The Night Strangers (37 page)

E
mily had switched off her flashlight and now held it against her thigh like a club. She pressed herself flat against the kitchen wall beside the pantry and waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. She held her breath and listened, trying to hear or feel movement anywhere in the house, but heard and felt nothing. When she could make out the details of the kitchen more exactly, she gazed at the counter with the wooden block with the knives. She couldn’t tell if they all were there, but she saw at least three long handles, and so she knew the most dangerous ones were still in place. She moved quietly across the kitchen and pulled out the carving knife. Then she paused once more, waiting. Above her she thought she heard the groan of the trapdoor to the attic—a prolonged creaking that accompanied the descent of the stairs—but she wasn’t sure. It might simply have been the house shuddering in the wind. She considered taking her knife and going straight up the stairs and challenging whoever was there—assuming someone had indeed just opened the door to the attic—but even if she made it to the second-floor landing without being heard, she would lose all surprise when she ran down the corridor toward the trapdoor. She needed another approach.

And the answer, she realized, was that bizarre back stairway at the other end of the kitchen. She almost never used it. She had ascended it exactly two times since they had moved in—the second time only because Chip wanted to show her how he’d replaced the worst of the steps—but it was still windowless, unlit, and too thin to be of practical use if you were carrying anything of any size. It still felt half-finished. But now it might offer the element of surprise, and so silently she opened the door and started up those steps, the flashlight in her left hand and the carving knife in her right.

T
he primary impact rarely kills everyone in a plane crash. This is especially true in the case of a planned water ditching. Reseda recalled Chip telling her in a voice that was almost numbingly clinical that underwater disorientation, drowning, disorderly evacuation, and injuries from not bracing properly were what killed many people, and Flight 1611 was tragically typical in that regard. Moreover, he feared it was likely that some passengers had an unreasonable faith that they would walk away from the disaster as easily as had the passengers on Flight 1549, Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River, and those individuals may not even have braced properly. They had, he presumed, been staring enrapt out the windows, as if this were a mere carnival ride.

He had no idea whether Ashley Stearns had braced properly, he said, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered: If Sandra Durant was one of those who did not die on primary impact, then Ashley was one of those who did. Compared to Sandra, she was fortunate, in that her death was almost instant. From what Reseda could see in Chip’s mind and from what he had told her of his encounters with the child, the girl had been all but cut in half—imagine a guillotine blade slicing through the abdomen—by a part of the aircraft when it finished its somersault and slammed upside down into the lake. Based on the airline’s colors and the portion of logo Chip could see on the metal, he had presumed it was either a part of the rear fuselage or a piece of the vertical stabilizer. There was so much more that he could have told her, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. He didn’t have to tell her of the child’s eyes, open but listless, the light of the living there gone, because she saw the girl in his mind. Ashley’s skin was waxen, a ghost’s right away. The gaping wound—chasmlike, the great, triangular shard ripping through muscle, intestine, and kidney (the blood and urine rising amidst the bubbles like ribbons), until finally it severed even the vertebrae and spinal cord—reminded her of a painting she’d seen once in a San Gimignano torture museum of a specific medieval form of execution: A person would be suspended upside down so there would be as much blood flowing to the brain as possible, and thus the victim would remain conscious through far more of the agony. The heretic’s or prisoner’s ankles would be bound to separate posts to shape the body into a Y. Then he would be cut in half with a two-person saw, the blade starting in the groin and slicing first through the perineum. The difference for Ashley? She had been killed in a heartbeat. Thank God.

She deserves friends
, someone said bitterly, and Reseda knew this was the girl’s father. Even now he was out there somewhere, angry and poised for a fight.

“This will be a long evening,” Holly murmured, her voice a wisp, and Reseda nodded. She had been so focused on Ashley Stearns’s imminent death that she had nearly forgotten Holly was beside her and might hear Ethan, too. Still, Reseda opened a vial with an oil composed of valerian leaves and retreatus and put a line of drops along the captain’s upper lip so he would inhale the potion as he breathed. She pressed her fingers against his temples and asked to speak to Ashley. She feared briefly that the girl’s father was going to act as a buffer spirit, a barrier, and he might have tried, but the child had heard her instantly and come forward.

I can’t talk to most breathers
, she said.

“You can talk to me,” Reseda said gently.

If Ashley’s mother had died in the crash with her, Reseda would have sent the child to her—instructed her to go home with her. But her mother had survived, and that was a part of the problem. And while her father had died that afternoon, he may have been the very reason why the girl had not gone on but had instead remained attached to the pilot; her father had stayed, and so she had stayed with him. Consequently, that afternoon Holly had researched which of the child’s grandparents were living and which ones were dead. She’d learned that Ethan’s mother had passed away from cancer last year, which meant that Ashley had known her. That woman might be the spirit guide the child needed, the escort who could take Ashley by the hand and lead her to her destined next life. So Reseda had Holly fill the air of the greenhouse with fresh, pungent ayahuasca and enticium leaves, sprinkling the plants like confetti, while she summoned the spirit of Ashley Stearns’s grandmother.

I
t might have been possible to find places to hide in the attic if they had had more time. There were boxes, some empty and some filled with old blankets and quilts or half-filled with ancient high school yearbooks and aviation manuals. Perhaps they could have buried themselves in a couple of them. But it hadn’t crossed either of the girls’ minds that whoever was in the house would think to search the attic. And so the best they could do now was to crouch together behind a tall cardboard wardrobe container near the window where they had been standing. They both understood it wouldn’t take long for them to be found.

And then? Garnet didn’t imagine she would fight, but she thought Hallie might. And as scared as she was, she believed that struggling was a bad idea. As she had told her sister earlier, the women—and whoever was now in the house—wanted them. They
needed
them. It didn’t make sense that they would hurt them. But, then, there seemed to be a whole world of things swirling just beyond their understanding. She saw in her mind the jawbone and the skull she had found in the basement in this very house, three floors below them. She wondered where her mother was now; she was no longer yelling out their names, which might mean that she also knew there were intruders in their home.

“You’re shivering,” Hallie whispered.

Garnet nodded. Her teeth were chattering, too, and her bracelet was vibrating against the tall cardboard box. She wrapped her other hand around it.

“What do we do?” her sister asked.

She saw Hallie was watching her, wide-eyed, her cheek pressed against the wardrobe. Her sister was so scared that she was panting, and just as Hallie had shushed her with a single finger a few minutes ago, now Garnet silenced her. She clenched her teeth to stop them from clicking. Then she puffed out her cheeks to convey the idea that they both should be holding their breath. They listened, aware that any moment they would hear someone or some people climbing the steps and the light in the attic would grow brighter. They would be discovered and then …

And there Garnet’s imagination failed her. She tried to reassure herself that the plant ladies couldn’t possibly want to harm them.

But the attic didn’t fill with light. Instead they heard below them what sounded like someone grunting—gasping, perhaps—and the attic went completely dark as they heard something fall to the pinewood floor, a thump so heavy that, even a floor above, they felt a slight quiver along the crude wooden planks on which they were cowering.

R
eseda knew that her own energy was starting to flag. She had felt the agony in her throat and chest and had nearly blacked out herself before Sandra Durant’s soul found its way beyond Chip Linton, and she had wound up gasping and then reduced to whimpers as she experienced Ashley Stearns’s sudden evisceration when the CRJ broke apart in the lake. She wondered how the captain had lived with it all for so long and whether the physical agony was actually worse than the psychological torment of myriad second guesses and what-ifs, of having not gone down with his ship—of having lived when so many of his passengers had died. Nevertheless, she kept searching for the girl’s grandmother, entreating the spirit to guide her young granddaughter home. Finally, there in the fog, she saw a heavyset older woman in a leopard-print bathing suit and a diaphanous beach cover-up, barefoot. The powdery white beach on which she was walking was dotted with sand dollars and shells from sea urchins, slippers, and fighting conchs. She had a whelk shell in one hand but was beckoning toward someone else with the other, smiling. She was wearing dark sunglasses because recently she had had a cataract removed from her right eye. Then she took Ashley’s small hand in hers. Ashley, it seemed, was whom she was waiting for. The child was in a bathing suit, too, a little girl’s two-piece patterned with cartoon butterflies, and she was no longer impaled on the jagged remains of a wrecked airplane. She gazed quizzically up at her grandmother, a little confused, but then she rested her head against her grandmother’s arm as they walked down the beach, the low tide lapping at the sand a dozen or so yards away, while the whitest sun Reseda had ever seen burned off the last of the early morning fog.

“V
erbena, no! No, no, no! That was a monumental mistake.”

Emily was on the floor, kneeling over the broad-shouldered stranger in the wool cap and the yellow slicker she had just attacked, and there before her—towering over her, it felt—were Anise and John. Emily was almost hyperventilating, and she wasn’t precisely sure where she had stabbed the fellow: She had seen him from the top of the back stairs no more than three or four feet away and leapt at him, trying to plunge the knife into him. And now the man was facedown and Emily could see a great streak of blood along one of the jacket shoulders.

“We were going to fetch the girls and then you,” John continued, the irritation evident in his usually avuncular voice. “Really, what in heaven’s name would possess you to assault a person like that?”

“Where’s Hallie? Where’s Garnet? What have you done with my children?” She spat the words out in a frenzy as she rose to her feet, and now she held up the knife, pointing the tip at John as if it were a fencing foil. She saw that Anise looked every bit as perturbed as the older lawyer—perhaps more so. She was wearing a parka so wet that it glistened in the beam of the flashlight. “Tell me right now or I will kill you just like I killed him,” Emily continued, motioning at the body on the floor.

Anise rubbed her eyes with her fingers, clearly exasperated and tired. “No, I don’t think you will. Especially since, thank God, you didn’t kill Alexander,” she said. And just as the realization was registering in Emily’s mind that she hadn’t recognized the powerfully built older man because of his wool cap, she felt her bare ankles being grabbed and her legs pulled out from underneath her. She lost the flashlight as she fell onto her knees, the bones thumping hard on the wooden floor, but she might have been able to hang on to the knife if John hadn’t grabbed her arm and whisked it from her fingers. Then Alexander rolled her onto her back and knelt on her chest, one of his knees pressing hard against her sternum. She barely could breathe beneath his weight.

“That’s fine, Alexander,” John said. “That’s enough. Are you badly hurt?”

“Well, I could bore you with the details of what could have been the damage to my rotator cuff,” he answered, grimacing. “But I won’t. Shoulder wounds can be nasty, so suffice to say I dodged a bullet—or, in this case, a knife. I have a bulky sweater under my raincoat, and that helped. She only got my upper arm. I’m bleeding, but mostly she knocked the wind out of me.”

“We’ll be sure to tend to your wounds,” Anise said as she crouched before Emily.

“I’ll be fine,” he said simply in response.

“Trust me, Verbena, this will all go so much easier if you just tell us where Cali and Rosemary are hiding,” John said. “Will you do that, for us—for them?”

“They’re in the attic,” Alexander said. “At least I think they are. I thought I heard them scurrying around up there when I pulled open the trapdoor.”

“I hope so. Really, I do. I hope it wasn’t just a couple of very large mice,” John muttered. “Verbena, call your girls. Tell them to come down.”

“I won’t,” she grunted. “I can’t yell with him on me anyway,” she stammered.

“If I ease up, you’ll call them?” Alexander asked.

They beamed a flashlight onto her face, and she shook her head no.

“Good Lord, what do you think we plan to do with them?” John asked. “Cook them in a stewpot?”

And so Alexander sat back on his heels so she could breathe deeply and yell, and Emily did call out to the girls. But she screamed precisely the opposite of what John and Anise desired. “Hallie, Garnet, wherever you are, stay hidden!” she screamed as loud as she could. “Don’t let them find you!”

Alexander cupped his hand over her mouth, and Emily was astonished at the fellow’s strength. “All you are doing is postponing the inevitable,” John said to her. Then he turned his gaze upon Alexander. “I think you can let her go. Really, I do. She’s not leaving. But would you mind going up to the attic and retrieving the children? Anise, you, too? Give me the knife and I’ll wait here with Verbena. This already has taken far, far too long. We have people waiting.”