The Night Strangers Part 21

"Yes, but we really don't have the time to convince him to ... take care of himself."

"Well, that doesn't matter because I'm not much of a sorcerer. Just had the good sense to marry one. Besides: It's not as if Anise has managed to convince the captain to take care of himself."

"These things take time. And unfortunately, I really don't have a lot of it."

"Everything is so much easier once the captain is committed. Verbena is dependent upon us and enamored with us. There's a term for that, isn't there? A psychological term?"

She nodded. "The Stockholm syndrome. It's when a captive or a hostage starts thinking well of his or her abductors."

"Well, I like to believe she would think highly of us no matter what. I think most of the time we're rather good eggs."

"John, sometimes I just can't tell when you're pulling my leg or being deadly serious."

He reached across the table and squeezed her arm. "This time? I am being deadly serious," he answered, smiling, and his eyes had the twinkle she loved.

That night Emily skimmed through the local phone book. Even though it was but a fraction as thick as the one back home in Pennsylvania, there were still nearly two columns of people named Davis. Fortunately, there were only two in Bethel and only one Rebecca. Paul and Rebecca Davis. Clearly this was the woman who had b.u.t.tonholed her at the diner in Littleton soon after they arrived in New Hamps.h.i.+re. While the girls were doing their homework she phoned her. That afternoon, Anise and Sage had each tried calling her Verbena, just as John Hardin had earlier in the week. Meanwhile, Valerian Wainscott wanted to inst.i.tutionalize her husband. And so now Emily decided that she needed another opinion about these self-proclaimed herbalists. She wanted to speak with someone who, clearly, wasn't one of them.

A man answered the phone at the Davis household, and she introduced herself to him. She said she was Emily Linton and she was hoping to speak to Becky Davis. Although she was quite sure she heard the woman in the background speaking with that high schoolage son she had mentioned at the diner, Paul Davis said his wife wasn't home. But he said that she would call Emily back in the next day or two.

"Would you like my work number?" she asked.

"We know your firm," he said, an edge to his voice that hadn't existed when he first answered the call.

"That's right," Emily said simply. "Your wife mentioned that she knew I worked with John Hardin."

"We all do," he told her, and then added curtly, "Good night."

You wonder: These days, does Emily ever fall into a sleep so deep that she will not remember her dreams in the morning and no mere rustle will wake her? You know what she thinks about you. You know what they all think. The women. Their husbands. You know what they all believe.

The truth is, now whenever you climb from beneath the sheets-before you have even thrown your feet over the side of the bed onto the cold wooden floor of your bedroom-Emily is awake.

Chip? she will murmur, and then she will ask you where you are going.

Oh, just getting an Advil, you will rea.s.sure her, and sometimes that has indeed been the case, because sometimes Ethan or Ashley or even Sandra has joined you in your bedroom in those smallest, darkest hours of the night. Other times you have simply gone to the bathroom. Either way, Emily will sit upright in bed and await your return. You know she is listening carefully to the sound of your footsteps along the corridor and awaiting the sound of the bathroom door closing and opening. If your toes so much as touched the steps to the third floor and Hallie and Garnet's bedrooms, she would be out of your bed like a shot.

The result is that those same demons that have you contemplating the deaths of your own children have you contemplating her death as well. She has no idea that you have brought Tansy's knife upstairs, none at all. Right now, you could lie on your stomach and drape your arm over the side of the mattress, dangle it casually as if you were getting a ma.s.sage, and find the knife held to the inside wall of a horizontal slat with one wide piece of duct tape. Or you could simply smother Emily. The original Desdemona-Shakespeare's, not yours-died that way. And, in fact, your Emily once played Desdemona and she was remarkable. You were able to rearrange your flight schedule that month so you could be in the audience opening night, and you may never have been more proud of her as an actress than when you witnessed her final scene with Oth.e.l.lo. You watched her die at the hands of her husband.

You have to hope it will never come to that in real life. You have to hope you can resist. But the physical pains grow worse, as does Ethan's incessant prodding. If you ever hurt either Emily or your girls, you know that next you would kill yourself. That has always been clear.

And so once more you contemplate the knife you have brought to your bed. Perhaps you should simply use it upon yourself first and ensure that nothing happens to Emily or Hallie or Garnet. This time, instead of plunging it into your abdomen-trying, in some way, to eradicate the pain you already are feeling-you should slash your wrists. Long cuts along your forearms, from your elbows to the wrinkles at the palms of your hands.

"Chip?"

"Yes, sweetie?"

"Were you having a bad dream? One of your plane dreams?"

"No. I wasn't even asleep. I was wide awake."

"You were?"

"I was." You pull your legs out from under the sheets and feel her sit up in bed. You knew she would.

"Where are you going?" she asks.

"Just getting an Advil."

And then you walk to the bathroom, leaving the door open so she can hear exactly what you are doing. She can hear the mirrored cabinet door with its small squeal and she can hear the rattle of the red pills in the plastic bottle when you shake three more tablets (yes, that is how many you will take now; sometimes you even take four) into the palm of your hand. When you return to bed, her head is on her pillow, but you can tell that her eyes are open. She is alert. Vigilant. But, of course, she is not as vigilant as she thinks she is. She has no idea that on the other side of the bed-her side of the bed-Ethan Stearns is watching her. He is watching you both. And your head? It now feels like it will explode, and, despite those three Advil, you shut tight your eyes against the pain, grimacing into your pillow in the dark.

Chapter Sixteen.

Michael Richmond flipped the winds.h.i.+eld wipers on the car to a faster speed because the rain was relentless and navigating the tortuous two-lane road up the hill to his A-frame was proving a challenge. The thermometer on the dashboard said it was thirty-eight degrees, so he wasn't worried about the rain turning to sleet or this stretch of road becoming a long sheet of black ice that glistened in the light from his car's headlamps. But it was nearly ten-thirty at night and he was sleepy, so he sat back against the seat to concentrate and took another sip of his Red Bull. (Valerian, he had to a.s.sume, did not approve of Red Bull.) Then he grasped the steering wheel with both hands.

He kept thinking about Valerian's appalling and absolutely irresponsible belief that Chip Linton should be inst.i.tutionalized. There was something going on with the captain, there was no doubt about that, but the answer wasn't confinement in the state hospital. It made absolutely no sense, no sense at all. "The person in this write-up in no way resembles my client," he had told Valerian.

Tomorrow he was going to contact the Board of Medicine. He considered whether his anger was reasonable and decided it was. Valerian had overstepped her bounds and, worse, was going to try to convince a fundamentally sane man to commit himself. He knew also that she was going to pay: He was going to go after that lunatic's license.

"Michael," she'd replied at one point when, yet again, they were arguing, "he may have stuck a knife in his stomach. He has phantom pains that are off the charts. He may have poisoned the family cat. He went berserk over a coal chute door."

"And that door turned out to be a crypt," he had answered, though he knew this really didn't exonerate Chip. The man hadn't known the Dunmores buried their son there. And so quickly he'd added, "He's calm and reasonable now, and we don't know if he poisoned the cat-and we probably never will. Imagine if we were discussing whether the man was competent to stand trial: Well, perhaps he wasn't competent the night that Molly Francoeur was over at their house and he hurt himself. But you know as well as I do that a person can become competent. And he is definitely competent right now."

Though they had argued for nearly thirty minutes-their third debate over the past five days-it was clear that she wasn't going to budge. And neither was he.

Up ahead he saw a vehicle pulled off to the side of the road with its hazard lights flas.h.i.+ng, and he thought about what a miserable night it was to have car trouble. He slowed as he approached and saw the car was a new-model hybrid and there was a person in a hooded yellow slicker standing beside it, waving at him with a flashlight. He coasted to a stop ahead of it, wis.h.i.+ng his sheepskin coat was waterproof or he kept an umbrella in the backseat. But there was nothing to be done about that now, and so he braced himself for a foray into the chill rain and climbed from his car.

He saw that the individual was a tweedy, athletic-looking older man with a great shock of Robert Frostlike white hair and wire-rimmed eyegla.s.ses, now spotted with rain. He guessed the fellow was in his late sixties or early seventies.

"Thank you so much," the gentleman said, and Michael realized that he was shouting to be heard over the wind and the rain.

"Not a big deal. What's the problem?" he asked. The guy must have been desperate to stand out here in the storm.

He shook his head and extended his hands, palms up, signaling his absolute befuddlement. "And there's no cell coverage here-at least I have none," he said.

"Yeah, I don't, either," Michael told him. "What happened?"

"I heard a beep and then got a ma.s.s of flas.h.i.+ng warning lights on the dashboard. One for the ABS system, one for the battery, one for the pressure in the tires. I pulled over to turn off the car and turn it back on, hoping it was just some computer glitch that needed a restart. Nope. Now the car won't even turn over. When I looked under the hood, I saw nothing obviously amiss."

"Where do you live?" Michael asked. "At the very least I can give you a ride back to Franconia. Maybe something will be open there. Or you can call someone from my house. I only live about two miles up this road."

"If it comes to that, I'll certainly hitch a ride. Thanks a bunch. But would you mind first seeing if you can get it started? It would save us both a lot of trouble."

Michael grinned. "My auto mechanic training begins and ends with adding wiper fluid. Sorry. You probably know a h.e.l.l of a lot more about what goes on underneath the hood of a car than I do."

"Well, maybe you'll have better luck turning it over," the man said, and he handed Michael the keys. "Would you mind trying? Maybe something will catch."

"And I thought I was an optimist," Michael said. "Get in with me and we'll see what happens. Is the door unlocked?"

"It is," the fellow said. Then: "I think I have some gloves in the front seat. My fingers are a little numb from the cold." And already he was racing around the front of the car and escaping the rain in the pa.s.senger seat, where he retrieved his gloves. Michael slid in behind the steering wheel, amazed at how already the rain had soaked through his coat and sweater and s.h.i.+rt. He could feel the wetness against his back when he leaned against the seat in the car.

"I'm Michael," he said as he settled in.

"John," the older man said. "Pleasure to meet you." Then he added, "Excuse the blankets on the seats. My wife and I have two very big dogs at home, and sometimes they travel with me."

Michael looked down now and realized that, indeed, both the pa.s.senger and driver's seats were covered by old, badly stained blankets. "Well, here goes," he murmured. And almost out of intellectual curiosity, he turned the key in the ignition. He tried twice, and both times the engine made almost no noise. Once he thought he might have heard a dim clicking somewhere under the hood, but otherwise there wasn't even a gurgle from the engine.

He turned to the older gentleman, shaking his head, his eyebrows raised, and saw him smile. But it was an odd grin, the smile Michael had seen before on patients he'd visited at the state psychiatric hospital-a smile unconnected to normal stimuli or responses. It was a little manic and disturbing. "I tried," he said sheepishly. "I was-"

He never finished the sentence. He was aware of the fellow's right arm rising up out of nowhere, and even in the dark of the car he saw the long, wide blade of the knife. But it all happened so fast. One second he was telling him that, as he had expected, he had no magic touch that was going to start the engine. The next? Vicious, stinging pain and he knew he was going to die. He hadn't even had time to raise an arm in defense. The knife hacked deep and far into his neck, not once, not twice, but three times, and it felt like his throat was full of fluid, a melting glacier in his esophagus. Intellectually he understood that his carotid artery had been slashed wide open on that first, violent pa.s.s and he was going to bleed to death within moments. Exsanguination was the medical term. Odd that in these last seconds of life he should think of that. Or, as his head was all but decapitated and balanced briefly on his shoulder before his chin toppled forward against his jacket, the colloquial term: Bleeding out. Bleeeding ... out.

Then, he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

When it was done, John Hardin took a washcloth from a pocket of his raincoat and wiped the blood off the window beside the driver's seat, and then dabbed at the steering wheel a little delicately. He wrapped the body in the blanket on which it was sitting, pulling the corners up and over the lolling skull and the limp arms. He was a strong man, but it still took enormous effort to drag the corpse from the driver's bucket seat to the pa.s.senger's-he had to stand on the pavement in the rain and pull-and one of the psychiatrist's hands fell from the blanket and got blood on the cus.h.i.+on. He used the washcloth to clean that, too. Clary hated bloodstains. He couldn't blame her. They both liked a tidy house and tidy cars.

When he was done, he turned off the blinking hazard lights on the psychiatrist's vehicle, locked the door, and then climbed back into the driver's seat of his hybrid. He reached under the steering wheel and aimed his flashlight at the fuse box. Before leaving home he had taped small, bright dots of yellow paper beside the fuses for the fuel pump and the ignition so he could spot them easily. Now he pressed the fuses back into place and started the vehicle. As he did, a tremendous milk tanker barreled up the road, seemingly out of nowhere, and he spotted its lights at the very last moment. The trucker slammed on his horn, veered into the other lane, and continued on. Had he pulled out a split second earlier, the tanker probably would have killed him and totaled the car. And that, John thought, would have done no one any good. No one any good at all. So he took a breath to compose himself, though he really hadn't lost his composure until he had almost pulled out without looking. Then he flipped on the car's radio to the local public radio affiliate-the station played jazz this time of the night, which he liked-and started home. He glanced back one time at the psychiatrist's vehicle through the rain, but, without its lights on, it grew invisible quickly. The road curved to the left, and the empty car disappeared into the night.

Reseda returned to the real estate office after showing a pair of married bond traders intent on early retirement what they thought might be the bed-and-breakfast of their dreams. The old inn had been for sale for nearly eighteen months, and the asking price was a fraction of what it had been when the widower first put it on the market. But Reseda ended up talking the traders out of the property. It was clear to her that the couple wouldn't be happy in this backwater corner of New Hamps.h.i.+re. Neither was the sort who was capable of aimlessly chatting up weekend guests about the foliage, maple syrup, or the perils of mud season. They still needed the frenetic chaos of the trading floor, even if they thought they were burned out.

When she arrived, Holly was waiting for her with a stack of pages from the Internet listing the names of the people who had died on Flight 1611, and any demographic information she could glean from news articles.

"Who do you think it is?" Reseda asked as she sat at her desk and began leafing through the papers.

"I have no idea. I thought about what you told me the girl had said," she answered, "and there are some distinct possibilities. But there were still thirty-nine fatalities."

"That's how many died? Thirty-nine?"

Holly nodded.

"Well, I would say it's this child," Reseda said after a moment, touching the name Ashley Stearns with the tip of her pen, "because Rosemary was quite sure that, when he was talking to himself, he was imagining a girl. He was, in fact, playing with one of her and her sister's dolls."

"But a little girl couldn't be that controlling. Could she?"

Reseda thought about this. "If Ashley is with the captain, she's probably not alone."

"I wish we knew how they had died in the crash. After all, we know where the captain is in pain."

She smiled approvingly at Holly. If what she did demanded an apprentice, she would want Holly to be hers.

Hallie watched Anise intently as the woman turned her face up into the April sun, her eyes closed and her hands clasped behind her. The light was raining down upon her like a shower. With her halo of gray hair and a thin smile on her face, she looked, Hallie thought, like an angel. She was standing toward the western wall of the Lintons' greenhouse and staring up at the western ceiling. At her feet were three supermarket cartons filled with seedlings (most from either her greenhouse or Ginger Jackson's), a forty-pound bag of potting soil, and a plastic watering can she had filled from the outdoor spigot near the house's wheelbarrow ramp. The seedlings, according to Anise, were among the more common herbs and flowers-not the exotic ones that Hallie had never heard of before they moved to Bethel. The cartons were filled with basil, parsley, peppermint, sage, and thyme, but she wouldn't have been able to say which seedlings were which without the small Popsicle-stick signs that had been speared into the dirt.

Today was the warmest the greenhouse had been since they moved here, two months ago. Hallie and her sister were wearing only hooded sweats.h.i.+rts over their T-s.h.i.+rts, and Hallie felt she would have been comfortable in here even without the hoodie. They had been picked up after school by Anise and brought home so they could start setting up their very own greenhouse. Once more, instead of doing homework or attending a dance cla.s.s or having a music lesson, the girls were going to be gardening. Their mother would be at the office for another two hours. Meanwhile, their father had finally finished the dining room, the living room, and the front hallway, and this afternoon he had gone to the hardware store and the lumberyard. He had been nosing around those back stairs behind the kitchen-wondering what, if anything, he should do about them-and decided he wanted to replace some of the rotting steps and try to add a handrail.

"It's not polite to stare, Rosemary," the woman said, emerging abruptly from her reverie. She was smiling at the girl, but still Hallie felt scolded, and so she quickly formulated her defense.

"Oh, I wasn't staring," she said, though she was well aware that she had been. "But I did think you looked pretty in the sunlight, Anise," she added. She sounded in her head like a kiss-a.s.s, a term she had learned the night before on a TV show, but she was confident that Anise wouldn't see through her. Reseda would; Reseda seemed to know precisely what a person was thinking. Hallie had figured out that, when she was around Reseda, she should keep her mind as blank as possible or she should tell the absolute truth. But Anise? She wasn't as bright. Or, maybe, she wasn't as (to use the word she had overheard Clary once use) gifted.

And, indeed, Anise smiled at her. Then the woman put her hands on her hips in a businesslike fas.h.i.+on and surveyed the tables and the toys in the greenhouse. "First of all, a greenhouse is no place for a lot of dolls," she said. She lifted one of the American Girl dolls roughly by its ankle and started toward the greenhouse door. Garnet had been kneeling before one of the cartons, peering in at the rows of plants there in their tiny plastic pots, but she was instantly on her feet when she saw Anise treating the doll so roughly. She pulled the doll from the woman's hand and held it against her chest as if it were an actual infant.

"Cali, really. It's a doll," Anise scolded her. "You are ten years old. Isn't it time to-forgive me-stop thinking like a child and reasoning like a child? Isn't it about time you put aside your childish ways?"

Hallie was pretty sure the quote came from the Bible, but she couldn't have begun to explain the context or the meaning or why Anise had decided to cite it. She had a vague sense that the woman was using it ironically: Anise had meant what she said, but quoting the Bible was almost a joke to her.

"I like that doll," Garnet said. "I like all my dolls."

"You're too old-"

"I'm not too old! I'm ten!" She motioned at Hallie with her hand. "We're ten!"

"It's okay," Hallie said, hoping to calm her sister. "We'll bring the dolls inside and put them back in the den. They probably shouldn't be out here in the greenhouse anyway. I'll take a couple and you take a couple. Anise, is that okay? We'll bring them to the den or even upstairs to our bedrooms, and it will just take a minute. Cali and I will-"

"And I'm not Cali! I'm Garnet! I don't want to be Cali!" Suddenly she was shouting, and Hallie could see from the corner of her eye that Anise was more intrigued than angered by the outburst. She seemed to be studying the two of them, almost curious. She had no intention of jumping in as a grown-up.

"Okay, you're Garnet. Fine. Not a big deal," Hallie rea.s.sured her sister, and Garnet seemed to calm down. They would each take an armful of dolls, and then they would each take an armful of the dolls' furniture. In two trips they would have cleared the greenhouse of what Anise considered the childish things. "Anise, we'll be right back, okay?" Hallie said.

Anise nodded, and Hallie turned back to her sister, expecting to see her rounding up more of their toys. But she wasn't, she was just standing there, her gaze stonelike, and Hallie knew instantly that the girl was in the midst of a seizure. Her eyes were open but absolutely oblivious to the world they were taking in. She was standing perfectly still, holding the American Girl doll named Addy in her arms; she might have been mistaken for a wax model of Garnet Linton, except for the reality that Hallie could see her sister breathing slowly and evenly.

"Garnet?" she said, but only because she felt she had to say something. She knew her sister wouldn't respond. "Garnet?"

And, just as she expected, her sister didn't say a word. And so Hallie gently removed the doll from her arms and took Garnet's hands in hers. Then she sat her sister down on the ground where she was, the dry dirt warm, and knelt beside her.

"What is she doing?" Anise asked. The woman was towering over the twins, and Hallie couldn't tell what to make of her tone.

"She's not doing anything," she answered. "At least nothing on purpose. But she has these seizures. It's a brain thing."

"An illness?"

"Sort of. I don't understand it really. But my mom and dad have tried to explain it to me. It has something to do with how the synapses fire in her brain. Sometimes they just fire like crazy all at once, and it's like when a computer freezes."

"And you know what a synapse is, Rosemary?"

"No, not really. All I know is that it has something to do with the way the nerves communicate and the brain sends messages to the body."

"And her brain has ... a problem?"

"It's not a problem. It's just how she is."

"You likened it to when a computer freezes. I'd say that const.i.tutes a problem."

"She hasn't had one in a really long time."

"Interesting."