The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [121]
You are contemplating precisely how to begin, the knife at your side, when you hear your name.
“Chip?”
You look up. There in the doorframe is Emily. She is lit by the hall light behind her, but she has not turned on Hallie’s bedroom light. Her hand is near the wall switch. If she does, she will see the knife. You hold your breath.
“Chip?” she whispers again, her voice a little more urgent this time. She clearly has no plans to risk waking the children by turning on the light. You press the knife against your side, shielding it from her view. You join her and wrap your free hand around her waist. You pull her against you.
“I was watching them sleep,” you murmur, the words catching strangely in your throat. You look for Ethan, but he’s gone.
“Come back to bed,” she says.
“Yes, of course,” you agree, and together you return to your bedroom. There you slip the knife between the mattress and the box spring when you tuck back in the sheets. And you are thorough when you tuck them back in, because Emily likes a tight bed.
Chapter Fourteen
When the girls are at school and Emily is at work, while you are painting the entry foyer, you are surprised by a visitor. It is Hewitt Dunmore. He is wearing a red check flannel jacket and leans on his cane on the front steps of your house in much the same way he did when you visited him at his home in St. Johnsbury. Behind him, in the trees at the edge of the meadow beyond the greenhouse, you notice that the wisps of green shadowing the tree branches have become actual buds. Alabaster white clouds float against the blue sky like islands.
“This is a surprise,” you tell him, extending your hand.
“I was going to call, but since I am apologizing, I thought I should do it in person. Seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Apologize?”
He peers over your shoulder at the masking tape protecting the trim in the front hallway and surveys the way you have already coated one wall with a shade of paint called sunset coral. “Looks like you’re making some changes,” he says, ignoring your question. “Good for you.”
“I guess.” You shrug, not wanting him to feel insulted by the ways you are redoing virtually every room in this house that once belonged to his family. “But that’s only because we have little girls and—”
He waves you off. “The paper was tired. The paint was tired. Makes sense to spruce up the old place.”
“Would you like to come in?”
“I’ll just stay a minute,” he agrees, and together you walk carefully over the newspaper along the floor in the hall and around the paintbrush and roller and the open can of sunset coral paint. You sit in your kitchen now, just as you did once before in his, though this visit feels more companionable. He drapes his flannel jacket on the back of the chair and hooks his cane over an armrest. Behind his shoulder, in the dining room, you gaze at those disturbing, nearly dead sunflowers.
“I want to tell you I’m sorry.”
“So you said. What for?”
“For my parents’ strangeness. For the things my mother left around the house. And, yes, for their burying my brother in the basement,” he says, and you have the sense by the forcefulness of his response that he has rehearsed these words.
“You knew?”
“About my brother? I did not know for a fact. But I suspected.”
“Did you know about the knife and the—”
“No. That was a surprise. I would have told you about those things if I’d known, since you have children. But Sawyer’s body? I figured it was long gone by now—you know, deteriorated—assuming anyone even wanted to break down that blasted door. Still, I should have told you. But I needed the money from the house. It’s just that simple. I have health issues, I don’t have much of a retirement nest egg. And so, well, I looked the other way. Told myself my parents hadn’t really buried Sawyer there, and, if they did, it wasn’t a big deal.