You stare at the horizontal blinds in the window and try to focus. A thought: You fly the plane until, pure and simple, you can’t. Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. It’s what you do. It’s all about concentration.
Yes, tomorrow you will go home. You will try to stay away from the basement. You will try not to curl into a ball in the bone-ridden dirt in your own little pit of despair.
Outside your hospital room, you hear the nurse with the goatee laughing gently with another of the nurses, the stout woman with the button mushroom for a nose. She seemed very kind. They all seem very kind.
Yes, yes, the poor, dead Ashley Stearns does deserve friends. She does. But you can’t do what it takes. You won’t.
Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Fly the plane until you can’t.
You close your eyes against the stars in your hospital room, and eventually you fall back to sleep.
Chapter Ten
In the morning, John Hardin came to the house. The sun was up, and it was apparent that the last of the snow in the yard would be gone by lunchtime. There would still be snow in the woods, and a small, crunchy, knee-high ridge along the north wall of the carriage barn was likely to remain for at least a couple more days. And certainly more snow would fall at the end of March and into April. But the morning felt like spring when Emily opened the front door around seven-thirty. Holly and the twins were still asleep, but Reseda was upstairs showering. Emily had been so exhausted when she returned from the hospital that she hadn’t bothered to climb into her nightgown and had instead simply collapsed on her bed in her clothes and pulled the quilt over her. She had somehow staggered to her feet when the alarm went off, and she had only set the alarm because she was a mother of ten-year-old girls who were going to need her rather badly when they awoke.
“Good morning,” John said, his voice as cheerful as ever. She noticed that he was dressed more formally than usual. He was wearing a necktie with his tweed coat, and penny loafers instead of his usual L.L. Bean duck boots. She was impressed by how well rested he seemed; she hadn’t glanced at herself in the mirror when she made her way from the bedroom to the kitchen, and so she presumed that she looked terrible-tired and messy and not even clean. But simply having made it awake and vertical seemed a monumental accomplishment at the moment-or, perhaps, a testimony to whatever antidepressant Michael Richmond had given her.
“Hi, John,” she whispered, ushering him into the hallway and then into the kitchen. “The girls and Holly are still sound asleep in the living room.”
He hunched his shoulders and nodded, as if making his body a little smaller would make him a little quieter. He sat down at the kitchen table in the seat nearest the counter with the coffeemaker as she started to brew a pot. “Giving the girls a day off from school?” he asked very quietly, enunciating each word with care. “I think that is an excellent plan.”
“I wouldn’t say it was a plan. It’s just what’s happening.”
“Well, I hope you weren’t intending on coming into the office today.”
“No, I wasn’t. I presume you don’t mind.”
“I would have sent you home the moment I heard you coming up the stairs. Your girls need you today. Chip needs you. What time are you getting him?”
“I thought I would call the hospital in a few minutes and see what’s going on. But I guess I was hoping he would be back here by lunchtime or so.”
“I want him to have the best care available,” John said. “It’s why I’ve come by. We both know in our hearts he didn’t fall on that knife.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed at her temples. She wanted this-whatever this was-to be a one-time aberration. She wanted Chip to come home and be fine and this latest phase in their nightmare to be behind them. “What do you have in mind?” she asked finally. “Is there a particular doctor or psychiatrist you would recommend?”
“I know Dr. Richmond spoke to him for a couple minutes last night-”
“Michael is his psychiatrist here in New Hampshire,” she told him. “They have a relationship. It wasn’t like he just dropped by the hospital.”
“I understand. Not a problem at all. But there’s another doctor I would love him to see, too. Her name is Valerian Wainscott, and you can have absolute faith in her. She’s very, very good-an excellent therapist.” He chuckled and shook his head slightly. “I remember watching her grow up.”
“Any special reason you want Chip to see her?”
“Well, Valerian has a lot of experience with post-traumatic stress disorder. She works at the state psychiatric hospital two days a week,” he explained. “Tell me: Has Chip been acting particularly odd lately-you know, before last night?”
“You mean more than the flashbacks?”
“And, I suppose, a measure of guilt and depression.”
She watched the coffee drip into the glass pot and breathed in the aroma. “Yes. He has been a different person since the crash-which is to be expected.”
“Anything specific?”
“He…” She floundered for a moment, trying to find the right words. It had been much easier talking to the psychiatrist around midnight, when she was at once exhausted and in shock. When she resumed, she said, “As I told Michael last night, he went a little nuts on this door in the basement. It was just the old coal chute. But it was nailed shut, and he took an ax to it.”
“It was a violent act?”
“An act with an ax usually is.”
“I see your point.”
“And I think he was more disturbed than I was by Tansy Dunmore’s paranoia. At first I was pretty shaken-more than Chip. But I guess I got over it.” The night before she had told John and Clary that the knife Chip had brought to the basement was one of the items Tansy had left hidden in the house. “He was a little obsessed by it.”
“Her paranoia.”
“Yes.”
John shook his head ruefully. “She was a very ill woman toward the end.”
“So I gather.”
“And Chip’s therapist knew about all this?”
“Michael? Oh, absolutely.”
“Good,” he said, but the word caught just the tiniest bit in his throat. Then he smiled. “Tell me: How are the world’s most adorable twins?”
Before Emily could answer, Reseda appeared in the kitchen entrance from the dining room, a towel on her head like a turban. “They’re fine, John,” she told him. “I just peered into the living room, and they’re still sound asleep.”
“Reseda, God bless you,” John said, rising from his chair, a small eddy of laughter in his voice. “Well, I think that coffee is just about ready. May I help myself, Emily?”
“Go ahead.”
“You were suggesting Valerian to Emily?” Reseda asked him.
“I was, I was. Doesn’t this coffee smell heavenly? Ladies, may I pour? Reseda?”
“Thank you, John,” Reseda said, “but I think I’ll have tea.”
“Of course you will,” he murmured, “of course. You know, Emily, on the bright side, at least you’re here in Bethel right now and not in West Chester. I don’t know what sorts of friends or support group you had back there, but here you have a whole big family waiting to care for you and those two precious children of yours. Imagine: You had Reseda and Holly staying the night. You have Anise’s magical cooking in your refrigerator. And you have people like my own lovely bride and Sage and Peyton at your disposal.”
“And you, John,” she said, taking the mug of coffee he was handing her. “Really, I’m so lucky to have you, too. You’re such a gift.”
He rolled his eyes. “Some folks would say I’m more of a curse. Wouldn’t you agree, Reseda?” Her friend raised her eyebrows but otherwise didn’t respond. “But, yes, I do try. We all try here in Bethel.” He paused for a moment and then said with great earnestness, “It’s a bit like all of you have come home to a big family, don’t you think? It must feel a bit like coming home.”
G arnet had seen greenhouses as large as this one, but they had all been commercial nurseries-not someone’s personal greenhouse. There had been a nursery like this not too far from where they lived in Pennsylvania, and two or three times she and Hallie had gone there with their mother, and Garnet recalled trying (and failing) to convince Mom to buy one of the stone gargoyles or garden trolls the place sold. But she had never been inside a greenhouse this large in someone’s backyard-or one that had grow lights on stands above many of the tables of plants. It struck her as longer than any of the ones she had seen from the roads as they drove between the highway and their new home. It belonged to Sage Messner, the older woman she and her sister had met at Mr. and Mrs. Hardin’s house a couple of nights ago. Saturday.