brought to New Hampshire, it was a wonder that there hadn’t been far more and far worse instances of acting out. She wished that Garnet had evidenced more contrition, but clearly her daughter accepted that she had made a mistake. And even the girl’s schoolteacher seemed to believe that the boy who had drawn the picture of the plane was just asking for some sort of off-the-grid reaction.
“And the greenhouses are all in Bethel. Not in Littleton or Franconia,” Hallie was saying. “You see one almost the second you get off the highway.”
“And then another and another,” Garnet added.
“Well, winters are long here,” Emily said, speaking as much to try to make sense of it to herself as to try to explain it to her daughters. “And that means the growing seasons are short. You want to start plants as early as you can in a greenhouse and then give them as long a growing season as possible.”
“But why just here?” Garnet asked her.
This was a perfectly reasonable question, and she wished she had a good answer. She recalled that woman from the diner, Becky Davis, and how Becky had referred to the local women as the herbalists-as if they were a cult. Emily presumed that each of those women had a greenhouse. And that group, apparently, included Anise and Reseda and Ginger Jackson and John Hardin’s wife, Clary, since she knew that all four of them owned greenhouses. And that also meant, perhaps, that even Tansy Dunmore at some point had been one of them- whoever they were-because she and Chip now owned a house with a greenhouse.
Of course, as loopy as all those women might be about vegetables and herbs, Becky herself hadn’t seemed a paragon of stability that afternoon in the diner.
“Well,” Emily said, trying to focus on Garnet’s question, “it could be as simple as the fact that someone around here builds greenhouses. You know, maybe someone in the community owns a company that makes them. That’s all. Or it could be a… a club.”
“Even Mrs. Collier owns one,” Hallie added, referring to the girls’ schoolteacher. Emily felt Hallie tapping the back of her seat with her foot absentmindedly. It drove her a little crazy some days, but now she was taking comfort in the idea that her daughter had kicked off her snow boots when she climbed into the car and so at least she wasn’t leaving brown marks from road sand and mud on the tan leather. “What did she tell you about hers?” she asked. In her mind she had already added another person-another woman-to the group. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea that the girls’ teacher was one of the women (and the club really did seem to include only women). “Anything special?”
“No. She just said she might take us there later this spring to show Garnet and me some of her special plants.”
“You mean the whole class?”
“No, not the whole class,” Hallie answered. “I think she just meant Garnet and me.”
Emily wondered what the teacher had meant by special plants. Some people used greenhouses to grow tomatoes or phlox. What were these women using them for? Comfrey and crampbark? Hawthorn? Elder? She knew there were all sorts of people floating around remote corners of New England, some New Agers and some old-timers, who would still put a little comfrey on a cut or a bruise. She recalled a woman from her visits to her grandmother in Meredith, an elderly friend of the family: Before she would join her grandmother and her friend for walks around the lake at twilight, the woman would rub some leaf on her arms and no mosquito would ever come near her. Not a single one. And it smelled heavenly. Like perfume. Emily tried to recall now what it was and couldn’t.
She slowed as she took a corner and the road’s shoulder all but disappeared, and she noted the way the snow was starting to stick to the pavement. She had hoped it would have stopped for the season by now. But they’d gotten another three inches in the night, and John Hardin and his wife were probably on their fourth or fifth runs of the day at the mountain. Soon, she presumed, the couple would be calling it quits and heading home to prepare for their small dinner party that evening. Behind her, Hallie stopped kicking her seat.
“Maybe we should put some interesting plants in our greenhouse,” Emily said to the girls, trying out an idea. Maybe one of the benefits to living here in northern New Hampshire would be the chance for the girls to reconnect with the natural world. She imagined taking them on nature walks and teaching them the names of the wildflowers that grew along the side of the road. Of course, that would mean she would have to learn the names of those wildflowers first.
“No, let’s not,” Hallie said, mimicking the derisive voices of the teenagers she saw on sitcoms on TV.
“Yeah,” Garnet agreed. “We want that to be our playhouse.”
“Can’t it be both?” Emily asked, though now she was really only teasing them. If they felt that strongly about wanting it to be their private world, she had no objections at all.
“No way,” Hallie said. “It’s a playhouse-not a greenhouse.”
“Okay, then,” Emily agreed. “Playhouse: not a greenhouse.” She glanced out the window at a handsome white Cape with evergreen shutters. In the backyard she thought she spied a greenhouse.
Y ou could tell your wife about the bone. Bones, actually. When you dug around in the dirt a little more, you found three bullet-size phalanges that you are quite sure came from a human hand. A human finger.
Perhaps you even should tell your wife about the bones. But you don’t. You did not tell her yesterday when she came home from work and you will not tell her when she and the girls return from dance class this morning. And while you could devise any number of reasonable excuses for withholding the discovery-Emily is a little depressed, Emily already has a basket case of a husband, Emily is questioning her decision to bring the family north to New Hampshire-the main reason is essentially this: You have a macabre fascination with the bones. This house is brimming with strangeness and purposeful surprises. You want to investigate this on your own. See what it means. Talk to Hewitt Dunmore yourself.
Besides, why scare Emily? She was disturbed enough by the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. Why risk agitating her-and, thus, the girls? Because when Emily is anxious, the girls are anxious. That’s just how it is.
And so you wrap the long bone in sheets of newspaper (the Philadelphia Inquirer, the same pages that days ago pillowed the china plates that had come into your life in the weeks and months after your wedding) and place it upright in the very back of your mahogany armoire. It reminds you of the way that crowbar had been leaned up-hidden-in a corner of a closet in another bedroom. You place the pieces of fingers in a Ziploc bag beside it.
You find yourself smiling a little ruefully when you shut the armoire door. Perhaps you are more like Parnell or Tansy or Hewitt Dunmore than you realized. You hide things.
At some point soon, however, perhaps even this afternoon, Emily is going to go downstairs to the basement, and there she will see that you have torn down that door. She will see that the coal has been moved and the door is in ruins. And so you decide you will tell her about that part of your little project. You will tell her when she gets back from the dance studio with your girls. You will say you initiated this small home improvement this morning. Not yesterday. Today. After all, if she thinks you took care of the door yesterday and chose not to tell her until now, she might ask questions. And, before you know it, you might reveal that you have found some bones. Or, worse, that you may have reconnected with a dead girl with a Dora the Explorer backpack.
O n Saturday afternoon, the sun trying and failing to burn off the high overhead quilt of oyster white cirrus, Reseda misted the hypnobium, epazote, and derangia in her greenhouse. Then she gazed for a long moment at the arnica, appraising the plants. They looked like daisies, but the flowers were an orange just a tad more vibrant than terra-cotta. They smelled slightly like sage. On Monday she would harvest the arnica for a tincture. Most people only used arnica externally as an anti-inflammatory. They rubbed it on sprains and strains. They feared its toxicity when taken internally: A large enough dose was lethal. And while Reseda knew that you could kill a person with arnica, the truth was you could kill a person with plenty of medicines if you overdid it. Hence the word: overdose. She used a thousand times more arnica than the bare trace element you might find in a homemade homeopathic tincture or pill, but not enough, apparently, to ever have killed a person.
She wondered what she would prepare for the Lintons tomorrow night when they came to her house for dinner, and she put down her mister and wandered across the greenhouse to the section with the herbs she used in cooking. She noted how healthy the rosemary looked and inhaled its fragrance. Lamb, she decided that moment. Yes: She would serve lamb.
She recalled the way Captain Linton’s mind had roamed among shadows when he dropped by her office, how he seemed to be living now only in gloaming. She understood; she had her own trauma. She had had her own extended moments with the dead. His depression and disorientation were products of the accident, and with a
