The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [76]
“Yes. I took it down, and I found bones in there. In the dirt.”
He sits forward, alert for the first time. “From what sort of animal?”
“Human.”
“Unlikely.”
“Some I am sure are digits from fingers. One is clearly a human arm.”
“And you are sure of this because you went to medical school when you weren’t flying airplanes?”
This was, you like to believe, merely a harmless dig—he meant nothing especially hurtful. And you’re honestly not sure why it seems to cut so deep. “I have some education,” you answer simply.
He shakes his head. “I hate to think of the animal that must have dug its way into that corner and then couldn’t dig its way back out. Very, very sad.”
“You really believe the bones belong to, I don’t know, a dog?”
“Or a feral cat. Or a fox.”
“The bones are too big.”
“Even those little ones you think are finger bones? You’re one hundred percent sure of that?”
“Not one hundred percent, no.”
“You show them to a doctor or professor? I used to work at the school here in town. St. Johnsbury Academy. I managed the physical plant. You want, you bring me them bones and I can show them to a teacher there. How’s that sound?”
It is an interesting idea. “Can I think about it?”
“ ’Course you can. I don’t expect I’m going anywhere.”
“That’s a very compelling offer. One thing …”
“Go on.”
“I haven’t told my wife about the bones. I don’t want to scare her.”
“That’s up to you.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
He shrugs. “Are people making a big deal out of the greenhouse on the property?”
“My girls. They seem to love it.”
“I meant the women.”
“Not really. There was some talk the other night when Emily and I were at a dinner party. But I think my children have already claimed it as a playhouse.”
“Well, that’s good. I think you will be much better-off if you keep it a playhouse. My mother … Oh, never mind about my mother.”
“No, tell me. I’d like to know.”
“Nothing to say. You just keep that greenhouse for the girls—the twins. You just keep them twins safe.”
“As their father, I try. Is there anything specific I should be worried about?” you ask, recalling the sad fact that his twin brother took his own life.
“No. No, I’m just a morbid old man,” he says, and he uses the armrests on the chair to push himself to his feet. You remind him that he is only a decade and a half your senior and really not an old man at all, but you can tell by the way he is standing—pressing both hands on the table for support—that your visit is over. A few moments later, as you are outside on his front steps and putting your gloves back on, you hear him speaking in the living room. You are barely out the door and already he has picked up the telephone and called someone. You wonder what this means—whether you have merely embarrassed yourself or whether there will be consequences for revealing what you found behind that door in the basement.
Among Chip and Emily’s acquaintances in West Chester was an FBI agent who had retired early and was now a security consultant. His name was Steve Hopper. At a holiday cocktail party at a mutual friend’s house their last December in Pennsylvania, Emily had seen Chip and Steve and a woman she didn’t know chatting near the fireplace, and when she joined them the woman was telling Chip, “I just think it’s unbelievable you didn’t panic. I mean, weren’t you scared to death? I would have been shrieking bloody murder.”
The woman clearly had had way too much to drink; her words were slurred, and no sober individual would have asked her husband if he had been terrified. Few sober people would even have been willing to bring up the doomed aircraft.
But Chip seemed to view this conversation as merely one more element to the cross he believed he was destined to shoulder. He was nodding, formulating a response, when Steve jumped in.
“I would wager my friend here was too busy focusing to be frightened,” he said. “My money is that bravery never entered into the equation. That right, Chip? Good CRM?”
Emily knew that CRM stood for crew resource management, and she wasn’t all that surprised that