Chapter Eight
The house always seems a little more peculiar to you when the girls are at school and Emily is at work. When you’re alone. It’s as if it suspects that this is when you’re the most receptive. Or, perhaps, the most vulnerable.
It.
One day you stood on your driveway and just stared at it. The windows were eyes, the long screened porch a mouth. It watched you back.
You know the air moves in currents along the hallways like breath, especially in that back stairway to the second floor and the thin corridor along the third floor. One day you came across Desdemona cowering in the living room, her orange body a small ball between the radiator and the corner where the wall angled into the bay window. She was quivering, her fur fluffed and her eyes wide. For the only time ever she hissed at you.
And then there was the time you found her with her collar caught on the pineapple finial on the banister to the front staircase. She was trying and failing to extricate herself and growing panicked. She was hanging herself, choking to death because for some reason the breakaway collar hadn’t unclasped. If you hadn’t wandered into the hallway at that very moment, in all likelihood the animal would have died.
In the end, you didn’t tell Emily about this because you know it would have upset her. There is actually a great deal you are shielding her from.
You realize, of course, that you are giving life to slate and clapboard and horsehair plaster. To bad wallpaper and a door in the basement. There is no it. But there is something. There are people. You know what you have found and you know what you have hidden in newspapers in the back of your armoire.
She deserves friends.
It’s Monday, the start of a workweek for Emily and a school week for your girls, and once more you are here all alone. You tell yourself it wasn’t a bad weekend, despite your encounter with Ethan Stearns and Sandra Durant from Flight 1611 in the small hours of Sunday morning. After all, you spent time with the living, too. You got to know Emily’s boss a little better on Saturday night; you had a nice evening at Reseda’s on Sunday. Both parties were actually rather pleasant, and you made new friends. Moreover, when you awoke hours before sunrise today, you and Emily made love with an ardor you hadn’t felt in months.
So, you tell yourself, in many ways you are managing just fine. For a long moment you sit in a ladder-back chair and stare at the grotesque sunflowers on the dining room walls. These are not the cheerful Tuscan sunflowers of August. They are the dying blossoms of September, brown not merely because the wallpaper is antique. Even brand-new this paper may have been morbid.
The plan today is to continue stripping that god-awful wallpaper. In the past—in this house and in West Chester—you always scraped the old wallpaper off all of the walls before starting to hang the new paper. That is the logical way to proceed. But not this time. The other day you grew so bored with scraping that you started hanging the new paper, a serene (and appropriate) Victorian array of roses, on the wall on which you had removed all the old paper. You expect you will finish scraping today. You have one long wall and a small portion of another to go. Then you will have only one set of sponges and buckets to contend with and one set of tools.
Tools. You gaze for a moment at the sponges and scrapers and box cutters and pause on the word. Each tool has a purpose.
As did that ax that was left for you. It was meant to batter down that door in the basement.
And that would suggest that the crowbar and the pearl-handled knife have specific functions, too. They’ve been provided to you for a reason. Unfortunately, you see only the barest wisps of that reason; it stretches away from you like the delicate, silken threads of cirrus you gazed upon too many times to count from the flight deck.
You have just steeled yourself to begin scraping for the day when you breathe in through your nose and there it is: the aroma of lake water and jet fuel. (The smell of the jet fuel actually makes you a little nauseous. This is new. You find this reality disconcerting.) You turn, and there on the dining room rug is little Ashley with her Dora the Explorer backpack, sitting with her legs curled up on the carpet underneath her. She looks at you with her big eyes and her damp hair, and you study her wet face. It’s not all lake water that is on her cheeks, you realize. You know from the redness of her eyes that she is crying, and her cheeks are moist with her tears.
And so you sit on the floor beside her, your own knees a little creaky.
“Hello, Ashley.”
She sniffles and folds herself around that backpack. She looks down, and you can no longer see her eyes and her face, just the way her sodden hair is plastered to the top of her head.
“Why are you crying, sweetie?”
The second the words are out there, you regret the question. Why wouldn’t she be crying? She simply shakes her head obstinately and ignores your inquiry. Which is when the more practical question comes to you.
“Sweetie,” you begin, and the second time you use this particular term of endearment, it dawns on you that this is a name you use often with Hallie and Garnet. “Is there something I can do?”
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
Again, she offers you only a sad, stubborn twist of her head.
“Are you lonely?”
Slowly she meets your eyes. She nods almost imperceptibly. You recall your conversation with her father: You had offered to introduce this poor child to your own wonderful girls. You need to follow through with that idea of yours. You need to find Ashley playmates. This is something tangible you can do.
“I know you’ve seen Hallie and Garnet,” you tell her, and you reach behind you for the roll of paper towels on the floor. You hand one to the girl so she can blow her nose and wipe her eyes. “How do I introduce you to them? Any idea there?”
She presses the paper towel flat against her face for a moment and chokes back a small sob. Then she pulls it away and looks more composed. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Tell me: Have my girls seen you?”
“Sort of. But not really.”
“Not really?”
“I don’t think they can.”
“Why?”
“They’re breathers.”
“Breathers?”
“You know. Like you.”
“But I can see you. I can hear you.”
She shrugs.
“Well, then,” you say in your most gentle, paternal voice. “We have a problem. And problems need solutions. Right?”
She turns from you and gazes out the dining room window. You follow her eyes and see in the clear sky high over the meadow a plume from an airplane. Really, planes are everywhere. Just … everywhere. When you turn back to Ashley, she is gone. Reflexively you pat the carpet where she was sitting, and it is still damp with lake water. All that remains is the paper towel, which you pick up. It, too, is wet, and it has the rank odor of jet fuel. So, you wad it into a ball and push yourself to your feet. You know the solution to the problem and you know you have the tools. Or, to be precise, the tool. But you have no intention of taking the knife that the Dunmores left you and butchering either Hallie or Garnet so Ashley Stearns can have a playmate.
Wouldn’t that be asking too much of you—of anyone? One would think so. Yes. That is indeed what one would think.
Emily wasn’t about to call Reseda because she hadn’t the slightest idea what she would say. She honestly wasn’t sure whether she should be indignant that this woman had kissed her on Sunday night—certainly she would be if a man had done such a thing—or whether she needed to say simply that she wasn’t interested in her in that sort of way. She loved her husband and wanted only to be friends. The last thing she needed to add to her life was some sort of harmless, playful dalliance with Reseda. Because in the end it wouldn’t be harmless. These things never were.
Besides, she didn’t believe that Reseda actually had designs on her. Emily couldn’t decide what the kiss had meant—if, in fact, it had meant anything.
She realized she had been sitting at her desk, daydreaming, for twenty minutes. Somehow it had become ten-fifteen in the morning. She was supposed to be in Franconia for a real estate closing at eleven. Quickly she rose and gathered the file on the property, a relatively new gray Colonial with four bedrooms and a pond, and reached for her coat behind the door. In the hallway on her way out, she ran into John Hardin.
“Emily,” he said, “your girls are a dream. Clary and Sage just adored them. I think they’re going to become the granddaughters Sage still doesn’t have!”
She nodded. She had thought so much about that Sunday night kiss that she had completely forgotten how the seniors had swarmed on her children the night before then. Somehow, that part of the weekend seemed a long, long time ago.
You pinpoint Hewitt Dunmore’s address in St. Johnsbury on Map-Quest and see you can drive there via the interstate in thirty-five minutes—assuming you don’t hit a moose. You don’t really worry about hitting a moose; you haven’t even seen one since you moved here. But those warning signs on the highway make you smile. You consider phoning Hewitt before leaving your house but in the end decide against it; you know he will try to dissuade you from coming. He may even insist that he doesn’t want to see you. But the girls—and that friend of theirs, Molly, who is joining them later today—don’t climb off the school bus until just about three in the afternoon. And it’s only a half hour and change that separates your house from Hewitt’s, so you could spend a good forty-five minutes with him before having to turn around. Assuming, of course, that he’s home. Since you haven’t called ahead, there’s no guarantee, and this may very well be a waste of an hour and a quarter.
Still, you don’t imagine that he travels all that much, and you have a sense he will be there. And when you coast to a stop on a St. Johnsbury street with the unpromising name of Almshouse Road, the modest house at the address where he lives has a tired-looking minivan—covered with end-of-winter muck, like most cars around here this time of the year—parked in the driveway. The house is a Cape in dire need of scraping and painting, and the roof looks a little ragged, but you like the remnants of red that peel from the clapboards. The color reminds you of a barn.
There isn’t a doorbell, and so you remove your glove before you rap on the wood: You expect the sound will be sharper and more likely to carry this way. Sure enough, a moment after you knock, a small man with bloodhound jowls and a gray bristle haircut opens the door, leaning heavily on a cane, and stares out at you through eyeglasses thick as a jelly jar. He is wearing a tattered cardigan the color of coral and a string tie over a blue oxford shirt. He looks like a cantankerous professor from a small, rural college. He is not what you expected, but, since he did not attend the closing on the house, you honestly weren’t sure what to expect. Emily had found him ornery on the telephone, but that’s really all you know.
“Yes?”
You extend the hand on which you are not wearing a glove. “I’m Chip Linton. My wife and I are the ones who—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he says, taking your hand and cutting you off. “You’re the ones who bought my parents’ house.”
You note in your mind how he altered slightly how you would have finished that sentence. You would have referred to it as his house; he called it his parents’. You wonder if this distinction means anything.
“Come in, come in,” he says, his voice resigned. “No sense in standing outside in the doorway.”
He takes your coat and tosses it on a coatrack behind the front door as you untie your boots, and then he limps into the kitchen, sitting you down in a heavy wooden armchair before a mahogany table that is perfectly round and rather substantial. The chair is one of four. The appliances are old but spotless, the white on the refrigerator showing a little dark wear only around the handle. The floor has linoleum diamonds, and the cabinets look to be made of cherry.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he says, sitting across from you and folding his hands on the tabletop. In another room there is a radio playing classical music.
“Well, your parents’ house is proving to be a bit of a mystery to me,” you respond, smiling as you speak. You hadn’t planned on getting to the matter at hand quite so quickly, but he hasn’t offered you coffee or tea and has come right to the point: Why are you here?
“How so?” he says evenly.
“Well, let’s see. There are the items you left behind.”
“That old sewing machine? I told your wife to keep it. Same with the sap buckets and all them bobbins. Or you can cart ’em off to the dump. Makes no difference to me.”
“There’s a very nice brass door knocker. You could use a door knocker.”
“I heard you rapping just fine, thank you very much.”
You nod. For the first time you have gotten a real taste of his accent. When he said fine, you heard more than a hint of an o and a second syllable: fo-ine. “There were three other items that were real, well, UFOs.”
“Unidentified flying objects.”
“That’s right. You’re a pilot.”
“Used to be.”
“You ever see any UFOs?”
“I did not.”
“Believe in them?”
“No.”
“You should. This universe is a very strange place.”
“You know this from personal experience?”
He raises the caterpillars that pass for eyebrows. “So, your new home,” he says, ignoring your question. “I would not be surprised by anything at all my mother or my father left behind in that house. As you must know by now, my mother was nothing if not eccentric. And she was mighty ill toward the end.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Huh. I woulda thought she was still a source of gossip up in Bethel.”
“Rest assured, she isn’t.”
Outside Hewitt’s door, a town sand truck rumbles by, and the two of you sit and listen. The storm windows rattle.
“She was once,” he says. “That’s for sure.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “People are just built the way they’re built.”
You point at a dusty photo on a wall of dusty photos at the edge of the kitchen. It’s a teenage boy holding a fishing pole and a brown trout that must be a foot and a half long. “Is that you or your brother?” you ask.
“That would be Sawyer.”
“Did your mom become more eccentric after he died?”
“Ayup. I suppose she did.”
“How?”
“Losing a son cannot be easy on any mother.”
“Do you have children?”
This is starting to feel to you like an interrogation, and you don’t like that. But you don’t seem to be getting anywhere with your questions. And so you change your tactics. “I like this little city—St. Johnsbury.” You are careful not to add a question to the statement, hoping he will offer something back without a prompt. But he just sits back in his chair, pulling his folded hands off the table and into his lap, and stares at you with a face that is absolutely unreadable. You have the sense that, if this becomes a contest to see who can remain silent the longest, you won’t have a chance in hell. Suddenly you are aware of how hot he keeps this house, and you look back into the living room and notice for the first time a cast-iron woodstove the size of a dryer. Atop is a black kettle steamer shaped like a sleeping cat. The place seems to be filled with these unexpected, oddly domestic touches. You are pretty sure he is not married now; you wonder if he was once.
“There are a few things in your parents’ house that I’m hoping you can explain to me,” you tell him finally, when the quiet has become interminable.
“You know, I haven’t been inside there in years.”
“I didn’t know that, either.”
“Ayup.”
“Can you tell me about the door in the basement?”
“You mean the door to the basement? The one in the kitchen? Or the wheelbarrow ramp?”
“Neither. I meant that piece of barnboard with the thirty-nine carriage bolts that goes to nowhere.”
He arcs his eyebrows and actually chuckles the tiniest bit. “Thirty-nine, eh?”
“Yes. Thirty-nine.”
“Seems a mite excessive. I just guess my father was a tad eccentric, too.”
“What was it? Why did he seal it up? Please?”
You hadn’t meant for that last word to have such a pleading quality to it; there was an unmistakable tenor of begging to your tone. But, much to your surprise, it seems to have an effect on Hewitt Dunmore. The moment he starts to speak, you realize he is about to say more than he has the whole time you have been with him in this overheated kitchen. He is finally going to tell you a story.
“It was a coal chute. But hasn’t been that in years. The way my father explained it, Mother had gotten a little paranoid. Start of her Alzheimer’s, maybe. She was afraid of someone sneaking in through the chute. You know, they’d climb through the latticework under the porch, and the next thing you know, they’re inside the house. So, as I understand it, my father put a wooden beam across the door and thought, That was that. Didn’t do at all, not in my mother’s eyes. Mother wanted more. Now, usually my father was very good with her when she got like that. Even before the Alzheimer’s, she could be a bit difficult. And she was always like a dog with a bone. Always. Just wouldn’t let something go. So, you might say that my father was making a statement with a wall of two-by-fours and all those carriage bolts. Weren’t no intruder going to get into the house that way, thank you very much.” When he is done, he shakes his head and grins. Then: “Thirty-nine, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Guess Father didn’t have a lot to do that day.” He gives you a small smile.
“Tell me, is that how your mother passed away? Alzheimer’s?”
“Ayup.”
“I’m sorry.”
He pulls his hands from his lap and, elbows at his sides, raises his hands, palms up—a universal gesture for resignation. Then he folds his arms across his chest.
“I think, in her paranoia, she left behind some other things,” you continue.
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“She seemed to have hidden things.”
“That would be Mother. ’Specially toward the end.”
“We found a knife under a heating grate. A very sharp carving knife.”
He shakes his head. “Oh, I am sorry about that. You have small children, as I recall.”
“We do.”
“They weren’t hurt, were they?”
“No. Emily—my wife—found it.”
“I heard after the closing that your girls are twins. My lawyer told me. I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. Fraternal. Not identical.”
“I was a twin.”
“I know.”
He sighs. He seems about to say something more but manages to restrain himself.
“There’s more,” you tell him finally. “More things.”
“Go on.”
“One of my girls came across a disposable cigarette lighter in the house.”
“A lighter? Huh. Well, I doubt that was Mother. A workman, maybe.”
“And there was a crowbar and an ax.”
“Hidden, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I would guess we can pin those items on Mother and on her Alzheimer’s. She musta been mighty scared.”
“Was she afraid of anyone in particular?”
“Just burglars,” he answers simply, though he draws the word out into three syllables: bur-ga-lers.
“Burglars.”
“Ayup.”
“So she hid weapons so she could defend herself.”
“So it seems.”
“Did your father know?”
“About the weapons? Doubt it. He wouldn’t have stood for it. Would have put those sorts of items away where they belonged.”
You consider whether to tell him about the bones. But you pause because you haven’t even mentioned them to Emily. And you’re not sure who Hewitt would tell. But you don’t know when you will have an opportunity like this again. “I broke the door down,” you begin, but then you catch yourself. “Well, I took the door down.”
“The basement door with all them carriage bolts.”
“Yes. I took it down, and I found bones in there. In the dirt.”
He sits forward, alert for the first time. “From what sort of animal?”
“Human.”
“Unlikely.”
“Some I am sure are digits from fingers. One is clearly a human arm.”
“And you are sure of this because you went to medical school when you weren’t flying airplanes?”
This was, you like to believe, merely a harmless dig—he meant nothing especially hurtful. And you’re honestly not sure why it seems to cut so deep. “I have some education,” you answer simply.
He shakes his head. “I hate to think of the animal that must have dug its way into that corner and then couldn’t dig its way back out. Very, very sad.”
“You really believe the bones belong to, I don’t know, a dog?”
“Or a feral cat. Or a fox.”
“The bones are too big.”
“Even those little ones you think are finger bones? You’re one hundred percent sure of that?”
“Not one hundred percent, no.”
“You show them to a doctor or professor? I used to work at the school here in town. St. Johnsbury Academy. I managed the physical plant. You want, you bring me them bones and I can show them to a teacher there. How’s that sound?”
It is an interesting idea. “Can I think about it?”
“ ’Course you can. I don’t expect I’m going anywhere.”
“That’s a very compelling offer. One thing …”
“Go on.”
“I haven’t told my wife about the bones. I don’t want to scare her.”
“That’s up to you.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
He shrugs. “Are people making a big deal out of the greenhouse on the property?”
“My girls. They seem to love it.”
“I meant the women.”
“Not really. There was some talk the other night when Emily and I were at a dinner party. But I think my children have already claimed it as a playhouse.”
“Well, that’s good. I think you will be much better-off if you keep it a playhouse. My mother … Oh, never mind about my mother.”
“No, tell me. I’d like to know.”
“Nothing to say. You just keep that greenhouse for the girls—the twins. You just keep them twins safe.”
“As their father, I try. Is there anything specific I should be worried about?” you ask, recalling the sad fact that his twin brother took his own life.
“No. No, I’m just a morbid old man,” he says, and he uses the armrests on the chair to push himself to his feet. You remind him that he is only a decade and a half your senior and really not an old man at all, but you can tell by the way he is standing—pressing both hands on the table for support—that your visit is over. A few moments later, as you are outside on his front steps and putting your gloves back on, you hear him speaking in the living room. You are barely out the door and already he has picked up the telephone and called someone. You wonder what this means—whether you have merely embarrassed yourself or whether there will be consequences for revealing what you found behind that door in the basement.
Among Chip and Emily’s acquaintances in West Chester was an FBI agent who had retired early and was now a security consultant. His name was Steve Hopper. At a holiday cocktail party at a mutual friend’s house their last December in Pennsylvania, Emily had seen Chip and Steve and a woman she didn’t know chatting near the fireplace, and when she joined them the woman was telling Chip, “I just think it’s unbelievable you didn’t panic. I mean, weren’t you scared to death? I would have been shrieking bloody murder.”
The woman clearly had had way too much to drink; her words were slurred, and no sober individual would have asked her husband if he had been terrified. Few sober people would even have been willing to bring up the doomed aircraft.
But Chip seemed to view this conversation as merely one more element to the cross he believed he was destined to shoulder. He was nodding, formulating a response, when Steve jumped in.
“I would wager my friend here was too busy focusing to be frightened,” he said. “My money is that bravery never entered into the equation. That right, Chip? Good CRM?”
Emily knew that CRM stood for crew resource management, and she wasn’t all that surprised that Steve knew, too; he seemed to know all sorts of arcane trivia. But this woman with them couldn’t possibly know, and Emily wondered if she would ask. She was swaying slightly, and it was probably a good thing that her glass was only half full; otherwise she would have sloshed some of the alcohol on either Chip or Steve.
“Well,” Chip said, looking first at Steve and then at this other woman and then at her, “there was a lot to do and not very much time. Mostly Amy and I were—”
“Who’s Amy?” the woman asked.
“She was my copilot.”
“She must have been peeing in her pants.”
“No, I don’t think she was.”
“So you really weren’t scared?” the woman asked, circling back to her original question.
“No,” Chip said. “I think there were two things filling up that part of my brain that might otherwise have been wanting—to use your term—to shriek bloody murder. The first, just like my friend Steve here said, was focus. Amy and I were pretty focused on the tasks at hand.”
Emily watched her husband stare down at the flames in the fireplace for a moment. “I always thought I could do it,” he said finally. “I’d seen the Airbus land in the Hudson. I saw in my mind the CRJ landing on Lake Champlain in just the same way.”
The woman was about to say something more, but Steve took her by the elbow, said jovially that he wanted to freshen up both of their drinks, and then led the two of them away from her husband.
On the way home from St. Johnsbury, you race into the supermarket because you recall you don’t have after-school snacks in the refrigerator for the girls. And since Molly is with them, you want to be sure you have something special. In minutes you have rounded up a six-pack of juice boxes, two pints of ice cream, apples, and peanut butter. In the parking lot on your way out, as you are opening the front door to your car, you run into Anise. She has pulled into the space right beside yours.
“Chip, hi,” she says, climbing out of her pickup with a grocery list and a chaotic raft of coupons in her hand.
“No time,” you tell her, smiling. “I have to race up the hill and beat the school bus.”
“Goodies for the girls?” she asks, motioning at the grocery bag that you have just now plopped onto the passenger seat.
“Absolutely.”
“Here, take these, too,” she says, reaching back into her pickup and handing you a plastic bag with cookies she has baked. “Vegan,” she informs you. “And totally scrumptious. They’re maple. There should be a sugar run tomorrow, so I decided it was finally time to use the very last of last year’s syrup.”
“Thank you, Anise. That’s very kind of you.”
“Try one,” she says, and to be polite you are about to open the bag she has given you. But before you can, she is handing you a cookie that she has, seemingly, pulled out of nowhere. “I baked this one especially for you,” she says, and for a split second you are a bit flustered because you presume she is serious. But she winks, and you decide she is kidding. Then you bite into a soft maple cookie that melts in your mouth. It’s delicious—far and away the best thing this culinary lunatic has offered you since you arrived here in Bethel.
Emily didn’t know Molly Francoeur’s family at all, but she wasn’t about to say no when Molly’s mother, Jocelyn, called, absolutely frantic, to ask if Molly could stay for dinner that night. Emily had just walked into the house herself. It seemed that Molly’s grandmother had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her hip. So Jocelyn Francoeur didn’t expect that she would be back from the hospital much before eight-thirty or nine that evening.
“Of course she can stay with us,” Emily said, adding that the girl could spend the night with them if need be.
“No, I’ll be back before bedtime for sure,” Jocelyn said, her tone a little crazed—which made all the sense in the world, given the accident that had befallen her own mother. “If not, then I’ll have Molly’s aunt come get her. She lives down around Hanover.”
“That’s almost an hour and a half away!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, we have plenty of room and extra pj’s if you change your mind,” Emily said.
“No. She is not spending the night,” Molly’s mother said adamantly, and that was that.
Hallie didn’t think Molly was all that worried about her grandmother. In truth, Hallie wouldn’t have been especially alarmed if her grandmother in Connecticut had broken her hip, either. She knew a hip was serious, but didn’t broken bones heal all the time? Back in West Chester, there had been a boy in Garnet’s and her class who had broken an arm falling off the zip line at the playground and, a year later, his leg learning to play ice hockey. Another boy they knew who was three years older than Garnet and she had broken his collarbone playing football.
“I think we need some leaves and grass and stuff,” Molly was saying now. “Enough of the snow has melted that we can get some.” They had done their homework after having snacks with Dad when they came home from school, and now, after dinner, they had bundled up and come out here to the greenhouse. The place didn’t have lights like most of the greenhouses in Bethel, but they had brought two battery-powered lanterns—essentially big flashlights that sat on the floor. It wasn’t going to be light enough to read with them, but they were able to build scenes with their dolls. It was a little after eight o’clock, and Molly’s mom had called from the hospital and said she would get here around nine-thirty. Emily hadn’t wanted the girls to head out to the greenhouse, but Hallie had reminded her that it was come out here or stay inside and play one of the computer games she really didn’t approve of or watch another DVD—and they were all bored to tears with their DVDs. And so Mom had relented and here they were. Molly wanted to gather some sticks and leaves because the scene they were constructing for their dolls was supposed to be in the woods. She wanted the dolls to be witches, and while Hallie didn’t believe that any of their dolls had the face of a witch, she was happy to go along with the game. They had put the dolls under the spell of witches the other day; making their dolls the witches themselves was refreshing and new.
“I’ll go with you,” said Garnet, grabbing one of the lanterns, and the two girls zipped up their parkas and wandered from the greenhouse. For a moment, Hallie was surprised at how quickly she had been left alone in the structure. She realized she had never been out here alone after dark and considered joining the girls outside. But even through the steamy, smudged glass she could see the lights of her house, and she could see the glow from Garnet’s lantern as it bobbed like a buoy in the dark. And then, abruptly, it was gone. She guessed either Garnet was holding it in front of her and walking away from the greenhouse or they had simply crossed the meadow and wandered into the edge of the woods. Either way, it wasn’t a big deal. And so she resumed work on their scene, standing the dolls erect in a circle around a toy copper kettle that was going to be the cauldron. She raised one of the dolls’ arms and extended it over the kettle as if it were sprinkling some sort of herb or powder into it. She wondered: Did the women around here who Molly insisted were witches use cauldrons? Or did they mix up their potions in everyday-looking, normal kitchen pots? One day, those pots were boiling spaghetti or potatoes. And the next? Love potions. Or, maybe, some sort of potion that made a person’s eyes less blue—or not blue at all. That was it: Maybe there was a witch with blue eyes and she used her magic to make sure that no one in Bethel could have eyes as blue as hers. Whenever a woman was pregnant, that witch would cast some sort of spell to make sure the baby had eyes that were brown or green or whatever colors eyes could be, so long as they weren’t blue like hers. Hallie liked this story: It could be the start of whatever scene they created tonight with their dolls.
Hallie had kept her promise to Molly and not told her mother that some people—including Molly’s own mom—believed that one of the twins who had lived in this house years and years ago had been killed by the local women. But the story had scared her because she was a twin. It was like when a plane crashed: She felt a connection. And so she had asked her mom whether she thought there might be witches living here in Bethel. Her mom, in turn, had said that the women were merely eccentrics, and then she had explained what this new word meant. She had said there were lots of rumors about what the women did, but there were no such things as witches—just as there were no such things as ghosts or vampires or werewolves. The truth, her mom insisted, was that these women were just very, very interested in plants—flowers and herbs, especially. And, maybe because they took themselves so seriously, they had made some enemies. Or, at least, gotten a reputation for being self-important and strange. But that’s all there was to it: Women like Clary and Sage and Anise and Reseda might be eccentric, but they most assuredly were not witches.
Hallie had moved a third doll in front of the kettle and was surveying her work, wondering what to add next, when she saw the house go dark. One moment she had been aware of the glow from the lights that were on in rooms on every single floor of the place, even the third floor, where she and Garnet slept, and the next the house had vanished completely into the moonless night. The greenhouse was still lit by her lantern, but the rest of the world had gone black. She understood that this was a blackout: They had had them once in a great while in the winter back in West Chester, and they had already had a couple of them here in Bethel. Nevertheless, this was scary. Blackouts always were scary. But this was worse because she was all alone out here in the greenhouse and her mind had been wandering among visions of witches. Her first thought was to race for the main house, maybe calling for Garnet and Molly and searching out their lantern as she ran. But she took a breath and reminded herself that either the lights would pop back on any second or—if they didn’t—Mom or Dad would be out here to get her and her sister and their friend. And the last thing she wanted was to be caught running like some terrified toddler back to the house just because there was a blackout. So, working very hard to remain calm, she started rummaging through the miniature trunk in which she stored the dolls’ clothes, looking for appropriate attire and props for the scene they were constructing.
This is fall-of-man blackness, a despairing, debilitating sort of blindness. You hadn’t anticipated the cloak of misery that would descend upon you when you flipped the breaker—a light switch, but a click that is louder, sharper, and considerably more satisfying—and cut the power to the house. But the fuse box is in the basement, on the wall by the concrete pad that holds the appliances, so perhaps you should have known that you would not merely be blind, you would be dealt a body blow of gloom.
She deserves friends.
Usually, everything throbs more here in the basement. The top of your head, your lower back, and abdomen—sometimes the pain there is so pronounced that you see white spots of light and fear you will vomit. Back in Pennsylvania, you told a doctor it felt like you had been gored. But it’s not so bad at the moment. You can feel it, but it is more of an ambient twinge.
You are a pilot—you were a pilot—and so you tend always to be thinking ahead. Prior to flipping the breaker, you had counted exactly how many steps it was to the wheelbarrow ramp and unlatched the dead bolt and the chain, and removed the horizontal beam that Parnell Dunmore had used to keep out intruders. Prior to darkening the house—prior to even starting to clean the dinner dishes with Emily—you had brought down from the attic the carving knife that the Dunmores had left behind for you. Yes, for you. Every tool has a purpose. You cut the power with the fingers on your left hand because in your right you are holding the knife. Now you move across the basement, counting the steps in your mind, and in a moment you feel the start of the incline and you are walking up from the coal black basement into the nearly coal black night. There is no moon, but there are stars, and in the greenhouse there is still some dusky light because your beautiful daughters brought lanterns out there so they could play.
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
And because you are a pilot, you have determined in your mind precisely how you will approach the three girls and who will live and who will die—who will die in addition to yourself. Because you know you can’t live another day after you have tried to atone for the deaths of thirty-nine people with a fortieth. Funny: Your mind formed the words thirty-nine people, not thirty-nine souls. Because you know now that souls don’t die. For a person who is not religious, this is a revelation. It has not been a joyful one, however, because along with your discovery that there is an afterlife has come the knowledge that sadness and pain transcend the grave, too. Children live on, their hair always dripping with lake water and jet fuel, their abdomens skewered with the horrific shards of metal airplanes. Dead fathers watch helplessly as their dead daughters pine for playmates. Young women stagger through the blackness of your basement after interviews for jobs they never will have.
The blackness of your basement: no white light there. Perhaps there is no white light anywhere. It’s a myth. A vision triggered by dying brain chemicals and desperate endorphins.
Still, no one will ever understand what you are about to do. You could never explain it. You should have died back in August.
In the distance, you watch a silhouette move in the greenhouse, and you wonder why you see only one. Aren’t all three girls out there? After dinner, all three went out there to play. Two, you presume, must simply be in corners you cannot see. Or, maybe, the light from the lantern (didn’t they bring more than one?) is angled so that you can only see one of the children.
Your mind roams back toward the house. It is possible that one or two of the children has gone back inside for something. You pause and run your fingers over the side of the blade, trying to decide what to do. And then you see the second lantern bobbing at the edge of the meadow a good ninety or one hundred yards from the greenhouse, and then it’s gone, disappearing into the brush and the trees. And that’s when it all makes sense. Your judgment is suspect, and so the decision has been made for you. There is but a single girl remaining inside the greenhouse, and so, clearly, she is the one. You take a breath and march ahead, resolved.
Hallie ran to the entrance of the greenhouse and stared into the dark when she heard her mother’s voice. Her mother was calling out her name and Garnet’s, dashing from the house and spraying the greenhouse and the carriage barn and the woods with one of their regular flashlights. Hallie thought for a split second there was someone else out there—someone other than her mom and Garnet and Molly—though she couldn’t have said whether it was because she had heard footsteps in the grass or because she had seen a shape change the consistency of the darkness enveloping the chasm that now separated the greenhouse from the rest of the property.
“Garnet? Hallie?” her mother was shouting over and over, and so Hallie screamed for her mother that she was right here, she was right here in the doorway to the greenhouse, and her mother ran to her and knelt briefly before her, studying her in the light from the lantern without saying a word. Then she spoke: “We’ve lost power. Again.” She rolled her eyes, trying to make light of the way, a moment ago, she had been frantically shrieking their names. Then she looked over Hallie’s shoulder into the greenhouse, and Hallie could see the concern instantly return to her face. “Where in heaven’s name are your sister and Molly?”
“They went to the woods to get stuff for the game.”
“Stuff?”
“Twigs and moss and things.”
“At night?”
“Uh-huh.”
Her mom shook her head. “I wouldn’t want them doing that any night and certainly not now. Not with a blackout. They won’t be able to see the house to get their bearings.”
“I saw the porch light go out and the house get dark,” Hallie told her.
“Which direction did they go in? Do you know?”
“They were just going to go to the edge—to that path at the bottom of the field.”
“Okay. You stay here while I go get them. Don’t move.”
Hallie nodded, but only seconds after her mother started off toward the path, she followed her, suddenly very afraid to be alone in the greenhouse.
“Wait up!” she cried, and her mother paused, shining the light back on her, and Hallie ran through the mud and melted snow. She realized that her mom was navigating this chilly March slop with nothing but socks on her feet. When she caught up, her mom took her hand and pulled her along, crying out Garnet’s and Molly’s names into a wind that seemed to be increasing, growing more blustery the closer they got to the woods. But it really didn’t take them long to find the girls. Within minutes they were upon her sister and their new friend, perhaps a dozen yards past where the grass would merge with the trees. The small copse of pines where they were standing was illuminated by their lantern.
“Is everything okay?” Garnet asked their mother, becoming a little unnerved now herself.
Hallie watched their mom embrace first Garnet and then Molly. She held each child at arm’s length and seemed to inspect them, just as she had examined her back at the greenhouse. “I was worried about you,” she answered. “I didn’t know where you were. What were you two thinking going into the woods at night?”
“We were just getting things to make it look like the dolls were in the forest.”
“We lost power,” Hallie said.
“We did?”
“Yes, we did,” their mother told them, her voice sounding less unhinged than it had a moment ago but also more stern. Abruptly Hallie watched her mother’s head spin toward the path that led back to the fields. “Chip?” she said into the dark. “Chip, is that you?” Hallie had heard the sound, too: a rustling, a scuffling among the leaves.
When there was no response, their mother took Garnet by the hand and pointed her flashlight toward the meadow. “Did you girls hear something?”
Molly, who hadn’t said a word, suddenly started to whimper. “I’m scared,” she sniffled, and she ran the sleeve of her coat across her nose and then wiped at her eyes. “I want to go home.”
“Oh, Molly, I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m sorry. I’m sure we just heard a deer or a fox or something,” Emily said, but Hallie could tell that her mother didn’t believe a word she was saying. “I just got spooked by the blackout. Come on, girls, let’s head back to the house.”
“Where’s Daddy?” Hallie asked.
“I guess he’s back at the house, too,” her mother answered. “Come on. I’m positive the power will be back on in a couple of minutes and we’ll be able to have some hot chocolate.” Then they walked purposefully from the woods along the path and up the sloping meadow past the greenhouse—retrieving the single lantern there—and into the dark house.
Silently you place the knife at your feet and push shut the door to the wheelbarrow ramp, locking it from the inside, your fingers spidering along the wood frame in the absolute dark. You feel around for the horizontal beam and drop it back in place, listening as your wife calls your name in the kitchen above you. She sounds anxious, frenzied. You want to yell up to her, Down here, honey. Just checking the breakers in the fuse box. Everything’s fine! But Ethan Stearns is standing between you and the stairs, a beacon that is strangely but perfectly visible in the blackness. He is scowling, incapable of masking his disgust.
But, really, what were you supposed to do? Massacre all of them?
You couldn’t have done that. You see in your mind an image of the children at daybreak, all dead, Emily, too, their throats cut as they bled to death in the woods—their parkas and sweaters forever stained red. You see it all in your mind with the sun overhead, the sky the same breathtaking summer cobalt it had been on August 11 over Lake Champlain. But this was never supposed to have been a slaughter of that magnitude: three fifth-grade girls and your wife. This had been about a playmate. A single playmate. You kill a child and then you kill yourself. That was the bargain.
But Ethan is shaking his head.
She deserves friends.
Was it always a plural? Friends? He nods. It was, it was.
You kneel and paw at the dirt floor until you have recovered the knife. There you notice little Ashley, sitting with her legs crossed, her eyes sadder than you have ever seen them. Does she understand what she is asking—what it means?
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
You gaze at Ethan. No, you want to say aloud, no, but for some reason you are afraid to speak in this dark and crease the blackness with noise. But you do think to yourself: No. Absolutely not. That is asking too much.
Upstairs, Emily searches for you. You can feel the way she is moving up the steps to the second floor; the house—it—is telling you. Meanwhile, the girls huddle around the kitchen table, Molly alone on the deacon’s bench. Desdemona is prowling on that rickety staircase behind the kitchen, the existence of which is, like so much of this house, an absolute mystery. And you? Once again, as you did one morning in the pit of despair on the other side of this basement—Harry Harlow’s vertical chamber apparatus, reconfigured for a house on the fringes of madness—you curl your knees into your chest and try to lie there, unmoving as an egg.
Hallie glanced at Garnet, but she couldn’t quite make out her sister’s eyes in the dim glow of the lantern. She sensed that Garnet had retreated into one of those places where she was gazing at nothing. She wondered if Garnet was about to have one of her seizures—or whether she was in the early stages of one already. She heard their mother call out their dad’s name again. Her mother was upstairs now, going from room to room along the hallway. Hallie guessed that she would head up to the third floor and her and Garnet’s rooms next. She might even pull down that trapdoor to the attic.
“Where do you think he is?” Molly asked, her voice strangely small on a girl Hallie usually thought of as so very big.
“I don’t know.”
The girl looked at Garnet. “Garnet?” she said, but her sister didn’t respond.
“She’s okay,” Hallie said, shrugging.
Upstairs they heard a crash, a small piece of furniture toppling over in Hallie’s mind, and Hallie watched Molly flinch. She knew that she herself had been startled also. But Garnet remained oblivious.
“I’m okay, girls,” their mother called down the stairs. “I knocked into the end table by your father’s and my bed, that’s all!”
“Okay, Mom,” Hallie called back.
“I hope my mom gets here soon,” Molly said.
“Yup.” Hallie didn’t know what else to say. A moment later she heard her mother pulling down the door to the attic, just as she had expected she would, and Molly, unfamiliar with the lengthy groan the hinges made as the door descended, looked a little ashen in the lantern light.
“What was that?” she asked.
Hallie reassured her that it was only the door to the attic, adding, “I know. It sounds really creepy.”
Eventually Emily pounded her way back down the stairs, and Hallie asked her, “Did you really go into the attic?”
“No, I just, I don’t know, I called and shone my light up there.”
“You checked our rooms?”
“Yes, I did check your rooms,” she said, opening the basement door. “Chip?” she yelled down the stairs and bent over, peering underneath the wobbly banister and shining the flashlight into the void. “Chip?” When he didn’t answer, she slammed the door shut and swore, finally succumbing to the fear and frustration she had been experiencing since they lost power and her husband—and, briefly, one of her daughters and their friend—disappeared into the dark. “Damn it! Where is he?” she asked aloud, clearly not expecting an answer. Hallie feared that her mother was on the verge of tears. Normally she would have told her that Garnet might be having a seizure, but she didn’t dare. Besides, what really could her mother do? Most of the time, you just had to wait them out anyway.
“You girls really haven’t seen him?” her mother asked, her voice helpless.
Hallie shook her head but then wondered if her mother could see her and said, “No, Mom.”
She watched her mother go to the wall where the phone usually hung, running her hand along it. It was as if she had forgotten she had a flashlight. “I can’t find the phone!” she was saying. “It’s not in the cradle. I want to call the power company, and I can’t even find the goddamn phone.” A moment later Hallie heard a crash and her mother swearing again, and she knew by the sound it was the casserole dish in which her parents had baked the enchiladas they’d eaten for dinner. But then her mother must have found the phone, because they heard her pressing the buttons. Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to work because there was no power. Hallie could have told her that. It was electric. And, as they all knew, there was no cell coverage in this corner of Bethel, which was why her mom had been searching for the regular phone in the first place.
“Fuck!” her mother swore. Hallie had never heard her mother say that word before. “Fuck!”
“Want me to go upstairs and get another flashlight?” Hallie asked. “It would make the kitchen a little lighter.”
“God, no! I want all three of you to stay right here with me,” her mother said, trying to regain a semblance of maternal composure. “I’m sure the power will come back on any second now and your father will reappear—he’s probably outside in the woods this very minute looking for you—and so let’s just stay right where we are. Okay? We’ll stay right here in the kitchen and wait for him,” she continued, and she had barely finished her sentence when, indeed, the lights returned and the refrigerator started to hum and below them the furnace rumbled back into life. Hallie heard the classical music their parents must have been listening to on the public radio station when they were cleaning up the kitchen.
“See what I mean?” her mother said, and she extended her hands, palms up. She looked disheveled, her hair wild, as if she had been awakened in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Garnet sat perfectly still, absolutely unmoved or unaware or uninterested in the fact that the power had been restored. She was indeed having a seizure, and, given the blackout and their dad’s disappearance, Hallie hoped it would be a short one. She looked to see if her mom had noticed yet that Garnet was in her own private world, but her mother was staring down at her feet. She was still wearing only her socks, and they were sopping wet and streaked with mud.
“I guess I’ll need to throw these away,” she said, looking up, and Hallie thought she might have been about to offer a small smile, but she looked over Hallie’s shoulder and gasped, and a second later Molly pushed away from the table and stood, screaming, a ululating, sirenlike wail of terror. And so reflexively Hallie turned around, too.
There in the doorway at the top of the stairs to the basement was their father. His shirt was awash in blood, a great stain spreading from the left of his navel with the speed of toppled house paint on tile. And there in the center of that red tsunami was—and now Hallie started to scream, too—the pearl handle of a carving knife. Her father rolled his eyes up into his head so they looked like golf balls and groaned. Then he fell back against the doorframe, pulled the knife from his abdomen with both hands, and sank slowly to the floor, leaving a long swash of blood against the wood.