The Night Strangers (30 page)

“Anise was over here just the other day,” Reseda said. “You make it sound like the two of us don’t play nicely together in the sandbox.”

Sage chuckled nervously and ran two dry, gnarled fingers underneath the first cerulean blossoms on the memoria. Neither she nor Clary was accustomed to speaking so candidly about Reseda and Anise’s relationship. “Of course you do. You both do. But …”

“Go on.”

“Everyone knows you two aren’t as close as we’d all like. I am about to be completely honest because—” And she paused here. Finishing the sentence as she had originally planned would have meant acknowledging that Reseda knew always what they were thinking and this made it hard for Sage to trust her as deeply as she wanted. And so she switched gears and said instead, “Well, I think Anise is a little threatened by you. And I think you two sometimes work at cross-purposes.”

“Thank you for being so candid, Sage. I appreciate that,” Reseda said agreeably, and she meant it. “Anise doesn’t know you’re telling me this, does she?”

“No. But you can tell her. It isn’t a secret.”

“And what are you planning to say to Anise? I suppose, as part of your shuttle diplomacy, you’re seeing her as well.”

“We are,” Clary admitted. “And we are going to ask her to do nothing without your involvement.”

“She won’t agree to that.”

“You weren’t there the first time we tried,” Clary said. “It was horrible. Everything went wrong. Just … everything. That wouldn’t happen this time.”

“Besides, it wasn’t Anise’s fault,” Sage continued. “It was Tansy’s.”

Reseda watched a block of sun on Baphomet and strolled into the center of the pentagon. She closed her eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the greenhouse for a long moment, savoring the feel of the warmth on her skin. “Have you decided which twin?” she asked, opening her eyes.

“No,” Sage told her. “But Anise is enjoying her afternoons with the girls and getting to know them.”

“I am, too,” Reseda said. “And I like their mother a great deal. Don’t you?”

“She’s very nice. But I can’t say for sure if she’ll ever be one of us.”

“Move too fast and she won’t be. I think it was a mistake to try and start calling her Verbena so soon. Same with the girls.”

“The problem is that Anise doesn’t think she has all that much time. And we have even less. I had given up before the Lintons came into our lives. I had absolutely given up. The first tincture is long gone. And then, magically, they appeared.”

“I would not read too much into the idea that Emily contacted Sheldon Carter in the autumn and wanted to see a house. This was neither some cosmic plan nor one of mine.”

“You don’t have as much interest in the second volume, that’s the problem,” Clary told her, raising her voice slightly in her excitement. “You don’t care as much for the blood potions. But the fact is, the tincture worked. Yes, the child died. But the tincture worked.”

Reseda was struck by how old the pair seemed, how physically decrepit. They weren’t, not really; the truth was, they were in absolutely remarkable shape for their age. But they were aging rapidly now, and that was what Reseda was sensing: their panic that, for them, time was running out. The tincture had worked forty years ago, but now they needed more. One of the Linton twins probably represented their last chance. “No,” she admitted, “I don’t care much for those potions. Those, in my opinion, are witchcraft.”

“We know more now than we did with the Dunmore child. And we have you. This time nothing would go wrong,” Sage said, pleading.

Reseda looked back and forth between the women. “I am more interested in their father.”

“For a tincture?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why?” Clary asked, her puzzlement evident in the way she drew out that one short sentence.

“Something is going on inside him. I don’t know what precisely. But I don’t believe he’s the man he was before he came here.”

“Of course, he isn’t!” Sage said, seemingly nonplussed by Reseda’s uncharacteristic denseness. “He was the captain of a plane that crashed. It must be horrible.”

“It’s more than that.”

“More than PTSD?” asked Clary.

“Perhaps.”

“Well, John and Valerian and Anise have that under control,” Sage told her, and then busied herself by inhaling the rosemary. “Valerian is having lunch with Emily tomorrow. I am very confident that Chip Linton won’t have any effect on what we want.”

“Please, Sage: Be judicious with your use of the word
we
.”

“Does that mean you won’t help us?” Sage asked.

Reseda noticed the woman’s jaw working as she tried to control her annoyance. Her earrings were bunches of green grapes. “I’ll speak to Anise,” she said finally, and she watched as both older women relaxed, their shoulders sagging a little forward, and their minds focusing more on the possibilities held by the future than on what they had witnessed that night long ago when Sawyer Dunmore died. Reseda was glad for them—and for herself. That vision was, she decided, among the most disturbing things she had ever seen in someone else’s mind.

Y
ou feel Ethan Stearns putting his cold, wet hands on your shoulders as you kneel in the front hallway, pressing the lid on the paint can. You close your eyes against the pain in your head.

“Chip?”

“Yes?”

“Keep your word to Hewitt. Do not tell Emily he was here.”

You push yourself to your feet, and he releases your shoulders. You rub your eyes at the bridge of your nose and you massage the top of your head, but it does nothing to ease the pain. In a minute or two you will take a couple of Advil, but you know that won’t help, either. At least not very much. The throbbing will cease only when Ethan Stearns leaves.

“I won’t tell her,” you agree. “But, please, don’t threaten me.”

“I wasn’t threatening you.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t tell her that Anise was here, either.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“If Anise wants her to know, Anise can tell her.”

Outside, through the glass window in the storm door, you notice two very large robins landing on a thin branch of the bare lilac near the front walkway. They are so large that you half-expect the branch to bow. But it doesn’t. Birds have hollow bones. It really is hard to believe it was birds that brought down your plane.

T
he next morning, John Hardin strolled into Emily’s office in the Georgian beside the bicycle shop and sat down in the chair opposite her desk. “Verbena,” he said, his voice a little wan. “How are you?”

“Still Emily,” she corrected him. “Not Verbena yet.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, sipping his coffee. “Sometimes for a sleepy little corner of New Hampshire, we move too quickly, don’t we?”

“It’s fine. I’m just not prepared yet to make that … that leap.”

He shrugged. “And you should feel no pressure to,” he said. “None at all.” He paused and then took a deep breath. “This has been a very strange spring, hasn’t it?”

“I would say that’s an understatement,” she said.

“I just got a piece of news that makes me a little sad. It really has nothing to do with your family, but—”

“Then do I need to know?” she asked, cutting him off. “Honestly, John, I really don’t want to begin the day with bad news.”

“Sad—not bad. There’s a difference. And you’ll be fine. It just makes a man my age wistful. But it’s not tragic. You know that fellow you bought the house from? Hewitt Dunmore? Well, it seems he died last night.”

The news made her a little dizzy, a little nauseous, and she couldn’t say why. “I’m so sorry. How?”

“Natural causes, apparently. He was found in his garage. A heart attack, most likely. He wasn’t well. It might have been days and days before he was found, but, fortunately, the garage door was open and the light was on.”

“I never actually met him,” she said. “We spoke on the phone, but that was it. He didn’t come to the closing.”

“I know. I remember.”

“Who found him?”

“The fellow who delivers his newspaper. I guess he saw the light on in the garage and the garage door wide open. And then he saw the poor man.”

“How did you hear?”

“Old-fashioned grapevine, I guess. Someone told someone who told someone.”

“And who was the someone who told you?”

“Anise. I ran into her at the coffee shop. She was getting some tea.” He gazed out the window. “On the bright side, it’s going to be another beautiful day. God, I love spring.” He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast, stood up, and continued down the hall to his office.

Chapter Fifteen

V
alerian Wainscott asked only for tea and honey at the booth in the diner, waiting until after Emily had ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a diet soda to put in her small request.

“That’s all you’re having?” Emily said to the psychiatrist.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Valerian reassured her, and she reached into her handbag on the cushion beside her and pulled out a Ziploc plastic bag filled with granola. “Voilà! My lunch.”

“They don’t mind?”

The woman shrugged and smiled cherubically. “It’s homemade,” she said. Then she removed a black leather portfolio case and opened it on the table between them. On the inside front cover Emily saw a pocket with pages of handwritten notes about her husband. “There’s a lot I want to talk about,” Valerian said. “I have strong opinions about your husband and strong thoughts on how to help him.”

“Go on.” There was no doctor-patient confidentiality. Chip had told Valerian he wanted her to share with Emily whatever Valerian thought his wife should know.

“First of all, I worry that if we don’t, well, get him under control, he may hurt himself.”

“You mean again?” Emily said, seeing once more in her mind the knife in his stomach that night as he had stood at the top of the stairs.

“I mean worse than what was, in essence, an instance of especially violent cutting.”

“You’re suggesting that he might make another attempt to kill himself.”

“Yes.”

Emily sat back against the vinyl cushions and tried to focus. She reminded herself that Valerian was only verbalizing thoughts she had already had and things she and Michael Richmond had discussed. Nevertheless, the reality of her husband’s deteriorating mental state was still hard to hear. “I leave him alone with the girls as little as possible,” she murmured.

“Oh, he would never hurt the girls,” Valerian reassured her. “Never. This isn’t about that.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest he would,” she said. “I just worry that he gets so … so distracted. I just worry that one afternoon Hallie or Garnet might do something dangerous and silly—they’re only ten, after all—and Chip would be completely oblivious.”

“I see.”

“So, tell me: What do you want to do?”

“Well, remember, I am just the second opinion,” Valerian began. “Michael is still his doctor, and he seems perfectly competent in most ways.”

“Go on.”

“But your husband and I are starting to build a good rapport, too. And my sense is that I would like to admit him.”

“Admit him?”

“So we can observe him.”

Abruptly Emily understood what Valerian was telling her, and she felt as if she was on a plane and had just dropped a few thousand feet in sudden turbulence. She felt as if her whole body had lurched, and she was frightened. She heard the clatter of silver and plates and the din of conversation all around her through the thick French drapes of a theater. Everything sounded muffled and far away. “You want him institutionalized?” she asked when the idea had sunk in.

“Just temporarily. And he would have to agree to it. But all those beams that keep a person sane and functioning are about as stressed as they can get without snapping in two. And if they do snap, it won’t be pretty.”

“How long?”

“At the state hospital? I don’t know.”

“Best guess?”

“Maybe a month. Maybe less, maybe more. You both should view it as a time-out from life.”

“Then couldn’t the same effect be achieved with, I don’t know, a really restful vacation?”

“He needs treatment and observation.”

Emily was vaguely aware that the psychiatrist had opened her bag of granola, and now the woman popped a few pieces into her mouth. Her chewing reminded Emily of a rabbit.

“Have you talked to my husband about this?” she asked finally.

“No. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“What about Michael?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Can you tell me what’s involved?”

“With institutionalization?”

She nodded.

“Since it’s voluntary, it’s mostly about making sure there’s a bed. John Hardin would not even need to help us prepare committal papers.”

In her mind Emily saw her calm and gentle boss. “I keep forgetting: You know John.”

“Like a godfather, Emily. I love that man. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”

“Can I think about this?” she asked.

The waitress returned and, smiling, placed the chicken salad sandwich on the table. She was an older woman with bluish hair and large tortoiseshell eyeglasses that dwarfed her nose. She didn’t seem troubled by the idea that Valerian was eating food she had brought from home into the diner, and so Emily reflexively looked at the badge on her smock dress. Maggie. So, the waitress wasn’t one of them. Emily was surprised.

“Of course you can think about it,” the psychiatrist said after Maggie had left them alone. “And I will respect whatever decision you make. Just …”

“Just what?”

She pushed her little bag of granola aside and put her hands on the table, palms open and up. “Give me your hands,” she said to Emily, and—a little reluctantly at first—Emily did. Then Valerian grasped them, gently massaging Emily’s fingers with her thumbs. “I just worry about you. All of us do. We all just worry about you so, so much.”

T
he cat watched the birds here in New Hampshire, making no distinctions between the ones that she’d stalked in Pennsylvania and the ones that seemed to be everywhere in this new world. There were more of them now that the snow was gone and the days were growing long. She was finding the field grass beyond the greenhouse a considerably better place to stalk them than the manicured lawns around her previous home, even though it was nowhere near as tall as it would be in another month. Unlike other cats, she felt no need to share the remains of her kills with the four people around her. She needed their approval in some ways, but she tended to eat the birds she caught wherever she found them. Same with the field mice and moles.

Likewise, she watched the insects, and was particularly fascinated by the ants that would swarm upon the small pieces of the breads and confections that the people she didn’t know brought into this house. She made no connection between the people and the way some of those foods seemed to poison the ants; that sort of cause-and-effect leap was beyond her.

Among the humans whom she did not view as part of her family but was starting to recognize, there was one with gray hair that was long and thick, and who seemed to bring more food into the house than any of the other strangers. Today she had come by again when only the man was home. It was early in the afternoon, and the girls and their mother had disappeared, as they tended to most days, and the father was working around the first floor of the house. The woman had knelt down in the front hallway and made kissing sounds, and so Desdemona had walked over to her while the father went to retrieve something from the kitchen. She’d pressed her head into the woman’s fingers and the palm of her hand, enjoying the way this individual knew precisely how to rub her ears and scratch her neck. She’d purred.

Then the woman had opened a plastic bag and pulled out a mouse by its tail. It was already dead, and for a moment Desdemona had eyed it carefully. No human had ever given her an animal before. And there was a scent to it that she didn’t recognize. But a mouse was a mouse, and it was fresh. And so she took it and raced into the corner of the den nearest the woodstove. There she devoured every bit of it, despite its unfamiliar but not unappealing flavor, even the tail and the liver and the head.

M
ichael Richmond hadn’t known Valerian Wainscott well before their meeting that afternoon at his office in Littleton, but their paths had crossed at a pair of conferences and once they had been at a cocktail party together. That was three years ago. Richmond had been struck by her name the moment they’d met, since, he presumed, it signaled that she was a part of that bizarre cult of herbalists centered in Bethel. But she seemed almost too much of a flake to be one of them; moreover, she worked at the state psychiatric hospital. She was a lovely young woman whom he recalled nibbling on a homemade cupcake during a lecture in one conference and whose questions betrayed a deep distaste for most pharmacological interventions in the other—which, he supposed, made her a very rare bird at the hospital. Given how many beds were filled with the mentally ill who were violent or delusional or both, it seemed inconceivable that some days she wouldn’t want to pass out risperidone and valproate like M&M’s on Halloween. The fact was, chamomile tea wasn’t going to sedate a raging schizophrenic.

The two other women Richmond had met who he was convinced were part of the cult were a pair of real estate agents, and they seemed considerably more focused and intense than Valerian. One of them was so preternaturally composed that she was a little intimidating. He had met the two when he’d been searching for a small home near the ski resort. After spending a day looking at property with the composed one, he’d decided to work with another agency—and, eventually, through that firm had found an A-frame with a magnificent view of Cannon Mountain. He couldn’t recall the original real estate agent’s name now, but she had explained to him that it was some rare and exotic flower. Later people would tell him about the strange cult—a coven, they had said, only half-kidding—and he would realize that he had met one of its members.

Well, Dr. Valerian Wainscott was in all likelihood a member, too.

And now she wanted to commit Chip Linton—or, to be precise, recommend to Chip that he commit himself. And while that notion alone had infuriated Michael, he had to admit that he was also annoyed with her presumption that she was better trained than he was to care for “a middle-aged male cutter” like Chip Linton.

“You make it sound like that’s a type,” he had told her, incapable of hiding his incredulity.

“It’s uncommon, but not unseen,” she had replied, her voice downright chipper. “I see men like the pilot at the hospital periodically.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely,” she had assured him.

“Well, he does not need to be committed.”

“Is he getting better with you?”

“He’s making progress.”

“No,” she’d said, her voice pert, “I just don’t see it. And are you really that confident that he won’t kill himself? Tell me: Could you live with yourself if he did?”

“I simply do not believe hospitalization is in his best interests,” he had told her. “I will argue against it. I will tell Emily that her second opinion is a wrong opinion.”

Valerian had smiled and raised her eyebrows and shrugged. He’d decided she was absolutely beautiful and absolutely insane. He’d decided she was completely unqualified to do what she did for a living. And he’d decided he would tell Emily and Chip to give this Valerian Wainscott as wide a berth as they could. They should have nothing to do with her and—if they ever met any others—they should avoid those Bethel women who spent way too much time in their greenhouses.

“I
’ll bet your father has finished hanging the wallpaper in the dining room,” Emily told the girls, handing Hallie a half gallon of milk and Garnet a brown paper grocery bag. On the way home from dance class, they had stopped at the supermarket and done the food shopping for the next few days. “I really won’t miss those sunflowers,” she added, trying to sound cheerful. She was looking forward to seeing the room brightened by the new wallpaper patterned with roses, but mostly she was preoccupied with Valerian’s belief that her husband should be institutionalized. She wasn’t sure if she had stopped thinking about it for more than a few minutes since Valerian had rendered her opinion. She wanted to meet with Michael Richmond to see what he thought, and didn’t want to broach the subject with Chip until she knew more.

“Me, either,” Hallie said, leading the way into the house even though she was burdened with the milk, her dance bag, and her school backpack. “They were creepy.”

Emily called out to her husband that they were home, a grocery bag in each arm, figuring in her mind that she had two more trips. “Chip?” she called again when he didn’t respond. She thought she needn’t necessarily worry that he hadn’t answered, but she did.

The three of them went straight to the kitchen, put the bags down on the counter, and then Emily followed the twins as they peered into the dining room. But instead of hearing the girls either coo over the new wallpaper or remark on the reality that there was still a whole section of the west wall with those gloomy, dispiriting sunflowers, she heard Garnet calling out the cat’s name quizzically. “Dessy?” Garnet was saying, her voice not much more than a murmur. “Dessy?” But then the voice grew to one long, loud shriek, and Hallie was wailing the animal’s name, too. There was the family cat on the floor by the credenza—half on the Oriental rug and half on the hardwood planks—her eyes wide open and her tongue protruding like a small pink stone from her mouth. There seemed to be dried froth on her nose and a small stain of dried vomit on the floor beside her.

“Is she dead?” Hallie was asking, trying to sniff back enough of her tears for her words to be clear, and even before Emily had knelt on the floor by the cat and touched the cold fur, she knew that the animal was.

“Chip?” she called again. “Chip?”

“Be right up!” he yelled, his voice somewhere in the basement below them.

“He’s always down there,” Garnet murmured, still crying softly, speaking to no one in particular. She was sitting on the floor and running two fingers gently along the cat’s side. “There, there,” she said, as if the cat were alive and needed comforting. “There, there.”

In a moment Chip was standing in the doorway, his face grimy and his shoulders sagging just a bit, but looking rather cheerful. He had a glass jar in his hands with what looked like soapy water. “Hello, girls,” he said. “I didn’t hear you get home!”

“We were calling for you,” Emily said, trying to read him. “What were you doing?”

“Oh, I was in the basement. I guess I didn’t hear you. I must have been in my own little world.”