in her brain—solar flares on the EEGs—would interrupt her thinking, and her mind would become, in essence, a frozen computer. The issue, according to the neurologists (and they had seen three over the years), was whether the seizures might be symptomatic of a condition that would worsen as she grew, the seizures both lengthening and occurring with greater frequency. But, they reassured Chip and Emily, they were just as likely to disappear forever as Garnet approached adolescence. For a while she had been treated with Valium, but in doses that Emily knew would have left most adults wobbly-kneed and walking into walls. Somehow, Garnet handled the dosage just fine, despite the reality that she weighed barely half as much as her mother. The child had been off Valium for a year now and she hadn’t had a seizure since October, but Emily never stopped watching.

Then last night they had lost power in a windstorm and the four of them wound up huddling for three hours in front of the woodstove. The novelty of the outage had worn off quickly, and the event had proven to be the last straw. They needed to get away for the day, and a Sunday at the nearby ski resort seemed like the ideal prescription.

As they were stowing their gear in the wagon midmorning, the air brisk but not uncomfortable (the thermometer outside the kitchen window, a dollop of mercury in a tube that was held by a brass relief of either a portly chimney sweep or Saint Nicholas, they couldn’t decide, read thirty-one degrees), Emily saw a battered pickup truck rumbling its way up the long driveway. Most of the year the driveway was gravel and dirt, but by this point in the winter it was a solid glaze of packed snow and ice. The drifts along the side were so high that she couldn’t see the truck’s wheels, and it looked as if the vehicle were skimming across the top of the snow. She didn’t recognize it. As far as she could tell it was red, but it was so streaked with white from road salt and brown from spread sand that she wasn’t entirely sure. But it seemed to be losing a back panel to rust. And it definitely needed muffler work. It announced its presence with a roar, even though it was navigating the curling driveway with some care.

“You know who that is?” Chip asked. He had just finished pulling shut the clamps that locked the girls’ snowboards to the roof.

“Not a clue,” she said, and now she could see it was a woman driving, her hair a lustrous gray mane that was parted in the middle and fell well past her shoulders. Her parka was blue. The woman coasted to a stop in a section of driveway in front of the carriage barn, actually driving past their station wagon. Emily looked at her husband and saw he was already walking over to the pickup, and so she followed. The girls were bundled up and ready to go, but—as usual, when there was daylight and they weren’t in school or unpacking boxes in their bedrooms—they were in the greenhouse.