Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

The two other women Richmond had met who he was convinced were part of the cult were a pair of real estate agents, and they seemed considerably more focused and intense than Valerian. One of them was so preternaturally composed that she was a little intimidating. He had met the two when he’d been searching for a small home near the ski resort. After spending a day looking at property with the composed one, he’d decided to work with another agency-and, eventually, through that firm had found an A-frame with a magnificent view of Cannon Mountain. He couldn’t recall the original real estate agent’s name now, but she had explained to him that it was some rare and exotic flower. Later people would tell him about the strange cult-a coven, they had said, only half-kidding-and he would realize that he had met one of its members.

Well, Dr. Valerian Wainscott was in all likelihood a member, too.

And now she wanted to commit Chip Linton-or, to be precise, recommend to Chip that he commit himself. And while that notion alone had infuriated Michael, he had to admit that he was also annoyed with her presumption that she was better trained than he was to care for “a middle-aged male cutter” like Chip Linton.

“You make it sound like that’s a type,” he had told her, incapable of hiding his incredulity.

“It’s uncommon, but not unseen,” she had replied, her voice downright chipper. “I see men like the pilot at the hospital periodically.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely,” she had assured him.

“Well, he does not need to be committed.”

“Is he getting better with you?”

“He’s making progress.”

“No,” she’d said, her voice pert, “I just don’t see it. And are you really that confident that he won’t kill himself? Tell me: Could you live with yourself if he did?”

“I simply do not believe hospitalization is in his best interests,” he had told her. “I will argue against it. I will tell Emily that her second opinion is a wrong opinion.”

Valerian had smiled and raised her eyebrows and shrugged. He’d decided she was absolutely beautiful and absolutely insane. He’d decided she was completely unqualified to do what she did for a living. And he’d decided he would tell Emily and Chip to give this Valerian Wainscott as wide a berth as they could. They should have nothing to do with her and-if they ever met any others-they should avoid those Bethel women who spent way too much time in their greenhouses.

“I ’ll bet your father has finished hanging the wallpaper in the dining room,” Emily told the girls, handing Hallie a half gallon of milk and Garnet a brown paper grocery bag. On the way home from dance class, they had stopped at the supermarket and done the food shopping for the next few days. “I really won’t miss those sunflowers,” she added, trying to sound cheerful. She was looking forward to seeing the room brightened by the new wallpaper patterned with roses, but mostly she was preoccupied with Valerian’s belief that her husband should be institutionalized. She wasn’t sure if she had stopped thinking about it for more than a few minutes since Valerian had rendered her opinion. She wanted to meet with Michael Richmond to see what he thought, and didn’t want to broach the subject with Chip until she knew more.

“Me, either,” Hallie said, leading the way into the house even though she was burdened with the milk, her dance bag, and her school backpack. “They were creepy.”

Emily called out to her husband that they were home, a grocery bag in each arm, figuring in her mind that she had two more trips. “Chip?” she called again when he didn’t respond. She thought she needn’t necessarily worry that he hadn’t answered, but she did.

The three of them went straight to the kitchen, put the bags down on the counter, and then Emily followed the twins as they peered into the dining room. But instead of hearing the girls either coo over the new wallpaper or remark on the reality that there was still a whole section of the west wall with those gloomy, dispiriting sunflowers, she heard Garnet calling out the cat’s name quizzically. “Dessy?” Garnet was saying, her voice not much more than a murmur. “Dessy?” But then the voice grew to one long, loud shriek, and Hallie was wailing the animal’s name, too. There was the family cat on the floor by the credenza-half on the Oriental rug and half on the hardwood planks-her eyes wide open and her tongue protruding like a small pink stone from her mouth. There seemed to be dried froth on her nose and a small stain of dried vomit on the floor beside her.

“Is she dead?” Hallie was asking, trying to sniff back enough of her tears for her words to be clear, and even before Emily had knelt on the floor by the cat and touched the cold fur, she knew that the animal was.

“Chip?” she called again. “Chip?”

“Be right up!” he yelled, his voice somewhere in the basement below them.

“He’s always down there,” Garnet murmured, still crying softly, speaking to no one in particular. She was sitting on the floor and running two fingers gently along the cat’s side. “There, there,” she said, as if the cat were alive and needed comforting. “There, there.”

In a moment Chip was standing in the doorway, his face grimy and his shoulders sagging just a bit, but looking rather cheerful. He had a glass jar in his hands with what looked like soapy water. “Hello, girls,” he said. “I didn’t hear you get home!”

“We were calling for you,” Emily said, trying to read him. “What were you doing?”

“Oh, I was in the basement. I guess I didn’t hear you. I must have been in my own little world.”

“Something’s happened to Desdemona,” she said.

He walked around her and crouched like a baseball catcher between his daughters. He stroked the cat once and then lifted the animal’s head so he could see her dead eyes and the way the tongue protruded from her mouth.

“Oh, Dessy,” he said. Then: “She must have gotten into something. The poor, poor thing.”

“You think she ate something that poisoned her?” she asked him.

“I do. Look at the tongue and look at the vomit.”

“And she’s dead, Daddy?” Hallie asked. “Definitely?”

“Definitely,” he said sadly.

“What’s that in the jar?” Emily asked him.

He looked from the cat to his fingers and seemed surprised to see anything there. Then he shrugged. “Paint thinner. I got tired of wallpapering in here and touched up the trim. I was cleaning the brushes when you got home.”

“In the basement.”

“That’s right,” he said, and once again he stroked the cat behind her ears, the way he had countless thousands of times before. Emily couldn’t imagine why he would have poisoned the cat, but the idea crossed her mind that he had. And then she looked back and forth between her girls, and the notion of her husband taking-to use Valerian’s expression-a time-out from life seemed more and more logical. She decided in the meantime that under no circumstances would she leave him alone with their daughters.

R eseda thought that Sage Messner’s greenhouse-the largest in Bethel and the one the women who did not have greenhouses used-needed statuary. She was watching Anise and Sage work with the twins, and she imagined a marble sculpture of the girls near the parsley, basil, and echinacea. She recalled a Renaissance statue of twin children she had rather liked that she had seen one afternoon on a third-floor corridor at the Uffizi. A cat was rubbing her side against one of the girls’ marble shins, and so Reseda made a mental note to leave out that detail if she should decide to mention the statue to the children. Their cat had died two days earlier, and she knew the loss was still fresh. Right now the twins were standing around a table, hunched over a copy of The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs, while Anise and Sage stood behind them and pointed out where in the greenhouse they could see the actual plants that were pictured in the text. This was the first of the two-volume encyclopedia that the women used for most of their tinctures, and some approached the book with an almost biblical reverence. There were only four copies of that first volume in the group’s possession, all from 1891, and the women were constantly photocopying pages from it or scanning them into PDFs on their computers, and it was an indication of Anise’s interest in Emily’s daughters that she had shared with them her own personal copy.