The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [160]
Anise rubbed her eyes with her fingers, clearly exasperated and tired. “No, I don’t think you will. Especially since, thank God, you didn’t kill Alexander,” she said. And just as the realization was registering in Emily’s mind that she hadn’t recognized the powerfully built older man because of his wool cap, she felt her bare ankles being grabbed and her legs pulled out from underneath her. She lost the flashlight as she fell onto her knees, the bones thumping hard on the wooden floor, but she might have been able to hang on to the knife if John hadn’t grabbed her arm and whisked it from her fingers. Then Alexander rolled her onto her back and knelt on her chest, one of his knees pressing hard against her sternum. She barely could breathe beneath his weight.
“That’s fine, Alexander,” John said. “That’s enough. Are you badly hurt?”
“Well, I could bore you with the details of what could have been the damage to my rotator cuff,” he answered, grimacing. “But I won’t. Shoulder wounds can be nasty, so suffice to say I dodged a bullet—or, in this case, a knife. I have a bulky sweater under my raincoat, and that helped. She only got my upper arm. I’m bleeding, but mostly she knocked the wind out of me.”
“We’ll be sure to tend to your wounds,” Anise said as she crouched before Emily.
“I’ll be fine,” he said simply in response.
“Trust me, Verbena, this will all go so much easier if you just tell us where Cali and Rosemary are hiding,” John said. “Will you do that, for us—for them?”
“They’re in the attic,” Alexander said. “At least I think they are. I thought I heard them scurrying around up there when I pulled open the trapdoor.”
“I hope so. Really, I do. I hope it wasn’t just a couple of very large mice,” John muttered. “Verbena, call your girls. Tell them to come down.”
“I won’t,” she grunted. “I can’t yell with him on me anyway,” she stammered.
“If I ease up, you’ll call them?” Alexander asked.
They beamed a flashlight onto her face, and she shook her head no.
“Good Lord, what do you think we plan to do with them?” John asked. “Cook them in a stewpot?”
And so Alexander sat back on his heels so she could breathe deeply and yell, and Emily did call out to the girls. But she screamed precisely the opposite of what John and Anise desired. “Hallie, Garnet, wherever you are, stay hidden!” she screamed as loud as she could. “Don’t let them find you!”
Alexander cupped his hand over her mouth, and Emily was astonished at the fellow’s strength. “All you are doing is postponing the inevitable,” John said to her. Then he turned his gaze upon Alexander. “I think you can let her go. Really, I do. She’s not leaving. But would you mind going up to the attic and retrieving the children? Anise, you, too? Give me the knife and I’ll wait here with Verbena. This already has taken far, far too long. We have people waiting.”
“And it has been a long wait,” said Anise, and Emily understood that the woman was speaking of something entirely different from what John Hardin had meant.
But the partner in her law firm smiled at Anise’s remark and added, “Indeed, it has.” Then he looked straight into Emily’s eyes and told her, “We’ve been waiting since Sawyer Dunmore died. Now: Let’s go get the girls from the attic. Shall we?”
There is nothing you would not do for your daughter. Nothing.
Or is it daughters? You find yourself watching the CRJ descend toward Lake Champlain, but the view is not from the flight deck, it’s from one of the passenger cabin windows toward the left rear of the aircraft. Meanwhile, you struggle with this one strangely unanswerable but profoundly important question: Where on the aircraft is your daughter? Or, again, daughters? You see in your mind the round face and blond spit curls of one girl, but shouldn’t there