Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

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.

R eseda 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 Hampshire. 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.

H allie 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 sweatshirts over their T-shirts, 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 class 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-ass, 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 fashion 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.