The Night Strangers (34 page)

“Good Lord, what makes you think I talk to anyone when I’m alone?”

“One of your girls told me.”

You pause, your stomach turning over once. This is devastating news. You had no inkling that they had seen—that they knew. “And both know?”

“Yes.”

“How long have they known?”

“I couldn’t say. But they seem to comprehend you are experiencing something rather different here from what you were enduring back in West Chester. Is that accurate?”

You feel the first twinge in your side, the first indication that Ashley is near.

“Yes. It’s this …”

“This house. I know.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not angry at you because you didn’t know … but you and that Sheldon character sold us a house with a body in the basement.”

“If I could do it all over again, I would never have allowed you to buy this place. Never. I would have stopped Sheldon from showing it to you. That’s the truth. I’m sorry,” she says. “But the voices—”

“The visions,” you say, correcting her. “I wish it were voices only. Then you could diagnose me a schizophrenic and drug me accordingly.”

“But the visions do not involve Sawyer Dunmore. It may have been his bones in the basement, but he’s no longer here. You’ve never seen him.”

She is watching you, and you find yourself swallowing uncomfortably. “No. Never him.”

“There were children who died on Flight 1611. Is it one of them?”

You nod. “Ashley Stearns.”

“Who else?” she asks. “Are there others?”

“Yes.” The word catches in your throat and the syllable grows elongated.

“How many?”

“Two—plus Ashley.”

“Do you know what they want?”

You see in your mind the knife by your bed, and then you have to close your eyes against the first migraine-like spikes of pain along the top of your head and behind your eyes. Ethan is coming, too.

“Do you want to get some aspirin?” she asks when you remain silent.

“Maybe in a minute,” you answer. Then you take a deep breath and tell her in as reasonable a tone as you can muster of your visits with Sandra Durant, the PR executive who liked orange marmalade, and of Ethan Stearns, the father with the serious guns for upper arms who is so angry at the death of his daughter. And, of course, you tell her lots more about Ashley. That child, it seems, is the reason why your own family is in danger. Someday, when it all becomes too much, you may savage one of your children with the knife you keep by your bed. But you don’t tell Reseda that. It is impossible to say such things aloud. Instead you finish by murmuring, “I had never believed in ghosts. But they’re real, you know. Either that or I’ve lost my mind once and for all.”

“They’re real,” she agrees simply.

“You believe in ghosts?”

“I do.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“I have.”

“The thing is …”

“Go on.”

“The thing is, they were my passengers and they died when my plane was brought down by a flock of geese. There were thirty-nine people who died. Why those three?”

“Versus your first officer or the flight attendants or anyone else who was onboard?”

“Exactly! Why not Amy Lynch or Eliot Hardy?”

“The rest of them have gone on.”

“To heaven.”

“That word is as good as any,” she says. “When we’re living, we’re shielded from possession by an aura. When an aura is sound, it’s difficult for a spirit to penetrate it and become one with us.”

She says this as if she is explaining how the immune system or a jet engine functions. A year ago, you would have assumed it was New Age nonsense. Now? You tend to have a more open mind.

“And you know all of this … how?” you ask finally.

“
Know
is a very loaded word in this case. The truth is, I
know
nothing. I am certain of nothing. But that’s what faith is, isn’t it? We believe things we can’t prove and have some confidence that we’re right.”

“They want things from me.”

“I am sure they do. But if you want me to,” she says, leaning in to you in a fashion that is at once provocative and intense, “I can try to make them leave.”

“You can?”

She nods. “I can try. And if I succeed, I want you and your family to move away.”

“Leave this house?” You are surprised by the loyalty you have to the Sheetrock and plaster. To the rooms you have made new and to the rooms that await new wallpaper and paint. You have changed the house dramatically. Made it yours.

“Bethel,” she answers. “The White Mountains.”

“You don’t think we belong here?”

She shakes her head. “I think you belong here too much.”

I
n the morning, John Hardin gazed up at the wondrous penumbra of lime green on the tips of the trees: not leaves yet, but waves and waves of buds. That moment when life moves from mere mist to a tangibility that swallows the twigs. It was weeks past the equinox now, and the days were starting to feel pleasantly long. He and Clary were likely to have dinner when it was still light out, which was rather nice, they both agreed. And there had been one last, torrential sugar run the day before. A person could have stood at the top of Mooseback, the squat little mountain just east of Bethel, and seen steam from sugarhouses in all directions. Over the weekend he had taken Verbena and her girls to Claude and Lavender Millier’s sugarhouse to witness boiling firsthand. As John had expected, the Milliers’ son had driven up from Salem for the weekend. And the girls had loved it. Verbena had been positively entranced. Said it brought back memories long dormant of visiting one of her grandmother’s neighbors in the woods near the lake in Meredith.

He was just about to get into his car and drive to the office when he heard the front storm door squeak open and saw Clary walking briskly across the slate to the driveway. Like him, she usually rose and dressed early, even though she didn’t have a law practice to tend to, but they had made love this morning and she was still in her ankle-length red nightgown.

“What did I forget?” he asked her, though her hands were empty.

“Phone call,” she murmured, and he could see the worry on her face.

He nodded. The cordless phone didn’t work this far from its base. He tossed his briefcase onto the passenger seat of his car, thought of the body of the dead psychiatrist that once had lolled there in mangy old blankets, and strolled back to the house. He noticed that there was a perfect line on the grass where the rising sun had melted the frost: The grass was white where it was still masked by the shade from the house and green where the rime had turned to water.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Anise.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

In the kitchen he reached for the phone. “Good morning,” he began, “though I have the distinct sense based on the scowl on my wife’s usually lovely face that you haven’t rung me with good news.” Clary was standing in the doorframe, her arms folded across her chest. Her lower lip was quivering with anger; she looked profoundly unhappy.

“I just saw Reseda. She came by my house this morning.”

“Wonderful! I always want my girls to be friends.” He was absolutely sincere in that he did want all of them—the women as well as the men—to get along. But there was also a layer of black humor rippling just beneath the surface of his remark. He knew that Reseda and Anise would never be close, at least not in the way that most of the women were. Reseda was always going to be something of an outsider.

“It wasn’t wonderful at all.”

“No?”

“No, John. It wasn’t. She believes we killed both Hewitt and the psychiatrist. She said the death of the doctor—”

“Not dead, my dear. Only missing.”

“Presumed dead. It’s been a while.”

“And he has, more or less, fallen off the radar. There was nothing on the news last night—again—and nothing in the paper this morning. He had no wife, no children. A deceptively easy man to forget. That sounded rather harsh—certainly harsher than I meant. I’m sorry.”

He heard her sigh on the phone. “Reseda might not let him be forgotten.”

Once more it crossed his mind that in their enthusiasm they had all moved too quickly. The idea had been gnawing at him. The reality was that half the town already thought everyone in their small group was a little nuts. And while he viewed most of what they did as, well, rather a freedom of religion issue—a First Amendment issue—homicide represented an arguably unnecessary part of their practice. It was one thing to risk sacrificing one of the girls. But homicide? Now that was nasty.

“Well, I’m glad she went to you and not me,” he said finally, knowing—as they all did—that Reseda seemed incapable of reading Anise’s mind.

“She will come to you. Reassure me: There is no evidence?”

He chuckled. “Oh my, Anise, there is almost always evidence if you look in the right place. I’m quite sure if the State Police ever checked my car, they would find traces of the psychiatrist. A tiny hair. A piece of skin the vacuum missed. But they would need reasonable cause to search the car. And I tend to doubt any judge would approve a warrant because Reseda pulled a memory from me and went to the police.”

“She wants this over with now.”

“I do, too.”

“I meant something different.”

“I know what you meant. Reseda wants us to leave the twins alone and move on. Accept the inevitability that a person ages and dies. Well, that’s easy for her to say, given that she is still on the smooth side of forty. I’m on the deeply wrinkled side of … never mind. So are Clary and the Messners and the Jacksons. And you are precariously close to that Rubicon.”

“I think we should do it tonight.”

“Interesting. I was just thinking how we may have been moving too quickly. And now you want us to move faster still.”

“Tonight. Before Reseda can intervene.”

He stood a little straighter. He felt himself growing frustrated and shook his head. He had always tried to view Reseda like a daughter. Lately he had even begun to hope that someday she and Verbena—who still, much to his disappointment, insisted on being called Emily—would both be like daughters to him. And if Verbena was like a daughter, then her twins were like granddaughters. And why would he want to hurt one of his granddaughters? He wouldn’t! Really, what kind of man did Reseda think he had become? No, in theory nothing bad was going to happen to either of Verbena’s girls. Nothing at all. There was a risk. Sawyer Dunmore was proof that there was a risk. But look how the tincture had worked! There was every reason to suppose it would work again. It demanded a lot of blood, no question about it, especially given the number of adults who would be present this time and how much of the tincture would be necessary. But both girls were young and strong. And they fit the recipe perfectly: They were twins, they were preadolescent, their blood had been leavened by trauma.

“Intervene,” he murmured, repeating the word. “That would suggest that Reseda shouldn’t be present. That she really is no longer a part of our little group.”

“I don’t think she is.”

The answer made him wistful; he couldn’t imagine proceeding without her—though clearly they would.

“So, should we?” Anise went on. “I really do want us to try tonight.”

“Yes,” he said finally. “Make the arrangements.”

“But I also don’t want Verbena to wind up like her”—and here the old lawyer heard Anise pausing as she chose her word carefully—“
predecessor
in that house. I don’t want her to wind up like Tansy.”

“Heavens, none of us do! But maybe that won’t happen to Verbena.”

“I hope not. I rather like her.”

“I do, too. And she’s a very good lawyer. Good, solid work ethic.”

“But if she does lose one of her children …”

“It will be a shattering blow. Absolutely staggering.”

“Do you think she’ll leave us?”

“She might. But now we know more how to handle such an … an eventuality. And I suspect that she’ll need us more than ever if something should happen to one of the twins. She really hasn’t any family.”

“She still has the captain. At the moment, he is neither dead nor committed.”

“No. But I think you’re correct: We do it tonight and we do it without Reseda. I don’t think we have a choice, as much as I wish the captain were out of the picture. Tell me, have you decided which girl?”

“Absolutely. We should use—”

“No, don’t tell me! Surprise me!” he said, an almost childlike giddiness in his voice. “It will be more interesting that way. It will be more interesting for all of us.” He looked at his watch and realized he would be late for a real estate closing if he didn’t leave soon. “Anise, I need to skedaddle. And I meant what I said: Don’t fret. We’ll iron out the details this afternoon, but go ahead and start preparing for the ceremony tonight.” Then he placed the phone back in the cradle, kissed Clary on the cheek, and strolled out to the car. He noticed the line of frost on the grass had moved a few inches while he was inside and smiled up at the spring sun. He really wondered how anyone couldn’t be happy just to be alive.

Chapter Eighteen

E
mily thought Jocelyn Francoeur was more polite than she needed to be—and, perhaps, more polite than she had to be, given the circumstances. Although the idea initially had made Jocelyn uncomfortable, in the end she hadn’t prohibited Emily from bringing her girls over to the Francoeurs’ modest ranch that afternoon after school with the small birthday present they had picked out for Molly. The last time Emily had seen Jocelyn, Chip’s arms and shirt were awash in blood and Molly was sobbing. This was not precisely the way any mother wanted a playdate to end.

Still, it was almost as if the woman’s original rage toward the Lintons had been replaced by wariness and unease. Jocelyn seemed more frightened than angered by the idea that the Lintons were in her home; it seemed to Emily that the woman had only agreed to see them because she thought not seeing them would be worse.

Yet the purpose of the visit, in Emily’s mind, was simply to apologize once again as a family and to bring by the birthday present. She presumed that Molly was having a party on Saturday and her children weren’t invited, which was fine, but she still wanted to do all that she could to make sure the twins were invited to any party Molly had next year.

Now the five of them—two mothers and three daughters—were sitting awkwardly but politely in the living room. Emily sensed that Jocelyn was eyeing the twins and her a little guardedly and hadn’t said very much. Really, no one had said much but Emily, as she struggled to find things to talk about (which shouldn’t have been hard with three girls roughly the same age) and topics they might discuss. “Well, this is the main reason we came,” Emily said brightly, after she had run out of things to say. She smiled as broadly as she could and watched as Hallie handed Molly a small box wrapped in silver paper. “It’s a birthday present from all of us.”

The girl looked at her mother, and Jocelyn seemed to be thinking about whether she wanted her daughter to have it. Again, there was that ripple of anxiety on the woman’s broad face. Then, much to Emily’s embarrassment for her own children—Hallie, especially, who had offered the present—Jocelyn took the box from Molly and held it for a moment. She seemed to be weighing it, trying to decide what might be inside. The box was not quite the length of a pack of playing cards and half an inch deeper. She didn’t actually sniff it, but Emily could tell that she was inhaling the air around it to see if whatever was inside had an aroma.

“Not a plant,” she said to Jocelyn, hoping to reassure her. “Nothing herbal. I promise.”

Emily saw a small swell of dread pass over the woman’s face, but Emily had only meant to be glib—not terrifying. Quickly she added, “They’re earrings. That’s all.” She turned to Molly and her girls and added, “Sorry. I guess I just ruined the surprise.”

Jocelyn handed her daughter the box, and Molly opened it with unusual delicacy for a child: She slowly untied the ribbon and peeled back the tape on the wrapping paper. Then she opened the lid and held up one of the silver earrings for her mother to see. “It’s pretty,” she said. “What does it mean?”

Emily knew the interlocking circle of vines was a Celtic symbol of friendship: Reseda had told her. It was why she and her girls had picked out this particular pair of earrings for Molly when the three of them and Reseda visited the jewelry store. She was just about to explain this to the girl when Jocelyn took the earring from her daughter and placed it back inside the box. Then she stood, and Emily was struck by just how tall this woman was; there was a reason that Molly was such a big girl. Jocelyn towered over her, and Emily wanted to rise up off the couch, but she was afraid that she would appear defensive or confrontational if she did. And so she remained seated as her hostess handed her the earrings and said firmly, “No. We will not have these in this house. We will not have your … your beliefs … in this house. Go. Go now.”

“They’re just earrings,” Emily said. “They’re Celtic earrings. That’s all.” She looked at her girls, but clearly they understood. Already they were standing up and slinking toward the front door like chastised puppies. And so Emily stood, too.

“I want no part of your group or their symbolism, and I want my daughter to have no part of it, either,” the woman insisted.

“My group? Really, what group am I a part of? I know you don’t mean my law practice,” Emily argued, though she understood precisely what Molly’s mother was driving at. “I’m serious, Jocelyn, tell me: What group?”

The woman put her hands on her hips and was visibly shaking. Then she took her daughter by the hand and pulled her beside her. “You know better than me. You live in the house where one of them lived. You work for John Hardin.”

“I know next to nothing about Tansy Dunmore. And most of what I know about John Hardin begins and ends with his legal expertise.”

“There are two kinds of people in Bethel. And someday your kind will go too far. Frankly, I think you already have.”

“My kind? Jocelyn, look, I am—”

“Fine,” the woman said, interrupting her. “I believe you. There’s no group. None. There’s no witchcraft and there’s no weird religion. Now, Molly and I have some things to do to get ready for … Well, we just have some things to do,” she said, and Emily understood that Jocelyn was not going to discuss this any further. Clearly the woman was afraid that she had said too much. And so Emily took the girls, who looked no less sheepish as they stood by the front door pulling on their boots, and left the Francoeur house with the little box of earrings in her hand.

R
eseda stared up at the looming Victorian from the seat of her car, watching the afternoon sun on the western windows. She couldn’t decide whether the dead would have grown so invasive had the captain remained in West Chester. Probably they would have, but he had been more isolated here—more separated from friends and neighbors and a support group of other pilots—and that seclusion, more than this house, was what may have given the spirits such access. Such command. There was also the possibility that whatever Anise was feeding Chip was exacerbating their control and making their presence more disturbing. But Reseda would never know for sure. Finally she heard another vehicle rumbling up the driveway. She looked into the rearview mirror and saw Emily’s station wagon approaching. A moment later, Emily coasted past, waving, and came to a stop before one of the carriage barn’s two bays. She had the twins with her.

“Coming or going?” Emily asked, as Reseda climbed from her own car.

“Coming,” she answered.

“Does Chip know you’re here?”

“I don’t think so. I just arrived.”

“Well, let’s go inside,” Emily said, and together they started up the front walkway.

“You’re not returning from something pleasant like a dance class or a music lesson, are you?” Reseda asked the twins.

Garnet shook her head no and Hallie sniffed derisively.

“We just tried to make peace with Jocelyn Francoeur,” Emily explained. “Remember the earrings you helped us pick out? Giving them to Molly didn’t go well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She doesn’t approve of you herbalists.”

“She really doesn’t know us well enough to approve or disapprove. I told you that.”

“She would disagree,” Emily said. “She has mighty strong feelings. And …” She stopped midsentence and said to her girls, “Run ahead and tell your father we’re home and Reseda is here. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Are you going to tell Reseda what happened? What Molly’s mom said?” asked Garnet.

“I may, yes. But please don’t you tell Daddy—or at least wait for me. I’ll be right in,” Emily said, and the girls ran into the house. Then she pulled the box of earrings from her shoulder bag and shook it at Reseda, unable to mask the disgust on her face. She recounted for her how Jocelyn had refused to allow her daughter to accept the gift that they had chosen together and how she had all but called the herbalists witches. Finally Emily put her hands on her hips, and her gaze grew earnest. “Tell me,” she demanded of Reseda, “are you a witch?”

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

“A real estate agent.”

“Don’t be coy. I want to know what’s going on here in Bethel and I want to know right now. I want to know why your little group wants to change our names and what you want from me and my girls.”

“It’s why I’ve come here.”

“Okay then, tell me. Now.”

“First we need to begin with your husband.”

“With Chip? He has his share of problems, but—”

Reseda cut Emily off, pressing one finger gently but firmly against her lips, silencing her. Then she took her hand and started leading Emily away from the house, walking her in the clean spring air into the meadow, where the grass was, suddenly, almost knee-high. There she told Emily of the dead who were with her husband and the dangers they posed for her daughters, and how she wanted to bring her husband to her own greenhouse that night to perform a depossession—and how she already had broached this idea with Chip and he had agreed. She told Emily that there was a second volume of recipes in their group’s canon, and it included a particular tincture that the herbalists wanted to make that also represented a danger to her children.

“What do they all want to do?” Emily asked, her voice facetious. “Graft some of their skin? Harvest a little blood?”

“Not a little,” Reseda said, and for the first time in her life she verbalized aloud what she had seen one night in Clary Hardin’s mind when she pressed for details about the death of Sawyer Dunmore.

T
he twelve-year-old boy was drugged with a tincture that Anise had made from valerian, skullcap, and California poppy, his body resting flat on its back on the makeshift wooden altar in the communal greenhouse, his hands folded across his chest as if—and his mother had to have noticed this—he were a corpse. Anise was a decade and a half younger than the others, but every bit as committed. The child’s hair was the color of wheat, and it was damp from sweat, the perspiration a side effect of the tincture. His eyes were shut, and he breathed with the slowness of a seemingly sound, untroubled sleep. But he was not as sedated as everyone thought, the sleep not nearly as deep, and that would be a part of the problem and why everything went so horribly wrong. It was well into the night, and the greenhouse was lit entirely by candles—Sage had rounded up easily a hundred of them, tapers and blocks and votives from the church outside Boston where she and Peyton had been married one summer Saturday in 1932, and now the candles were lining the tables with the plants or ensconced in hurricane lamps on the ground—and the walls were alive with the shadows of the six herbalists. Outside the air was bracing and crisp, as late autumn rolled inexorably toward winter. Parnell had taken Hewitt hunting, and the father and son were with Parnell’s brother at a friend’s deer camp in Danville, Vermont, though there was no question that Parnell knew what his wife and her friends had planned for Sawyer. He had seen how well their tinctures worked—even the ones from the second volume—and, like Tansy, supposed this one would, too.

And so the herbalists surrounded the body in the greenhouse. They edged closer all the time, especially when Anise finally raised the child’s right arm from his chest and Clary held a cast-iron stewpot beneath it while Tansy—the boy’s own mother—took one of her own kitchen knives and made a single cut along the wrist. The boy flinched. Certainly Clary saw that. Probably Anise did, too, and she must have worried that she had either mixed the sedative improperly or—fearful of killing the child with an overdose—given him too little. But the boy did not awaken. At least not yet. Sawyer Dunmore awoke only after Anise and Sage had both observed aloud that the slice had been neither deep enough nor long enough and already the coagulants were starting to stem the tide. They needed far more than a few drops of blood; this wasn’t homeopathy, after all. They needed enough blood to reduce it like a sauce with the ashwagandha and eternium. And though Tansy paused with the knife at her side, summoning the courage and deciding whether she was indeed capable of cutting her own child a second time—and making this gash far more pronounced—she didn’t pause long. Had she been tranquilized, too? Clary didn’t know and so Reseda didn’t know. Clary had never been sure whether the stupor that initially had enveloped Tansy Dunmore like a shawl and made her eyes less animated than the rest of the herbalists—all of whom were electrified by the idea that finally they were preparing this particular tincture, the one that demanded the blood of a traumatized, prepubescent twin—was the result of massive doses of passionflower and schisandra or unease at the reality that she was slashing her own child’s wrist. Regardless, she raised the knife once more and this time made the cut deeper and longer and, intentionally or not, she ran the knife lengthwise along the ulnar artery, rather than across it, and blood geysered up into the air, a punctured hose with the spigot on full, and the boy awoke. He screamed and struggled to sit up, but Peyton Messner and John Hardin were there before he could, the two men pressing the boy’s shoulders back against the altar. But Sawyer fought hard for his life, and his cries pulled Tansy from the somnambulance that had allowed her to forget for a period who she was and what she was doing to her own son. She lashed out at Peyton and John, and managed to tear the sleeve from John’s robe, but Clary dropped the heavy pot—spilling the little blood they had collected onto the dirt floor of the greenhouse, where it disappeared into the earth—and she and Anise together clenched Tansy’s arm and pushed her away from her son and then onto the ground. But Tansy heard Sawyer crying as he bled out (and he really did bleed out very, very quickly), and she wailed his name over and over. The adults might have saved the boy’s life if they hadn’t been working at cross-purposes: Peyton was hoping to stop the bleeding, trying to press the cloth from the cuff of his robe against the deep gash, but Anise and John were squeezing the child’s forearm, trying to keep the vein open. Moreover, at some point someone had toppled one of the candles and set Anise’s long sleeve on fire, badly burning her arm before she was able to smother it. She seemed oblivious to the pain, but the small blaze only added to the distraction. Still, Clary eventually managed to right the cauldron and capture Sawyer Dunmore’s blood as it flowed and flowed, puddling in the bottom of the cast-iron pot and saturating John’s and Anise’s robes.