The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [54]
You find yourself smiling a little ruefully when you shut the armoire door. Perhaps you are more like Parnell or Tansy or Hewitt Dunmore than you realized. You hide things.
At some point soon, however, perhaps even this afternoon, Emily is going to go downstairs to the basement, and there she will see that you have torn down that door. She will see that the coal has been moved and the door is in ruins. And so you decide you will tell her about that part of your little project. You will tell her when she gets back from the dance studio with your girls. You will say you initiated this small home improvement this morning. Not yesterday. Today. After all, if she thinks you took care of the door yesterday and chose not to tell her until now, she might ask questions. And, before you know it, you might reveal that you have found some bones. Or, worse, that you may have reconnected with a dead girl with a Dora the Explorer backpack.
On Saturday afternoon, the sun trying and failing to burn off the high overhead quilt of oyster white cirrus, Reseda misted the hypnobium, epazote, and derangia in her greenhouse. Then she gazed for a long moment at the arnica, appraising the plants. They looked like daisies, but the flowers were an orange just a tad more vibrant than terra-cotta. They smelled slightly like sage. On Monday she would harvest the arnica for a tincture. Most people only used arnica externally as an anti-inflammatory. They rubbed it on sprains and strains. They feared its toxicity when taken internally: A large enough dose was lethal. And while Reseda knew that you could kill a person with arnica, the truth was you could kill a person with plenty of medicines if you overdid it. Hence the word: overdose. She used a thousand times more arnica than the bare trace element you might find in a homemade homeopathic tincture or pill, but not enough, apparently, to ever have killed a person.
She wondered what she would prepare for the Lintons tomorrow night when they came to her house for dinner, and she put down her mister and wandered across the greenhouse to the section with the herbs she used in cooking. She noted how healthy the rosemary looked and inhaled its fragrance. Lamb, she decided that moment. Yes: She would serve lamb.
She recalled the way Captain Linton’s mind had roamed among shadows when he dropped by her office, how he seemed to be living now only in gloaming. She understood; she had her own trauma. She had had her own extended moments with the dead. His depression and disorientation were products of the accident, and with a little luck and the right counsel he would recover and resume a safer path. She found it significant that she was most attracted to the stories of the captain and his wife, while Anise and the other women were obsessed only with their girls.
She paused when she felt a prickling at the outer edge of her aura and stood perfectly still. She hadn’t imagined it. Consequently, she stepped over the shin-high stone statue of the amphisbaena, careful not to trip over either of the serpent’s heads (in myth, amphisbaena meat was an aphrodisiac; its skin could cure colds), passed by her Baphomet, and knelt. She peeled off her gardening gloves and spread wide her fingers, stretching her arms and straightening her spine. She stared up through the glass at the nimbus of light in the hazy western sky, closed her eyes, and randomly said aloud names of the living as if they were parts of a mantra or prayer. In a moment, whatever—whoever—was trying to cloud her aura was gone.
It was a source of unending interest to her: How could she—given all that she knew and all that she had endured—be so attuned to the thoughts of the living and so mystified