Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

“Besides, it wasn’t Anise’s fault,” Sage continued. “It was Tansy’s.”

Reseda watched a block of sun on Baphomet and strolled into the center of the pentagon. She closed her eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the greenhouse for a long moment, savoring the feel of the warmth on her skin. “Have you decided which twin?” she asked, opening her eyes.

“No,” Sage told her. “But Anise is enjoying her afternoons with the girls and getting to know them.”

“I am, too,” Reseda said. “And I like their mother a great deal. Don’t you?”

“She’s very nice. But I can’t say for sure if she’ll ever be one of us.”

“Move too fast and she won’t be. I think it was a mistake to try and start calling her Verbena so soon. Same with the girls.”

“The problem is that Anise doesn’t think she has all that much time. And we have even less. I had given up before the Lintons came into our lives. I had absolutely given up. The first tincture is long gone. And then, magically, they appeared.”

“I would not read too much into the idea that Emily contacted Sheldon Carter in the autumn and wanted to see a house. This was neither some cosmic plan nor one of mine.”

“You don’t have as much interest in the second volume, that’s the problem,” Clary told her, raising her voice slightly in her excitement. “You don’t care as much for the blood potions. But the fact is, the tincture worked. Yes, the child died. But the tincture worked.”

Reseda was struck by how old the pair seemed, how physically decrepit. They weren’t, not really; the truth was, they were in absolutely remarkable shape for their age. But they were aging rapidly now, and that was what Reseda was sensing: their panic that, for them, time was running out. The tincture had worked forty years ago, but now they needed more. One of the Linton twins probably represented their last chance. “No,” she admitted, “I don’t care much for those potions. Those, in my opinion, are witchcraft.”

“We know more now than we did with the Dunmore child. And we have you. This time nothing would go wrong,” Sage said, pleading.

Reseda looked back and forth between the women. “I am more interested in their father.”

“For a tincture?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why?” Clary asked, her puzzlement evident in the way she drew out that one short sentence.

“Something is going on inside him. I don’t know what precisely. But I don’t believe he’s the man he was before he came here.”

“Of course, he isn’t!” Sage said, seemingly nonplussed by Reseda’s uncharacteristic denseness. “He was the captain of a plane that crashed. It must be horrible.”

“It’s more than that.”

“More than PTSD?” asked Clary.

“Perhaps.”

“Well, John and Valerian and Anise have that under control,” Sage told her, and then busied herself by inhaling the rosemary. “Valerian is having lunch with Emily tomorrow. I am very confident that Chip Linton won’t have any effect on what we want.”

“Please, Sage: Be judicious with your use of the word we.”

“Does that mean you won’t help us?” Sage asked.

Reseda noticed the woman’s jaw working as she tried to control her annoyance. Her earrings were bunches of green grapes. “I’ll speak to Anise,” she said finally, and she watched as both older women relaxed, their shoulders sagging a little forward, and their minds focusing more on the possibilities held by the future than on what they had witnessed that night long ago when Sawyer Dunmore died. Reseda was glad for them-and for herself. That vision was, she decided, among the most disturbing things she had ever seen in someone else’s mind.

Y ou feel Ethan Stearns putting his cold, wet hands on your shoulders as you kneel in the front hallway, pressing the lid on the paint can. You close your eyes against the pain in your head.

“Chip?”

“Yes?”

“Keep your word to Hewitt. Do not tell Emily he was here.”

You push yourself to your feet, and he releases your shoulders. You rub your eyes at the bridge of your nose and you massage the top of your head, but it does nothing to ease the pain. In a minute or two you will take a couple of Advil, but you know that won’t help, either. At least not very much. The throbbing will cease only when Ethan Stearns leaves.

“I won’t tell her,” you agree. “But, please, don’t threaten me.”

“I wasn’t threatening you.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t tell her that Anise was here, either.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“If Anise wants her to know, Anise can tell her.”

Outside, through the glass window in the storm door, you notice two very large robins landing on a thin branch of the bare lilac near the front walkway. They are so large that you half-expect the branch to bow. But it doesn’t. Birds have hollow bones. It really is hard to believe it was birds that brought down your plane.

T he next morning, John Hardin strolled into Emily’s office in the Georgian beside the bicycle shop and sat down in the chair opposite her desk. “Verbena,” he said, his voice a little wan. “How are you?”

“Still Emily,” she corrected him. “Not Verbena yet.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, sipping his coffee. “Sometimes for a sleepy little corner of New Hampshire, we move too quickly, don’t we?”

“It’s fine. I’m just not prepared yet to make that… that leap.”

He shrugged. “And you should feel no pressure to,” he said. “None at all.” He paused and then took a deep breath. “This has been a very strange spring, hasn’t it?”

“I would say that’s an understatement,” she said.

“I just got a piece of news that makes me a little sad. It really has nothing to do with your family, but-”

“Then do I need to know?” she asked, cutting him off. “Honestly, John, I really don’t want to begin the day with bad news.”

“Sad-not bad. There’s a difference. And you’ll be fine. It just makes a man my age wistful. But it’s not tragic. You know that fellow you bought the house from? Hewitt Dunmore? Well, it seems he died last night.”

The news made her a little dizzy, a little nauseous, and she couldn’t say why. “I’m so sorry. How?”

“Natural causes, apparently. He was found in his garage. A heart attack, most likely. He wasn’t well. It might have been days and days before he was found, but, fortunately, the garage door was open and the light was on.”

“I never actually met him,” she said. “We spoke on the phone, but that was it. He didn’t come to the closing.”

“I know. I remember.”

“Who found him?”

“The fellow who delivers his newspaper. I guess he saw the light on in the garage and the garage door wide open. And then he saw the poor man.”

“How did you hear?”

“Old-fashioned grapevine, I guess. Someone told someone who told someone.”

“And who was the someone who told you?”

“Anise. I ran into her at the coffee shop. She was getting some tea.” He gazed out the window. “On the bright side, it’s going to be another beautiful day. God, I love spring.” He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast, stood up, and continued down the hall to his office.

Valerian Wainscott asked only for tea and honey at the booth in the diner, waiting until after Emily had ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a diet soda to put in her small request.

“That’s all you’re having?” Emily said to the psychiatrist.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Valerian reassured her, and she reached into her handbag on the cushion beside her and pulled out a Ziploc plastic bag filled with granola. “Voila! My lunch.”