verbalizing thoughts she had already had and things she and Michael Richmond had discussed. Nevertheless, the reality of her husband’s deteriorating mental state was still hard to hear. “I leave him alone with the girls as little as possible,” she murmured.
“Oh, he would never hurt the girls,” Valerian reassured her. “Never. This isn’t about that.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest he would,” she said. “I just worry that he gets so… so distracted. I just worry that one afternoon Hallie or Garnet might do something dangerous and silly-they’re only ten, after all-and Chip would be completely oblivious.”
“I see.”
“So, tell me: What do you want to do?”
“Well, remember, I am just the second opinion,” Valerian began. “Michael is still his doctor, and he seems perfectly competent in most ways.”
“Go on.”
“But your husband and I are starting to build a good rapport, too. And my sense is that I would like to admit him.”
“Admit him?”
“So we can observe him.”
Abruptly Emily understood what Valerian was telling her, and she felt as if she was on a plane and had just dropped a few thousand feet in sudden turbulence. She felt as if her whole body had lurched, and she was frightened. She heard the clatter of silver and plates and the din of conversation all around her through the thick French drapes of a theater. Everything sounded muffled and far away. “You want him institutionalized?” she asked when the idea had sunk in.
“Just temporarily. And he would have to agree to it. But all those beams that keep a person sane and functioning are about as stressed as they can get without snapping in two. And if they do snap, it won’t be pretty.”
“How long?”
“At the state hospital? I don’t know.”
“Best guess?”
“Maybe a month. Maybe less, maybe more. You both should view it as a time-out from life.”
“Then couldn’t the same effect be achieved with, I don’t know, a really restful vacation?”
“He needs treatment and observation.”
Emily was vaguely aware that the psychiatrist had opened her bag of granola, and now the woman popped a few pieces into her mouth. Her chewing reminded Emily of a rabbit.
“Have you talked to my husband about this?” she asked finally.
“No. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“What about Michael?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Can you tell me what’s involved?”
“With institutionalization?”
She nodded.
“Since it’s voluntary, it’s mostly about making sure there’s a bed. John Hardin would not even need to help us prepare committal papers.”
In her mind Emily saw her calm and gentle boss. “I keep forgetting: You know John.”
“Like a godfather, Emily. I love that man. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”
“Can I think about this?” she asked.
The waitress returned and, smiling, placed the chicken salad sandwich on the table. She was an older woman with bluish hair and large tortoiseshell eyeglasses that dwarfed her nose. She didn’t seem troubled by the idea that Valerian was eating food she had brought from home into the diner, and so Emily reflexively looked at the badge on her smock dress. Maggie. So, the waitress wasn’t one of them. Emily was surprised.
“Of course you can think about it,” the psychiatrist said after Maggie had left them alone. “And I will respect whatever decision you make. Just…”
“Just what?”
She pushed her little bag of granola aside and put her hands on the table, palms open and up. “Give me your hands,” she said to Emily, and-a little reluctantly at first-Emily did. Then Valerian grasped them, gently massaging Emily’s fingers with her thumbs. “I just worry about you. All of us do. We all just worry about you so, so much.”
T he cat watched the birds here in New Hampshire, making no distinctions between the ones that she’d stalked in Pennsylvania and the ones that seemed to be everywhere in this new world. There were more of them now that the snow was gone and the days were growing long. She was finding the field grass beyond the greenhouse a considerably better place to stalk them than the manicured lawns around her previous home, even though it was nowhere near as tall as it would be in another month. Unlike other cats, she felt no need to share the remains of her kills with the four people around her. She needed their approval in some ways, but she tended to eat the birds she caught wherever she found them. Same with the field mice and moles.
Likewise, she watched the insects, and was particularly fascinated by the ants that would swarm upon the small pieces of the breads and confections that the people she didn’t know brought into this house. She made no connection between the people and the way some of those foods seemed to poison the ants; that sort of cause- and-effect leap was beyond her.
Among the humans whom she did not view as part of her family but was starting to recognize, there was one with gray hair that was long and thick, and who seemed to bring more food into the house than any of the other strangers. Today she had come by again when only the man was home. It was early in the afternoon, and the girls and their mother had disappeared, as they tended to most days, and the father was working around the first floor of the house. The woman had knelt down in the front hallway and made kissing sounds, and so Desdemona had walked over to her while the father went to retrieve something from the kitchen. She’d pressed her head into the woman’s fingers and the palm of her hand, enjoying the way this individual knew precisely how to rub her ears and scratch her neck. She’d purred.
Then the woman had opened a plastic bag and pulled out a mouse by its tail. It was already dead, and for a moment Desdemona had eyed it carefully. No human had ever given her an animal before. And there was a scent to it that she didn’t recognize. But a mouse was a mouse, and it was fresh. And so she took it and raced into the corner of the den nearest the woodstove. There she devoured every bit of it, despite its unfamiliar but not unappealing flavor, even the tail and the liver and the head.
M ichael Richmond hadn’t known Valerian Wainscott well before their meeting that afternoon at his office in Littleton, but their paths had crossed at a pair of conferences and once they had been at a cocktail party together. That was three years ago. Richmond had been struck by her name the moment they’d met, since, he presumed, it signaled that she was a part of that bizarre cult of herbalists centered in Bethel. But she seemed almost too much of a flake to be one of them; moreover, she worked at the state psychiatric hospital. She was a lovely young woman whom he recalled nibbling on a homemade cupcake during a lecture in one conference and whose questions betrayed a deep distaste for most pharmacological interventions in the other-which, he supposed, made her a very rare bird at the hospital. Given how many beds were filled with the mentally ill who were violent or delusional or both, it seemed inconceivable that some days she wouldn’t want to pass out risperidone and valproate like M amp;M’s on Halloween. The fact was, chamomile tea wasn’t going to sedate a raging schizophrenic.
The two other women Richmond had met who he was convinced were part of the cult were a pair of real estate agents, and they seemed considerably more focused and intense than Valerian. One of them was so preternaturally composed that she was a little intimidating. He had met the two when he’d been searching for a small home near the ski resort. After spending a day looking at property with the composed one, he’d decided to work with another agency-and, eventually, through that firm had found an A-frame with a magnificent view of Cannon Mountain. He couldn’t recall the original real estate agent’s name now, but she had explained to him that it was some rare and exotic flower. Later people would tell him about the strange cult-a coven, they had said, only half-kidding-and he would realize that he had met one of its members.
Well, Dr. Valerian Wainscott was in all likelihood a member, too.
