that his mental illness had worsened, perhaps-according to Valerian-because of the solitude. Not that taking a yoga class or volunteering at the library would have made a difference. But all those hours alone in this house scraping wallpaper and slathering paint on kitchen walls? It had exacerbated his disconnection from people other than his wife and his daughters. And so whatever demons he already had were transformed into the self-loathing that had led him to hurt himself.
And then Garnet had found the bones. Good God, her children would have had to have been mannequins not to have been out of sorts. It was a miracle that they could put one foot in front of the other and function at all.
No, it wasn’t precisely a miracle. It was Reseda. Anise. Holly. Clary. Ginger. Sage. It was all those remarkable women. It was John Hardin. It was all those remarkable people. They were strange, there was no doubt about it. They were obsessed with their greenhouses and gardens and quaint little remedies. But they were caring and giving and intellectually engaged. While the girls might feel a little ostracized at the moment by their classmates-though Emily honestly was convinced this would improve over time-they had been embraced by the most interesting women of Bethel. Verbena. This was the name that Clary and Anise were calling her now. John was, too, though for some reason she found his use of it a little troubling: It suggested a more public transformation than she was prepared to make at the moment, because he wanted to call her that at work. Moreover, she wasn’t enamored of the name-the connotation in her mind was the men’s talcum and soap she had sometimes placed under the Christmas tree for Chip, though Anise had reassured her that it had a long and rich feminine history as well. A mystical history. Anise had told her that another term for verbena was Juno’s tears, and she thought it might be a fitting name for Emily as she coped with the heartbreaking loss of Flight 1611 and her reawakening into a future she had never anticipated.
When Emily had told Reseda that some of the women now wanted to call her Verbena, her friend had shown absolutely no emotion, and for a moment she thought that perhaps Reseda didn’t approve-which made her fear that perhaps Reseda didn’t believe she was worthy of having a new name. Of becoming one of them. But then Reseda had nodded and said, “Yes, of course. We should have a christening. A rebirth into Verbena. It might be fun. We’ll view it as an excuse for a party.”
“Mommy?”
She looked over at Garnet. “Yes, dear?”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking about vocabulary words. At least I should have been. Sorry.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the words, either.”
“No?”
“No. I want to move back to Pennsylvania.”
Emily rested her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and rubbed it softly. She was surprised by both the bluntness and the suddenness of her daughter’s request. “Sometimes I do, too,” she said, and she was about to say more: explain why that idea had its appeal but why, in the end, she would prefer to stay here in Bethel. At least for now. The reality was that there was a support group here. Moreover, she didn’t believe that her husband-their father-was capable of uprooting his life once again. In some ways, the man she had fallen in love with and married and raised the two of them with had died that awful afternoon last August. He had become a ghost of his former self, a wisp: He had become, sadly, the pilot who wasn’t Sully Sullenberger.
Meanwhile, she wasn’t even sure she was capable-not emotionally, not intellectually-of returning to a practice as demanding as the one she had left behind in Philadelphia.
“Then we might move back?” Garnet was saying. “There’s a chance?”
“I don’t want to,” said Hallie, and she glared down at her sister from the bed. “I know things have been kind of weird here. But it’s not like West Chester was so great.”
“You loved West Chester,” Garnet corrected her. “You were, like, the most popular girl in the class!”
“I was not!”
“You were! You totally were!”
Hallie sat back against her headboard and folded her arms across her chest.
“Let’s talk about this calmly,” Emily said. She gazed back and forth at her daughters and recognized in the two of them the odd penumbra of resemblance that strangers noted when they first met the girls. “Garnet, you go first. Why do you want to move back to Pennsylvania? And then Hallie, you can tell us why you don’t. Okay?”
Hallie gazed angrily out the window into the night, and Garnet nodded slowly, marshaling her ideas. Before she started to speak, however, the phone rang and Emily made a T with her hands, signaling a time-out. “Hold your thoughts,” she said to Garnet, and then she rose and ran down the stairs to the second floor to get the phone in her and Chip’s bedroom. She figured she reached it about a half second before the answering machine would have picked up.
“Good evening, ma’am. Is this Emily Linton?”
“Yes.” She didn’t recognize the male voice.
“My name is Sergeant Dennis Holcomb, I was one of the investigators from the Major Crime Unit who examined the remains your daughter found in your basement. We met your husband, the captain, that morning.”
“Yes. Of course.” She felt her heart thrumming in her chest; she feared this could only be more bad news.
“Well, we went and got a DNA swab from Hewitt Dunmore. There’s a match. He still claims he had no idea that his twin brother had been buried down there. Insists the bones must have preceded his family’s purchase of the house: Abenaki remains or fur trappers or loggers. He still says that door was just the old coal chute. But it’s pretty evident the remains are Sawyer Dunmore.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means the case is closed. The twelve-year-old’s death was ruled a suicide years ago; there was never any suggestion there may have been foul play. And New Hampshire law allows for burial on private property. Why the parents wanted the world to think they buried their boy in the cemetery-and how the mortician was or wasn’t involved-is anyone’s guess. But they’re all dead, and no laws were broken.”
“So we’re done?” she asked.
“More or less. I will tell you this: The medical examiner’s office said some of the bones are still somewhere in your basement-in that homemade vault. They couldn’t build a whole skeleton. So, you might want to discourage your little girls from playing down there. I know I wouldn’t want my little boy digging around that cellar.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome, ma’am,” he said, and then he gave her his number in case she ever had any more questions. She, in turn, murmured her gratitude and hung up. When she went back upstairs to Hallie’s bedroom, both girls were sulking-clearly they had bickered while she had been gone-and neither wanted to discuss the pros and cons of leaving Bethel.
Y ou hang up the kitchen phone only after both Emily and Sergeant Holcomb have hung up their receivers. You make sure that there is no one on the line to hear your click. Then you lean against the counter beside the oven. You glance down. The knife that Tansy left you is still underneath it. One time Desdemona pawed at a dust bunny there and Emily watched the cat while she was chopping an onion, but otherwise you have had little fear that someone will notice it there. Nevertheless, you are relieved the sergeant didn’t ask about it-that he didn’t ask Emily whether it had turned up. He might have. He might have said something as simple as We’ll get that crowbar and that ax back to you soon enough. They weren’t murder weapons, so we don’t need them. Or, Did you or your husband ever find that knife? Just curious . And then Emily would have asked you where the knife was, since clearly it wasn’t with the State Police. Yes, you were lucky. She might not have trusted you after that.
You hear a noise in the den and stroll there. As you expected, Ashley is playing with your daughters’ dolls, while Ethan watches. He glances at you and then back at his little girl. He tries not to share with her his utter contempt for you. But he is relentless, his judgment unforgiving and harsh. Why is it that the presence of this other father and daughter causes you such intense physical pain? It is not merely sympathy for all they have endured and all they have lost. For their unspeakable loneliness. It is the racking pain in your head, your abdomen, and lower back that causes you to close your eyes and breathe in deeply and slowly until the Advil kicks in and takes the edge off.
Ashley looks up at you and then drops the doll in the Civil War-era smock near the brick hearth for the
