“How about with the girls? How has he been with them?”
“He’s been great. Always has been. The issue for me over the years was that he wasn’t home half the time because he was a pilot. Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Try being a single mom with a job and twin toddlers three or four days a week. When he’d come home after flying for three or four days, the girls would swarm on him. We’re talking seagulls on a Dumpster. And while I understood that it was simply that he’d been away, I always felt a little, I don’t know, inadequate. And unloved. No, that’s not right: less loved.”
“But you realized this was an inaccurate perception.”
“Intellectually. Not viscerally,” she said, and she regretted that somehow this discussion was starting to become about her rather than about her husband. But it seemed that the doctor sensed her unease and brought the conversation back to Chip.
“And since the plane crash? How has he been as a dad since the accident?” he asked.
“Still great. He’s a terrific parent. I mean, he’s been a little spacey. How could he not? And, as you know, he’s been depressed. There was a period when I don’t think he was getting dressed until the girls were about to get off the school bus in the afternoon.”
“Here in New Hampshire?”
“No, this was in those months right after the crash. Back in Pennsylvania.”
He rubbed at his eyes, and she guessed that he was probably as tired as she was.
“How is he doing now?” she asked.
“Well, he’s sticking with his story that it was an accident. He fell. And I guess it is possible that he happened to have the knife with him when he took a tumble while going downstairs to check on the pilot light. Or maybe he fell and didn’t fall on the knife. Then, as he was sitting on the basement floor in the dark-he has no flashlight, remember-it all just overwhelms him: the accident, the move, the lack of purpose in his life right now. The flashbacks, the guilt. There is a lot going on inside his head. And so he hurts himself. I mean, we usually associate cutting with teen girls and young women. But it can affect anyone.”
“He’d never cut himself before tonight.”
“And perhaps he never will again. But it’s still going to take a bit of work to answer your question: Why did he do this? And we may never answer that question, at least not to our satisfaction. But your husband has no history of schizophrenia or mental illness or violence, correct?”
“No,” she agreed. “None. Trust me, they don’t let schizophrenics fly planes. They don’t let people who are likely to take a knife to themselves pilot commercial jets.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But what about that thing he said about some girl on his flight-his last flight-needing a playmate? What was that about?”
“Oh, it could mean any one of a hundred things. What I found interesting is that he only brought that up after he had given you the knife and collapsed.”
“He didn’t give me the knife,” she corrected him. “He pulled it out of his stomach and tossed it on to the floor. It was like it was something that repulsed him.”
The doctor stretched his legs out straight in front of him. She noticed he was wearing black Converse sneakers. “Your husband’s contrition is profound. He is calm but ashamed. Appalled at what he did tonight. He is devastated that his girls saw him that way. But he is also continuing to insist that the water in the sink seemed a little cool when the two of you were doing the dishes after dinner. He says you went to the dining room to continue clearing the table and he went downstairs to the basement to see what was going on with the hot-water tank. But he tripped and fell. Then the lights went out.” He paused, thinking, and then turned to her. “Did that ER doctor check for a head injury?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Before your husband goes home tomorrow-”
“If my husband goes home tomorrow-”
“Make sure he was checked for a concussion. There was no obvious sign of a head injury, but I wonder if maybe he hit the back or the side of his head in the dark and blacked out. It’s just an idea.”
Emily thought about this and about how Chip hadn’t answered her when she had called out his name over and over, yelling for him as she went from floor to floor in the house. “Wouldn’t the ER have looked into a concussion?” she asked.
“You had a pretty green doctor and nurse. I think he had graduated, oh, around three-thirty this afternoon. A lot would have depended on what he thought to ask your husband. And I’m not saying your husband even has a concussion. I’m only suggesting that he may have blacked out-if only briefly.”
“You might be onto something,” she said, and she told Richmond about her attempts to find Chip and how he hadn’t responded when she had positively screamed for him during the blackout. She actually felt a little relieved at the idea that he may have been unconscious. “It would explain an awful lot,” she told him when she was finished.
“See what I mean?” he said, and he gave her a small smile. “There are a lot of questions about what happened tonight that we’ll never answer. Never. But some may have incredibly obvious solutions.”
R eseda knew as well as anyone the stories-all suspect in her opinion-that Tansy Dunmore had not buried her son in the cemetery. The woman had feared that Clary or Sage or Anise or one of the herbalists long past would try again, even if it meant desecrating the boy’s bloated corpse. Reseda gave little credence to the idea. Although Sawyer Dunmore had died before she was born (though only by half a decade, a reality that always made Reseda aware of her age since most of Bethel viewed Sawyer Dunmore’s death as chronologically distant as the Peloponnesian War), she knew the women and she knew the tincture. She had always been confident that Sawyer Dunmore’s body was in his casket in the family plot beside the two hydrangeas in the cemetery. It was only when the pilot had come to her office and mentioned that door in the basement that she had begun to wonder if she was mistaken.
Now standing perfectly still, hunched over, in the muddy chamber that Chip Linton had opened with an ax, she decided that Tansy and Parnell Dunmore had indeed turned a corner of their basement into a mausoleum. They had buried their child here, determined to keep even the soulless, rotting cadaver from the women. She had the sense that, if she took a shovel and dug, it wouldn’t take long to find human remains. The notion filled her with despair for both of the parents, but particularly for Tansy. Her guilt just might have rivaled the pilot’s.
Nevertheless, Reseda felt nothing attaching itself to her, nothing-no one-at all. If Sawyer Dunmore had remained here with his body (a distinct possibility, given how he died), he was now long gone. She ran her fingertips over the ravaged barnboard. It was appropriate that here was a doorway. A threshold. A liminal world.
She recalled the first time the dead had attached themselves to her and the trauma that had preceded it. She had understood even then, if only instinctively, how receptive the traumatized are to the dead. How open. Again, a doorway into one’s aura-one’s space. The dead will always find a passage. In hindsight, her twin sister had attached herself to her well before the police and the EMTs arrived. Reseda had been barely conscious and had presumed at first that she was dreaming: One minute she and Lucinda were walking on a path along Storrow Drive, and the next there was a man before them whom her sister clearly recognized and whose sudden presence she found terrifying. But all that had registered for Reseda was that he was wearing a New England Patriots knit cap and that he was massive. It was late at night, and people would tell her later that they shouldn’t have been out. But they were both juniors, Reseda at BC and Lucinda at BU. Soon they would be going home for Thanksgiving. Their family lived perhaps a mile from the ocean in Yarmouth, Maine. Lucinda had taken her sister’s arm when she saw the man, but she had barely started to scream when he killed her. Just like that. Reared up like a stallion and stabbed her over and over in the chest and face. There had been so much of Lucinda’s blood on Reseda’s own white parka that initially the EMTs had been confused as they tried to find where she had been stabbed. And then he had attacked her. The next day in the hospital she would learn that her forearms had practically been skinned and the snow jacket sleeves shredded as she used her arms to ward off the knife blows and defend herself. A tendon in her hand had been sliced through, presumably because she grabbed at the blade while reaching for the knife. But the blade had neither hit her heart nor nicked her aorta, either of which in all likelihood would have been lethal. The knife had missed her liver and her spleen. She had lost a lot of blood, but she had suffered mostly puncture wounds, and nothing vital-no large-caliber veins-had been punctured. Unfortunately, in addition to gaping lesions along both arms and an especially cavernous maw on her right leg (had she kicked at her assailant as he stabbed her?), her left lung was collapsed.