“The back stairs. I have no idea if we’ll ever use them, but you never know. A fire exit, maybe. So, I’m repairing the scarier-looking steps.”
“Do you have a couple of minutes?”
You motion toward the deacon’s bench where once the family cat would sleep, and Reseda unzips her jacket and sits.
“I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I am very, very sorry about Desdemona,” she says. “That was her name, right?”
“Thank you. It was a bit of a blow,” you admit, taking the ladder-back chair across from her. You wonder: Does she think you killed the cat, too? It’s so clear that Valerian does. And Anise. And, perhaps, even your own family. And yet you didn’t. At least you don’t believe that you did. These days, you seem capable of almost anything.
“Cats-and dogs-poison themselves all the time. It wasn’t your fault,” she says evenly.
“Thank you. You want some tea?” Somehow you know she doesn’t drink coffee. Did you learn this when you were at her house for dinner, or is it merely a suspicion that all of these herbalists prefer tea?
“No, but you’re kind to ask. I want you to tell me something.”
“Sure.” You realize you have folded your arms across your chest. You try to casually bring them onto the kitchen table.
“Tell me about the voices,” she says.
“The voices?”
“Who are you talking to when you’re alone?”
“Good Lord, what makes you think I talk to anyone when I’m alone?”
“One of your girls told me.”
You pause, your stomach turning over once. This is devastating news. You had no inkling that they had seen-that they knew. “And both know?”
“Yes.”
“How long have they known?”
“I couldn’t say. But they seem to comprehend you are experiencing something rather different here from what you were enduring back in West Chester. Is that accurate?”
You feel the first twinge in your side, the first indication that Ashley is near.
“Yes. It’s this…”
“This house. I know.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not angry at you because you didn’t know… but you and that Sheldon character sold us a house with a body in the basement.”
“If I could do it all over again, I would never have allowed you to buy this place. Never. I would have stopped Sheldon from showing it to you. That’s the truth. I’m sorry,” she says. “But the voices-”
“The visions,” you say, correcting her. “I wish it were voices only. Then you could diagnose me a schizophrenic and drug me accordingly.”
“But the visions do not involve Sawyer Dunmore. It may have been his bones in the basement, but he’s no longer here. You’ve never seen him.”
She is watching you, and you find yourself swallowing uncomfortably. “No. Never him.”
“There were children who died on Flight 1611. Is it one of them?”
You nod. “Ashley Stearns.”
“Who else?” she asks. “Are there others?”
“Yes.” The word catches in your throat and the syllable grows elongated.
“How many?”
“Two-plus Ashley.”
“Do you know what they want?”
You see in your mind the knife by your bed, and then you have to close your eyes against the first migraine- like spikes of pain along the top of your head and behind your eyes. Ethan is coming, too.
“Do you want to get some aspirin?” she asks when you remain silent.
“Maybe in a minute,” you answer. Then you take a deep breath and tell her in as reasonable a tone as you can muster of your visits with Sandra Durant, the PR executive who liked orange marmalade, and of Ethan Stearns, the father with the serious guns for upper arms who is so angry at the death of his daughter. And, of course, you tell her lots more about Ashley. That child, it seems, is the reason why your own family is in danger. Someday, when it all becomes too much, you may savage one of your children with the knife you keep by your bed. But you don’t tell Reseda that. It is impossible to say such things aloud. Instead you finish by murmuring, “I had never believed in ghosts. But they’re real, you know. Either that or I’ve lost my mind once and for all.”
“They’re real,” she agrees simply.
“You believe in ghosts?”
“I do.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“I have.”
“The thing is…”
“Go on.”
“The thing is, they were my passengers and they died when my plane was brought down by a flock of geese. There were thirty-nine people who died. Why those three?”
“Versus your first officer or the flight attendants or anyone else who was onboard?”
“Exactly! Why not Amy Lynch or Eliot Hardy?”
“The rest of them have gone on.”
“To heaven.”
“That word is as good as any,” she says. “When we’re living, we’re shielded from possession by an aura. When an aura is sound, it’s difficult for a spirit to penetrate it and become one with us.”
She says this as if she is explaining how the immune system or a jet engine functions. A year ago, you would have assumed it was New Age nonsense. Now? You tend to have a more open mind.
“And you know all of this… how?” you ask finally.
“ Know is a very loaded word in this case. The truth is, I know nothing. I am certain of nothing. But that’s what faith is, isn’t it? We believe things we can’t prove and have some confidence that we’re right.”
“They want things from me.”
“I am sure they do. But if you want me to,” she says, leaning in to you in a fashion that is at once provocative and intense, “I can try to make them leave.”
“You can?”
She nods. “I can try. And if I succeed, I want you and your family to move away.”
“Leave this house?” You are surprised by the loyalty you have to the Sheetrock and plaster. To the rooms you have made new and to the rooms that await new wallpaper and paint. You have changed the house dramatically. Made it yours.
“Bethel,” she answers. “The White Mountains.”
“You don’t think we belong here?”
She shakes her head. “I think you belong here too much.”
I n the morning, John Hardin gazed up at the wondrous penumbra of lime green on the tips of the trees: not leaves yet, but waves and waves of buds. That moment when life moves from mere mist to a tangibility that swallows the twigs. It was weeks past the equinox now, and the days were starting to feel pleasantly long. He and Clary were likely to have dinner when it was still light out, which was rather nice, they both agreed. And there had been one last, torrential sugar run the day before. A person could have stood at the top of Mooseback, the squat little mountain just east of Bethel, and seen steam from sugarhouses in all directions. Over the weekend he had taken Verbena and her girls to Claude and Lavender Millier’s sugarhouse to witness boiling firsthand. As John had expected, the Milliers’ son had driven up from Salem for the weekend. And the girls had loved it. Verbena had been positively entranced. Said it brought back memories long dormant of visiting one of her grandmother’s neighbors in the woods near the lake in Meredith.
He was just about to get into his car and drive to the office when he heard the front storm door squeak
