The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [102]
“Tell me more about ‘explicable.’ I want my daughters to get a few hours of sleep tonight. I want to get a few hours of sleep tonight.”
“Sawyer’s parents were, I gather, a little … off. Especially his mother. And when Sawyer killed himself, she really lost it. At least that’s what people say. I mean, it must be awful to lose a child like that. Just awful. I know I would have been willing to cut her a bunch of slack. Know what I mean?”
Emily thought about the weapons she had found in the house. She thought about the paranoia the woman had been enduring at the end of her life. “Go on,” she said.
“We all used to try and scare each other by saying that Sawyer wasn’t really buried in the cemetery. We used to go on and on with stories straight out of Psycho. You know the movie, right?”
Emily nodded. “Absolutely.”
“We’d tell ourselves that Tansy and Parnell had kept their son’s body around the house. They’d talk to it, dress it up. But his actual death was before my time, and we didn’t really believe it. Not a word. After all, his twin brother had grown up in that house, too, and when I was a kid he was an adult living not all that far from here. St. Johnsbury, I think.”
“Yes,” Emily said. “It is St. Johnsbury.”
“Anyway, it seems that maybe they really did bury their boy right downstairs. Built a little vault. But the Major Crime Unit and the medical examiner will look at what we have here. They’ll make sure the skull and whatever bones are down there really are Sawyer Dunmore’s. Dental records, most likely. If that doesn’t work, then DNA. As you said, the brother still lives in St. Johnsbury. I just guess, Mr. Linton, you hacked your way into a personal crypt.”
“But wouldn’t Hewitt Dunmore have told us there was a body buried in the basement of the house?” Emily asked. “Wouldn’t he want the grave respected?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure it’s legal. And, somehow, I don’t think leaving a corpse in the cellar does a whole lot for a property’s resale value,” the trooper said, and she actually chuckled just the tiniest bit as she started walking toward the front hallway. She paused for a moment and waved at the girls. “You’ll be okay,” she told them, and she sounded a bit like an older sister. “You’ll be just fine.”
As they were saying good-bye, the porch light caught the badge with the woman’s name, and it sparkled. “Tell me,” Emily said, “What does the C stand for?”
The trooper looked her straight in the eye and said—just a hint of a smile on her lips—“Celandine. It’s an herb.” Then she turned and marched down the slate walkway to her cruiser.
Chapter Twelve
Again today the girls are not going to school. Not after last night. But you’re not worried, they’re smart. They’ll catch up. Instead Emily has taken them shopping in Hanover and West Lebanon for the day. Anything to get them out of the house. She didn’t want them here when the state troopers from the Major Crime Unit appeared, and she didn’t want them present when this new psychiatrist makes her house call.
The Major Crime Unit came first, soon after the girls left, and you found that you rather enjoyed giving the four investigators in their crisp uniforms a tour. The men were roughly your age, and you took pleasure in showing them the door in the basement you destroyed and that strange back stairway between the kitchen and the second floor. You shared with them your work spackling and sanding and painting, and you showed them the new wallpaper you have started to drape upon the walls. You moved carefully because of your stomach, but it was only when you twisted your torso in that back stairway that you felt a real spike of pain—and even that was rather minor compared to the agonies you experience when Ethan or Ashley or Sandra is present. For a time you sat on the basement steps and watched as they dug and sifted through the dirt in the chamber. You were there when they exhumed more of the skeleton and when they found the small brown medicine bottle—uncorked, empty, and perhaps three inches long. It’s just like the