Chapter Eleven

You contemplate all the hours you sat attentive and alert on the flight deck, and how you never grew less enamored of the niveous white magnificence of clouds as you gazed down at them from thirty or thirty-five thousand feet. Their exquisite polar flatness: fields of pillowy snow that stretched to the horizon. As the shadow of your plane would pass over them, you would imagine you were gazing down on an arctic, alabaster plain, and in your mind you could see yourself crossing them alone in a hooded parka and boots. (You wonder now: Why were you always a solitary man in this daydream?) If you were flying at the right time of the day and the sun was in the right spot, the vista would be reduced to a splendid bicolor world: albino white and amethyst blue.

And then there was that moment when you would skim across the surface of the great woolpack before starting to descend underneath it, and your plane would feel more like a submarine than a jet. It was like going underwater—deep underwater—right down to the darkness that abruptly would enfold the aircraft once you were inside the clouds. One minute the sky would be blue and the flight deck bright, and the next the world outside would be gray soup and the flight deck dim.

You know the technical names for clouds as well as a meteorologist, just as you know the federal aviation definitions for ice: Glaze. Inter-cycle. Known or observed. Mixed. Residual. Runback. Rime. You have always loved the alliteration that marks those last three, the poetry of the memorized cadence. And you can do the same thing with clouds. You know the names of the ones that grow in the low elevations and the ones that exist in much higher skies. Even now, sitting in the backseat of the Volvo as Emily and John Hardin drive you home from the hospital, you can see perfectly in your mind the leaden sheets of gray stratus as the nose of your plane would start to nudge through them; the fleece of the cumulus, bright and cheerful when lit by the sun, dark and shadowy when not; the ominous towers and anvil plumes of the cumulonimbus you would steer your plane around when the traffic and the tower permitted. You close your eyes and see once again the gauzy layers of cirrus, their wisps strangely erotic, or their cousins, the rippling cirrocumulus. (Some people call these clouds a mackerel sky, but a flight instructor you liked very much called it a lake sky because it reminded him of the days he would spend with his own father fishing.) You see the rain on the flight deck windows and feel the bump as you break the plane of a layer of dark nimbostratus.

And now you open your eyes and the clouds disappear and you stare at the back of John Hardin’s head. It is an indication of the toll your breakdown is having on Emily that she needed cavalry help to bring you home from the hospital. It is a sign of how ill they think you are that they have squirreled you into the backseat. John has pulled the passenger seat so far forward that his knees are pressed against the glove compartment, though you have told him over and over you are fine. You have been telling people precisely this all morning long. I am fine. Fine. Just fine.

You still have in your mouth the taste of the oatmeal cookies that John Hardin handed you when you first climbed into the backseat. Immediately you ate two. Anise had baked them. Of course. You are aware of raisins and cinnamon and a bitter spice you don’t recognize. The truth is, you were never an especially creative cook, and you don’t recognize very many spices and seasonings.

There is midday sun coming in through the car window, and you stare up into it. Into a cloudless sky. Apparently a psychiatrist—not your psychiatrist, not Michael Richmond—is going to come visit you tomorrow afternoon. Examine you. At your house. Imagine, a psychiatrist making house calls. You have no idea what to make of that, none at all. But she’s a friend of John’s and, like all of John’s friends, seems to want to help you. To help you and Emily and your girls.

You run your tongue between your teeth and your gums. You decide that you don’t honestly understand the appeal of Anise’s cooking. She seems to be a hit-and-miss baker. Of course, it may simply be that you will never be interested in vegan cooking and vegan desserts, and apparently everything the woman cooks is vegan. Or, maybe, she really isn’t especially talented in the kitchen. Maybe people abide her cuisine simply because they like her. Even those oatmeal cookies you just polished off have left a sour, vinegary aftertaste that seems to smother the cinnamon.

“Chip?”

You face forward and see that John is speaking to you.

“The hospital pharmacy gave us a couple pills for pain. You may not need them, but we have them.”

Us. We. “Thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I am fine.” Fine. Just fine.

“Well, if you need something more, Clary gave me a tincture that I can assure you works wonders.”

“A tincture.”

“Her own little potion. Skullcap and willow bark. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me when my knees get cranky after a day skiing or hiking.” He reaches into his front blazer pocket and removes a small brown bottle the length of a finger. It has an eyedropper for a lid.

“Thank you.”

Now it seems to be Emily’s turn: “Chip?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Is there anything special you would like from the grocery store? We can stop before heading up the hill.”

“No, I’m good.” I am fine.

“Okay.”

You want to ask about the twins. You want to ask Emily what they believe happened last night and what they think of you now, but you won’t with John Hardin present. You can’t. You will wait until you and your wife are alone. But they are smart girls. They know something has happened. Something has happened to you. You have—choose an expression—gone off the rails. Left the reservation. Gone broken arrow.

But do they know that, for whatever the reason, you can’t be trusted?

For the briefest of moments you recall the will—the monumental determination—it took to press the knife into your abdomen, and the agony that finally forced you to stop. You wince, but neither John nor Emily notices.

You didn’t see Ethan or Ashley or Sandra last night in the hospital. You were alone with the distant stars that made up your room. But you have a feeling they will be waiting for you tonight.

Chip went upstairs to shower, and John climbed from the station wagon into his immaculate green sedan and drove back to their office in Littleton. The girls were with Reseda somewhere. And so Emily found herself alone in the kitchen, staring out the window over the sink at the greenhouse and, beyond it, at the meadow and the edge of the woods. She closed her eyes and fought back the tears. She tried to push from her mind her memories of last night or, even more recently, the image of her husband in the rearview mirror of the car that morning, chewing cookies without evident pleasure: He was eating them, it seemed, only because John had offered them. He insisted he was fine, but he wasn’t. The Chip Linton she lived with now was a frightening doppelgänger for her husband. The fellow was a mere husk of the man she had married. It wasn’t merely that this new catatonia was different from the walking somnambulance that had marked the months after the crash: This one was both the result of whatever tranquilizers he’d been given last night at the hospital and the reality that the self-loathing he’d experienced after the failed ditching of Flight 1611 paled compared to the self-hatred he was experiencing now. Whatever had happened to him last night—whatever he had done—had left him staggered: He’d slouched as they walked to the car in the hospital parking lot this morning, unshaven and his hair badly combed, like one of the murmuring homeless men Emily had seen on the streets of Philadelphia. She recalled something he had said to her last night in the emergency room: It was something nonsensical about the pit of despair that awaited him, and how it would be a relief to be walled up inside it.

It all left her wondering: What had been happening to him since they arrived here in the White Mountains? What had she been missing over the last month and a half? What had been occurring at the house while she’d been at work and the girls had been at school? She felt she had been a derelict wife, and she considered if this was, in some way, her fault. Had she been inattentive? So it seemed. Michael Richmond had been unable to reassure her that it was safe to leave Chip home alone. She wasn’t certain it was even safe to leave him alone with the girls. It wasn’t that he might harm them—though the idea had now entered her mind, and she knew as a mother it was going to lodge there—it was that he might harm himself when they were present.

She remembered something John had said to her that morning, before they picked up her husband. “This will all seem less surreal as the days pass,” the older lawyer had told her. “I mean that, Emily. Everything’s different now, nothing will ever be the same. But eventually you’ll find a new normalcy. We all do.”

She thought about this. She saw her experience as unique—horrific and peculiar to herself. But he’d seemed to be viewing it as a rite of passage. Unpredictable and certainly unanticipated, but in some way universal. “You make it sound like you went through something like this,” she had said, staring straight ahead at the entry ramp to the interstate and the pine trees now clean of snow.

“No, of course not.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“But my mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt. Someone must have told you that by now.”

“No. Right now I am far more desirous of finding the healing in an orange prescription vial.”

“I imagine Clary or Anise has something much better for you: more effective and safer,” he’d said, smiling, his eyes a little knowing and wide.

She listened to the water running in the shower above her and turned her face toward the spring sun. She breathed in deeply through her nose, the air whistling ever so slightly, and tried to focus on nothing but the warmth on her face.

Hallie hadn’t planned on going to the basement. She hadn’t even planned on getting out of bed. But she awoke in the night and thought she heard noises downstairs in the kitchen and presumed that her parents were sitting at the table and talking. She knew her mom was really worried about Dad. Then she decided that Garnet must be down there, too; it was why, in the hazy logic of someone awoken from a deep sleep, she hadn’t peeked into Garnet’s room before heading downstairs. But the kitchen was completely empty. The overhead lights were on, but probably because her mom had left them on by mistake before going upstairs to bed herself. The digital clock on the stove read 12:15.

She realized she was a little scared to be downstairs alone at night and was about to scamper back up the two flights of stairs to her own bed when, for the briefest of seconds, she heard a voice again—a single voice this time—and understood it was coming from the basement. The door was ajar, and a light was on down there as well. And so she stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs, listening carefully, aware because of the cold drifting up from the cellar that she hadn’t bothered to put on her slippers. Now she regretted that: Her toes were cold. She ran her fingers over her bracelet, which she had begun to view as a good-luck charm. That afternoon Anise had said she would like her second present even more, but the truth was that she loved this bracelet much better. The second gift was a very old book about plants and what Anise called natural medicine. According to Anise, it had belonged to another herbalist a long time ago. Then Anise had given her sister an even fatter book titled The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs—again, apparently, a favorite of an herbalist who had passed away.

Finally, when Hallie was just about to shut the basement door and race upstairs, she heard someone mumbling and she was sure it was her sister.

“Garnet?” she called into the basement. “Is that you?”

But no one responded, and so she tiptoed onto the top step, the wood coarse against her bare feet, and peered underneath the banister. Sure enough, there was Garnet, all alone, standing in the shadows before the remnants of the wooden door that their father had destroyed last week. She was ankle deep in the coal and staring into the black maw of the tiny room that their father had found behind that door.

“Garnet,” she said again, her voice reduced by incredulity to a stage whisper. “What are you doing down there?”

The girl looked up at her, blinked, and then rubbed at her eyes. She looked down at her feet and seemed to realize for the first time the grotesque mess in which she was standing. She jumped away from it, landing in the moist dirt of the floor, which was a marginal improvement at best. Hallie understood that her sister had just—as one of their teachers back in West Chester once put it, infuriating their mom—zoned out. She had gone into one of her trances and lost herself somewhere inside her head. Hallie feared that it might have been a full seizure, and the fact that she was having a second one so close on the heels of another alarmed her. Garnet had never before had two in a week. Moreover, until the other night, it had been a long while since she had had even one.

“Come upstairs,” Hallie said. “Get out of there and come back to bed!” she added, though she guessed that first her sister would have to run her feet under some hot water in the tub.

Instead the girl shook her head and said, “No. You have to see this first. You have to see what I found.” Then she raised her arm and pointed into that little room.

“You went in there?” Hallie asked.

“I think so. I … I don’t know.”

The last thing Hallie wanted to do was go down those stairs: It wasn’t merely the cold and the dirt and the coal on the ground there. It was the reality that she was scared. Her sister had always been able to freak her out; the idea that it was inadvertent didn’t make the sensation any less real. Still, it was clear that Garnet was not going to come upstairs until she went downstairs, and so Hallie held on to the banister and descended the steps, wondering as she went if instead she should have gone upstairs and awakened their mother. But, she decided, she didn’t want to leave her sister alone here; she wanted to retrieve her twin (and here she was surprised when she heard in her head the name Cali instead of Garnet) and get the two of them back into their beds.

“This floor is gross,” she grumbled. “It’s bad enough with shoes on. Have you gone crazy coming down here barefoot?” Her feet made soft squishing sounds as she navigated her way over to the coal.

“You’re barefoot, too,” Garnet reminded her.

“Duh. But only because I was in bed when I came to look for you.” She exhaled in exasperation.

“Look,” said her sister. “See it? I think I dug it up.” Her right hand was indeed brown with dirt, as were the knees of her pajamas.

Hallie peered in, but she didn’t see anything at first, just more dirt inside the cubicle and the wooden framing darkened by earth and coal. “What do you mean you dug it up? Dug what up?”

“That,” said Garnet simply, and the word stuck a tiny bit in her throat.

And so Hallie squinted, reflexively rubbing at her new bracelet, and she leaned in more toward the doorway. Then, a little maddened, she decided that her feet were already a mess so what did it matter if they got even dirtier, and she plowed ahead, crossing the coal and walking right up to the remnants of the hacked door. There she held on to one of the dangling boards, realizing only after she had grabbed it that she was lucky she hadn’t gotten a splinter, and gazed into the dark. And there it was, the object that Garnet in one of her unpredictable though characteristic stupors had dug up. For a second Hallie stared at it, convinced this was some strange Halloween prank, because it couldn’t possibly be real. But it was. Had to be. There on a pile of dirt, beside a hole deep enough to bury a small dog, if necessary, was the unmistakable top of a human skull: the coral-colored Wiffle ball of the cranium, the deep sockets where once there had been eyes, and the tiny beak that she knew was the only part of a nose made of bone. There didn’t seem to be a jaw, and, when she turned back to Garnet, she understood why: There in her sister’s left hand was that piece of the skull, and it was evident that she had used it like a trowel to scoop out the dirt.

“Garnet,” she whispered, “how?” She didn’t know what she meant by the word, she wasn’t precisely sure what she was asking. But then the presence of the skull and the night and the idea that a body had been buried in their house all came crashing down upon her and she batted the jawbone out of her sister’s hand as if it were some sort of violent animal and dragged the girl as fast as she could up the stairs, screaming all the way for their mother.

The state trooper who arrived in the middle of the night was a slim young woman with short dark hair and an aquiline nose. Her badge said C. PAYNE. She knew all about Chip Linton, and not merely that he was that pilot. Emily had the distinct sense that she was aware that he had spent the night before at the hospital. The trooper acted surprised when Emily told her, but she wasn’t much of a thespian.

“Tomorrow morning the state will send a team from Concord,” she said matter-of-factly, referring to the State Police’s Major Crime Unit. Her voice was pleasant but laconic: Emily recognized a trace of a Yankee drawl. The trooper was leaning against the kitchen counter, explaining to Chip and her what was next, while the girls sat wrapped in a blanket on the living room couch. It was evident that they weren’t going to let their parents out of their sight, and Emily presumed that the two of them would be sleeping tonight with Chip and her in the queen-size bed in the master bedroom.

“The mobile crime lab will search for any remaining bones and probably nose around the basement—especially behind that door—for anything that might have been a murder weapon. Even a big rock,” she said.

“This house seems to be filled with them,” Emily observed.

The trooper smiled at the small, dark joke and said, “I guess you mean murder weapons and not big rocks.”

“Yes.”

“You want to be more specific?”

Emily looked at Chip to see if he wanted to answer, but he remained silent. And so she described the crowbar, the knife, and the ax.

“And you really found them hidden around the house?” the trooper asked.

“We did.”

“Well, be sure to give them to the investigators tomorrow. And I know you’ve probably handled them a bunch, but try not to handle them anymore. Okay?”

“No problem there.”

“That Tansy Dunmore was quite a piece of work.”

“That’s what I hear,” Emily agreed.

The trooper turned to Chip. “So, you took down that door,” she said.

“I did.”

“Why?”

He shrugged and smiled. “Same reason men climb mountains, I guess. Because it was there.”

“And you never found any bones in the dirt on the other side?”

“I did not.”

“Okay.” Then she peered through the doorway into the living room at the twins. “Really, there’s nothing more to be scared of,” she told the girls. “It’s just a skull. We all have one. You’re not in any danger.”

Her daughters were staring at the woman, their faces a little blank. Emily couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. “Whose body was buried down there?” she asked, lowering her voice, though she feared that her girls could still hear her. “Do you have any idea at all?”

“My guess? And it’s just a guess from growing up around here. But I’d say it was Sawyer Dunmore. We’ll see if there are any open homicides or missing persons going back a long while. But my money would be on Sawyer. He killed himself years and years ago, and became the sort of ghost story we’d all tell each other at sleepover parties and Girl Scout campouts.”

“You were a Girl Scout?” Emily asked.

The trooper grinned a little sheepishly. “I guess I’ve always liked uniforms.”

“I was, too.”

“There you go,” she said. “You probably had your share of ghost stories founded on nothing.”

“Well,” Emily said, “this was something.”

“Yes and no. I mean, it’s real and it’s scary. But it’s all explicable. Everything you’re going through is explicable and, soon enough, will be behind you.”

“Tell me more about ‘explicable.’ I want my daughters to get a few hours of sleep tonight. I want to get a few hours of sleep tonight.”

“Sawyer’s parents were, I gather, a little … off. Especially his mother. And when Sawyer killed himself, she really lost it. At least that’s what people say. I mean, it must be awful to lose a child like that. Just awful. I know I would have been willing to cut her a bunch of slack. Know what I mean?”

Emily thought about the weapons she had found in the house. She thought about the paranoia the woman had been enduring at the end of her life. “Go on,” she said.

“We all used to try and scare each other by saying that Sawyer wasn’t really buried in the cemetery. We used to go on and on with stories straight out of Psycho. You know the movie, right?”

Emily nodded. “Absolutely.”

“We’d tell ourselves that Tansy and Parnell had kept their son’s body around the house. They’d talk to it, dress it up. But his actual death was before my time, and we didn’t really believe it. Not a word. After all, his twin brother had grown up in that house, too, and when I was a kid he was an adult living not all that far from here. St. Johnsbury, I think.”

“Yes,” Emily said. “It is St. Johnsbury.”

“Anyway, it seems that maybe they really did bury their boy right downstairs. Built a little vault. But the Major Crime Unit and the medical examiner will look at what we have here. They’ll make sure the skull and whatever bones are down there really are Sawyer Dunmore’s. Dental records, most likely. If that doesn’t work, then DNA. As you said, the brother still lives in St. Johnsbury. I just guess, Mr. Linton, you hacked your way into a personal crypt.”

“But wouldn’t Hewitt Dunmore have told us there was a body buried in the basement of the house?” Emily asked. “Wouldn’t he want the grave respected?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure it’s legal. And, somehow, I don’t think leaving a corpse in the cellar does a whole lot for a property’s resale value,” the trooper said, and she actually chuckled just the tiniest bit as she started walking toward the front hallway. She paused for a moment and waved at the girls. “You’ll be okay,” she told them, and she sounded a bit like an older sister. “You’ll be just fine.”

As they were saying good-bye, the porch light caught the badge with the woman’s name, and it sparkled. “Tell me,” Emily said, “What does the C stand for?”

The trooper looked her straight in the eye and said—just a hint of a smile on her lips—“Celandine. It’s an herb.” Then she turned and marched down the slate walkway to her cruiser.