The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [159]
“You’re shivering,” Hallie whispered.
Garnet nodded. Her teeth were chattering, too, and her bracelet was vibrating against the tall cardboard box. She wrapped her other hand around it.
“What do we do?” her sister asked.
She saw Hallie was watching her, wide-eyed, her cheek pressed against the wardrobe. Her sister was so scared that she was panting, and just as Hallie had shushed her with a single finger a few minutes ago, now Garnet silenced her. She clenched her teeth to stop them from clicking. Then she puffed out her cheeks to convey the idea that they both should be holding their breath. They listened, aware that any moment they would hear someone or some people climbing the steps and the light in the attic would grow brighter. They would be discovered and then …
And there Garnet’s imagination failed her. She tried to reassure herself that the plant ladies couldn’t possibly want to harm them.
But the attic didn’t fill with light. Instead they heard below them what sounded like someone grunting—gasping, perhaps—and the attic went completely dark as they heard something fall to the pinewood floor, a thump so heavy that, even a floor above, they felt a slight quiver along the crude wooden planks on which they were cowering.
Reseda knew that her own energy was starting to flag. She had felt the agony in her throat and chest and had nearly blacked out herself before Sandra Durant’s soul found its way beyond Chip Linton, and she had wound up gasping and then reduced to whimpers as she experienced Ashley Stearns’s sudden evisceration when the CRJ broke apart in the lake. She wondered how the captain had lived with it all for so long and whether the physical agony was actually worse than the psychological torment of myriad second guesses and what-ifs, of having not gone down with his ship—of having lived when so many of his passengers had died. Nevertheless, she kept searching for the girl’s grandmother, entreating the spirit to guide her young granddaughter home. Finally, there in the fog, she saw a heavyset older woman in a leopard-print bathing suit and a diaphanous beach cover-up, barefoot. The powdery white beach on which she was walking was dotted with sand dollars and shells from sea urchins, slippers, and fighting conchs. She had a whelk shell in one hand but was beckoning toward someone else with the other, smiling. She was wearing dark sunglasses because recently she had had a cataract removed from her right eye. Then she took Ashley’s small hand in hers. Ashley, it seemed, was whom she was waiting for. The child was in a bathing suit, too, a little girl’s two-piece patterned with cartoon butterflies, and she was no longer impaled on the jagged remains of a wrecked airplane. She gazed quizzically up at her grandmother, a little confused, but then she rested her head against her grandmother’s arm as they walked down the beach, the low tide lapping at the sand a dozen or so yards away, while the whitest sun Reseda had ever seen burned off the last of the early morning fog.
“Verbena, no! No, no, no! That was a monumental mistake.”
Emily was on the floor, kneeling over the broad-shouldered stranger in the wool cap and the yellow slicker she had just attacked, and there before her—towering over her, it felt—were Anise and John. Emily was almost hyperventilating, and she wasn’t precisely sure where she had stabbed the fellow: She had seen him from the top of the back stairs no more than three or four feet away and leapt at him, trying to plunge the knife into him. And now the man was facedown and Emily could see a great streak of blood along one of the jacket shoulders.
“We were going to fetch the girls and then you,” John continued, the irritation evident in his usually avuncular voice. “Really, what in heaven’s name would possess you to assault a person like that?”
“Where’s Hallie? Where’s Garnet? What have you done with my children?” She spat the words out in a frenzy as she rose to her feet, and now she held up the knife, pointing the tip at John as