“Anise. I ran into her at the coffee shop. She was getting some tea.” He gazed out the window. “On the bright side, it’s going to be another beautiful day. God, I love spring.” He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast, stood up, and continued down the hall to his office.
Chapter Fifteen
Valerian Wainscott asked only for tea and honey at the booth in the diner, waiting until after Emily had ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a diet soda to put in her small request.
“That’s all you’re having?” Emily said to the psychiatrist.
“Oh, no, not at all,” Valerian reassured her, and she reached into her handbag on the cushion beside her and pulled out a Ziploc plastic bag filled with granola. “Voilà! My lunch.”
“They don’t mind?”
The woman shrugged and smiled cherubically. “It’s homemade,” she said. Then she removed a black leather portfolio case and opened it on the table between them. On the inside front cover Emily saw a pocket with pages of handwritten notes about her husband. “There’s a lot I want to talk about,” Valerian said. “I have strong opinions about your husband and strong thoughts on how to help him.”
“Go on.” There was no doctor-patient confidentiality. Chip had told Valerian he wanted her to share with Emily whatever Valerian thought his wife should know.
“First of all, I worry that if we don’t, well, get him under control, he may hurt himself.”
“You mean again?” Emily said, seeing once more in her mind the knife in his stomach that night as he had stood at the top of the stairs.
“I mean worse than what was, in essence, an instance of especially violent cutting.”
“You’re suggesting that he might make another attempt to kill himself.”
“Yes.”
Emily sat back against the vinyl cushions and tried to focus. She reminded herself that Valerian was only verbalizing thoughts she had already had and things she and Michael Richmond had discussed. Nevertheless, the reality of her husband’s deteriorating mental state was still hard to hear. “I leave him alone with the girls as little as possible,” she murmured.
“Oh, he would never hurt the girls,” Valerian reassured her. “Never. This isn’t about that.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest he would,” she said. “I just worry that he gets so … so distracted. I just worry that one afternoon Hallie or Garnet might do something dangerous and silly—they’re only ten, after all—and Chip would be completely oblivious.”
“I see.”
“So, tell me: What do you want to do?”
“Well, remember, I am just the second opinion,” Valerian began. “Michael is still his doctor, and he seems perfectly competent in most ways.”
“Go on.”
“But your husband and I are starting to build a good rapport, too. And my sense is that I would like to admit him.”
“Admit him?”
“So we can observe him.”
Abruptly Emily understood what Valerian was telling her, and she felt as if she was on a plane and had just dropped a few thousand feet in sudden turbulence. She felt as if her whole body had lurched, and she was frightened. She heard the clatter of silver and plates and the din of conversation all around her through the thick French drapes of a theater. Everything sounded muffled and far away. “You want him institutionalized?” she asked when the idea had sunk in.
“Just temporarily. And he would have to agree to it. But all those beams that keep a person sane and functioning are about as stressed as they can get without snapping in two. And if they do snap, it won’t be pretty.”
“How long?”
“At the state hospital? I don’t know.”
“Best guess?”
“Maybe a month. Maybe less, maybe more. You both should view it as a time-out from life.”
“Then couldn’t the same effect be achieved with, I don’t know, a really restful vacation?”
“He needs treatment and observation.”
Emily was vaguely aware that the psychiatrist had opened her bag of granola, and now the woman popped a few pieces into her mouth. Her chewing reminded Emily of a rabbit.
“Have you talked to my husband about this?” she asked finally.
“No. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“What about Michael?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Can you tell me what’s involved?”
“With institutionalization?”
She nodded.
“Since it’s voluntary, it’s mostly about making sure there’s a bed. John Hardin would not even need to help us prepare committal papers.”
In her mind Emily saw her calm and gentle boss. “I keep forgetting: You know John.”
“Like a godfather, Emily. I love that man. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”
“Can I think about this?” she asked.
The waitress returned and, smiling, placed the chicken salad sandwich on the table. She was an older woman with bluish hair and large tortoiseshell eyeglasses that dwarfed her nose. She didn’t seem troubled by the idea that Valerian was eating food she had brought from home into the diner, and so Emily reflexively looked at the badge on her smock dress. Maggie. So, the waitress wasn’t one of them. Emily was surprised.
“Of course you can think about it,” the psychiatrist said after Maggie had left them alone. “And I will respect whatever decision you make. Just …”
“Just what?”
She pushed her little bag of granola aside and put her hands on the table, palms open and up. “Give me your hands,” she said to Emily, and—a little reluctantly at first—Emily did. Then Valerian grasped them, gently massaging Emily’s fingers with her thumbs. “I just worry about you. All of us do. We all just worry about you so, so much.”
The cat watched the birds here in New Hampshire, making no distinctions between the ones that she’d stalked in Pennsylvania and the ones that seemed to be everywhere in this new world. There were more of them now that the snow was gone and the days were growing long. She was finding the field grass beyond the greenhouse a considerably better place to stalk them than the manicured lawns around her previous home, even though it was nowhere near as tall as it would be in another month. Unlike other cats, she felt no need to share the remains of her kills with the four people around her. She needed their approval in some ways, but she tended to eat the birds she caught wherever she found them. Same with the field mice and moles.
Likewise, she watched the insects, and was particularly fascinated by the ants that would swarm upon the small pieces of the breads and confections that the people she didn’t know brought into this house. She made no connection between the people and the way some of those foods seemed to poison the ants; that sort of cause-and-effect leap was beyond her.
Among the humans whom she did not view as part of her family but was starting to recognize, there was one with gray hair that was long and thick, and who seemed to bring more food into the house than any of the other strangers. Today she had come by again when only the man was home. It was early in the afternoon, and the girls and their mother had disappeared, as they tended to most days, and the father was working around the first floor of the house. The woman had knelt down in the front hallway and made kissing sounds, and so Desdemona had walked over to her while the father went to retrieve something from the kitchen. She’d pressed her head into the woman’s fingers and the palm of her hand, enjoying the way this individual knew precisely how to rub her ears and scratch her neck. She’d purred.
Then the woman had opened a plastic bag and pulled out a mouse by its tail. It was already dead, and for a moment Desdemona had eyed it carefully. No human had ever given her an animal before. And there was a scent to it that she didn’t recognize. But a mouse was a mouse, and it was fresh. And so she took it and raced into the corner of the den nearest the woodstove. There she devoured every bit of it, despite its unfamiliar but not unappealing flavor, even the tail and the liver and
the head.
Michael Richmond hadn’t known Valerian Wainscott well before their meeting that afternoon at his office in Littleton, but their paths had crossed at a pair of conferences and once they had been at a cocktail party together. That was three years ago. Richmond had been struck by her name the moment they’d met, since, he presumed, it signaled that she was a part of that bizarre cult of herbalists centered in Bethel. But she seemed almost too much of a flake to be one of them; moreover, she worked at the state psychiatric hospital. She was a lovely young woman whom he recalled nibbling on a homemade cupcake during a lecture in one conference and whose questions betrayed a deep distaste for most pharmacological interventions in the other—which, he supposed, made her a very rare bird at the hospital. Given how many beds were filled with the mentally ill who were violent or delusional or both, it seemed inconceivable that some days she wouldn’t want to pass out risperidone and valproate like M&M’s on Halloween. The fact was, chamomile tea wasn’t going to sedate a raging schizophrenic.
The two other women Richmond had met who he was convinced were part of the cult were a pair of real estate agents, and they seemed considerably more focused and intense than Valerian. One of them was so preternaturally composed that she was a little intimidating. He had met the two when he’d been searching for a small home near the ski resort. After spending a day looking at property with the composed one, he’d decided to work with another agency—and, eventually, through that firm had found an A-frame with a magnificent view of Cannon Mountain. He couldn’t recall the original real estate agent’s name now, but she had explained to him that it was some rare and exotic flower. Later people would tell him about the strange cult—a coven, they had said, only half-kidding—and he would realize that he had met one of its members.
Well, Dr. Valerian Wainscott was in all likelihood a member, too.
And now she wanted to commit Chip Linton—or, to be precise, recommend to Chip that he commit himself. And while that notion alone had infuriated Michael, he had to admit that he was also annoyed with her presumption that she was better trained than he was to care for “a middle-aged male cutter” like Chip Linton.
“You make it sound like that’s a type,” he had told her, incapable of hiding his incredulity.
“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 assured 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 class, 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 institutionalized. 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 basement 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 glass jar in his hands with what looked like soapy water. “Hello, 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 basement. 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 basement.”
“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 circumstances would she leave him alone with their daughters.
Reseda thought that Sage Messner’s green
house—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 shins, 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.”
The Night Strangers Page 29