The Night Strangers (20 page)

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.

S
ilently 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.

H
allie 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.

Chapter Nine

G
arnet felt confused, the way she always did when a seizure had passed: It was as if she had had a nap and missed things that everyone else knew about. But unlike after a nap, she never felt well rested. She felt groggy instead: It was like she had awoken in the middle of the night rather than at a predictable time in the morning.

Now she was aware that her mother was leaving her, speeding down the driveway after their father. The headlights and siren from the ambulance had faded moments ago, and Reseda was here. Holly and Ginger Jackson, too. Her mother had called Reseda and said to come quickly. She had. Before that, however, Molly’s mother had come to the house and retrieved her own daughter. The first thing Garnet recalled seeing when she emerged from the seizure was Molly leaning against her own mom, sobbing, as Mrs. Francoeur stood in the front hallway and ranted about what a mistake she had made letting the girl stay here. Only when Mrs. Francoeur saw Garnet’s father bleeding on the kitchen floor did her rage dissipate. She went from railing about how Emily clearly was part of something evil to crying that the house was cursed and Emily was merely a fool to bring her family here. Meanwhile, Garnet’s mom simply kept pressing dish towels against her dad’s abdomen. Then the ambulance arrived, and Mrs. Francoeur finally went home—though not before making it clear that Molly was never going to be allowed over for a playdate again.

Before her mother left, she had told Garnet that she would be back soon. She had said that Daddy would be just fine. He would get some stitches and be as good as new. But whether
soon
meant within hours or the next day, Garnet didn’t know, and when she asked, her mother just repeated that one word:
soon
. So, now she sat beside the window in the living room and gazed outside. The yard was dark once more now that all the cars had driven off and—other than murmured voices—the only sound was the occasional rattle of one of the windowpanes in an early spring breeze. Yet the house felt full. Reseda and Holly and Ginger were in the kitchen, discussing how best they could help the family, and it had already been decided that Reseda and Holly were going to spend the night.

Eventually Hallie sat back down beside her. “They’re about to have us get in our pajamas and go to sleep,” she said, her chin in her hands.

“You were listening.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You hear anything else?”

“Not really. They knew I was by the door.”

“They did?”

“Yup.”

“How?”

Hallie shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, Reseda wasn’t mad or anything. She just tapped on the door and teased me about it.”

“I don’t want to sleep upstairs.”

“Me, either.”

Garnet sighed. “When we were in the woods, do you think he was there?” she wondered aloud.

“Dad?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t think so. Do you?” Hallie asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

“There was one second when I thought I saw something. Someone,” Hallie admitted.

“If it was Dad, he must have been there to protect us,” she said.

“Yup,” Hallie agreed, but Garnet had the sense that her sister—like her—wasn’t completely certain of that.

R
eseda had spent very little time in the Southwest, but one night in Taos she had been part of a fire ceremony. The shamans had burned juniper branches they had soaked in water, and the result was a blaze with hypnotic purple smoke, the air alive with the aroma from the juniper’s essential oils. A woman had played the violin while sixty or seventy of them sat or stood around the bonfire and contemplated the colors of the flames against the night sky.

Tonight, with the two girls haunted by the power outage and the image of their father’s blood, she was using sage. In her experience, sage cleansed the energy in a space in much the same fashion as juniper: It helped clear away fear and worry and violence. And this was a space that had experienced all three that evening. She added a few more drops of sage oil to the diffuser and lit the tea candle beneath it.

“Candles make me think of blackouts,” Hallie said from the couch, her voice slightly petulant.

Reseda knew this was the child’s way of asking her to blow out the candle. She sat down on the armrest beside the girl and wondered what it meant that her father had actually cut the breakers: This had been no wind- or storm-triggered blackout. She had gleaned this when she said good-bye to him and to Emily as they left for the hospital. She honestly wasn’t sure what to do with this information and, at the moment, had no plans to share it with anyone. “This candle really offers very little light,” she said. “It warms the oil in the shallow bowl above it. Do you like the aroma?”

The girl shrugged noncommittally, but Reseda knew that she did. Then Hallie put down the mug with the California poppy and chamomile tea that Reseda had steeped for the twins to help them sleep. She noted that it was almost empty.

“I love sage,” said Holly, looking up at the girl from her spot on one of the two air mattresses they had inflated and set on the floor beside the couch. She was planning to sleep tonight in black dance pants and a yoga T-shirt. Reseda watched her reach under the quilt on the couch and squeeze Hallie’s toes. “It smells heavenly, and it’s the Lysol of essential oils.”

Garnet was curled into a ball on the air mattress beside Holly, and she looked like she was already asleep. Reseda, however, knew that she wasn’t. Her head was deep in the pillow and her eyes were shut, but she was merely feigning sleep while listening intently to the conversation around her.

“Will you keep the candle burning when you turn out the lights?” Hallie asked from her nest on the sofa.

“I was thinking that we might keep some of the lights on,” Reseda told her. “I know I’d be happier if we kept at least the lamp on that table on. Would you mind?”

Hallie shook her head.

“Thank you.”

“I know I want a light on, too,” Holly said, and she giggled.

Hallie turned to Reseda. “Where are you going to sleep?” she asked.

The truth was, Reseda wasn’t completely sure she was going to sleep. She had found that she was most receptive to visions when she was a little sleep-deprived. Everyone was. Healers and shamans and religious fanatics of all stripes knew the mind was most amenable to psychic visitation when it was exhausted. And she was feeling a little wrung out. Assuming the girls—especially Garnet, whose mind was particularly interesting to Reseda—eventually fell asleep, she thought she might visit the basement. She might see for herself the door that was of such interest to the captain and try to get a sense of what might have attached itself to him.

E
mily had presumed that nothing could have been worse than watching the news footage of her husband’s plane cartwheeling across the surface of Lake Champlain, or the images of the floating wreckage and the bodies as they bobbed amidst the ferries and dinghies and rescue boats. But this might have been worse. She wasn’t sure how—she couldn’t make distinctions that fine when the world was unraveling so completely—but at the moment she didn’t even have the relief that came with the idea that the worst was at least behind her. By the time she’d seen the images of the destruction of Flight 1611, she knew that Chip had survived. Her husband was alive.

But now? Her husband was alive, but he had just had another very close call. He had, apparently, fallen down the basement steps and accidentally plunged a knife into his abdomen when he hit the mud floor. At least he said it was an accident. She would have been more confident that it was if the knife hadn’t been the one the paranoid woman who had lived in the house before them had left behind in a second-floor heating grate. The young ER physician and an even younger nurse at the hospital here in Littleton had sewed him up, telling her that he was very, very lucky. The knife had not perforated the intestines. Nor had it nicked his left kidney, the pancreas, or—perhaps most fortunately—the iliac artery. There had been a lot of blood, but not a lot of damage. The principal concern, now that he was stitched up, was infection. But that should be manageable. Still, the hospital staff had decided to keep him overnight for observation, and now he was resting, sedated, in a room down the corridor.

Chip had insisted that he hadn’t tried to harm himself, but he had seemed confused when he first appeared at the top of the basement steps. Had she not noticed all the blood, she would have wondered first how he could possibly have gotten so filthy: It was as if he had been rolling around on the dirt floor in the basement. But he had seemed to reacquire his bearings quickly, and then he had grown contrite and shaken. He kept apologizing for disappearing, and he kept trying to explain both to her and to himself what had happened. It still wasn’t clear to her when he had fallen down the stairs. Had he stumbled while on his way to the water tank to check the pilot light? (There again was that excuse. Hadn’t he claimed to have been checking the pilot on the furnace when she found him in the basement on Saturday night?) Or was it after the lights had gone out, on his way back up the stairs? He had offered both scenarios. And why was he even bringing that old knife with him down the stairs into the basement? He said he happened to have been washing it with the dinner dishes because it was a perfectly good knife, and he had had it in his hands in the soapy water when he decided to check on the water tank.

And so she was worried that this was, in reality, no mere accident. Whether it was self-flagellation or a suicide attempt, however, remained unclear. Obviously he had been depressed since the plane crash; obviously he had been enduring ongoing symptoms of PTSD. But there was a monumental difference between experiencing flashbacks of a failed water ditching and taking a knife and plunging it into one’s own stomach. It was as if he had been in the throes of some new PTSD hallucination or nightmare. Moreover, something Chip had said when he collapsed at the top of the stairs, before he came back to his senses, made absolutely no sense. He was babbling that some child who had died in the accident needed company and he owed it to the passenger to find her a playmate. A moment later he seemed to understand fully where he was and what had happened: They had lost power, it was back on, and he was bleeding.

Emily sipped at the coffee, tepid and a little bitter, that she had gotten from a vending machine outside the hospital cafeteria, long closed for the night, and surveyed the waiting room. She wasn’t alone because no more than a dozen yards away was command central for the wing, an island with four walls of chest-high counters, and nurses and doctors and administrators who were constantly racing among patient rooms and back behind it with clipboards, paperwork, and plastic cups filled with meds. But there were no other relatives or friends of patients at the moment because it was after midnight and visiting hours were long over. She recalled Jocelyn Francoeur’s remorseless (though understandable) hostility. Before she had seen how badly Chip was hurt, the woman had been furious, nearly hysterical, and had hissed that she had been warned about the family. She had been told to steer clear of Emily and the twins the way she had always steered clear of Reseda and Anise and that whole perverted crowd.

Emily rubbed at her eyes. Clearly there was a schism in Bethel. There were her strange new friends with their greenhouses, and then there was the rest of the community. But who had reached out to her
except
for those odd herbalists? No one. No one at all. Consequently, she decided she was very glad to have that whole perverted crowd a part of her life tonight. John and Clary Hardin had appeared out of nowhere and had been sitting on this appallingly ugly, orange Naugahyde couch beside her until a few minutes ago, holding her hand and comforting her, until finally she had insisted they go home and get some rest. And even before Chip had been rushed to the hospital, Reseda and Holly and Ginger had descended upon her home, Reseda and Holly offering to stay with the girls as long as necessary. (She called, they came.
That
was friendship.) When Emily had phoned home a few minutes ago to check in, the four of them—Reseda and Holly, Hallie and Garnet—had set up a big slumber party in the living room, piling quilts and air mattresses and pillows onto the floor as if they were all teenage girls on a Friday night. Reseda didn’t think the twins would want to stay alone in their bedrooms, and she was correct. The girls had sounded more tired than terrified when Emily spoke to them, and they were all finally going to sleep. According to Reseda, Anise had been by the house as well. She’d just left, though not before stocking the refrigerator.

The truth was, Emily knew that she didn’t have anyone but these people in Bethel. Her mother-in-law? She might phone her in the morning, but then again she might not. What precisely would she tell her? And given her mother-in-law’s drinking—given the reality that her mother-in-law was a drunk—what assistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had passed before she called her son, and, though Chip wouldn’t share with Emily the details of the conversation, he did say that his mother had told him fatalistically that it—an accident of this magnitude—was bound to happen. Emily imagined she could phone her theater pals in Pennsylvania or some of the lawyers with whom she was friends in her old firm, but what were they supposed to do? Drop everything and come to New Hampshire so they could hold her hand and help nurse her husband back to health? That was what mothers and fathers and siblings did, and she had none. Since her parents had passed away, she didn’t have any family at all.

Emily realized that she desperately needed to sleep now, but there was one more doctor who wanted to talk to her, and that was Chip’s new psychiatrist here in New Hampshire. Her husband had only met with him three or four times, but Chip had said that he liked him, and so Emily had called him. His name was Michael Richmond. He had arrived at the hospital just about when the ER physician and the nurse finished stitching up Chip, and he had been allowed to spend a few minutes with her husband after he was admitted. Now the psychiatrist was discussing her husband’s case on the phone with a colleague in Chicago. Emily yawned again and was just about to curl up her legs and lie down on the couch when he returned. He was a tall man, roughly her age, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans. He had thinning blond hair and a strong face made more handsome by the scars that remained from what must have been a titanic battle with acne as an adolescent. He sat on the couch beside her, in the very spot where John Hardin had been earlier.