planning and did the heavy lifting when it came to raising their twin girls, who would see the advantages of finding a house that offered both relative seclusion and vistas that might feed her husband’s battered soul. Emily Linton was two years shy of forty when Flight 1611 flipped onto its back like a killer whale at a SeaWorld performance. Her husband was not deemed responsible for the tragedy (that onus would be hung round the remains of the cooked birds), but neither was he Sully Sullenberger. The media’s interest in him would wane once it was clear that he hadn’t made an egregious mistake but neither had he successfully ditched a commercial jet on the water. And their lack of attention was precisely what he desired as he mourned the dead in the lake and pondered the long, painful litany of might-have-beens. Chip Linton would second-guess this critical three minutes of his life for as long as he lived, aware always that he was not Sully Sullenberger. He would, Emily knew, compare himself to that older pilot he had never met and always come up lacking. The psychiatrist from the pilots’ union and a preternaturally serene young woman from the Critical Incident Response Team warned them both of this; they seemed to want to counsel both her husband and her, and she was grateful.
Their children were fifth-graders named Hallie and Garnet: Garnet because her newborn hair had been the deep red it was even now and Hallie because it was the name of the infant’s grandmother-Emily’s mother. Hallie and Garnet were not identical twins, though they certainly were close and took pride in their sisterly camaraderie. They were each other’s best friend. The family had lived outside of Philadelphia, in the mannered suburb of West Chester, but at different points in their lives both Emily and Chip had spent sizable chunks of time in New England. Emily’s grandparents had had a summerhouse in Meredith, New Hampshire, and she had fond childhood memories of Julys and Augusts in the brisk waters of Lake Winnipesaukee. Chip had spent four years in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts, though by his senior year he was spending far more time at the Northampton Airport than he was in classes: He would devote whatever money he made working overnight at the university switchboard to flying lessons there in Pipers and Cessnas and, eventually, in a twin-engine Beechcraft Duchess. The first mountains he flew over-foothills in all but name-were the thousand-foot peak of Hitchcock and the eleven-hundred-foot summit of Norwottuck, which were no more than five miles from the edge of the runway.
Consequently, the idea of retreating to New England after the disastrous water landing grew slowly but inexorably-rather like a seed germinating in water in a bathroom glass-in the minds of both the captain and his wife. Any state but Vermont, the site of the crash, would do. Neither of them particularly liked the idea of uprooting their children, but they also didn’t believe that remaining in Pennsylvania was an option after the captain’s sudden retirement from flying. They needed to start fresh someplace new. Emily thought she could take the bar wherever they resettled, and Chip presumed it didn’t matter at forty whether he started a new career in New England or the Mid-Atlantic. The girls would make friends wherever they found themselves. Children were resilient. Didn’t families move all the time?
Still, they had barely begun to search the Web for possible homes in New England when they heard from a real estate agent. A fellow named Sheldon Carter called, describing some town they had never heard of in northern New Hampshire. Bethel. Sheldon, of course, along with every other sentient adult in the country, was aware of Flight 1611 and the captain who wasn’t Sully Sullenberger. He knew precisely who Emily was. He said that he had seen her name among the possible buyers who requested more information on the agency’s Web site in Littleton, New Hampshire, and that he had the perfect house for them. His voice was serene and warm, and it sounded as if he really did have an intuitive sense of what the Linton family needed: a world where they would be far from both the stares-some judgmental, some pitying-and the averted eyes. A world where people were not defined by their successes and failures. A world that was, in some ways, oblivious to the inexorable media-the twenty-four-hour news cycles, the relentless blogs, the wonder walls of gossip and innuendo and supposition on the Web-that constantly had stories likely to trigger self-hatred and despair in the captain, even though it wasn’t his fault.
The house he had in mind, the Realtor said, had character, space, and absolutely spectacular views. It sat alone on a hill up the road from the village. And the town had a first-rate public school system. Sheldon actually described the property as regal before sending Emily a link to it on the agency’s Web site.
Consequently, the Lintons agreed to visit Bethel, New Hampshire. They drove, though the captain insisted he had no fear of flying. They drove because this way they could look at four other possible houses along the Connecticut River, two in western Massachusetts and two in New Hampshire.
All of those houses were intriguing in some fashion, and all of them felt more authentically Yankee than the development Colonial in which they lived in Pennsylvania-a house that wasn’t that much older than the stadium where the Phillies played baseball. But none of them cast a spell over Emily or Chip or their girls. They were too small or too damp or simply not as interesting as they had seemed on the Web sites. Two of them were in a condition that was almost too good. It felt to Emily as if they were strolling inside the pages of Martha Stewart Living and there was no need to fix the place up and make it their own. It seemed like someone was about to walk in the door and ask them to take their shoes off. Consequently, the Lintons’ expectations were not especially high when they finally reached a sparsely populated corner of northwestern New Hampshire and met the real estate agent in the driveway of the house just outside of Bethel. The Canadian border, Chip realized, couldn’t have been more than forty-five or fifty miles distant.
Sheldon was delightful and he was obese. His stomach pillowed over his belt like a beanbag chair and he walked with a cane. He said he was sixty-eight, but he was diabetic and Emily doubted he’d reach seventy. But he was charming, and immediately he commented upon young Hallie’s remarkable cheekbones and Garnet’s thick mane of red hair. Emily presumed this was his way of trying to build commonality with prospective buyers. And if she was being manipulated, Emily decided that she didn’t mind; anyone who complimented her daughters made her happy. But the girls were far more interested in the greenhouse and the barn on the property than they were in the kind words of a grandfatherly real estate agent. They were intrigued by the idea that the house came with a carriage barn. Then the whole family wandered through the Victorian’s three floors, the rooms and the corridors handsome, though even Sheldon admitted that they were a little dark once they went beyond the entry foyer. The air was particularly musty in the bedrooms, but it was thick everywhere with emptiness and disuse. They listened attentively as the real estate agent explained how it would be deceptively easy to lay down a concrete pad across the entire basement floor, and how the three stories above were not nearly the fiscal nightmare to heat in the winter that a person might fear they would be. There was, for instance, that beautiful soapstone woodstove in the den. Supposedly, it alone heated the den, the kitchen, and the dining room.
But neither the captain nor his wife was troubled by the basement with its dirt floor and low ceiling or how costly it might be to heat the massive structure above it. They saw only a magnificent three-story Victorian with that gingerbread trim and its fish-scale clapboards along the three porches. They saw only its carriage barn and that greenhouse. They saw only its views of Mount Lafayette and the cannonball-shaped foothills that rippled beneath the mountain’s tectonic heft, and the house’s proximity to a village green with a gazebo and a Civil War cannon, an immaculate white clapboard firehouse for the volunteer firefighters, and an iconic, squat brick library built with Carnegie money in 1911.
If they noticed a door with thirty-nine carriage bolts partially hidden by a moldering pile of coal, the image never registered in either of their minds. It certainly didn’t register in the minds of their daughters. And so the Lintons offered more or less what the absentee owner was asking for the property-they chalked up his unwillingness to budge much on the price to the fact that he had grown up in the house, and with both parents and his lone sibling dead attributed profound sentimental value to the brown and red clapboard walls and elegant slate roof-and he accepted. The very next day, Sheldon Carter died of a heart attack. But the closing was still seamless, and the Lintons moved in on Groundhog Day.
It was only on their third afternoon there, when Chip Linton descended the basement steps with their first ever load of laundry in their new home, that he would sense something from the corner of his eye and turn toward it, realizing as the hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle that behind all that coal in the corner was a door.
Chapter One
You see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words
