forbid, something happened to either of your girls and you found yourself face-to-face with the person you held responsible for the child’s death.
“No, I don’t,” you tell him simply, and though it sounds like a confession, you do not bow your head. You meet him eye to eye. Father to father.
“But it’s not just all that potential that’s gone,” he says. He takes a deep breath and exhales through his nose. The steam rises like mist in the chill of the basement. “It’s that she has no one her age. She has-”
“Ethan, stop it,” says Sandra Durant, her tone at once determined and pleading. How is it, you wonder, that she hasn’t yet finished bleeding out? Her blouse and her skirt have become indistinguishable, one long, saturated tunic the color of those wines Peyton kept opening earlier that evening.
“I won’t,” Ethan insists. “I want my daughter to have friends again. I want her to have little girls to play with.”
“That’s cruel!”
“That’s fair! She deserves friends!” he snaps back. And that’s when you first understand what this pair has been fighting about. They have been arguing over your girls. Hallie and Garnet, the two of them asleep right now in their rooms on the third floor. Ethan holds you responsible for the death of his daughter. For killing Ashley and leaving her with no one to play with. You know you would feel precisely the same way.
“Would you like me to introduce my girls to Ashley?” you ask this father, this man just like you. “They seem to be a little older, but they’re good girls, Ethan. Very good girls. Very kind, both of them. They’d be good playmates-and role models.”
“Yes, I would like that,” he tells you. “Do what it takes.” His scowl lessens appreciably, but then Sandra slaps him hard, whatever fear she has of him subsumed by her apparent worry for your daughters, and you feel the spray from the lake on your own face. You bring your fingertips to your cheek and then gaze at the drops of water there that a moment ago were on Ethan Stearns’s cheek.
“Chip?” You turn toward the stairs when you hear Emily’s voice. She is calling down into the basement from the top of the steps, her concern for you permeating your name. When you turn back to Ethan and Sandra, the two of them are gone.
“I’m here, sweetheart,” you call up to Emily.
“What are you doing?”
“I was checking the pilot light on the furnace.” Yes, that’s it. What else would you have been doing? Then you walk in your bare feet across the moist dirt of the basement and up the steps to your wife, telling her that the pilot is fine and the furnace is fine and the basement is fine. Everything is fine.
Yes, it is. Everything is just fine. Even the pilot.
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
You kiss her on the cheek and meet her worried eyes. You smile. Then you flip off the light to the basement and grab a wad of paper towels for your feet. No sense in tracking mud between here and the bathtub.
Chapter Seven
The girl was another fifth-grader named Molly Francoeur, and Hallie had figured out right away-in her very first hours in the new classroom-that the child was not one of the school’s popular kids. She was big for her age, already five and a half feet tall, and she towered over the boys and the girls. As a result, she was gangly, awkward, and could be very shy in the classroom and at recess. She wore a tractor green John Deere sweatshirt most days and reminded Hallie of a Sesame Street character. Her father had run off years earlier, and her mother worked a shift behind the register at the gas station and convenience store by the entrance to the interstate. She had a sister in second grade and a brother in ninth grade, at the high school, a boy who had already gotten into trouble for drugs and “borrowing” a car that belonged to a teacher’s aide. But Molly was also much smarter than Hallie had expected when Mrs. Collier was introducing the twins to the class and she sat Hallie down at the table with Molly and two boys. Hallie had slowly gotten to know the girl, and she realized that the kid had been besieged by bad luck since the day she’d been born.
At first, Hallie had feared that she herself wouldn’t have a lot of clout in whatever pecking order existed here in northern New Hampshire: She was new, her father was the pilot who crashed the plane into the lake (even if it wasn’t his fault), and she was twins with a girl with the freakiest red hair on the planet. It was why she had invited Molly over to their house the first time: She’d figured that beggars really couldn’t be choosers. It was only when Hallie had been in the school a few days and realized that Mrs. Collier was strangely excited by the idea that she was a twin and that the grown-ups in this town actually liked the color of Garnet’s hair that she began to understand it wouldn’t be long before she had reestablished herself as one of the cooler kids in the class. And this mattered to Hallie.
By then, however, she had already become friends with Molly Francoeur and, happily, learned that she might have underestimated this other child. Now it was early Sunday afternoon, and Molly had just been dropped off at their house for another playdate. Hallie and Garnet had taken the girl out to the greenhouse this time. The snow that had fallen the other night had melted off the roof, and the early March sun was warming the structure, but they still kept on their snow jackets. The three fifth-graders were creating a tableau with Hallie and Garnet’s large American Girl dolls and furniture, not especially troubled by the reality that some of the dolls’ clothing and tables and beds were supposed to look like they were from eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia while the other accessories were supposed to replicate the Northern Plains a hundred years later. Molly spoke with the laconic cadences that Hallie and Garnet had come to recognize from many (though not all) of the people they ran into at school, at the dance studio, or with their mom and dad at the supermarket or the hardware store.
They had just decided that the three dolls would be sisters-three beds and three dressers in a row, the dolls in their beds for the night-when Molly folded her fingers under her arms to warm them and said, “Maybe they should be triplets.”
“And maybe they’re orphans,” Garnet said, and Hallie had to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. Garnet loved building games around orphans. Over the years, she had made Beanie Babies, Barbies, and trolls into orphans. It didn’t surprise Hallie that now she wanted to make their American Girl dolls orphans, too. Usually Garnet’s orphan scenario was straight out of Annie or A Little Princess. There was an evil lady running an orphanage, and out of the blue a loving and spectacularly wealthy guardian angel would exact revenge on the orphanage director and whisk the Beanie Babies, Barbies, or trolls off to a life of luxury and unimaginable happiness. Sometimes the angel would be a prince, and sometimes there would be two angels-the orphans’ parents come to rescue them.
“Okay,” agreed Molly, and Hallie decided there was no reason for the dolls not to be orphans. The game would be a little predictable, but it was Sunday afternoon, she was tired from going to Mom’s boss’s house last night, and she didn’t have a better idea. “And maybe they’re cursed,” Molly added.
Hallie thought about this: It was definitely a new wrinkle. She and Garnet had never put a curse on their American Girl dolls. The closest they had come to using a curse as a device in any of their games had been a brief phase so long ago that Hallie had only the dimmest recollection. It had something to do with a couple of their “ball gown” Barbies and the two Disney princesses who wind up out like a light: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. “What’s the curse?” she asked Molly.
The child’s lips were chapped from months of cold weather, and she curled them together while she formulated a response. Garnet looked back and forth between Molly and her, waiting. Hallie had the sense that her sister didn’t want to deviate too far from the orphan game. Finally Molly unpuckered her lips and said, “They’ve been poisoned.”
“With an apple?” Garnet asked.
“No, that’s too boring,” Molly said, and Hallie agreed. The girl pulled her hands out from under her arms and with one of her hands pointed at the greenhouse walls around them. “Maybe something poisonous was grown in here. What’s a good poisonous plant?”
“Poison ivy,” Garnet suggested, but she crinkled her nose immediately after she spoke, and Hallie could tell it was because Garnet understood that this wasn’t at all what they were looking for. She was just brainstorming. They didn’t need a poison that made your skin itch; they needed a poison that might kill you.