The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [114]
When Emily had told Reseda that some of the women now wanted to call her Verbena, her friend had shown absolutely no emotion, and for a moment she thought that perhaps Reseda didn’t approve—which made her fear that perhaps Reseda didn’t believe she was worthy of having a new name. Of becoming one of them. But then Reseda had nodded and said, “Yes, of course. We should have a christening. A rebirth into Verbena. It might be fun. We’ll view it as an excuse for a party.”
“Mommy?”
She looked over at Garnet. “Yes, dear?”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking about vocabulary words. At least I should have been. Sorry.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the words, either.”
“No?”
“No. I want to move back to Pennsylvania.”
Emily rested her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and rubbed it softly. She was surprised by both the bluntness and the suddenness of her daughter’s request. “Sometimes I do, too,” she said, and she was about to say more: explain why that idea had its appeal but why, in the end, she would prefer to stay here in Bethel. At least for now. The reality was that there was a support group here. Moreover, she didn’t believe that her husband—their father—was capable of uprooting his life once again. In some ways, the man she had fallen in love with and married and raised the two of them with had died that awful afternoon last August. He had become a ghost of his former self, a wisp: He had become, sadly, the pilot who wasn’t Sully Sullenberger.
Meanwhile, she wasn’t even sure she was capable—not emotionally, not intellectually—of returning to a practice as demanding as the one she had left behind in Philadelphia.
“Then we might move back?” Garnet was saying. “There’s a chance?”
“I don’t want to,” said Hallie, and she glared down at her sister from the bed. “I know things have been kind of weird here. But it’s not like West Chester was so great.”
“You loved West Chester,” Garnet corrected her. “You were, like, the most popular girl in the class!”
“I was not!”
“You were! You totally were!”
Hallie sat back against her headboard and folded her arms across her chest.
“Let’s talk about this calmly,” Emily said. She gazed back and forth at her daughters and recognized in the two of them the odd penumbra of resemblance that strangers noted when they first met the girls. “Garnet, you go first. Why do you want to move back to Pennsylvania? And then Hallie, you can tell us why you don’t. Okay?”
Hallie gazed angrily out the window into the night, and Garnet nodded slowly, marshaling her ideas. Before she started to speak, however, the phone rang and Emily made a T with her hands, signaling a time-out. “Hold your thoughts,” she said to Garnet, and then she rose and ran down the stairs to the second floor to get the phone in her and Chip’s bedroom. She figured she reached it about a half second before the answering machine would have picked up.
“Good evening, ma’am. Is this Emily Linton?”
“Yes.” She didn’t recognize the male voice.
“My name is Sergeant Dennis Holcomb, I was one of the investigators from the Major Crime Unit who examined the remains your daughter found in your basement. We met your husband, the captain, that morning.”
“Yes. Of course.” She felt her heart thrumming in her chest; she feared this could only be more bad news.
“Well, we went and got a DNA swab from Hewitt Dunmore. There’s a match. He still claims he had no idea that his twin brother had been buried down there. Insists the bones must have preceded his family’s purchase of the house: Abenaki