The Night Strangers (4 page)

“Good morning,” the woman said, pushing open her door and jumping down onto the driveway with an obliviousness to the coating of snow there that was somewhere between foolhardy and confident. Emily still found herself moving gingerly along it. They had snow in Pennsylvania, but not like this. Not all winter long. There the snow came and it went. Here? You’d never know that Greenland was melting faster than a Popsicle in July. Here were the winters she recalled from her childhood: snow and cold and winds that numbed her cheeks. Leafless, sinuous maples.

She noticed that the woman was holding a long, flat Tupperware tin in both hands and, on top of it, a similarly shaped baking dish covered with aluminum foil. Emily understood instantly that this was a neighbor bringing food. More food. A lasagna and brownies, she suspected. She guessed that the woman was almost a generation older than she and Chip: probably fifty-five or sixty. Her face was lovely but lined, and her eyes looked a bit like her parka: They were the color of moonstones. She wasn’t wearing gloves. “I’m Anise,” she said. “I’m a friend of Reseda Hill,” she added, referring to the woman who had taken over as their real estate agent after Sheldon Carter died so abruptly.

“Emily Linton,” she said. “This is Chip, my husband.” Emily found it interesting that, ever since the plane crash, she had been more likely to introduce her husband than he was to take the social lead and introduce her. He wasn’t a failure—not by a long stretch when she contemplated the traumas that had marked his childhood—but he had confessed to her that he felt like one. These days he defined himself entirely by a single moment, and that moment was not about the nine people who had lived but was instead about the thirty-nine who had perished. He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not. Now she watched the tentative way that he gave this friend of their real estate agent his hand and mumbled a soft greeting.

“Oh, I’d know your face anywhere,” Anise said with a broad smile that revealed a layer of upper teeth that were just beginning to cross over one another and a row of lower ones that were starting to yellow with age. The woman hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but it had become one of those statements that Emily knew made Chip anxious. Yes, for a time his face had been everywhere. For a time it had been all over the Web, the cable news networks, and the newsweeklies. After all, he was the pilot who had failed to do what Sully Sullenberger had accomplished. People never meant anything when they said that they recognized him. And sometimes it was even better when they came right out and acknowledged that they knew who he was, as Anise just had, rather than simply staring at him and saying nothing. Chip had told her once that silence without verbal recognition seemed like even more of an indictment.

“Can I help you with those?” Emily asked, and she pointed at the tin and the baking dish in Anise’s arms.

“If you promise to eat them,” said Anise. “There’s a lentil-nut loaf in this one and carob-chip brownies in the other.”

“Vegan?” Emily asked.

“Yes. They taste better than they sound—I promise,” Anise insisted, and she handed the items to Emily with particular care because Emily was already wearing her ski gloves. “The brownies have names on them. One for each of you. Hallie is spelled with an
i-e
, right?”

“Yes, that’s right. Really, this all sounds scrumptious. Thank you. It will be such a gift not to have to cook tonight.”

“Reheat the lentil loaf in a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree oven for twenty minutes.”

“Or microwave it for, what, three minutes? Four?”

Anise tilted her head as if this were a math equation that was puzzling her. “Huh. I don’t have one of those. Too scary. I put those in the same category with cell phones and aspartame. You’re just asking for brain cancer.”

Emily noticed that her husband hadn’t said a word, but now he was eyeing the woman’s vehicle. She had been married to him long enough to know that he was probably wondering how this woman with her fear of carcinogens in diet soda and radiation from a cell phone could drive around in that rusted-out, carbon-monoxide-spewing tank.

“It looks like you’re about to head to the mountain,” Anise observed, just as the pause was about to grow awkward.

“We are,” Emily told her.

“With the girls?”

“Yes,” she said, momentarily nonplussed by the idea that she and Chip might be leaving the girls behind. Of course they would be bringing them. She wasn’t going to leave a pair of ten-year-olds alone for the day—especially in an unfamiliar house in which once had resided an apparently sociopathically skittish old woman who left knives and hatchets in corners. But then she reminded herself that Anise was a friend of Reseda’s, and there was every reason to presume that Anise was simply trying to make conversation. Show some interest. “It’s a family outing,” Emily went on. “An escape from Box Hell.”

“You lose power last night?”

“We did. Did you?”

“I did. I was surprised because I live in the valley. Living up here on the hill, you’ll lose it more often than I will,” Anise said. Then: “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I live on the road to the Notchway Inn. It’s the brick Georgian with the greenhouse and the overgrown paddock with the white fence. I don’t have horses, but a previous owner did. Don’t be strangers.”

“You know much about this house?” It was Chip speaking, and because it was the first time he had opened his mouth other than his softly murmured how-do-you-do, both she and Anise found themselves turning toward him with a combination of intensity and expectation.

“A little bit. I knew Sawyer and Hewitt Dunmore. It’s an interesting place, isn’t it?”

“Can I ask you a question?” Chip said.

“Absolutely,” answered this friend of their real estate agent.

“In the basement is a door. I noticed it the day before yesterday when I was bringing a load of laundry down there.”

“Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Where does it go?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you might.”

“Nope.”

“It’s sealed shut.”

“Sealed?”

“With bolts. Lots and lots of carriage bolts.”

“That’s interesting. Based on the design of the house, where do you think it goes? Back up to the kitchen, I’d wager. I know the house has a back stairway linking the first and second floors. Why not one linking the basement with the kitchen?”

“Not likely. The kitchen would be above the other side of the basement. It seems to be a door to nothing. It’s at the edge of the house. All that’s above it is the screened porch. And that porch is just built above dirt.”

“I’ll bet it was a ramp, in that case. A wheelbarrow ramp.”

“There’s one of those on the other side of the basement—on the north side of the house.”

“Maybe it’s a coal chute then.”

“There is some old coal lying around it,” he admitted.

“There you go, mystery solved. The Dunmores—or the Pierces before them—probably built that screened porch after they stopped heating with coal.”

He nodded, but Emily knew that her husband wasn’t entirely convinced. The two of them had discussed the likelihood that it was merely a coal chute the afternoon he first noticed it. Certainly it was possible that’s all it was. But why would you use thirty-nine carriage bolts to seal it shut? (Emily feared the coincidence that there were the same number of bolts as there were fatalities on Flight 1611 was only going to exacerbate her husband’s fixation on the door.) Chip had removed one of the bolts, but it had taken an awl with a beveled point, a screwdriver, and a hammer—and nearly twenty-five minutes of struggling. It was six inches long. When he realized that the remaining thirty-eight were probably identical and might demand the same labor—kneeling in dirt and moldy, crumbling coal—he twisted the carriage bolt back into place and returned upstairs to unpack some more boxes. Over cups of decaffeinated coffee late that night, sitting on the floor in the den because here was one room where the wallpaper was a soothing pattern of blue and yellow iris, he and Emily discussed calling Hewitt Dunmore to ask about the strange door. But when Emily had phoned Hewitt yesterday about the possessions they’d come across in the house, everything from that extraordinary sewing machine to those eccentric figurines, she had found herself incapable of asking him about it—or, for that matter, about the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. He seemed too damn ornery. Besides, it was just a door to a coal chute, wasn’t it? She decided another time, perhaps.

“Yeah, that’s what we figured,” Chip said finally. “A coal chute.”

“What else could it be?” Anise agreed, and she raised her eyebrows and smiled once more. “It’s not like the Dunmores hid bodies down there.”

No, of course not
, Emily thought.

“It must feel wonderful to be here,” Anise continued.

“It’s nice,” Emily agreed, carefully modulating her tone. Nothing in her life felt particularly wonderful right now. Besides, she hadn’t been here long enough to have any sense at all of whether moving to Bethel had been the right decision.

“Are you going to garden?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you garden in Pennsylvania?”

“Not really.”

Anise motioned at the greenhouse. “You’ll want to take advantage of that. Tansy did for a while. Then she stopped. She shouldn’t have.”

Emily thought about this. “I presume you’re a gardener,” she said finally. “You said you have a greenhouse.”

“We’re all gardeners,” Anise answered, and there was something in the tone that was oddly salacious. A moment later, the woman was climbing into her battered pickup and Emily was carrying the lentil-nut loaf and four carob-chip brownies with their names on them into the kitchen and calling for the girls. Chip remained outside by their car, staring up into the sky and, she presumed, watching for birds or the white trail of a jet high overhead.

Y
ou do watch for birds. You do stare at the plumes of the jets high overhead. You will, you know, never fly again. Not as a pilot and not as a passenger. Never.

You have confessed only to your psychiatrist in Philadelphia that, suddenly, you are afraid of flying. As well, you discussed with her at length what physicians have determined are the psychosomatic or phantom pains in your neck and your back and your head: the lingering whiplash. The occasional daggerlike spikes in your left kidney and abdomen, a sensation you have likened to a horizontal barb impaling you through your back and your stomach. The way your skull sometimes feels as if the frontal bone—that great helmet beneath your skin—has been crushed, smashed into the brain in one moment of life-ending trauma.

She told you they would pass. Eventually.

Instead they have gotten worse this week since you arrived in New Hampshire. You tell yourself it is because of the work of moving your family from one house to another. All that lifting. All that stress. It was bound to aggravate whatever is going on in your back and your neck and your head. Your mind.

Moreover, the dreams seem to be changing here. Oh, you still have the dreams where you crash CRJs in catastrophic, steel-melting infernos—though, of course, you always wake a split second before impact. You still have the nightmares with dense tropical forests filled with palm trees and oxygen masks dangling like strange, tubular plants.

But last night there was a dream with a little girl, not either of your daughters. She was sopping wet, drowned—dead, you knew it even in your sleep—but she didn’t know she was dead and she was nattering on and on about her backpack, which she wanted you to help her find. This was new. So was the dream on Thursday night with some burly guy your age who was standing behind you and Amy, your now dead first officer, on the flight deck of the CRJ as you were about to start down Burlington’s runway 33 for the last time. He was telling you to wait, wait, wait—to goddamn it, wait!—because if you waited just a couple of seconds you wouldn’t hit the goddamn birds. But you ignored him and started your roll, turning around to command him to take his seat in the passenger cabin, noticing for the first time when you turned that he, too, was dead and hadn’t a clue: A round metal shard had pierced his skull like a long spike of rebar, and another was protruding from just beneath his rib cage. Only in a dream could he stand.

Soon enough, the nightmare ended as they all do: a fireball occurring just as you open your eyes and stare up at the diaphanous shadows of your bedroom at night.

O
ne time, if only to change the dynamic with your psychiatrist in Philadelphia, you told her about a broad broad brought abroad. A joke at your mother’s expense when you were in the fifth grade. Your mother was terrified of flying. Absolutely petrified. Had to be hammered to get on an airplane. Had to have her good-luck charm bracelet on her wrist and her Saint Christopher’s medal around her neck. Had to be wearing a specific pair of sunglasses as a headband to keep that long and lustrous black hair off her face. Tony Swoboda and his wife, Kaye, were driving you and your family from Stamford to Kennedy Airport the time you all flew to Spain and Portugal on a two-week tour. One of those vacation packages that took you to a half dozen cities in barely a dozen days: Madrid in two days and Lisbon in thirty-six hours. An afternoon for Toledo. It was your last vacation as a family—you and your parents and your younger brother—because it would be soon after your return that your father would start up the grand staircase at Grand Central Terminal around 8:35 on a Tuesday morning and die right there on the steps of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. (His last conscious vision? You like to believe it was Paul Helleu’s Mediterranean sky, but at the time the ceiling had not yet been restored. The stars that day had still been obscured by soot.) He was walking from the train station to his office at the ad agency on Forty-eighth Street, as he had almost every workday of his life for twenty years. It was the end for him, but only the beginning of the end for your mother. Somehow, her husband’s life insurance had lapsed and their savings and investments were clearly inadequate to keep her and her two sons in a four-bedroom house near the water in Greenwich, Connecticut. They would cut back, then they would move. A smaller house in Stamford, at the edge of the city. It wouldn’t have been so bad for the three of them if the combination of widowhood and diminished resources hadn’t conspired to turn a social drinker (a very social drinker, in hindsight) into a drunk.