She remembered something John had said to her that morning, before they picked up her husband. “This will all seem less surreal as the days pass,” the older lawyer had told her. “I mean that, Emily. Everything’s different now, nothing will ever be the same. But eventually you’ll find a new normalcy. We all do.”
She thought about this. She saw her experience as unique-horrific and peculiar to herself. But he’d seemed to be viewing it as a rite of passage. Unpredictable and certainly unanticipated, but in some way universal. “You make it sound like you went through something like this,” she had said, staring straight ahead at the entry ramp to the interstate and the pine trees now clean of snow.
“No, of course not.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“But my mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt. Someone must have told you that by now.”
“No. Right now I am far more desirous of finding the healing in an orange prescription vial.”
“I imagine Clary or Anise has something much better for you: more effective and safer,” he’d said, smiling, his eyes a little knowing and wide.
She listened to the water running in the shower above her and turned her face toward the spring sun. She breathed in deeply through her nose, the air whistling ever so slightly, and tried to focus on nothing but the warmth on her face.
H allie hadn’t planned on going to the basement. She hadn’t even planned on getting out of bed. But she awoke in the night and thought she heard noises downstairs in the kitchen and presumed that her parents were sitting at the table and talking. She knew her mom was really worried about Dad. Then she decided that Garnet must be down there, too; it was why, in the hazy logic of someone awoken from a deep sleep, she hadn’t peeked into Garnet’s room before heading downstairs. But the kitchen was completely empty. The overhead lights were on, but probably because her mom had left them on by mistake before going upstairs to bed herself. The digital clock on the stove read 12:15.
She realized she was a little scared to be downstairs alone at night and was about to scamper back up the two flights of stairs to her own bed when, for the briefest of seconds, she heard a voice again-a single voice this time-and understood it was coming from the basement. The door was ajar, and a light was on down there as well. And so she stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs, listening carefully, aware because of the cold drifting up from the cellar that she hadn’t bothered to put on her slippers. Now she regretted that: Her toes were cold. She ran her fingers over her bracelet, which she had begun to view as a good-luck charm. That afternoon Anise had said she would like her second present even more, but the truth was that she loved this bracelet much better. The second gift was a very old book about plants and what Anise called natural medicine. According to Anise, it had belonged to another herbalist a long time ago. Then Anise had given her sister an even fatter book titled The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs -again, apparently, a favorite of an herbalist who had passed away.
Finally, when Hallie was just about to shut the basement door and race upstairs, she heard someone mumbling and she was sure it was her sister.
“Garnet?” she called into the basement. “Is that you?”
But no one responded, and so she tiptoed onto the top step, the wood coarse against her bare feet, and peered underneath the banister. Sure enough, there was Garnet, all alone, standing in the shadows before the remnants of the wooden door that their father had destroyed last week. She was ankle deep in the coal and staring into the black maw of the tiny room that their father had found behind that door.
“Garnet,” she said again, her voice reduced by incredulity to a stage whisper. “What are you doing down there?”
The girl looked up at her, blinked, and then rubbed at her eyes. She looked down at her feet and seemed to realize for the first time the grotesque mess in which she was standing. She jumped away from it, landing in the moist dirt of the floor, which was a marginal improvement at best. Hallie understood that her sister had just-as one of their teachers back in West Chester once put it, infuriating their mom-zoned out. She had gone into one of her trances and lost herself somewhere inside her head. Hallie feared that it might have been a full seizure, and the fact that she was having a second one so close on the heels of another alarmed her. Garnet had never before had two in a week. Moreover, until the other night, it had been a long while since she had had even one.
“Come upstairs,” Hallie said. “Get out of there and come back to bed!” she added, though she guessed that first her sister would have to run her feet under some hot water in the tub.
Instead the girl shook her head and said, “No. You have to see this first. You have to see what I found.” Then she raised her arm and pointed into that little room.
“You went in there?” Hallie asked.
“I think so. I… I don’t know.”
The last thing Hallie wanted to do was go down those stairs: It wasn’t merely the cold and the dirt and the coal on the ground there. It was the reality that she was scared. Her sister had always been able to freak her out; the idea that it was inadvertent didn’t make the sensation any less real. Still, it was clear that Garnet was not going to come upstairs until she went downstairs, and so Hallie held on to the banister and descended the steps, wondering as she went if instead she should have gone upstairs and awakened their mother. But, she decided, she didn’t want to leave her sister alone here; she wanted to retrieve her twin (and here she was surprised when she heard in her head the name Cali instead of Garnet) and get the two of them back into their beds.
“This floor is gross,” she grumbled. “It’s bad enough with shoes on. Have you gone crazy coming down here barefoot?” Her feet made soft squishing sounds as she navigated her way over to the coal.
“You’re barefoot, too,” Garnet reminded her.
“Duh. But only because I was in bed when I came to look for you.” She exhaled in exasperation.
“Look,” said her sister. “See it? I think I dug it up.” Her right hand was indeed brown with dirt, as were the knees of her pajamas.
Hallie peered in, but she didn’t see anything at first, just more dirt inside the cubicle and the wooden framing darkened by earth and coal. “What do you mean you dug it up? Dug what up?”
“That,” said Garnet simply, and the word stuck a tiny bit in her throat.
And so Hallie squinted, reflexively rubbing at her new bracelet, and she leaned in more toward the doorway. Then, a little maddened, she decided that her feet were already a mess so what did it matter if they got even dirtier, and she plowed ahead, crossing the coal and walking right up to the remnants of the hacked door. There she held on to one of the dangling boards, realizing only after she had grabbed it that she was lucky she hadn’t gotten a splinter, and gazed into the dark. And there it was, the object that Garnet in one of her unpredictable though characteristic stupors had dug up. For a second Hallie stared at it, convinced this was some strange Halloween prank, because it couldn’t possibly be real. But it was. Had to be. There on a pile of dirt, beside a hole deep enough to bury a small dog, if necessary, was the unmistakable top of a human skull: the coral-colored Wiffle ball of the cranium, the deep sockets where once there had been eyes, and the tiny beak that she knew was the only part of a nose made of bone. There didn’t seem to be a jaw, and, when she turned back to Garnet, she understood why: There in her sister’s left hand was that piece of the skull, and it was evident that she had used it like a trowel to scoop out the dirt.
“Garnet,” she whispered, “how?” She didn’t know what she meant by the word, she wasn’t precisely sure what she was asking. But then the presence of the skull and the night and the idea that a body had been buried in their house all came crashing down upon her and she batted the jawbone out of her sister’s hand as if it were some sort of violent animal and dragged the girl as fast as she could up the stairs, screaming all the way for their mother.
T he state trooper who arrived in the middle of the night was a slim young woman with short dark hair and an aquiline nose. Her badge said C. PAYNE. She knew all about Chip Linton, and not merely that he was that pilot. Emily had the distinct sense that she was aware that he had spent the night before at the hospital. The trooper acted surprised when Emily told her, but she wasn’t much of a thespian.
“Tomorrow morning the state will send a team from Concord,” she said matter-of-factly, referring to the State Police’s Major Crime Unit. Her voice was pleasant but laconic: Emily recognized a trace of a Yankee drawl. The trooper was leaning against the kitchen counter, explaining to Chip and her what was next, while the girls sat wrapped in a blanket on the living room couch. It was evident that they weren’t going to let their parents out of
