The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [162]
Reseda examined the woman’s wounds. They were bloody, but they weren’t deep. “He was,” she said, aware that her own words sounded slightly garbled because it hurt so much to speak. Her face still smarted where he had struck her. “But it wore off. It’s been a long night. There were three of them.”
“Can you stop him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Go,” Holly insisted, “go!” She rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and added, “I think he took my bag.”
And Reseda understood instantly what the captain had grabbed on his way out—and why. “Call Emily right now!” she said. “Tell them to leave the house right this second.” Then she stood, but already she heard a vehicle engine starting and outside she saw its headlights illuminating the trees. A second later, Chip was spinning Holly’s car into reverse, the trees went dark, and he was gone.
Chapter Twenty
Emily knew the communal greenhouse from those afternoons that spring when she had picked up the twins there after school—when, ostensibly, they had been learning about plants and herbs with some of the women at Sage Messner’s. But she had never been inside it at night and she had never seen it so crowded: In her mind, it was always just her girls and two or three older women, and the skies high above the glass ceiling were likely to be blue.
Not now. The wind and the rain were lashing the great panes of glass against their metal framing, and there were at least three censers burning what John had told her with unrestrained pride was frankincense Clary had transplanted from Oman. There must have been twenty or twenty-five of her neighbors present tonight, women and men she was likely to meet on the streets of Littleton and Bethel—the people she had viewed as an extended family of sorts throughout the last couple of months—though now they were all dressed in what looked like burgundy-colored choir robes. There were Anise and Clary and Valerian and Sage and Ginger—who gave Alexander a vaguely chaste kiss on the cheek and then insisted on looking at the wound on his upper arm, her eyes going back and forth between the puncture wound and Emily—and Celandine, the female trooper who had come to Emily’s home that frightening night when Garnet found the skull in the dirt in the basement. She saw her girls’ schoolteacher. In addition, there were another three or four women Emily didn’t recognize. And there were the men, their spouses and partners, and John quickly climbed into a robe and joined Peyton and Claude, where they stood beside a waist-high black marble basin, the column a spiral of interlocking carved vines. There was something unrecognizable about all of them this evening, something far more profound than the reality that they were dressed in red robes: They’d stood and swayed and stomped their feet in a barely controlled frenzy when Anise and John had first nudged the girls into the greenhouse. They were all a little giddy, and Emily couldn’t decide if it was more like a religious rapture or the adrenaline rush that accompanies a nighttime bonfire at a beach in high summer. Some of the assemblage were drinking from identical ceramic goblets with leaves carved into the cups and the stems, dunking their goblets into that basin as if it were a punch bowl.
The electric heaters were warming the greenhouse, but it was