She nodded, intrigued by the idea that there might be one. She understood why her father might have such a suspicion. Sometimes she found strange things in this house and the barn and the greenhouse.
Abruptly he stood to full height and rubbed his hands together, a habit of his when he was excited about something. “Well,” he said, his voice robust and happy. “What have you got there?” Then he placed his palm on her back and escorted her to the dining room table, where together they tackled the two pages in the workbook.
R eseda Hill stood in her greenhouse a few steps in front of Anise, inspecting the scapes on the coral root she had transplanted earlier that winter. She kept the plants and spices for cooking cordoned off from the herbs for healing. Basil and parsley had no business mixing with hypnobium, belladonna, or amalaki. Her tomato seedlings in late April, prior to being transplanted into her vegetable garden, would not do well near the pungent aroma from the angel’s death. The greenhouse was pentagonal and divided in half: On the right side, as one entered, were those herbs and spices that were common to any chef with even a modicum of culinary education; on the left side were those rare tropical plants from South America and India that only experienced healers, herbalists, and shamans were likely to use. In the center of the pentagon was a fountain with a stone creature holding a vase that dribbled water into the catch basin. The creature stood about three and a half feet tall, half man and half goat, with great, batlike wings on his back and a trim and pointed Vandyke running from his chin to his ears. Reseda did not bring it home from a compound in Barre, Vermont, that sold mostly (but not exclusively) tombstones and have it transformed into a fountain for her greenhouse because it bore a distinct resemblance to Baphomet. The truth was, she wasn’t a Satanist or attracted to most satanic rituals; but she was a bit of a bomb thrower, and she liked the idea that designing her greenhouse in the shape of a pentagon and placing what looked like a stone demon smack in the center would fuel rumors among the sorts of people who were never going to be her friends anyway. Besides, she liked goats and she liked handsome men with their shirts off. She thought both were cute in a diminutive sort of way.
“I find the twins very interesting,” Anise was saying, her parka draped over her folded arms.
“You’ve spent too much time with horror movies and pulp paperbacks. You always find twins interesting. I’m a twin. The world is filled with twins. Trust me: We’re not interesting.”
“These ones are prepubescent, and they have been traumatized. They’re like the Dunmore boys. You know the tincture. You know the recipe.”
Reseda bent over the patchouli and rubbed one of the egg-shaped leaves between her thumb and forefinger, breathing in deeply the perfume. Patchouli made her feel young. “The Dunmores were well before my time,” she said after a moment. “Besides, it was the girls’ father who was traumatized. We don’t know if Hallie and Garnet were.”
“You’re not a mother; I am. Their scars are different from their father’s, but nearly as deep.”
“The pair struck me as rather resilient.”
“I’m sure they are. But their father is an airline pilot who survived a plane crash. Most of his passengers died.”
“You really don’t like to fly, do you?” Reseda observed.
“You know I don’t.”
“When was the last time you were on an airplane?”
“I was twenty-three. Laurence and I flew to Aruba on our honeymoon. It took three planes to get there back then.”
“Was it pleasant?”
“The honeymoon? Absolutely. But I was scared to death every moment I was in the air. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.”
“I don’t like that expression: scared to death.”
“It’s apt.”
“It demonstrates both fear and naivete.”
“Perhaps in my case it’s a control phobia-or the lack of control. That’s why many people dislike flying. But I think my point is still valid. Captain Linton crashed a plane into a lake.”
Reseda went to the table with the motherwort and the hypnobium. She felt Anise’s eyes on her back. Anise loved working with hypnobium. She was one of the few women who was capable of using it in food as well as in potions. She was almost able to mask its bitterness with dark chocolate and sugar; no one could hide the taste completely, but Anise was able to make it edible. “The captain had help,” Reseda reminded her. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“True. But here is what I keep thinking about: The family came to us. The girls came to us. Sheldon Carter was an old fool selling a house. He had no idea what we needed. Lord, he had no idea even what we are.”
“What you are. I wasn’t there.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t approve of us, Reseda.”
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
“My point is simply that it wasn’t you who found the family and enticed them north. They found the house on the Web and Sheldon responded.”
“That’s true.”
“And so it must mean something. You of all people should see that.”
“Perhaps,” Reseda murmured, but she didn’t turn around. She honestly couldn’t decide if it meant anything at all. The world was awash in coincidence and connection; usually, it took time to deduce which was which.***
C hip told Emily that the worst of the flashbacks were of the moment when he was upside down, disoriented, the water starting to enter the flight deck through the edges of the door to the cabin, and he suspected the plane behind him had broken apart. But he had other flashbacks, too, such as when he was pulling his first officer through the upside-down door of the flight deck and saw how deep the water already was in the fuselage. He said he didn’t recall seeing any passengers strapped in the bulkhead seats, their feet above the waterline, their heads below it, either drowning or drowned. But he knew one woman had been there. She would manage to unbuckle her seat belt, but apparently she did so before registering where the exit was and, upside down, she went to the side of the plane with the lavatory. She had been sitting right beside the exit, and yet she would drown pressed against the floor of the fuselage, which, as this piece of aircraft fell to the bottom of the lake, had become its ceiling. Chip presumed he would have seen her when he was opening the door had she remained in her seat or not swum in the wrong direction.
What would remain a mystery to Chip and Emily and everyone who investigated the ditching was why the flight attendant had unlatched himself from his harness and not tried to open the exit. He had survived the initial impact, that was clear, and yet his body would be found lodged in the third row of seats. One possibility? He, too, had been disoriented when he was upside down and underwater, and he’d simply gotten lost when he tried to find the exit. Or, perhaps, he had tried to help someone. That seemed likely to Chip. He hadn’t known Eliot Hardy well, but in the few days they had flown together before the crash, he had found him patient, firm, and good-humored- precisely the characteristics that defined a professional flight attendant. His cause of death was drowning, but based on his broken nose, there was some thought that he may have hit his head on debris or been kicked in the face by a passenger. Even if the impact hadn’t knocked him out, it may have caused him to swallow great gulps of water, and that was the beginning of the end.
But the other flashbacks that Chip described to her were equally as disturbing in Emily’s opinion, beginning with the flameout of the left engine and ending with the half dozen corpses that somehow had been flung like scarecrows and wax figurines from the wrecked aircraft and were floating around him like buoys in Lake Champlain.
In some ways, the flashbacks were all worse than the nightmares. “I seem to know when it’s a dream and I seem to know that I’m not going to die-though there are times when I think you all would have been better off if I had died,” he said.
“You don’t mean that,” Emily told him. “I wouldn’t want to live without you. Hallie and Garnet would have been devastated to lose you. We all still have a lot of years before us.”
But she had been coached well by his therapist in Philadelphia and by friends that she should expect this. It was survivor guilt. No, it was worse than that: It was survivor guilt exacerbated by the reality that he was a captain who had survived the wreck of his plane. The captain had not gone down with his ship. She could remind
