The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [35]
And yet still …
Still …
Since the failed ditching in Lake Champlain, you have found yourself pausing as you gaze up at thunderheads and rainbows and at the snow that transforms these leafless trees in Bethel into skeletal sculptures of black and silver and white.
No one has brought up church here in New Hampshire. At least not yet. Everyone did back in West Chester after Flight 1611 broke apart in Lake Champlain. Maybe folks here are more circumspect. Still, it has left you surprised. Apparently, the Congregational church in the village has sparse attendance at best. You noticed few cars in the lot when you drove past it that first Sunday morning on your way to the ski resort. Maybe everyone here goes to the Catholic and Methodist churches in Littleton, or the Baptist one in Twin Mountain.
You shrug and dip the paint roller into the tray once again and resume work on the corner of the kitchen behind the pumpkin pine table and deacon’s bench. The irony that you own a piece of furniture called a deacon’s bench is not lost on you. In your old house, Desdemona would doze on it in the afternoons, when the sun would warm the long cushion. In this new house, the bench sits in a corner unlikely to see much sun, even in June and July. You wonder where the cat will doze now.
Emily drove up the long driveway that led to a house where an elderly couple named Jackson lived, the girls in the backseat behind her. She didn’t know the Jacksons, but the twins’ teacher, Mrs. Collier, wanted the girls to catch up with the rest of the class on a science project: The students were growing bean sprouts and carrot tops in glass jars, but they had started a little more than a week before the Lintons arrived in Bethel. Ginger Jackson, a retired food chemist from New Jersey, was also an avid vegetable gardener, and she had provided the class with the materials for their project. She had informed Mrs. Collier that she had extras she had started herself to follow along, and she could give them to Hallie and Garnet so they could have plants at the same stage as their peers’.
Emily felt an unexpected pang of melancholy when she reached the house, and she wondered what it was in the structure that was affecting her so. The oldest, original parts of the house dated back to 1860, Reseda had said. It was a Gothic Revival cottage, though the term cottage suggested a modesty the building had probably lacked even before two additions increased the size by roughly a thousand square feet. Now it was shaped like a rectangular U with four fireplaces, one in each of the shorter wings and two in the long center. The chimneys reminded Emily of the pictures of the funnels she had seen on massive cruise ships in port, and the house’s roofs were slate and descended gently like sand dunes. A snug and inviting bay window anchored each tip of the U, and Emily could imagine one of her daughters curled up with a book in each of the window seats.
And that, she understood suddenly, was why she was feeling a great pang of sadness. This was the sort of house she wanted—not the melancholy crypt she and Chip had bought.
“Does she know we’re coming for the plants?” Hallie asked her mother from the backseat of the car.
“I called and left a message,” Emily answered. She coasted to a stop beside the garage. “But it doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” she said, talking to herself as much as she was informing her daughters. She climbed from the Volvo and looked around. No sign of any other vehicles. She walked gingerly over the ice on the driveway and peered through one of the glass windows in the garage door. There was no car in either bay.
“I’m sorry, girls,” she said when she returned, settling back in behind the wheel. “We’ll have to try again another