The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [130]
“Is she dead?” Hallie was asking, trying to sniff back enough of her tears for her words to be clear, and even before Emily had knelt on the floor by the cat and touched the cold fur, she knew that the animal was.
“Chip?” she called again. “Chip?”
“Be right up!” he yelled, his voice somewhere in the basement below them.
“He’s always down there,” Garnet murmured, still crying softly, speaking to no one in particular. She was sitting on the floor and running two fingers gently along the cat’s side. “There, there,” she said, as if the cat were alive and needed comforting. “There, there.”
In a moment Chip was standing in the doorway, his face grimy and his shoulders sagging just a bit, but looking rather cheerful. He had a glass jar in his hands with what looked like soapy water. “Hello, girls,” he said. “I didn’t hear you get home!”
“We were calling for you,” Emily said, trying to read him. “What were you doing?”
“Oh, I was in the basement. I guess I didn’t hear you. I must have been in my own little world.”
“Something’s happened to Desdemona,” she said.
He walked around her and crouched like a baseball catcher between his daughters. He stroked the cat once and then lifted the animal’s head so he could see her dead eyes and the way the tongue protruded from her mouth.
“Oh, Dessy,” he said. Then: “She must have gotten into something. The poor, poor thing.”
“You think she ate something that poisoned her?” she asked him.
“I do. Look at the tongue and look at the vomit.”
“And she’s dead, Daddy?” Hallie asked. “Definitely?”
“Definitely,” he said sadly.
“What’s that in the jar?” Emily asked him.
He looked from the cat to his fingers and seemed surprised to see anything there. Then he shrugged. “Paint thinner. I got tired of wallpapering in here and touched up the trim. I was cleaning the brushes when you got home.”
“In the basement.”
“That’s right,” he said, and once again he stroked the cat behind her ears, the way he had countless thousands of times before. Emily couldn’t imagine why he would have poisoned the cat, but the idea crossed her mind that he had. And then she looked back and forth between her girls, and the notion of her husband taking—to use Valerian’s expression—a time-out from life seemed more and more logical. She decided in the meantime that under no circumstances would she leave him alone with their daughters.
Reseda thought that Sage Messner’s greenhouse—the largest in Bethel and the one the women who did not have greenhouses used—needed statuary. She was watching Anise and Sage work with the twins, and she imagined a marble sculpture of the girls near the parsley, basil, and echinacea. She recalled a Renaissance statue of twin children she had rather liked that she had seen one afternoon on a third-floor corridor at the Uffizi. A cat was rubbing her side against one of the girls’ marble shins, and so Reseda made a mental note to leave out that detail if she should decide to mention the statue to the children. Their cat had died two days earlier, and she knew the loss was still fresh. Right now the twins were standing around a table, hunched over a copy of The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs, while Anise and Sage stood behind them and pointed out where in the greenhouse they could see the actual plants that were pictured in the text. This was the first of the two-volume encyclopedia that the women used for most of their tinctures, and some approached the book with an almost biblical reverence. There were only four copies of that first volume in the group’s possession, all from 1891, and the women were constantly photocopying pages from it or scanning them into PDFs on their computers, and it was an indication of Anise’s interest in Emily’s daughters that she had shared with them her own personal copy.
Reseda had been about to say something complimentary to the girls about what lovely models for a statue they would make when she paused: She sensed that one of the twins was aware