little luck and the right counsel he would recover and resume a safer path. She found it significant that she was most attracted to the stories of the captain and his wife, while Anise and the other women were obsessed only with their girls.
She paused when she felt a prickling at the outer edge of her aura and stood perfectly still. She hadn’t imagined it. Consequently, she stepped over the shin-high stone statue of the amphisbaena, careful not to trip over either of the serpent’s heads (in myth, amphisbaena meat was an aphrodisiac; its skin could cure colds), passed by her Baphomet, and knelt. She peeled off her gardening gloves and spread wide her fingers, stretching her arms and straightening her spine. She stared up through the glass at the nimbus of light in the hazy western sky, closed her eyes, and randomly said aloud names of the living as if they were parts of a mantra or prayer. In a moment, whatever-whoever-was trying to cloud her aura was gone.
It was a source of unending interest to her: How could she-given all that she knew and all that she had endured-be so attuned to the thoughts of the living and so mystified by the thoughts of the dead?
T hey were only on the interstate for two exits on Saturday night, but they passed a pair of signs warning drivers of moose. One advised urgently, Brake for Moose: It may save your life. The first time Chip had seen that one, the day after they’d moved to Bethel, he’d remarked, “I suppose they’re afraid most people will accelerate when they see a moose. Look, honey, there’s a moose on the road: Let’s speed up and see if we can hit it!” He didn’t joke much these days, and so it always comforted Emily when she saw a glimpse of his humor. It was difficult to recall now, but before the accident he had actually been a rather funny man.
The Hardins’ house in Littleton was a white Federal that resided with princely elegance in the town’s hill section above the main street. The driveway had a circular portico and the front yard a stone fountain, the basin of which, because it was winter, had been removed and placed against the pedestal like a giant mushroom cap so the water pooling inside didn’t freeze and crack it. There was another car in the driveway, and Emily suspected by the way the front windshield had been defrosted that this vehicle was a recent arrival, too, and not one of the Hardins’ automobiles.
“There will be other people,” she said to neither Chip nor the girls in particular as they stood for a moment in the driveway. She found herself worrying for her husband. Worrying about her husband. It seemed that morning he had taken an ax and destroyed that squat, ugly door in the basement. The exertion had left him exhausted, though Emily was troubled more by the fury he had brought to the task: Why in the world had he used an ax instead of simply removing the carriage bolts from one side and then prying the door open with a crowbar? He had told her there were too many bolts and they were too long: Removing even a third of them would have taken hours. She took him at his word, but she couldn’t help but fear it was the fact that there were precisely thirty-nine of them that had prevented him. He had seemed unduly disturbed by the coincidence, the notion that there was one bolt for every fatality-as if each length of metal corresponded exactly with one human soul. One night over dinner he had expressed his wonderment at the connection, and she had smiled and told him this was magical thinking, a symptom of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He, in turn, had told her that magical thinking was also a symptom of depression and there was something enigmatic in his response: Was he signaling to her that he knew she had demons, too, and to allow him this indulgence? Or was he alerting her to the idea that she was right and he had done a little Web diagnosis on himself and understood that his consideration of the bolts was at once irrational and explicable?
And what had he discovered from all that sweat, what had he found on the other side of that barnboard? Nothing. He said there wasn’t a single thing behind that creepy door-which, when she was honest with herself, left her a little relieved. If she could find knives and axes hidden beneath heating grates and under the sink, what in the world might Tansy Dunmore have hidden behind the door in the basement? A cannon?
“Will there be other kids?” Garnet was asking. It was spitting snow once again, and the slate path had enough of a dusting that their boots were leaving tracks in the fine white powder. Emily looked up and focused instantly on her daughter when she heard the unease in the child’s voice. Garnet could be shy, and other children had not been a part of the plan. Quickly Emily inventoried the rest of the law firm in her mind and tried to catalog the possible children. In the end she couldn’t decide and answered that she honestly didn’t know, but she expected that the girls would be able to cocoon upstairs with a movie or two just as John Hardin had promised.
And, it turned out, there were no other children. But there was another couple present whom Clary Hardin, John’s wife, thought Emily and Chip would enjoy. When the pair saw the Lintons awkwardly removing their snow boots in the front entryway, they rose from their perch on a sofa with plush pillows and serpentine arms that looked like it belonged in a French villa and went with the Hardins to greet them. They seemed to be roughly the age of their hosts: Emily pegged the couple as somewhere in their late sixties, though both-like John and Clary- seemed almost impeccably well preserved. They introduced themselves as Peyton and Sage Messner.
“And you two, quite obviously, are Hallie and Garnet,” said Sage, kneeling down before the twins. It looked like she was drinking Scotch, and the ice cubes tinkled against her glass as she moved. With her free hand she surprised Garnet by stroking her hair, and Emily hoped that only a mother would sense her child’s discomfort with a gesture this intimate from a stranger. “Your hair is every bit as extraordinary and as beautiful as I’d heard,” Sage went on.
“I told Sage at bridge club,” Clary said quickly.
“And I had told Clary,” John added, chuckling. “I told her it was remarkable, a shade of magical titian that only a practiced Renaissance dye maker could concoct.”
“And you knew your share of them, old man,” Peyton Messner chided him.
“I am old, but not that old-thank heavens,” John corrected him.
Emily handed John her overcoat and glanced quickly at Chip. He was staring at the chandelier that was dangling from the dining room ceiling, and so she glanced at it, too. The bulbs were faces, she realized, though because they were lit one couldn’t really study them. But there seemed to be at least three or four different characters, one as sad as the classic drama mask signifying tragedy and one as hysterical as the mask denoting comedy. And then there was one that seemed… terrified. She thought of the Edvard Munch painting of the scream. She guessed there were twenty bulbs, each the white of a cotton ball cloud, and they seemed to exist like flowers at the ends of slender but tangled wrought-iron vines.
“Don’t you just love it,” Clary said, when she noticed Emily gazing at the chandelier. “John and I found it in a lighting store in Paris. We saw it for sale in a shop window in the Marais and just had to have it.”
“It’s pretty eccentric,” she said.
“I’ve always found it downright hypnotic,” said Peyton, his voice deep and plummy and rather hypnotic itself.
“Where in the world do you get replacement bulbs?” Emily asked.
“I hope we brought a lifetime supply back with us,” said John, and he punctuated the sentence with another small laugh. “But I do fear someday we may run out.”
“When my father’s construction company was building the first greenhouses, he was investigating the best grow lights. I wonder what he would have thought of bulbs like these,” Peyton said, pointing at the chandelier ever so slightly with one of his long, elegant fingers.
“Tell me something,” Emily asked. “Why are there so many greenhouses in Bethel?”
“Do you girls want some juice-or cocktails?” Clary asked the twins, and Emily had the distinct sense that she was consciously avoiding the question by turning her attention-everyone’s attention-to Hallie and Garnet. “John makes a mean Shirley Temple.”
“I make a mean everything,” her husband said, raising his eyebrows rakishly.
Emily saw both children looking at her, trying to gauge whether she approved of their having cocktails. The word was such a throwback to another era that she wasn’t sure either girl even knew what it meant. “Why not have Shirley Temples?” she said to them. “You always like them at the airport.” Funny, Emily thought now: The girls did like Shirley Temples, but she and Chip only thought to order them for the children when they were traveling. She recalled almost at once all of the restaurants and bars and lounges along the concourses at the Philadelphia airport.
“Okay, I’ll have one,” Hallie agreed.
“And you, Garnet?” asked John.
“Yes, please.”
“I have cherries, but the red won’t be as magic as your hair,” he said to her and then retreated to the kitchen.
