The Night Strangers (13 page)

And before you know it, you are in. The thirty-nine carriage bolts are still surrounding the frame like the bulbs on a movie marquee, but you are in. It took no more than an hour and a half, including the time you spent shoveling the coal like a stoker on a steamer.

You run the flashlight over the walls and the ceiling, aware that somewhere very far away the phone is ringing. (Later you will learn it is the principal at your daughters’ elementary school; you will be told that Garnet had brought a cigarette lighter into the classroom and reduced to ashes a drawing another student had made. Only after nearly ten minutes of obfuscation on the part of the principal will you discover that the drawing had been of a plane crashing into a lake.) No matter. The answering machine upstairs will get it. And with the flashlight you study the walls made of horizontal beams ten inches thick and easily two inches—two legitimate inches, not the two inches of the modern two-by-four—wide. If, long ago, this really had been a coal chute, the sluice has been boarded up solidly. You tap on the wood behind which the chute most likely would have existed, and it sounds pretty solid on the other side. Earth solid. No hollowness at all. And so you sit down in the dirt, your back to a wooden wall, and contemplate—now, where does this memory come from?—the pit of despair. That’s what it was called, when the researchers weren’t using its technical name: vertical chamber apparatus. You learned about it in college. In a psychology course. Harry Harlow designed it for baby monkeys to see what he could learn about depression. It was a stainless-steel trough in which he isolated the animals alone for months at a time. Even a year, in some cases. And, you recall, he learned only what one would expect from isolating a sentient creature for months in a box. The monkeys were wrecked when they emerged. Depressed. Psychotic. Really couldn’t be salvaged once they were set free. Rarely recovered. Well, this cubicle could be a pit of despair, too. You recall the sensation of lying in bed under the sheets this past autumn. After the accident. There were days, your children at school, thirty-nine dead in the water, your career over and done, when you didn’t get up until three in the afternoon, when the girls got home. Some days you didn’t get dressed at all. After all, what was the point? Really? What … was … the … point?

You pull your knees into your chest, if only because you believe this is the posture that behooves one in the midst of a stint in the pit of despair. You think of Poe and amontillado. A cask. Building stone and mortar. A trowel. Or, in this case, barnboard and thirty-nine six-inch-long carriage bolts. You bow your head against your drawn knees and breathe in the aroma of cold, cold dirt and mold. The air is a little stale.

In the unlikely event the cabin loses pressure, an oxygen mask will descend …

How many times had you heard that—or some version of that—in the cabin behind you while you were waiting to leave the gate? You always will miss that. The calm before … not the storm. The calm before the serenity of flying. How you loved flying.

You feel a sharp spike in your lower back, as if you have leaned against a protruding nail, and reflexively you wince. Just in case, you sit forward and run your hand over the wood behind you. It’s rough against your fingertips, but there is nothing spiking out from the beams. This pain is—as you presumed when you felt it—merely one of those strange, mystery aches that have dogged you since August 11.

“It was noisy under the water.”

Your head swivels instinctively toward the voice at the same time that your body jerks away from it, and your shoulder smacks hard into the gritty timbers beside you. But the voice is more startling than frightening. There, sitting next to you in the pit, is the child from the plane with the blond spit curls, her hair now wet with lake water and flattened against her scalp, who had boarded Flight 1611 with the Dora the Explorer backpack. The backpack is, in fact, in her arms even now, and she is sitting almost the way you are. Her arms are around her matchstick-like legs. You notice a bruise on one knee and a scratch on the other. Kiddie knees, Emily would call them. Too much tree climbing. Her uninflated life jacket looks like a bib.

“When I would have my head underwater at the swimming pool, it was always quiet,” she continues, her voice offhand, as if the two of you have known each other for years, “but that day in the lake? It was really, really noisy.”

When you think back to that moment, you realize she’s right. It was noisy. There were those ferryboat engines, which were much louder when you were in the water than when you were up on the deck, and the screams and shrieks from the passengers and the rescuers. There was a Coast Guard boat’s ululating siren. There was the chaotic, unorchestrated thwapping of the churned-up water and waves. And so you nod like a dad and tell the girl she is correct. You agree. Then you hear yourself asking the child her name, as if she is a slightly younger friend of Hallie and Garnet and you are sitting in a school classroom or, perhaps, at a Brownie picnic. (You wonder: Will your girls find a Girl Scout troop here or will this passage to the north lead them to leave the scouts altogether?)

“Ashley. I have two cats and a dog,” she tells you. “Your cat is huge. Much bigger than mine. Do you have any other pets?”

“Nope. Just Dessy. It’s short for Desdemona. And you’re right: She is a very big girl.”

“My cats are Mike and Ike. I didn’t name them. The animal shelter did. They were from the same litter, and the shelter named them after some candy because they loved each other so much as kittens and they were, like, always together. My dog is named Whisper. I got to name her. She’s a mutt, but she looks a little like a beagle.”

You wish you had gotten another dog after your chocolate Lab, Maxie, passed away the year before last. You would have liked to have had a dog here in the country. You would have liked to have had one to walk this past autumn when you were sleepwalking through life in Pennsylvania in the months after the crash. Desdemona might not have minded. She’d always seemed to like Maxie. But if you’d gotten a new dog, it would have been a puppy, and it’s possible that Desdemona would have had far less patience with the hysterical antics of a three-month-old Lab.

“Ashley’s a pretty name.”

“I don’t have a Mary-Kate.”

“I didn’t think so,” you tell her. You find yourself smiling, even though the child’s wet clothes are making the dirt between you turn to mud. Only recently have your daughters outgrown the Olsen sisters. “But you know what? My children are twins. I have twin girls.”

“I know.”

Of course she does. She knows about Dessy. Why wouldn’t she know about Hallie and Garnet?

“Most people think twins always look the same,” she tells you with great earnestness. “But I know that only happens sometimes. I have cousins who are twins, and one’s a boy and one’s a girl. It would be pretty weird if they looked identical! My family sometimes jokes about how Andrew—he’s the boy—is older than Becca. But it’s only by, like, a couple of minutes. Who’s older in this house: Hallie or Garnet?”

“Hallie but, like Andrew, only by minutes. Hallie is named after her grandmother. And her sister is named Garnet, because her hair was so very, very red when she was born.”

The child nods, taking this in. “Those are very pretty names.”

“I think so.”

Ashley stretches out her legs so she can open her backpack. She unzips the top and peers in for a moment. Then she turns to you, her face growing sad, and you reach out your arm to rub her shoulder, to console her. Suddenly she bends forward, bowing almost, grimacing, and your eyes go to her lower back, that precise spot on your own back where only moments ago you had felt a sharp sliver of pain. And then you gasp and, as if she were your own child, turn the girl away from you so you can examine more carefully the wound and see what you can do to help her. There you see a twisting corkscrew of metal nearly the size of a skateboard, a part of it adorned with the sky blue paint your airline uses to brighten the exterior fuselages of its jets, impaling the child from her back to her front. Perhaps seven or eight inches of the metal is extending from just beneath the front of her ribs—you must have missed it earlier because of her life jacket and knapsack—and at least a foot reaches out from her back like a shelf. Her clothing is awash in blood and flesh, and there are tendrils of muscle twitching like small black snakes from the holes that have been gashed through both sides of her shirt.

You can’t imagine what you can possibly do to help her—you can’t imagine what anyone could do—you can’t think of anything you could say to ease her agony and her fear. But, still, you reach for her because, after all, you are a father. Because you are an adult and you have to do something. Gently, so as not to jostle her and cause that great shard of metal to move inside her and cause her yet more agony, you wrap your arms around her. But when you press your fingers on the back of her shirt, you feel only air and she is gone.

You sigh. Your heart slows. You drop your hands to your sides and then, a moment later, touch the pinpricks of pain at the small of your own back.

She was never really there, you tell yourself. Yes, you recall there was a child on the plane named Ashley. You know this from the passenger manifest. You know this from the list of the dead. Ashley Stearns. She was seated beside her father, Ethan Stearns. But of course you just fabricated in your mind this whole brief conversation. You will be careful not to tell Emily. Or Michael Richmond, your new therapist here in New Hampshire. Already you worry them both. So, you will share this … this vision … with no one.

You run your fingers through the dirt, reassuring yourself that it was always this moist. This damp. You press them in a little deeper, digging abstractedly, when—And how did you not know this would happen, how could you possibly have not seen this coming? Isn’t this why you broke down the door in the first place?—you feel a long, coralline tube of bone. You pull it slowly from the ground and study it, grateful on some level that, unlike Ashley Stearns, it is no apparition. No delusion. This bone is as real as the ones in your forearm and probably as long as the radius and ulna that link your elbow and your wrist.

Chapter Six

“T
here’s another one,” Hallie was saying from the backseat of the Volvo.

“I saw it, too,” Garnet said, “and I saw it at the same time as you.”

“I called it, I get it,” Hallie insisted.

Emily stole a glance at her daughters in the rearview mirror. “Saw what? Get what?” she asked.

“Greenhouses,” Garnet answered. “There are greenhouses everywhere here. I bet there are even more greenhouses than silos.”

They were driving home from dance class Saturday morning, and it was starting to snow, great white flecks that hit the windshield and instantly were transformed into droplets of water. It wasn’t quite noon, and Emily was a little relieved to be talking about something other than that damned cigarette lighter. Counting greenhouses? The number in Bethel was odd, there was no doubt about it, but hearing the girls bicker as they counted them felt like a return to normalcy after yesterday afternoon’s and last night’s conversations about the lighter and what, as a family, they should do about it. The conversations had seemed endless. She and Chip had both had to speak to Mrs. Collier on the telephone, and then the two of them alone had debated what to do. She had come home from work early, and they had talked to Garnet soon after she got off the school bus. Then they had spoken with Garnet and Hallie together. Both girls had always been so well behaved that she and Chip really didn’t have a lot of history with discipline: Even when the girls had been toddlers, neither she nor Chip had sent either child to the “time-out chair”—one of the ladder-back chairs that was actually a part of their regular dining room furniture—more than two or three times. Good Lord, Garnet had been more likely to send herself to the time-out chair, which she had done at least twice when Emily was alone with the girls while Chip was flying. It was as if Garnet had somehow deduced that her mother was not merely outnumbered, she was outmatched by three-year-old twins and had reached the breaking point: She needed one of the girls to sit still for a few minutes while she tried to straighten up the board books and stuffed animals and baby dolls (and baby doll clothing) that coated the floor of the house like fallen leaves in October, or make a dent in the shaky skyscraper of disgusting dishes that rose high from the kitchen sink. In the end, Emily and Chip had chosen not to discipline Garnet for hiding her discovery of the lighter from them—and from Hallie—and then for bringing it with her to school: Between the plane crash and being uprooted and brought to New Hampshire, it was a wonder that there hadn’t been far more and far worse instances of acting out. She wished that Garnet had evidenced more contrition, but clearly her daughter accepted that she had made a mistake. And even the girl’s schoolteacher seemed to believe that the boy who had drawn the picture of the plane was just asking for some sort of off-the-grid reaction.

“And the greenhouses are all in Bethel. Not in Littleton or Franconia,” Hallie was saying. “You see one almost the second you get off the highway.”

“And then another and another,” Garnet added.

“Well, winters are long here,” Emily said, speaking as much to try to make sense of it to herself as to try to explain it to her daughters. “And that means the growing seasons are short. You want to start plants as early as you can in a greenhouse and then give them as long a growing season as possible.”

“But why just here?” Garnet asked her.

This was a perfectly reasonable question, and she wished she had a good answer. She recalled that woman from the diner, Becky Davis, and how Becky had referred to the local women as the herbalists—as if they were a cult. Emily presumed that each of those women had a greenhouse. And that group, apparently, included Anise and Reseda and Ginger Jackson and John Hardin’s wife, Clary, since she knew that all four of them owned greenhouses. And that also meant, perhaps, that even Tansy Dunmore at some point had been one of them—whoever
they
were—because she and Chip now owned a house with a greenhouse.

Of course, as loopy as all those women might be about vegetables and herbs, Becky herself hadn’t seemed a paragon of stability that afternoon in the diner.

“Well,” Emily said, trying to focus on Garnet’s question, “it could be as simple as the fact that someone around here builds greenhouses. You know, maybe someone in the community owns a company that makes them. That’s all. Or it could be a … a club.”

“Even Mrs. Collier owns one,” Hallie added, referring to the girls’ schoolteacher. Emily felt Hallie tapping the back of her seat with her foot absentmindedly. It drove her a little crazy some days, but now she was taking comfort in the idea that her daughter had kicked off her snow boots when she climbed into the car and so at least she wasn’t leaving brown marks from road sand and mud on the tan leather. “What did she tell you about hers?” she asked. In her mind she had already added another person—another woman—to the group. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea that the girls’ teacher was one of the women (and the club really did seem to include only women). “Anything special?”

“No. She just said she might take us there later this spring to show Garnet and me some of her special plants.”

“You mean the whole class?”

“No, not the whole class,” Hallie answered. “I think she just meant Garnet and me.”

Emily wondered what the teacher had meant by
special plants
. Some people used greenhouses to grow tomatoes or phlox. What were these women using them for? Comfrey and crampbark? Hawthorn? Elder? She knew there were all sorts of people floating around remote corners of New England, some New Agers and some old-timers, who would still put a little comfrey on a cut or a bruise. She recalled a woman from her visits to her grandmother in Meredith, an elderly friend of the family: Before she would join her grandmother and her friend for walks around the lake at twilight, the woman would rub some leaf on her arms and no mosquito would ever come near her. Not a single one. And it smelled heavenly. Like perfume. Emily tried to recall now what it was and couldn’t.

She slowed as she took a corner and the road’s shoulder all but disappeared, and she noted the way the snow was starting to stick to the pavement. She had hoped it would have stopped for the season by now. But they’d gotten another three inches in the night, and John Hardin and his wife were probably on their fourth or fifth runs of the day at the mountain. Soon, she presumed, the couple would be calling it quits and heading home to prepare for their small dinner party that evening. Behind her, Hallie stopped kicking her seat.

“Maybe we should put some interesting plants in our greenhouse,” Emily said to the girls, trying out an idea. Maybe one of the benefits to living here in northern New Hampshire would be the chance for the girls to reconnect with the natural world. She imagined taking them on nature walks and teaching them the names of the wildflowers that grew along the side of the road. Of course, that would mean she would have to learn the names of those wildflowers first.

“No, let’s not,” Hallie said, mimicking the derisive voices of the teenagers she saw on sitcoms on TV.

“Yeah,” Garnet agreed. “We want that to be our playhouse.”

“Can’t it be both?” Emily asked, though now she was really only teasing them. If they felt that strongly about wanting it to be their private world, she had no objections at all.

“No way,” Hallie said. “It’s a playhouse—not a greenhouse.”

“Okay, then,” Emily agreed. “Playhouse: not a greenhouse.” She glanced out the window at a handsome white Cape with evergreen shutters. In the backyard she thought she spied a greenhouse.

Y
ou could tell your wife about the bone. Bones, actually. When you dug around in the dirt a little more, you found three bullet-size phalanges that you are quite sure came from a human hand. A human finger.

Perhaps you even
should
tell your wife about the bones. But you don’t. You did not tell her yesterday when she came home from work and you will not tell her when she and the girls return from dance class this morning. And while you could devise any number of reasonable excuses for withholding the discovery—Emily is a little depressed, Emily already has a basket case of a husband, Emily is questioning her decision to bring the family north to New Hampshire—the main reason is essentially this: You have a macabre fascination with the bones. This house is brimming with strangeness and purposeful surprises. You want to investigate this on your own. See what it means. Talk to Hewitt Dunmore yourself.

Besides, why scare Emily? She was disturbed enough by the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. Why risk agitating her—and, thus, the girls? Because when Emily is anxious, the girls are anxious. That’s just how it is.

And so you wrap the long bone in sheets of newspaper (the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, the same pages that days ago pillowed the china plates that had come into your life in the weeks and months after your wedding) and place it upright in the very back of your mahogany armoire. It reminds you of the way that crowbar had been leaned up—hidden—in a corner of a closet in another bedroom. You place the pieces of fingers in a Ziploc bag beside it.

You find yourself smiling a little ruefully when you shut the armoire door. Perhaps you are more like Parnell or Tansy or Hewitt Dunmore than you realized. You hide things.

At some point soon, however, perhaps even this afternoon, Emily is going to go downstairs to the basement, and there she will see that you have torn down that door. She will see that the coal has been moved and the door is in ruins. And so you decide you will tell her about that part of your little project. You will tell her when she gets back from the dance studio with your girls. You will say you initiated this small home improvement this morning. Not yesterday. Today. After all, if she thinks you took care of the door yesterday and chose not to tell her until now, she might ask questions. And, before you know it, you might reveal that you have found some bones. Or, worse, that you may have reconnected with a dead girl with a Dora the Explorer backpack.

O
n Saturday afternoon, the sun trying and failing to burn off the high overhead quilt of oyster white cirrus, Reseda misted the hypnobium, epazote, and derangia in her greenhouse. Then she gazed for a long moment at the arnica, appraising the plants. They looked like daisies, but the flowers were an orange just a tad more vibrant than terra-cotta. They smelled slightly like sage. On Monday she would harvest the arnica for a tincture. Most people only used arnica externally as an anti-inflammatory. They rubbed it on sprains and strains. They feared its toxicity when taken internally: A large enough dose was lethal. And while Reseda knew that you could kill a person with arnica, the truth was you could kill a person with plenty of medicines if you overdid it. Hence the word:
overdose
. She used a thousand times more arnica than the bare trace element you might find in a homemade homeopathic tincture or pill, but not enough, apparently, to ever have killed a person.

She wondered what she would prepare for the Lintons tomorrow night when they came to her house for dinner, and she put down her mister and wandered across the greenhouse to the section with the herbs she used in cooking. She noted how healthy the rosemary looked and inhaled its fragrance. Lamb, she decided that moment. Yes: She would serve lamb.

She recalled the way Captain Linton’s mind had roamed among shadows when he dropped by her office, how he seemed to be living now only in gloaming. She understood; she had her own trauma. She had had her own extended moments with the dead. His depression and disorientation were products of the accident, and with a little luck and the right counsel he would recover and resume a safer path. She found it significant that she was most attracted to the stories of the captain and his wife, while Anise and the other women were obsessed only with their girls.

She paused when she felt a prickling at the outer edge of her aura and stood perfectly still. She hadn’t imagined it. Consequently, she stepped over the shin-high stone statue of the amphisbaena, careful not to trip over either of the serpent’s heads (in myth, amphisbaena meat was an aphrodisiac; its skin could cure colds), passed by her Baphomet, and knelt. She peeled off her gardening gloves and spread wide her fingers, stretching her arms and straightening her spine. She stared up through the glass at the nimbus of light in the hazy western sky, closed her eyes, and randomly said aloud names of the living as if they were parts of a mantra or prayer. In a moment, whatever—whoever—was trying to cloud her aura was gone.

It was a source of unending interest to her: How could she—given all that she knew and all that she had endured—be so attuned to the thoughts of the living and so mystified by the thoughts of the dead?

T
hey were only on the interstate for two exits on Saturday night, but they passed a pair of signs warning drivers of moose. One advised urgently,
Brake for Moose: It may save your life
. The first time Chip had seen that one, the day after they’d moved to Bethel, he’d remarked, “I suppose they’re afraid most people will accelerate when they see a moose. Look, honey, there’s a moose on the road: Let’s speed up and see if we can hit it!” He didn’t joke much these days, and so it always comforted Emily when she saw a glimpse of his humor. It was difficult to recall now, but before the accident he had actually been a rather funny man.

The Hardins’ house in Littleton was a white Federal that resided with princely elegance in the town’s hill section above the main street. The driveway had a circular portico and the front yard a stone fountain, the basin of which, because it was winter, had been removed and placed against the pedestal like a giant mushroom cap so the water pooling inside didn’t freeze and crack it. There was another car in the driveway, and Emily suspected by the way the front windshield had been defrosted that this vehicle was a recent arrival, too, and not one of the Hardins’ automobiles.

“There will be other people,” she said to neither Chip nor the girls in particular as they stood for a moment in the driveway. She found herself worrying for her husband. Worrying about her husband. It seemed that morning he had taken an ax and destroyed that squat, ugly door in the basement. The exertion had left him exhausted, though Emily was troubled more by the fury he had brought to the task: Why in the world had he used an ax instead of simply removing the carriage bolts from one side and then prying the door open with a crowbar? He had told her there were too many bolts and they were too long: Removing even a third of them would have taken hours. She took him at his word, but she couldn’t help but fear it was the fact that there were precisely thirty-nine of them that had prevented him. He had seemed unduly disturbed by the coincidence, the notion that there was one bolt for every fatality—as if each length of metal corresponded exactly with one human soul. One night over dinner he had expressed his wonderment at the connection, and she had smiled and told him this was magical thinking, a symptom of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He, in turn, had told her that magical thinking was also a symptom of depression and there was something enigmatic in his response: Was he signaling to her that he knew she had demons, too, and to allow him this indulgence? Or was he alerting her to the idea that she was right and he had done a little Web diagnosis on himself and understood that his consideration of the bolts was at once irrational and explicable?