But neither had you any desire to leave them where they were or to use them yourselves. Until now. Until you realized you needed an ax for this morning’s project.
And you like the symmetry. It’s as if the Dunmores left you this ax for precisely this purpose-which, of course, means there might be purposes as well for the crowbar and the knife. Now there’s a macabre thought.
This coming Sunday night, two days from now, you and Emily and the girls are having dinner with Reseda and Holly and whomever else the real estate agent will invite. You sip that cola and contemplate how satisfying it will be to inform them that you took the door down on your own-no need for this Gerard character that Reseda recommended-and found behind it… what?
You just can’t imagine. You have absolutely no idea what might be back there.
E mily’s mood had been sinking for days, ever since that chickadee died on their living room rug (though she told herself that there was no connection; her mood was going to deteriorate regardless of whether that bird made it out of the house). She knew it was never a good sign when she found herself poring over the obituaries she found in the Philadelphia Inquirer or-now that she and her family were ensconced in northern New Hampshire-in the weekly edition of the Littleton Courier . The old and the middle-aged and, in some disturbing or terrifying cases, the young. The faces in the photographs that were now being worked on by a mortician or moldering in a grave. Or cremated. It was the first thing Emily did this morning when she arrived at work and sat down at her desk in the room that not all that long ago had probably been someone’s bedroom. She sipped her coffee and thought of how she had uprooted her children and how her husband was a shell of the man he had been a mere seven months earlier. She thought of her friends she missed-those at the large firm where she had risen to partner, and those in the ridiculous, narcissistic, but bighearted theater community that offered such a wondrous change from her legal practice-and she contemplated how it had all come to this: a dusky office with three other lawyers she barely knew, a sweet young paralegal named Eve, and a secretary her own age named Violet, whom the lawyers shared and was dauntingly competent and not a little intimidating. She thought of how the days just didn’t get long fast enough here in northern New England. Right now back in West Chester, people were having their ride-on mowers tuned up.
On the stairway she heard footsteps, and a moment later she looked up and saw John Hardin peering in. John’s name was first on the firm’s shingle. He was over seventy, but he had the big hair of a Russian commissar. It was entirely white now, but he was a vigorous man who still skied and jogged and seemed to have no plans to retire. He didn’t work all that hard-none of them did-but they also didn’t make all that much money. In theory, however, that was precisely the point of living here rather than in, say, a suburb of Philadelphia like West Chester. Your paycheck was considerably smaller but your quality of life was so much better. You could age with the grace of John Hardin-though Emily knew that her and Chip’s dotage might not be quite so serene if either she didn’t find a way to make a little more money than she was earning now or Chip didn’t find a second career. The reality was that she had earned considerably more than her husband when they lived in Pennsylvania: Estate law was vastly more lucrative than commercial aviation in this day and age. Now that her income had taken a severe nosedive and his was-at the moment, anyway-nonexistent, they had not put a penny into their girls’ college funds in nine months and their savings would be long depleted by the time they were receiving their first solicitations from AARP. (And even that assumed the annual needs of a cranky old house on a hill in a frigid corner of northern New Hampshire did not grow particularly onerous in the coming decade and change.)
This morning, perhaps because it was a Friday and the fashion bar at the firm fell even lower, John was wearing blue jeans that were a little baggy, a gray tweed blazer, and a novelty T-shirt from the town in Mississippi that claimed the world’s largest aluminum and concrete catfish. Apparently, based on the photo on the shirt, you could walk inside the attraction and “Live Just Like Jonah!” The T-shirt was neon yellow and blue and clashed mightily with the jacket: It was like he had wrapped the Swedish flag around his torso. His parka was slung over his shoulder, and he was holding a paper cup of coffee in his free hand.
“It’s going to snow tonight,” he said, and the prospect clearly delighted him.
“And tomorrow?”
“Skiing.”
“Okay, then.”
“How are you doing, Emily? Honestly?” He had paused on the far side of her desk, and his voice took on the cast that she imagined he used when, before settling into a practice that revolved around real estate closings and trust modifications, he wanted to convey an avuncular sincerity to a jury. Convey to them how he could only represent a client who was innocent. She could tell he had noticed that her newspaper was open to the obituaries.
“No complaints,” she lied, shrugging.
He peered over her desk and pointed at the face of the teenage boy who had died in a snowmobile accident. “There’s little in this world worse than the death of a child,” he murmured.
“I agree.”
“I think everyone would. And yet it’s the damnedest thing: History is filled with human sacrifice-child sacrifice. Can you image? Anise and Reseda have come across some of the strangest cults and traditions in their botanical and shamanic research,” he said.
“Anise and Reseda? I know they grow a lot of bizarre plants. I know Reseda has introduced some very exotic flowers to this area. But human sacrifice? Where in the world does that fit in?” She wondered at the connection in John’s mind that would lead him to link the death of a boy in a snowmobile accident with human sacrifice.
“Well, it isn’t their specialty,” he said, and he raised his eyebrows mischievously.
“That’s a relief: No one likes to learn that one’s new friends are into human sacrifice.”
“I just meant that Reseda’s other work-her shamanic work-has led her to hear of ideas from other parts of the world that most people around here would find rather disturbing. Anise has, too.”
“Are Anise and Reseda both… shamans?”
“Oh, no.”
“Just Reseda?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Of course, even in this corner of the globe we’ve had our share of strange doings. Trust me: Some people think the woods around here are just filled with witches.” He shook his head a little ruefully and then smiled. “Tell me, do you and Chip have anything special planned this weekend?”
“I think we’ll do something different and scrape some wallpaper. Maybe unpack a few boxes. And, as a matter of fact, we’re having dinner with Reseda on Sunday.”
“How’s it coming? All that scraping and unpacking?”
“Just fine.”
He nodded. Then: “Do you have dinner plans on Saturday, too?”
They didn’t, but she wasn’t sure whether she felt up to two dinner parties in two days. She also understood, however, that it would probably do both her and Chip some good to get out tomorrow night and spend some time with this partner in the firm and his wife and whomever else he decided to invite at the very last minute.
“No.”
“Then come to Clary’s and my house for supper. Nothing fancy. We should have had you over weeks and weeks ago. We’re derelict. I’m derelict.”
Supper. A quaint word. Provincial, but sweet. She heard herself murmuring that yes, they would like that, thank you, but only if they could bring the girls because they didn’t really have a babysitter yet.
“Of course,” he said. “We can set them up in the playroom upstairs and they’ll be happy as can be. We already have an awful lot of high-tech toys and video games up there for our own grandchildren. Or, if the girls would be more comfortable, they can be downstairs with us.”
“Okay, then. Thank you. What can we bring?”
“Smiles. That’s absolutely it.”
“A bottle of wine?”
“Sure. I will never say no to a bottle of wine. That would be perfect.”
It all sounded so civilized, she thought. So… normal.
Unfortunately, it also sounded now as if she were hearing both of their voices underwater. And that, she knew, was not a good sign. She feared that it would take more than two dinner parties in two days to pull her
