The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  He shook his head and extended his hands, palms up, signaling his absolute befuddlement. “And there’s no cell coverage here—at least I have none,” he said.

  “Yeah, I don’t, either,” Michael told him. “What happened?”

  “I heard a beep and then got a mass of flashing warning lights on the dashboard. One for the ABS system, one for the battery, one for the pressure in the tires. I pulled over to turn off the car and turn it back on, hoping it was just some computer glitch that needed a restart. Nope. Now the car won’t even turn over. When I looked under the hood, I saw nothing obviously amiss.”

  “Where do you live?” Michael asked. “At the very least I can give you a ride back to Franconia. Maybe something will be open there. Or you can call someone from my house. I only live about two miles up this road.”

  “If it comes to that, I’ll certainly hitch a ride. Thanks a bunch. But would you mind first seeing if you can get it started? It would save us both a lot of trouble.”

  Michael grinned. “My auto mechanic training begins and ends with adding wiper fluid. Sorry. You probably know a hell of a lot more about what goes on underneath the hood of a car than I do.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll have better luck turning it over,” the man said, and he handed Michael the keys. “Would you mind trying? Maybe something will catch.”

  “And I thought I was an optimist,” Michael said. “Get in with me and we’ll see what happens. Is the door unlocked?”

  “It is,” the fellow said. Then: “I think I have some gloves in the front seat. My fingers are a little numb from the cold.” And already he was racing around the front of the car and escaping the rain in the passenger seat, where he retrieved his gloves. Michael slid in behind the steering wheel, amazed at how already the rain had soaked through his coat and sweater and shirt. He could feel the wetness against his back when he leaned against the seat in the car.

  “I’m Michael,” he said as he settled in.

  “John,” the older man said. “Pleasure to meet you.” Then he added, “Excuse the blankets on the seats. My wife and I have two very big dogs at home, and sometimes they travel with me.”

  Michael looked down now and realized that, indeed, both the passenger and driver’s seats were covered by old, badly stained blankets. “Well, here goes,” he murmured. And almost out of intellectual curiosity, he turned the key in the ignition. He tried twice, and both times the engine made almost no noise. Once he thought he might have heard a dim clicking somewhere under the hood, but otherwise there wasn’t even a gurgle from the engine.

  He turned to the older gentleman, shaking his head, his eyebrows raised, and saw him smile. But it was an odd grin, the smile Michael had seen before on patients he’d visited at the state psychiatric hospital—a smile unconnected to normal stimuli or responses. It was a little manic and disturbing. “I tried,” he said sheepishly. “I was—”

  He never finished the sentence. He was aware of the fellow’s right arm rising up out of nowhere, and even in the dark of the car he saw the long, wide blade of the knife. But it all happened so fast. One second he was telling him that, as he had expected, he had no magic touch that was going to start the engine. The next? Vicious, stinging pain and he knew he was going to die. He hadn’t even had time to raise an arm in defense. The knife hacked deep and far into his neck, not once, not twice, but three times, and it felt like his throat was full of fluid, a melting glacier in his esophagus. Intellectually he understood that his carotid artery had been slashed wide open on that first, violent pass and he was going to bleed to death within moments. Exsanguination was the medical term. Odd that in these last seconds of life he should think of that. Or, as his head was all but decapitated and balanced briefly on his shoulder before his chin toppled forward against his jacket, the colloquial term: Bleeding out. Bleeeding … out.

  Then, he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

  When it was done, John Hardin took a washcloth from a pocket of his raincoat and wiped the blood off the window beside the driver’s seat, and then dabbed at the steering wheel a little delicately. He wrapped the body in the blanket on which it was sitting, pulling the corners up and over the lolling skull and the limp arms. He was a strong man, but it still took enormous effort to drag the corpse from the driver’s bucket seat to the passenger’s—he had to stand on the pavement in the rain and pull—and one of the psychiatrist’s hands fell from the blanket and got blood on the cushion. He used the washcloth to clean that, too. Clary hated bloodstains. He couldn’t blame her. They both liked a tidy house and tidy cars.

  When he was done, he turned off the blinking hazard lights on the psychiatrist’s vehicle, locked the door, and then climbed back into the driver’s seat of his hybrid. He reached under the steering wheel and aimed his flashlight at the fuse box. Before leaving home he had taped small, bright dots of yellow paper beside the fuses for the fuel pump and the ignition so he could spot them easily. Now he pressed the fuses back into place and started the vehicle. As he did, a tremendous milk tanker barreled up the road, seemingly out of nowhere, and he spotted its lights at the very last moment. The trucker slammed on his horn, veered into the other lane, and continued on. Had he pulled out a split second earlier, the tanker probably would have killed him and totaled the car. And that, John thought, would have done no one any good. No one any good at all. So he took a breath to compose himself, though he really hadn’t lost his composure until he had almost pulled out without looking. Then he flipped on the car’s radio to the local public radio affiliate—the station played jazz this time of the night, which he liked—and started home. He glanced back one time at the psychiatrist’s vehicle through the rain, but, without its lights on, it grew invisible quickly. The road curved to the left, and the empty car disappeared into the night.

  Reseda returned to the real estate office after showing a pair of married bond traders intent on early retirement what they thought might be the bed-and-breakfast of their dreams. The old inn had been for sale for nearly eighteen months, and the asking price was a fraction of what it had been when the widower first put it on the market. But Reseda ended up talking the traders out of the property. It was clear to her that the couple wouldn’t be happy in this backwater corner of New Hampshire. Neither was the sort who was capable of aimlessly chatting up weekend guests about the foliage, maple syrup, or the perils of mud season. They still needed the frenetic chaos of the trading floor, even if they thought they were burned out.

  When she arrived, Holly was waiting for her with a stack of pages from the Internet listing the names of the people who had died on Flight 1611, and any demographic information she could glean from news articles.

  “Who do you think it is?” Reseda asked as she sat at her desk and began leafing through the papers.

  “I have no idea. I thought about what you told me the girl had said,” she answered, “and there are some distinct possibilities. But there were still thirty-nine fatalities.”

  “That’s how many died? Thirty-nine?”

  Holly nodded.

  “Well, I would say it’s this child,” Reseda said after a moment, touching the name Ashley Stearns with the tip of her pen, “because Rosemary was quite sure that, when he was talking to himself, he was imagining a girl. He was, in fact, playing with one of her and her sister’s dolls.”

  “But a little girl couldn’t be that controlling. Could she?”

  Reseda thought about this. “If Ashley is with the captain, she’s probably not alone.”

  “I wish we knew how they had died in the crash. After all, we know where the captain is in pain.”

  She smiled approvingly at Holly. If what she did demanded an apprentice, she would want Holly to be hers.

  Hallie watched Anise intently as the woman turned her face up into the April sun, her eyes closed and her hands clasped behind her. The light was raining down upon her like a shower. With her halo of gray hair and a thin smile on her face, she looked, Hallie thought, like a
n angel. She was standing toward the western wall of the Lintons’ greenhouse and staring up at the western ceiling. At her feet were three supermarket cartons filled with seedlings (most from either her greenhouse or Ginger Jackson’s), a forty-pound bag of potting soil, and a plastic watering can she had filled from the outdoor spigot near the house’s wheelbarrow ramp. The seedlings, according to Anise, were among the more common herbs and flowers—not the exotic ones that Hallie had never heard of before they moved to Bethel. The cartons were filled with basil, parsley, peppermint, sage, and thyme, but she wouldn’t have been able to say which seedlings were which without the small Popsicle-stick signs that had been speared into the dirt.

  Today was the warmest the greenhouse had been since they moved here, two months ago. Hallie and her sister were wearing only hooded sweatshirts over their T-shirts, and Hallie felt she would have been comfortable in here even without the hoodie. They had been picked up after school by Anise and brought home so they could start setting up their very own greenhouse. Once more, instead of doing homework or attending a dance class or having a music lesson, the girls were going to be gardening. Their mother would be at the office for another two hours. Meanwhile, their father had finally finished the dining room, the living room, and the front hallway, and this afternoon he had gone to the hardware store and the lumberyard. He had been nosing around those back stairs behind the kitchen—wondering what, if anything, he should do about them—and decided he wanted to replace some of the rotting steps and try to add a handrail.

  “It’s not polite to stare, Rosemary,” the woman said, emerging abruptly from her reverie. She was smiling at the girl, but still Hallie felt scolded, and so she quickly formulated her defense.

  “Oh, I wasn’t staring,” she said, though she was well aware that she had been. “But I did think you looked pretty in the sunlight, Anise,” she added. She sounded in her head like a kiss-ass, a term she had learned the night before on a TV show, but she was confident that Anise wouldn’t see through her. Reseda would; Reseda seemed to know precisely what a person was thinking. Hallie had figured out that, when she was around Reseda, she should keep her mind as blank as possible or she should tell the absolute truth. But Anise? She wasn’t as bright. Or, maybe, she wasn’t as (to use the word she had overheard Clary once use) gifted.

  And, indeed, Anise smiled at her. Then the woman put her hands on her hips in a businesslike fashion and surveyed the tables and the toys in the greenhouse. “First of all, a greenhouse is no place for a lot of dolls,” she said. She lifted one of the American Girl dolls roughly by its ankle and started toward the greenhouse door. Garnet had been kneeling before one of the cartons, peering in at the rows of plants there in their tiny plastic pots, but she was instantly on her feet when she saw Anise treating the doll so roughly. She pulled the doll from the woman’s hand and held it against her chest as if it were an actual infant.

  “Cali, really. It’s a doll,” Anise scolded her. “You are ten years old. Isn’t it time to—forgive me—stop thinking like a child and reasoning like a child? Isn’t it about time you put aside your childish ways?”

  Hallie was pretty sure the quote came from the Bible, but she couldn’t have begun to explain the context or the meaning or why Anise had decided to cite it. She had a vague sense that the woman was using it ironically: Anise had meant what she said, but quoting the Bible was almost a joke to her.

  “I like that doll,” Garnet said. “I like all my dolls.”

  “You’re too old—”

  “I’m not too old! I’m ten!” She motioned at Hallie with her hand. “We’re ten!”

  “It’s okay,” Hallie said, hoping to calm her sister. “We’ll bring the dolls inside and put them back in the den. They probably shouldn’t be out here in the greenhouse anyway. I’ll take a couple and you take a couple. Anise, is that okay? We’ll bring them to the den or even upstairs to our bedrooms, and it will just take a minute. Cali and I will—”

  “And I’m not Cali! I’m Garnet! I don’t want to be Cali!” Suddenly she was shouting, and Hallie could see from the corner of her eye that Anise was more intrigued than angered by the outburst. She seemed to be studying the two of them, almost curious. She had no intention of jumping in as a grown-up.

  “Okay, you’re Garnet. Fine. Not a big deal,” Hallie reassured her sister, and Garnet seemed to calm down. They would each take an armful of dolls, and then they would each take an armful of the dolls’ furniture. In two trips they would have cleared the greenhouse of what Anise considered the childish things. “Anise, we’ll be right back, okay?” Hallie said.

  Anise nodded, and Hallie turned back to her sister, expecting to see her rounding up more of their toys. But she wasn’t, she was just standing there, her gaze stonelike, and Hallie knew instantly that the girl was in the midst of a seizure. Her eyes were open but absolutely oblivious to the world they were taking in. She was standing perfectly still, holding the American Girl doll named Addy in her arms; she might have been mistaken for a wax model of Garnet Linton, except for the reality that Hallie could see her sister breathing slowly and evenly.

  “Garnet?” she said, but only because she felt she had to say something. She knew her sister wouldn’t respond. “Garnet?”

  And, just as she expected, her sister didn’t say a word. And so Hallie gently removed the doll from her arms and took Garnet’s hands in hers. Then she sat her sister down on the ground where she was, the dry dirt warm, and knelt beside her.

  “What is she doing?” Anise asked. The woman was towering over the twins, and Hallie couldn’t tell what to make of her tone.

  “She’s not doing anything,” she answered. “At least nothing on purpose. But she has these seizures. It’s a brain thing.”

  “An illness?”

  “Sort of. I don’t understand it really. But my mom and dad have tried to explain it to me. It has something to do with how the synapses fire in her brain. Sometimes they just fire like crazy all at once, and it’s like when a computer freezes.”

  “And you know what a synapse is, Rosemary?”

  “No, not really. All I know is that it has something to do with the way the nerves communicate and the brain sends messages to the body.”

  “And her brain has … a problem?”

  “It’s not a problem. It’s just how she is.”

  “You likened it to when a computer freezes. I’d say that constitutes a problem.”

  “She hasn’t had one in a really long time.”

  “Interesting.”

  Hallie looked up at Anise, annoyed that this was how the woman was going to respond. Hallie knew there was nothing to be done and that eventually Garnet would come out of it. She knew that her sister wouldn’t stop breathing and her heart wouldn’t stop beating. But whether it would be ten minutes or an hour until she was back was always a mystery, and so she hoped her dad would return any second now from the hardware store. Meanwhile, the idea that this grown-up who’d never before seen one of her sister’s seizures wasn’t fretting—not insisting that they call 9-1-1 or leave right away for the hospital—was disappointing. No, it was more than that: It was irritating. Weren’t these plant ladies supposed to care about her and her sister? Weren’t they supposed to be freakishly motherly and doting?

  “She’s going to be fine, you know,” she said to Anise, unable to mask the disgust in her voice.

  “This happens with some frequency?” Anise asked.

  “I told you: No. This is only the third time it’s happened here in New Hampshire.”

  “Three times in two months?”

  “They’re usually not that common.”

  “And she takes … pills?” the woman asked, the word pills spoken as if it were an obscenity.

  “Yes. But they’re not perfect.”

  “Pills never are.”

  Her mother had made a joke a week earlier about how some of the women here were not especially enamored of modern medicine, and now Hallie understood what she’d
meant a little better. “There’s nothing we should do but stay with her,” she said after a moment.

  “You mean watch her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure she doesn’t wander off.”

  “Does she do that when she has one of these seizures?”

  “She never has. But the doctors say she could. Like a sleepwalker.”

  Finally Anise squatted beside the two girls. “Rosemary?” she said, questioning Hallie though she was staring straight at Garnet’s slack face.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have any problem like this?”

  “No.”

  “You’re fine?”

  “Uh-huh. And Garnet is, too. She—”

  The woman put her finger to Hallie’s lips. “Cali when you’re with us. Remember? Her name is Cali.”

  “And Cali is, too,” she went on. “She just has this … this thing.”

  “But you don’t have it.”

  “No.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For telling me. Someone had to. We had to know. And now we do.” Then she stood up and started to unpack the cartons of seedlings as if absolutely nothing was wrong in the world. “You always want your ingredients to be flawless,” she added, apropos of nothing, as Hallie sat alone on the ground with her sister.

  Chapter Seventeen

  You sit on the couch in the den with Emily beside you and feel her entwining her fingers in yours. Emily has asked the girls to run along to their rooms upstairs to play or do homework, but you would not be surprised if they are sitting on the stairs right now and trying to listen. If you were ten years old and a pair of state troopers had appeared yet again at your house, you would want to know why.

  At first you had presumed this was about Sawyer Dunmore’s bones and the crypt in the basement you opened. Then you thought it might have something to do with the recent death of Hewitt Dunmore in St. Johnsbury. You were completely mistaken in both cases, and the reality of why they are here this evening—interrupting you and Emily as you prepared dinner—has left you a little shaken and stunned.