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.
It 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.
Reseda 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.
“Verbena, 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 answer
ed, 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.”
“And it has been a long wait,” said Anise, and Emily understood that the woman was speaking of something entirely different from what John Hardin had meant.
But the partner in her law firm smiled at Anise’s remark and added, “Indeed, it has.” Then he looked straight into Emily’s eyes and told her, “We’ve been waiting since Sawyer Dunmore died. Now: Let’s go get the girls from the attic. Shall we?”
There is nothing you would not do for your daughter. Nothing.
Or is it daughters? You find yourself watching the CRJ descend toward Lake Champlain, but the view is not from the flight deck, it’s from one of the passenger cabin windows toward the left rear of the aircraft. Meanwhile, you struggle with this one strangely unanswerable but profoundly important question: Where on the aircraft is your daughter? Or, again, daughters? You see in your mind the round face and blond spit curls of one girl, but shouldn’t there be a second child? Or (and here the mind feels truly unmoored) a third? Briefly you envision a girl with red hair, but the image grows hazy fast. And then it is gone. She’s gone.
The seat beside you is empty, but you are absolutely certain that your daughter—the blond girl—was there just a moment ago. She was in that window seat. Her Dora the Explorer backpack is still nearby, one of its straps and a nylon handle peering out from underneath the seat ahead of you. But that little girl? Gone. You scan the rows of people in the seats before you, but there is absolutely no sign of her. There is absolutely no sign of any children at all.
At the very least, you must find the child with the blond hair before the plane belly flops into the lake and—as somehow you know it will—breaks apart. You must, because you love her and she needs you and there is no more powerful, more poignant cord. But then the plane is down and for the barest of seconds seems to be skimming along the surface of the lake. This may, in the end, turn out all right. Suddenly, however, the aircraft plows into a surface as solid as a medieval castle wall and is stood upright on its nose, and your head is whipped into the seat before you and then, as the fuselage crashes back into the water, into the collapsing ceiling. Or is it the floor? You have no idea. You know only that the cabin has come alive with the sounds of screaming and ripping metal, and already you can smell the lake water that is rolling like a tsunami down the aisle, and—this doesn’t seem possible, this can’t possibly have happened—a metal pike has pierced your skull like an arrow. You run the fingers of your right hand over the shard, and they come away bloodied. And then you try to take a breath, but already the water is over your mouth and nose and you start to gag.
So you struggle, you thrash, even as you grow weak, even as the water is flooding your nose and you are aware that you will never survive your head wound. You try to rip the seat belt in half because something has dented the metal buckle and now it won’t open. And somewhere very far away someone is calling your name. Someone closer is, too.
But, still, you have no idea what happened to your daughter. Or those other girls. Twins? Yes, twins. You know for sure only one thing: Your daughter didn’t deserve this, and the realization has you enraged. She didn’t deserve to die this way. She deserved more than eight years. She deserved a lifetime. She deserved friends.
And so, once again, you lash out, even though it is futile, even though there is absolutely nothing that can be done.
But the anger is all and so you fight.
Holly tried holding down the captain’s left arm and shoulder and Reseda his right, but he was thrashing violently—great, convulsive heaves—and the greenhouse was filled with Ethan Stearns’s rage as he died once more in the warm August water of Lake Champlain.
“Go, you have people waiting for you!” Reseda tried to reassure him, the words rushed and, she knew, slightly fearful. He would have none of it. “She’s gone. Your daughter is gone. You can’t stay. You shouldn’t stay, your daughter is waiting—” she said, and she would have continued, Your daughter has gone home, she has gone to her grandmother, she has gone where she belongs and is happy, but she never got to finish the sentence. He broke free and slammed the back of his hand hard into the side of her face and her ears registered the hollow bang of his knuckles on the bones in her cheek, and she was reeling, falling into a table beside her, toppling the plants, one of the clay pots shattering and another spilling its dirt and the small, pink hysterium that was just starting to bloom. From the floor she saw him sitting up and Holly desperately trying to push him back down, but her ears were ringing from the blow and it was as if she were suddenly deaf or watching a movie with the sound off. Then he was on his feet, standing, and, with more strength than she had imagined he had, he was lifting Holly under her arms and hurling her into the glass wall, shattering it into thousands of pieces. Reseda pulled herself off the ground and tried to grab him, but already he was running toward the greenhouse entrance, angrily toppling Baphomet as he wheeled among the statuary and tables, one of the statue’s horns breaking off when it crashed to the dirt. He grabbed something on his way out, but she couldn’t see what it was. She crawled like a crab to Holly and found the woman’s hands and arms were bleeding where reflexively she had tried to shield her head from the glass. The rain and cold air whipped inside and stung the side of her face. Holly was breathing rapidly, and she sat upright and stammered, “He was out like a light, wasn’t he? I mean, where did that come from? I thought he was practically paralyzed.”
Reseda examined the woman’s wounds. They were bloody, but they weren’t deep. “He was,” she said, aware that her own words sounded slightly garbled because it hurt so much to speak. Her face still smarted where he had struck her. “But it wore off. It’s been a long night. There were three of them.”
“Can you stop him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Go,” Holly insisted, “go!” She rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and added, “I think he took my bag.”
And Reseda understood instantly what the captain had grabbed on his way out—and why. “Call Emily right now!” she s
aid. “Tell them to leave the house right this second.” Then she stood, but already she heard a vehicle engine starting and outside she saw its headlights illuminating the trees. A second later, Chip was spinning Holly’s car into reverse, the trees went dark, and he was gone.
Chapter Twenty
Emily knew the communal greenhouse from those afternoons that spring when she had picked up the twins there after school—when, ostensibly, they had been learning about plants and herbs with some of the women at Sage Messner’s. But she had never been inside it at night and she had never seen it so crowded: In her mind, it was always just her girls and two or three older women, and the skies high above the glass ceiling were likely to be blue.