The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [131]
And so instead of making a random suggestion that someday the girls pose for a statue, Reseda said, “I have always preferred this first volume to the second.”
Both girls looked up at her.
“I hadn’t told Cali and Rosemary about the second volume,” Anise said, her tone a little clipped.
“The book talks about it right here,” Garnet said, and she showed Anise and Sage where in the encyclopedia she’d seen that second volume referenced. “See?”
“Aren’t you the diligent student, Cali,” Anise told her.
“What does diligent mean,” Hallie asked, oblivious to the slight edge in Anise’s voice.
“It means she works very, very hard,” Sage explained. “I imagine you do, too.”
“No, she works harder than me,” Hallie said, and she smiled at Garnet with what Reseda knew was genuine sisterly pride. The pride a twin has in her twin. A lover had once told Reseda that he presumed the bonds twins shared far transcended the more common sibling rivalries. He’d been right. “Dad says she’s going to be a teacher or a professor someday.”
“Both are worthy aspirations,” said Anise.
“How is your father?” Reseda asked. She wasn’t as interested in what either child might say as she was in what thoughts would pass through Sage’s head when the woman envisioned Captain Chip Linton. But almost instantly Sage started counting the massive leaves on the hoja santa—which, in a fashion, was itself revealing.
“Mom is a little worried about him, I guess,” Hallie answered, looking down at a diagram of hypnobium in the book rather than meet her gaze.
“We all are,” Sage said.
“Is there anything in particular?” Reseda asked the girl, but carefully she gazed at Garnet as well. “So far, I don’t feel Bethel has been especially healing for him. I know the move to New Hampshire has been hard on all of you.”
“You do?” Garnet asked.
“I do. I really do.”
Garnet seemed to think about this. Then Hallie began to answer: “The other day I caught him talking to someone. I was in the kitchen and Mom was upstairs, and I heard—”
“Hallie!” said her sister, cutting her off, and she took the girl’s arm. “No!”
“It’s Rosemary,” the child snapped. “And, yes, I will tell them! Someone has to know! And just because you don’t want to scare Mom doesn’t mean I can’t talk about it!”
“Go ahead,” Reseda said. “Tell me.”
“The other day I caught him talking to himself,” Hallie said, and then she took a deep breath. “He was in the basement near that weird door, and it was like he was talking to me or Cali. But he wasn’t, because we weren’t with him. We had been upstairs. And another time I found him sitting in the den with my dolls, and it was like he was inventing a game with them for us. But again, he wasn’t. He was all alone.”
“They’re my dolls, too,” Garnet said, and she shook her head.
“And I think …”
“What do you think?” Reseda asked.
“I can tell Mom thinks he might have killed Dessy.”
“Do you think he did?” Sage asked, bending over with her hands on her knees.
“I don’t know. Mom started to say something about maybe taking her body to the veterinarian so he could tell us what happened, but Dad just wanted to bury her. And the ground was just soft enough now that we could.”
“Is there more?” Reseda said.
Hallie nodded. “I guess.”
“Tell me. You can.”
“Well, he’s gone from being kind of spacey since the accident to being really cheerful one second and then really angry the next. But he never gets mad at us. He just gets mad. He also has headaches, and I know they’re getting a lot worse. Mom doesn’t want us to know, but I’ve heard them talking. And he has some