The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [38]
“Were you gone a lot?”
“Probably too much. I was usually flying four days and home three. The rules for rest are complicated, but I might fly a dozen legs those four days. Sometimes, it would be less: seven or eight. Either way, I would say I ate half my meals between thirty and thirty-five thousand feet with a paper napkin in my lap.”
“And that was safe?”
You nod. “That was safe. I was always a stickler for safety.”
Just about then your real estate agent laughs at something and hangs up the phone. She rises from the seat behind her desk, and you are struck by the suede and fur, burgundy-colored boots she is wearing, and how they haven’t any heels at all: This really is a woman who knows how to navigate her way through a White Mountain winter.
“Chip, how are you?” she says, smiling, her eyes that beautiful, disturbing cobalt blue you noticed the first time you met and you think of whenever you think of her. Reseda is tall and trim, a slight ski jump to her nose, and her cheekbones are almost as prominent as her eyes. Her hair is darker than the chest-high wrought-iron fence that surrounds the cemetery at the edge of the village. She takes one of your hands in both of hers, and you always have the sense around her that, if you were in a big city, she would be the type who would want you to greet her with polite air kisses on both of her cheeks. Her palms are dry and cold, and yet the sensation, the touch, makes you a little warm.
“We’re settling in well, I think,” you begin. You describe your breakfasts with the view of Mount Lafayette from the kitchen and skiing periodically the past couple of weeks at the nearby resort. You make a small joke—and the joke does seem to you to be woefully inadequate—about the numbers of boxes you have unpacked and yet the numbers that remain. You wonder as you listen to the sound of your voice—a voice that once inspired confidence at thirty-five thousand feet—whether you are capable of asking the questions that have brought you here. They seem ridiculous now. Absolutely ridiculous. But, finally, you start: “You ever notice that door?”
She angles her head slightly, justifiably confused. The world has a lot of doors. Your house alone has twenty-seven (yes, you have counted), and that doesn’t include the closets and the cupboards and the pantry. “What door?”
“There is a door in the basement. It—”
And then there it is, that slight smile and sympathetic nod you have seen so often from people since August 11, and she is cutting you off. You are now in everyone’s eyes an emotional invalid. They need to be … gentle … around you. “Oh, Anise told me you were asking about that,” she is saying. “The coal chute.”
And you realize that once more they have been talking about you. Anise has told Reseda that you were nonplussed by a … coal chute.
“I must confess,” she continues, “I never did notice it. But then I rarely showed that house. Still, it must be a guy thing. I never heard other agents mention it. I guess women notice how much light a kitchen gets in the afternoon and men notice the coal chute in the basement. But sit down and tell me. What about it?”
You sit in the chair opposite her desk, and it feels good, if only because you have been working very, very hard scraping wallpaper and Reseda is indeed lovely to look at. The chair is leather and the smell is vaguely reminiscent of the aroma of the seat on the flight deck: human and animal all at once.
“I just can’t imagine why someone would have sealed the door shut in such an enthusiastic fashion,” you begin, careful to smile back both because Emily has told you that you have a handsome smile and because you don’t want to sound like any more of a lunatic than you already must.
She shrugs. “Hewitt Dunmore is a bit of an odd duck,” she says simply, referring to the previous owner.
“So you think he was the one who closed it up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know him well. Anise does. She knew his parents and his brother, too. Maybe his father was the one who