The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [137]
When she arrived, Holly was waiting for her with a stack of pages from the Internet listing the names of the people who had died on Flight 1611, and any demographic information she could glean from news articles.
“Who do you think it is?” Reseda asked as she sat at her desk and began leafing through the papers.
“I have no idea. I thought about what you told me the girl had said,” she answered, “and there are some distinct possibilities. But there were still thirty-nine fatalities.”
“That’s how many died? Thirty-nine?”
Holly nodded.
“Well, I would say it’s this child,” Reseda said after a moment, touching the name Ashley Stearns with the tip of her pen, “because Rosemary was quite sure that, when he was talking to himself, he was imagining a girl. He was, in fact, playing with one of her and her sister’s dolls.”
“But a little girl couldn’t be that controlling. Could she?”
Reseda thought about this. “If Ashley is with the captain, she’s probably not alone.”
“I wish we knew how they had died in the crash. After all, we know where the captain is in pain.”
She smiled approvingly at Holly. If what she did demanded an apprentice, she would want Holly to be hers.
Hallie watched Anise intently as the woman turned her face up into the April sun, her eyes closed and her hands clasped behind her. The light was raining down upon her like a shower. With her halo of gray hair and a thin smile on her face, she looked, Hallie thought, like an angel. She was standing toward the western wall of the Lintons’ greenhouse and staring up at the western ceiling. At her feet were three supermarket cartons filled with seedlings (most from either her greenhouse or Ginger Jackson’s), a forty-pound bag of potting soil, and a plastic watering can she had filled from the outdoor spigot near the house’s wheelbarrow ramp. The seedlings, according to Anise, were among the more common herbs and flowers—not the exotic ones that Hallie had never heard of before they moved to Bethel. The cartons were filled with basil, parsley, peppermint, sage, and thyme, but she wouldn’t have been able to say which seedlings were which without the small Popsicle-stick signs that had been speared into the dirt.
Today was the warmest the greenhouse had been since they moved here, two months ago. Hallie and her sister were wearing only hooded sweatshirts over their T-shirts, and Hallie felt she would have been comfortable in here even without the hoodie. They had been picked up after school by Anise and brought home so they could start setting up their very own greenhouse. Once more, instead of doing homework or attending a dance class or having a music lesson, the girls were going to be gardening. Their mother would be at the office for another two hours. Meanwhile, their father had finally finished the dining room, the living room, and the front hallway, and this afternoon he had gone to the hardware store and the lumberyard. He had been nosing around those back stairs behind the kitchen—wondering what, if anything, he should do about them—and decided he wanted to replace some of the rotting steps and try to add a handrail.
“It’s not polite to stare, Rosemary,” the woman said, emerging abruptly from her reverie. She was smiling at the girl, but still Hallie felt scolded, and so she quickly formulated her defense.
“Oh, I wasn’t staring,” she said, though she was well aware that she had been.