The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [53]
“No. She just said she might take us there later this spring to show Garnet and me some of her special plants.”
“You mean the whole class?”
“No, not the whole class,” Hallie answered. “I think she just meant Garnet and me.”
Emily wondered what the teacher had meant by special plants. Some people used greenhouses to grow tomatoes or phlox. What were these women using them for? Comfrey and crampbark? Hawthorn? Elder? She knew there were all sorts of people floating around remote corners of New England, some New Agers and some old-timers, who would still put a little comfrey on a cut or a bruise. She recalled a woman from her visits to her grandmother in Meredith, an elderly friend of the family: Before she would join her grandmother and her friend for walks around the lake at twilight, the woman would rub some leaf on her arms and no mosquito would ever come near her. Not a single one. And it smelled heavenly. Like perfume. Emily tried to recall now what it was and couldn’t.
She slowed as she took a corner and the road’s shoulder all but disappeared, and she noted the way the snow was starting to stick to the pavement. She had hoped it would have stopped for the season by now. But they’d gotten another three inches in the night, and John Hardin and his wife were probably on their fourth or fifth runs of the day at the mountain. Soon, she presumed, the couple would be calling it quits and heading home to prepare for their small dinner party that evening. Behind her, Hallie stopped kicking her seat.
“Maybe we should put some interesting plants in our greenhouse,” Emily said to the girls, trying out an idea. Maybe one of the benefits to living here in northern New Hampshire would be the chance for the girls to reconnect with the natural world. She imagined taking them on nature walks and teaching them the names of the wildflowers that grew along the side of the road. Of course, that would mean she would have to learn the names of those wildflowers first.
“No, let’s not,” Hallie said, mimicking the derisive voices of the teenagers she saw on sitcoms on TV.
“Yeah,” Garnet agreed. “We want that to be our playhouse.”
“Can’t it be both?” Emily asked, though now she was really only teasing them. If they felt that strongly about wanting it to be their private world, she had no objections at all.
“No way,” Hallie said. “It’s a playhouse—not a greenhouse.”
“Okay, then,” Emily agreed. “Playhouse: not a greenhouse.” She glanced out the window at a handsome white Cape with evergreen shutters. In the backyard she thought she spied a greenhouse.
You could tell your wife about the bone. Bones, actually. When you dug around in the dirt a little more, you found three bullet-size phalanges that you are quite sure came from a human hand. A human finger.
Perhaps you even should tell your wife about the bones. But you don’t. You did not tell her yesterday when she came home from work and you will not tell her when she and the girls return from dance class this morning. And while you could devise any number of reasonable excuses for withholding the discovery—Emily is a little depressed, Emily already has a basket case of a husband, Emily is questioning her decision to bring the family north to New Hampshire—the main reason is essentially this: You have a macabre fascination with the bones. This house is brimming with strangeness and purposeful surprises. You want to investigate this on your own. See what it means. Talk to Hewitt Dunmore yourself.
Besides, why scare Emily? She was disturbed enough by the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. Why risk agitating her—and, thus, the girls? Because when Emily is anxious, the girls are anxious. That’s just how it is.
And so you wrap the long bone in sheets of newspaper (the Philadelphia