The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [105]
“Why not?”
“Indeed, why not? Do you understand why I’m here, Chip?”
“I do.”
“Good. That’s a start.” She wipes her hands on a paper napkin and daubs at her lips. Her demeanor visibly changes as she pulls a pad and a clipboard and a fountain pen from that bag.
“I don’t see a lot of people using fountain pens these days.”
“That’s because you’ve spent so much of your time in the air. You want to see a mess? Bring one of these on a plane. You have not seen a mess until you’ve seen a fountain pen explode at ten thousand feet.”
“Probably not,” you tell her, marveling at the way she can make everything sound vaguely disturbing. Explode. Mess. Ten thousand feet. Some people are capable of making innocuous sentences sound sexual—they can twist everything into a double entendre. Valerian seems to have a similar, perhaps inadvertent, talent when it comes to breathing life into your own particular subconscious fiends.
She motions with both hands at the room in which you are sitting and out the window at the carriage barn and the greenhouse and the sloping meadows beyond it, and continues, “Okay, then. How are you doing here? How are your neighbors? They treating you well? Tell me honestly.”
“They are. Honestly.” You wonder: Did your repeating the word honestly sound like you were being flip? And if it did, should you care? You wonder why this woman’s opinion should matter more than Dr. Richmond’s. Again, you experience a wave of misgiving. What do these women whose names belong in a garden want from you? Do they want anything, anything at all? But Valerian simply nods. She doesn’t seem to find your response in any way impolite. She simply asks whom you have met and where, and what sorts of plans you have for the house. She asks, parent to parent, what you think of the school system here in this secluded corner of the White Mountains, since of course she has a girl only three grades behind Hallie and Garnet. Finally she gets around to the issue that matters most to Emily—the reason Valerian is here. She glances ever so slightly at your stomach, barely moving her head. It’s all done with her eyes.
“Tell me about the other night,” she asks.
“Well, without wanting to be glib, there are at least two ‘other nights’ that didn’t end well. There was the night when the girls had a friend over for dinner and a playdate and I wound up in the hospital. And then there was last night, when Garnet found a human skull and jawbone in the basement. Which?”
“Let’s start with the night of the playdate. What do you recall of your accident?”
You think about this. She said accident without a trace of sarcasm. Good for her. And so you tell her, as you have told others, about having Molly over for dinner. How you and Emily asked Molly a lot of questions about what she liked about the school and what she didn’t. She seemed like a good kid. A nice kid. Then you pause, recalling where everyone sat around the table in the dining room. There once again is Molly’s face, her elbow on the table and a fork balanced on the ends of her fingers. Behind her, on the wall, is one of those menacing sunflowers.
“I’m sure she is a good kid,” Valerian agrees, and the sound of her voice brings you back. “Go on.”
And so you do. “I felt we were running out of hot water after we ate,” you hear yourself saying, “which didn’t make any sense. One extra set of dishes? Oh, please. Besides, we were just putting the plates in the dishwasher.”
“What did you have for dinner?”
“It was all very easy. Mexican food. Rice. Beans.”
“Where were the girls?”
“By then they were out in the greenhouse. Hallie and Garnet view it as their playhouse.”
“A waste,” she says, and you can’t decide if she is kidding.
“They’ve had their dolls out there ever since we arrived.”
“Well, they’ll outgrow that soon enough,” she adds, as if she is trying to reassure you. “So, you and