The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [73]
Besides, she didn’t believe that Reseda actually had designs on her. Emily couldn’t decide what the kiss had meant—if, in fact, it had meant anything.
She realized she had been sitting at her desk, daydreaming, for twenty minutes. Somehow it had become ten-fifteen in the morning. She was supposed to be in Franconia for a real estate closing at eleven. Quickly she rose and gathered the file on the property, a relatively new gray Colonial with four bedrooms and a pond, and reached for her coat behind the door. In the hallway on her way out, she ran into John Hardin.
“Emily,” he said, “your girls are a dream. Clary and Sage just adored them. I think they’re going to become the granddaughters Sage still doesn’t have!”
She nodded. She had thought so much about that Sunday night kiss that she had completely forgotten how the seniors had swarmed on her children the night before then. Somehow, that part of the weekend seemed a long, long time ago.
You pinpoint Hewitt Dunmore’s address in St. Johnsbury on Map-Quest and see you can drive there via the interstate in thirty-five minutes—assuming you don’t hit a moose. You don’t really worry about hitting a moose; you haven’t even seen one since you moved here. But those warning signs on the highway make you smile. You consider phoning Hewitt before leaving your house but in the end decide against it; you know he will try to dissuade you from coming. He may even insist that he doesn’t want to see you. But the girls—and that friend of theirs, Molly, who is joining them later today—don’t climb off the school bus until just about three in the afternoon. And it’s only a half hour and change that separates your house from Hewitt’s, so you could spend a good forty-five minutes with him before having to turn around. Assuming, of course, that he’s home. Since you haven’t called ahead, there’s no guarantee, and this may very well be a waste of an hour and a quarter.
Still, you don’t imagine that he travels all that much, and you have a sense he will be there. And when you coast to a stop on a St. Johnsbury street with the unpromising name of Almshouse Road, the modest house at the address where he lives has a tired-looking minivan—covered with end-of-winter muck, like most cars around here this time of the year—parked in the driveway. The house is a Cape in dire need of scraping and painting, and the roof looks a little ragged, but you like the remnants of red that peel from the clapboards. The color reminds you of a barn.
There isn’t a doorbell, and so you remove your glove before you rap on the wood: You expect the sound will be sharper and more likely to carry this way. Sure enough, a moment after you knock, a small man with bloodhound jowls and a gray bristle haircut opens the door, leaning heavily on a cane, and stares out at you through eyeglasses thick as a jelly jar. He is wearing a tattered cardigan the color of coral and a string tie over a blue oxford shirt. He looks like a cantankerous professor from a small, rural college. He is not what you expected, but, since he did not attend the closing on the house, you honestly weren’t sure what to expect. Emily had found him ornery on the telephone, but that’s really all you know.
“Yes?”
You extend the hand on which you are not wearing a glove. “I’m Chip Linton. My wife and I are the ones who—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he says, taking your hand and cutting you off. “You’re the ones who bought my parents’ house.”
You note in your mind how he altered slightly how you would have finished that sentence. You would have referred to