The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [67]
“They were boys,” Molly continued. “And one killed himself. At least that’s what everyone says. But my mom thinks he was murdered by the women. The police never arrested the lady, and she ended up shutting down her greenhouse—this greenhouse. But my mom says the women killed him.”
“How old was he? Our age?” Hallie asked.
“A little older. He was, like, twelve or thirteen,” she said, and suddenly this big girl bowed her head and her body seemed to collapse into itself, the child almost shrinking before the twins’ very eyes. She was, Hallie realized, on the verge of tears. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this stuff. My mom made me promise.”
“But you did,” Garnet said.
“It all just came out,” she murmured. “Maybe it’s not true. I don’t know. But you can’t tell anyone I told you.” Then: “I want to go home. I should go home. Can I call my mom?” The last of her sentence was smothered by a few pathetic sniffles, and she ran her bare hand across her mouth and under her nose. Garnet reached out to pat the girl’s arm, but Molly jerked away and wouldn’t look at them. Garnet had the sense that the child was scared—really and truly terrified, despite the reality that it was the middle of a Sunday afternoon and the sun was high overhead.
“Molly, please stay,” Hallie said, though she was still profoundly disturbed by the idea that twins had lived in this house before Garnet and her and one of them had either killed himself or been killed. But she also realized that one of her and Garnet’s very first playdates here was about to end in disaster. That wouldn’t bode well as she and her sister tried to make new friends. And, the fact was, they were stuck here in Bethel; they had to make the best of it. So she took a deep breath and then did what she could to salvage the afternoon. She pulled the American Girl doll from eighteenth-century Virginia from its bed and held it under its arms like an offering. She presented the doll to Molly and said, raising her eyebrows theatrically and trying to add an aura of evil to her sentence—as if she were the scariest witch on the scariest Halloween—“Now, how shall we poison the child?”
A nise handled a pestle with the grace of a gourmet chef wielding a chopping knife. This afternoon she was grinding hypnobium, using her black marble mortar because her wooden ones were far too absorbent for a plant this toxic, pounding and swirling the seeds against the sides of the bowl. It sounded almost as if she were dicing an onion on a cutting board or chopping basil for bruschetta. Clary Hardin was sipping green tea and leaning against the counter in Anise’s kitchen, telling her about her dinner last night with John, the Messners, and the Lintons. She was pausing now in her story only because her friend was so intent on her work. Finally Anise looked up at Clary and exhaled deeply. “Tell me more about what you think of the girls,” she said.
“I told you, I think they’re delightful. John does, too.”
“This morning Sage described them as rather philistine. She found their uninterest in plants off-putting.”
Clary shook her head at Sage’s description. “They’re ten. She forgets what it’s like to be ten.”
“She said they want to use Tansy’s greenhouse as a playhouse.”
“For now. But I’m sure they’ll grow into it.”
“And Emily?” Carefully she tapped most of the powder from the mortar into a wide-mouth glass canning jar, holding the jar over the sink in the event some spilled over the side. She reserved a teaspoon, which she dropped into a porcelain mixing bowl already filled with flour and margarine and the very last of her maple syrup. She was baking cookies.
“Emily is far more scarred than she lets on,” Clary answered. “Of course, she is nowhere near the wreck that her husband is. Now he is seriously damaged goods.”
“As he should be. But not the girls?”
Clary thought about this. “Oh, they are. I think they’ll do.