The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [166]
You had stood over each of the beds in the girls’ rooms on the third floor of the house, the pearl-handled knife in each case raised in your hand high over your head. And yet each bed was empty. Emily had vanished as well, the bed still made (and the knife, fortunately, still held by duct tape to the horizontal slat on your side). Her station wagon was in the driveway, which suggested that, when they left, they had left in someone else’s vehicle.
You wonder if they left because of the blackout. You noted in the kitchen that the digital clocks on the microwave and the oven were dark, and then in the girls’ bedrooms that the automatic night-lights were off. But again, someone would have had to have picked them up.
Since they are not with Reseda, the Hardins are the most likely possibility. And so you drive to their place, peering at the tortuous road before you, the wipers on Holly’s compact battling to keep up with the downpour and the lights no match for the darkness. But then, as you are approaching the Messners’, you spy a conga line of cars parked off to the side of the road and snaking their way up the driveway.
Of course. You are not alone in wanting the twins. You know what the captain knows and he knows that the herbalists want them for … something. You crush the brakes hard and park.
Reseda hadn’t realized that John and Anise were taking the twins that very night. She presumed they would wait for the new moon, since the book suggested the tincture should be prepared when the moon was waxing, and now it would be waning for three more days. She knew only that the twins were in danger because Ethan Stearns had attached himself to the pilot.
Yet as she was approaching the Lintons’ driveway, before she had even pulled in, she saw headlights. She saw Holly’s car speed from the driveway onto the two-lane road, nearly sideswiping the mailbox in the process, and race away from her toward the village of Bethel. He must have accelerated to eighty or ninety miles an hour. Maybe more. Briefly she considered going to the Lintons’ as she had planned, but either they were already dead or they weren’t there. And she guessed it was the latter because Holly must have reached them by phone. She saw no lights on down the driveway.
And so she accelerated, hoping she could keep up with the captain, but she wasn’t sure she would succeed as she watched his red taillights disappear into the night. But she drove on as quickly as she could, the engine so loud that she could hear it even over the pounding drumbeat of the rain on the roof of her car. And then, as she was nearing the Messners’ home, she felt a powerful spike of unease rise up side by side with her frantic worry for the twins: In her mind she saw tall pillars of cedar mesa sandstone spiking straight into the air in the Southwest. There was an enormous amount of activity just beyond her aura, and she had the sense, despite the electricity in the air from the storm, that a gathering was nearby. She felt the presence, inchoate but organizing, of a crowd. And so she pressed hard on the brakes, the car swerving slightly on the slick pavement, and discovered instantly that she was correct. There was Holly’s car, empty, the front door wide open, the downpour saturating the seat and the upholstery on the inside of the door. It was last in the line of vehicles, most of which Reseda recognized. The Messners’ house was dark, but even through the storm she could see a weak penumbra of light emanating from the south side—the side where the large communal greenhouse was built—and so she started running across the yard, the rain-soaked grass saturating her canvas sneakers.
When she got to the greenhouse, she saw a window was venting steam from