The Night Strangers Part 20

"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 a.s.sured 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 cla.s.s, 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 inst.i.tutionalized. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 gla.s.s jar in his hands with what looked like soapy water. "h.e.l.lo, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt."

"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 circ.u.mstances would she leave him alone with their daughters.

Reseda 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 s.h.i.+ns, 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.

Reseda had been about to say something complimentary to the girls about what lovely models for a statue they would make when she paused: She sensed that one of the twins was aware that there was a second volume, and already the child had skimmed through enough of the first book to know its name: The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. Only a single copy of that second volume existed, and Anise kept it in an ornate, reliquary-like cherry cabinet in her bedroom. Frequently the women searched used bookstores and online auction sites for an additional copy, but one had never appeared. Like their four copies of the first volume, the copyright of the second volume was 1891.

And so instead of making a random suggestion that someday the girls pose for a statue, Reseda said, "I have always preferred this first volume to the second."

Both girls looked up at her.

"I hadn't told Cali and Rosemary about the second volume," Anise said, her tone a little clipped.

"The book talks about it right here," Garnet said, and she showed Anise and Sage where in the encyclopedia she'd seen that second volume referenced. "See?"

"Aren't you the diligent student, Cali," Anise told her.

"What does diligent mean," Hallie asked, oblivious to the slight edge in Anise's voice.

"It means she works very, very hard," Sage explained. "I imagine you do, too."

"No, she works harder than me," Hallie said, and she smiled at Garnet with what Reseda knew was genuine sisterly pride. The pride a twin has in her twin. A lover had once told Reseda that he presumed the bonds twins shared far transcended the more common sibling rivalries. He'd been right. "Dad says she's going to be a teacher or a professor someday."

"Both are worthy aspirations," said Anise.

"How is your father?" Reseda asked. She wasn't as interested in what either child might say as she was in what thoughts would pa.s.s through Sage's head when the woman envisioned Captain Chip Linton. But almost instantly Sage started counting the ma.s.sive leaves on the hoja santa-which, in a fas.h.i.+on, was itself revealing.

"Mom is a little worried about him, I guess," Hallie answered, looking down at a diagram of hypn.o.bium in the book rather than meet her gaze.

"We all are," Sage said.

"Is there anything in particular?" Reseda asked the girl, but carefully she gazed at Garnet as well. "So far, I don't feel Bethel has been especially healing for him. I know the move to New Hamps.h.i.+re has been hard on all of you."

"You do?" Garnet asked.

"I do. I really do."

Garnet seemed to think about this. Then Hallie began to answer: "The other day I caught him talking to someone. I was in the kitchen and Mom was upstairs, and I heard-"

"Hallie!" said her sister, cutting her off, and she took the girl's arm. "No!"

"It's Rosemary," the child snapped. "And, yes, I will tell them! Someone has to know! And just because you don't want to scare Mom doesn't mean I can't talk about it!"

"Go ahead," Reseda said. "Tell me."

"The other day I caught him talking to himself," Hallie said, and then she took a deep breath. "He was in the bas.e.m.e.nt near that weird door, and it was like he was talking to me or Cali. But he wasn't, because we weren't with him. We had been upstairs. And another time I found him sitting in the den with my dolls, and it was like he was inventing a game with them for us. But again, he wasn't. He was all alone."

"They're my dolls, too," Garnet said, and she shook her head.

"And I think ..."

"What do you think?" Reseda asked.

"I can tell Mom thinks he might have killed Dessy."

"Do you think he did?" Sage asked, bending over with her hands on her knees.

"I don't know. Mom started to say something about maybe taking her body to the veterinarian so he could tell us what happened, but Dad just wanted to bury her. And the ground was just soft enough now that we could."

"Is there more?" Reseda said.

Hallie nodded. "I guess."

"Tell me. You can."

"Well, he's gone from being kind of s.p.a.cey since the accident to being really cheerful one second and then really angry the next. But he never gets mad at us. He just gets mad. He also has headaches, and I know they're getting a lot worse. Mom doesn't want us to know, but I've heard them talking. And he has some really bad pain in his side."

"He's depressed," Anise said. "That's all. And he should be depressed. What kind of man would your father be, if he weren't?"

"Is that your way of comforting the children, Anise?" Reseda asked.

"It's my way of comforting everyone," she said, and then the whole room seemed to grow quiet, except for the gentle hiss of the humidifier. Sage counted soundlessly, moving her lips, and the girls thought of their father, and Anise merely smirked. And then Garnet's head cleared, and she looked at all three women around her but directed her question at Reseda.

"Can I ask you something?" the girl said.

"Yes, absolutely."

"What are the potions in the second volume?"

"I think he did poison that cat," Anise told Reseda, once Emily had picked up the girls and taken them home. The two of them were walking from Sage's greenhouse to their vehicles at the edge of the woman's long driveway. "I think Verbena and the girls will be much, much safer when he is properly hospitalized-as Valerian suggests."

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps?"

"I don't see that sort of unreasonable malevolence in the captain. I think the cat just ate something that did her in."

"I'm not sure Valerian would agree. And she's the doctor."

"But she's not his doctor."

"She will be."

"I don't think a hospital can treat what ails him."

"And that is?"

Already Reseda regretted saying as much as she had. She didn't trust Anise. The woman wasn't necessarily dubious of Reseda's work as a shaman, but she also craved the tangibility that came with a tincture. She saw magic largely in plants. But, then, Reseda wasn't fully confident in her own diagnosis, either, since it was based only on very limited observation and what one of the pilot's daughters had told her. Moreover, she herself had stood in Sawyer Dunmore's crypt and felt nothing. Nothing at all. It didn't seem likely the captain was possessed by the Dunmore twin who had been killed. "I'm honestly not sure," she said finally. "I just don't think he should be inst.i.tutionalized."

Anise shrugged. They had reached her truck, and the rusty front door groaned when she yanked it open. Before climbing in Anise added, "We will do this, Reseda. You know that, don't you? You can't stop us. We will try again."

"Because they're twins," she said.

"Yes. And because of what they've endured."

"Do you know which one?"

"I don't. Not yet. But I will."

"No good ever comes from that second volume."

"Not true," Anise said, settling into her seat and staring down at Reseda from the full height of the truck cab. "I may be vegan, but just the other day I whipped up something absolutely magic with a field mouse." Then she turned the key and the engine roared to life. She barely missed Reseda's toes as she sped down the driveway.

"He simply doesn't agree that hospitalization is the right course," Valerian told John Hardin, as they sat across from each other at his kitchen table. "I don't know Michael well, but I know his type."

"Even after the captain killed the girls' cat?" John asked, sipping his coffee. He could tell that Valerian, like his wife, did not approve of coffee. But he viewed it as his only vice. Besides, he had yet to find a tea he enjoyed half so much. "He really doesn't think the man poses some sort of danger to his family?"

"So it would seem. But, then, he doesn't believe the captain poisoned the animal."

"Well, Verbena does."

"And that's something. Nevertheless, he called me today to tell me he's going to report me to the State Board of Medicine. He's going to suggest that I have some ... some sort of agenda ... for wanting the man committed."

"Well, you do," John said, and he allowed himself a small smirk. As he hoped, it seemed to cheer the young woman a bit. "So, hospitalization isn't really the recommended protocol?"

"Of course not!"

"No arguable gray area?"

"None."

"Well, you're the doctor. I'm merely a lawyer. But sadly, in addition to getting you in a wee bit of hot water, this could be a bit of a cause celebre, couldn't it? Given the captain's history and that ditching in Lake Champlain, arguing over his competency could draw more attention to us than any of us desire."

"I know."

"Tell me: In your opinion, would Verbena be able to convince the captain to admit himself to the hospital if Michael were no longer his physician?"

"Absolutely," she answered. "I have no doubt."

"So we need Michael gone."