The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  You pinpoint Hewitt Dunmore’s address in St. Johnsbury on Map-Quest and see you can drive there via the interstate in thirty-five minutes—assuming you don’t hit a moose. You don’t really worry about hitting a moose; you haven’t even seen one since you moved here. But those warning signs on the highway make you smile. You consider phoning Hewitt before leaving your house but in the end decide against it; you know he will try to dissuade you from coming. He may even insist that he doesn’t want to see you. But the girls—and that friend of theirs, Molly, who is joining them later today—don’t climb off the school bus until just about three in the afternoon. And it’s only a half hour and change that separates your house from Hewitt’s, so you could spend a good forty-five minutes with him before having to turn around. Assuming, of course, that he’s home. Since you haven’t called ahead, there’s no guarantee, and this may very well be a waste of an hour and a quarter.

  Still, you don’t imagine that he travels all that much, and you have a sense he will be there. And when you coast to a stop on a St. Johnsbury street with the unpromising name of Almshouse Road, the modest house at the address where he lives has a tired-looking minivan—covered with end-of-winter muck, like most cars around here this time of the year—parked in the driveway. The house is a Cape in dire need of scraping and painting, and the roof looks a little ragged, but you like the remnants of red that peel from the clapboards. The color reminds you of a barn.

  There isn’t a doorbell, and so you remove your glove before you rap on the wood: You expect the sound will be sharper and more likely to carry this way. Sure enough, a moment after you knock, a small man with bloodhound jowls and a gray bristle haircut opens the door, leaning heavily on a cane, and stares out at you through eyeglasses thick as a jelly jar. He is wearing a tattered cardigan the color of coral and a string tie over a blue oxford shirt. He looks like a cantankerous professor from a small, rural college. He is not what you expected, but, since he did not attend the closing on the house, you honestly weren’t sure what to expect. Emily had found him ornery on the telephone, but that’s really all you know.

  “Yes?”

  You extend the hand on which you are not wearing a glove. “I’m Chip Linton. My wife and I are the ones who—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” he says, taking your hand and cutting you off. “You’re the ones who bought my parents’ house.”

  You note in your mind how he altered slightly how you would have finished that sentence. You would have referred to it as his house; he called it his parents’. You wonder if this distinction means anything.

  “Come in, come in,” he says, his voice resigned. “No sense in standing outside in the doorway.”

  He takes your coat and tosses it on a coatrack behind the front door as you untie your boots, and then he limps into the kitchen, sitting you down in a heavy wooden armchair before a mahogany table that is perfectly round and rather substantial. The chair is one of four. The appliances are old but spotless, the white on the refrigerator showing a little dark wear only around the handle. The floor has linoleum diamonds, and the cabinets look to be made of cherry.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he says, sitting across from you and folding his hands on the tabletop. In another room there is a radio playing classical music.

  “Well, your parents’ house is proving to be a bit of a mystery to me,” you respond, smiling as you speak. You hadn’t planned on getting to the matter at hand quite so quickly, but he hasn’t offered you coffee or tea and has come right to the point: Why are you here?

  “How so?” he says evenly.

  “Well, let’s see. There are the items you left behind.”

  “That old sewing machine? I told your wife to keep it. Same with the sap buckets and all them bobbins. Or you can cart ’em off to the dump. Makes no difference to me.”

  “There’s a very nice brass door knocker. You could use a door knocker.”

  “I heard you rapping just fine, thank you very much.”

  You nod. For the first time you have gotten a real taste of his accent. When he said fine, you heard more than a hint of an o and a second syllable: fo-ine. “There were three other items that were real, well, UFOs.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Unidentified flying objects.”

  “That’s right. You’re a pilot.”

  “Used to be.”

  “You ever see any UFOs?”

  “I did not.”

  “Believe in them?”

  “No.”

  “You should. This universe is a very strange place.”

  “You know this from personal experience?”

  He raises the caterpillars that pass for eyebrows. “So, your new home,” he says, ignoring your question. “I would not be surprised by anything at all my mother or my father left behind in that house. As you must know by now, my mother was nothing if not eccentric. And she was mighty ill toward the end.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Huh. I woulda thought she was still a source of gossip up in Bethel.”

  “Rest assured, she isn’t.”

  Outside Hewitt’s door, a town sand truck rumbles by, and the two of you sit and listen. The storm windows rattle.

  “She was once,” he says. “That’s for sure.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “People are just built the way they’re built.”

  You point at a dusty photo on a wall of dusty photos at the edge of the kitchen. It’s a teenage boy holding a fishing pole and a brown trout that must be a foot and a half long. “Is that you or your brother?” you ask.

  “That would be Sawyer.”

  “Did your mom become more eccentric after he died?”

  “Ayup. I suppose she did.”

  “How?”

  “Losing a son cannot be easy on any mother.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Nope.”

  This is starting to feel to you like an interrogation, and you don’t like that. But you don’t seem to be getting anywhere with your questions. And so you change your tactics. “I like this little city—St. Johnsbury.” You are careful not to add a question to the statement, hoping he will offer something back without a prompt. But he just sits back in his chair, pulling his folded hands off the table and into his lap, and stares at you with a face that is absolutely unreadable. You have the sense that, if this becomes a contest to see who can remain silent the longest, you won’t have a chance in hell. Suddenly you are aware of how hot he keeps this house, and you look back into the living room and notice for the first time a cast-iron woodstove the size of a dryer. Atop is a black kettle steamer shaped like a sleeping cat. The place seems to be filled with these unexpected, oddly domestic touches. You are pretty sure he is not married now; you wonder if he was once.

  “There are a few things in your parents’ house that I’m hoping you can explain to me,” you tell him finally, when the quiet has become interminable.

  “You know, I haven’t been inside there in years.”

  “I didn’t know that, either.”

  “Ayup.”

  “Can you tell me about the door in the basement?”

  “You mean the door to the basement? The one in the kitchen? Or the wheelbarrow ramp?”

  “Neither. I meant that piece of barnboard with the thirty-nine carriage bolts that goes to nowhere.”

  He arcs his eyebrows and actually chuckles the tiniest bit. “Thirty-nine, eh?”

  “Yes. Thirty-nine.”

  “Seems a mite excessive. I just guess my father was a tad eccentric, too.”

  “What was it? Why did he seal it up? Please?”

  You hadn’t meant for that last word to have such a pleading quality to it; there was an unmistakable tenor of begging to your tone. But, much to your surprise, it seems to have an effect on Hewitt Dunmore. The moment he starts to speak, you realize he is about to say more than he has the whole time you have been with him in this overheated kitche
n. He is finally going to tell you a story.

  “It was a coal chute. But hasn’t been that in years. The way my father explained it, Mother had gotten a little paranoid. Start of her Alzheimer’s, maybe. She was afraid of someone sneaking in through the chute. You know, they’d climb through the latticework under the porch, and the next thing you know, they’re inside the house. So, as I understand it, my father put a wooden beam across the door and thought, That was that. Didn’t do at all, not in my mother’s eyes. Mother wanted more. Now, usually my father was very good with her when she got like that. Even before the Alzheimer’s, she could be a bit difficult. And she was always like a dog with a bone. Always. Just wouldn’t let something go. So, you might say that my father was making a statement with a wall of two-by-fours and all those carriage bolts. Weren’t no intruder going to get into the house that way, thank you very much.” When he is done, he shakes his head and grins. Then: “Thirty-nine, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guess Father didn’t have a lot to do that day.” He gives you a small smile.

  “Tell me, is that how your mother passed away? Alzheimer’s?”

  “Ayup.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He pulls his hands from his lap and, elbows at his sides, raises his hands, palms up—a universal gesture for resignation. Then he folds his arms across his chest.

  “I think, in her paranoia, she left behind some other things,” you continue.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “She seemed to have hidden things.”

  “That would be Mother. ’Specially toward the end.”

  “We found a knife under a heating grate. A very sharp carving knife.”

  He shakes his head. “Oh, I am sorry about that. You have small children, as I recall.”

  “We do.”

  “They weren’t hurt, were they?”

  “No. Emily—my wife—found it.”

  “I heard after the closing that your girls are twins. My lawyer told me. I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes. Fraternal. Not identical.”

  “I was a twin.”

  “I know.”

  He sighs. He seems about to say something more but manages to restrain himself.

  “There’s more,” you tell him finally. “More things.”

  “Go on.”

  “One of my girls came across a disposable cigarette lighter in the house.”

  “A lighter? Huh. Well, I doubt that was Mother. A workman, maybe.”

  “And there was a crowbar and an ax.”

  “Hidden, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I would guess we can pin those items on Mother and on her Alzheimer’s. She musta been mighty scared.”

  “Was she afraid of anyone in particular?”

  “Just burglars,” he answers simply, though he draws the word out into three syllables: bur-ga-lers.

  “Burglars.”

  “Ayup.”

  “So she hid weapons so she could defend herself.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Did your father know?”

  “About the weapons? Doubt it. He wouldn’t have stood for it. Would have put those sorts of items away where they belonged.”

  You consider whether to tell him about the bones. But you pause because you haven’t even mentioned them to Emily. And you’re not sure who Hewitt would tell. But you don’t know when you will have an opportunity like this again. “I broke the door down,” you begin, but then you catch yourself. “Well, I took the door down.”

  “The basement door with all them carriage bolts.”

  “Yes. I took it down, and I found bones in there. In the dirt.”

  He sits forward, alert for the first time. “From what sort of animal?”

  “Human.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Some I am sure are digits from fingers. One is clearly a human arm.”

  “And you are sure of this because you went to medical school when you weren’t flying airplanes?”

  This was, you like to believe, merely a harmless dig—he meant nothing especially hurtful. And you’re honestly not sure why it seems to cut so deep. “I have some education,” you answer simply.

  He shakes his head. “I hate to think of the animal that must have dug its way into that corner and then couldn’t dig its way back out. Very, very sad.”

  “You really believe the bones belong to, I don’t know, a dog?”

  “Or a feral cat. Or a fox.”

  “The bones are too big.”

  “Even those little ones you think are finger bones? You’re one hundred percent sure of that?”

  “Not one hundred percent, no.”

  “You show them to a doctor or professor? I used to work at the school here in town. St. Johnsbury Academy. I managed the physical plant. You want, you bring me them bones and I can show them to a teacher there. How’s that sound?”

  It is an interesting idea. “Can I think about it?”

  “ ’Course you can. I don’t expect I’m going anywhere.”

  “That’s a very compelling offer. One thing …”

  “Go on.”

  “I haven’t told my wife about the bones. I don’t want to scare her.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Thank you for understanding.”

  He shrugs. “Are people making a big deal out of the greenhouse on the property?”

  “My girls. They seem to love it.”

  “I meant the women.”

  “Not really. There was some talk the other night when Emily and I were at a dinner party. But I think my children have already claimed it as a playhouse.”

  “Well, that’s good. I think you will be much better-off if you keep it a playhouse. My mother … Oh, never mind about my mother.”

  “No, tell me. I’d like to know.”

  “Nothing to say. You just keep that greenhouse for the girls—the twins. You just keep them twins safe.”

  “As their father, I try. Is there anything specific I should be worried about?” you ask, recalling the sad fact that his twin brother took his own life.

  “No. No, I’m just a morbid old man,” he says, and he uses the armrests on the chair to push himself to his feet. You remind him that he is only a decade and a half your senior and really not an old man at all, but you can tell by the way he is standing—pressing both hands on the table for support—that your visit is over. A few moments later, as you are outside on his front steps and putting your gloves back on, you hear him speaking in the living room. You are barely out the door and already he has picked up the telephone and called someone. You wonder what this means—whether you have merely embarrassed yourself or whether there will be consequences for revealing what you found behind that door in the basement.

  Among Chip and Emily’s acquaintances in West Chester was an FBI agent who had retired early and was now a security consultant. His name was Steve Hopper. At a holiday cocktail party at a mutual friend’s house their last December in Pennsylvania, Emily had seen Chip and Steve and a woman she didn’t know chatting near the fireplace, and when she joined them the woman was telling Chip, “I just think it’s unbelievable you didn’t panic. I mean, weren’t you scared to death? I would have been shrieking bloody murder.”

  The woman clearly had had way too much to drink; her words were slurred, and no sober individual would have asked her husband if he had been terrified. Few sober people would even have been willing to bring up the doomed aircraft.

  But Chip seemed to view this conversation as merely one more element to the cross he believed he was destined to shoulder. He was nodding, formulating a response, when Steve jumped in.

  “I would wager my friend here was too busy focusing to be frightened,” he said. “My money is that bravery never entered into the equation. That right, Chip? Good CRM?”

  Emily knew that CRM stood for crew resource management, and she wasn’t all that surprised that Steve knew, too; he seemed to k
now all sorts of arcane trivia. But this woman with them couldn’t possibly know, and Emily wondered if she would ask. She was swaying slightly, and it was probably a good thing that her glass was only half full; otherwise she would have sloshed some of the alcohol on either Chip or Steve.

  “Well,” Chip said, looking first at Steve and then at this other woman and then at her, “there was a lot to do and not very much time. Mostly Amy and I were—”

  “Who’s Amy?” the woman asked.

  “She was my copilot.”

  “She must have been peeing in her pants.”

  “No, I don’t think she was.”

  “So you really weren’t scared?” the woman asked, circling back to her original question.

  “No,” Chip said. “I think there were two things filling up that part of my brain that might otherwise have been wanting—to use your term—to shriek bloody murder. The first, just like my friend Steve here said, was focus. Amy and I were pretty focused on the tasks at hand.”

  “And the second?”

  Emily watched her husband stare down at the flames in the fireplace for a moment. “I always thought I could do it,” he said finally. “I’d seen the Airbus land in the Hudson. I saw in my mind the CRJ landing on Lake Champlain in just the same way.”

  The woman was about to say something more, but Steve took her by the elbow, said jovially that he wanted to freshen up both of their drinks, and then led the two of them away from her husband.

  On the way home from St. Johnsbury, you race into the supermarket because you recall you don’t have after-school snacks in the refrigerator for the girls. And since Molly is with them, you want to be sure you have something special. In minutes you have rounded up a six-pack of juice boxes, two pints of ice cream, apples, and peanut butter. In the parking lot on your way out, as you are opening the front door to your car, you run into Anise. She has pulled into the space right beside yours.

  “Chip, hi,” she says, climbing out of her pickup with a grocery list and a chaotic raft of coupons in her hand.

  “No time,” you tell her, smiling. “I have to race up the hill and beat the school bus.”