Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

“Why would they want to kill one of my girls?”

“Most of their potions and tinctures come from plants. You’ve seen their greenhouses. But not all. Some potions demand animal parts, too. Or blood. Sometimes it’s animal blood and sometimes it’s human blood. And sometimes it’s a heart. I know of one tincture that demands a deer heart. I know of another where they use the hearts of bluebirds. Yup, bluebirds. I don’t know what they did to Sawyer the night he died, but I presume they did not cut out his heart. Even in a part of New England as rural as this, I think someone in the medical examiner’s office or the funeral home would have noticed. But they did need his blood.”

“And my girls?”

“They’re twins. That was what was so important about Sawyer. Could have been me, you know. But the recipe, it seems, only needs one twin: And for some reason they picked him and not me. Maybe”-and here he waved one of his arms dismissively-“they liked his blood more than mine. Or maybe they thought he wasn’t as far along as I was.”

“Far along?”

“Puberty. The twin is supposed to be prepubescent.” He turns around abruptly and glances out the window. Churning up a trail of dust on the gravel and dirt driveway is Anise’s old pickup. When he looks back at you, his face has become ashen. He shakes his head ever so slightly, and you rise to go and greet Anise. You watch her gaze curiously at Hewitt’s automobile as she exits her truck, and then welcome her into your house. She has brought a casserole dish and a plate of brownies.

“You have company,” she says in the doorway. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all.”

“I’ve brought you a cassoulet-vegan, of course.”

“Of course.”

“It begins with dried haricot beans. But you’ll recognize lots of other vegetables. And the thyme and rosemary and bay leaf are from my greenhouse.”

“That was sweet of you. Thank you.”

She bustles past you into the kitchen without asking. “Hewitt Dunmore,” she says when she sees him, her voice flat and unreadable, her lips curling up into a withering smile. She places the brownies and the cassoulet on the counter. “It has been aeons. How are you? How is life in the big city?”

“I wouldn’t call St. Johnsbury a big city.”

“Oh, but it dwarfs Bethel. You must love it there. You never, ever seem to come back here.”

He remains silent.

“So, tell me: What has brought you back today? Old home week? Leave something behind in the house?” she asks, her face hard, and she rolls her eyes toward the door to the basement.

“I happened to be driving this way and thought I would see the old place,” he says, his voice a little shaky.

“That’s all? Really?”

He looks down at the tabletop, a small child being chastised. “Really,” he mumbles.

“First time back?”

“First time.”

“Well, I know the captain appreciates visitors enormously.”

“Actually, Anise, I was just leaving.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Errands,” he says vaguely.

“Well, I hope you two had a nice visit.”

“No complaints,” Hewitt says, reaching for his cane and standing. He clumsily pushes his arms through his jacket sleeves. And then he is gone, limping along the front walkway to his car.

“I’d say he’s a bit strange,” Anise remarks, her voice a little conspiratorial-as if you two are the closest of friends. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t think I’m a real good person to make that call.”

You watch Desdemona pounce upon the circular plastic ring from a milk carton. Accidentally she bats it underneath the stove.

“Are your daughters cat people?”

“Not especially. I think they are ambivalent about Desdemona,” you tell her. “When they were younger, they played with her more.”

She seems to think about this. Then: “How is your stomach? That injury must be pretty well healed by now.”

“It is, thank you. I feel pretty good.”

“I suppose they still have you on some antibiotic?”

“Not anymore.”

She nods, offering no opinion on whether she approves of antibiotics, but you have a feeling that she would have prescribed instead a tincture made from some exotic herb that she grows in her greenhouse. The idea crosses your mind that these women steer clear of doctors, but you don’t honestly believe this. After all, isn’t Valerian a psychiatrist?

Anise hands you one of the brownies. “I baked them this morning,” she says. “Try it.”

You take it and stare at it for a brief moment. When she senses your hesitation, she delicately breaks off a piece and puts it into her own mouth. “I am a fiend for my own cooking,” she says when she has swallowed it. The gesture is oddly intimate.

And so you take a breath. But still you can’t bring yourself to take a bite. “I had a big lunch,” you tell her.

She nods. “Suit yourself,” she says slowly. “I’ll be seeing your girls later today. They can tell you what you missed.”

R eseda was moving among the mad-dog skullcap and the ashwagandha in her greenhouse, tending them with a brass watering can shaped like a crouching gargoyle (the water flowed from its large, round eyes) and a plastic mister with a falcon’s head (in this case, the water emanated from its beak). She was listening more carefully than it might have seemed as Clary and Sage prattled on behind her about how far along her St.-John’s-wort was and how healthy it seemed by comparison to theirs. She understood why they had come by this afternoon, and she suspected they knew that she knew: They were struggling mightily to mask their real thoughts with their enthusiastic blather about the state of her herbs. Moreover, Clary was blinking senselessly, which the woman believed (mistakenly) in some fashion shorted out the connection between her mind and Reseda’s.

Finally, when Reseda turned off the spigot beside the greenhouse hose for the last time, Clary got around to the actual reason for their visit. “You know, Reseda,” she began, hoping her voice sounded offhand, “Anise wants to try again. She thinks the Linton girls offer real potential after what their father went through. The trauma of the plane crash and all. So, we were wondering if perhaps you two could, I don’t know, enter into a period of detente?”

“Anise was over here just the other day,” Reseda said. “You make it sound like the two of us don’t play nicely together in the sandbox.”

Sage chuckled nervously and ran two dry, gnarled fingers underneath the first cerulean blossoms on the memoria. Neither she nor Clary was accustomed to speaking so candidly about Reseda and Anise’s relationship. “Of course you do. You both do. But…”

“Go on.”

“Everyone knows you two aren’t as close as we’d all like. I am about to be completely honest because-” And she paused here. Finishing the sentence as she had originally planned would have meant acknowledging that Reseda knew always what they were thinking and this made it hard for Sage to trust her as deeply as she wanted. And so she switched gears and said instead, “Well, I think Anise is a little threatened by you. And I think you two sometimes work at cross-purposes.”

“Thank you for being so candid, Sage. I appreciate that,” Reseda said agreeably, and she meant it. “Anise doesn’t know you’re telling me this, does she?”

“No. But you can tell her. It isn’t a secret.”

“And what are you planning to say to Anise? I suppose, as part of your shuttle diplomacy, you’re seeing her as well.”

“We are,” Clary admitted. “And we are going to ask her to do nothing without your involvement.”

“She won’t agree to that.”

“You weren’t there the first time we tried,” Clary said. “It was horrible. Everything went wrong. Just… everything. That wouldn’t happen this time.”