Still, they had barely begun to search the Web for possible homes in New England when they heard from a real estate agent. A fellow named Sheldon Carter called, describing some town they had never heard of in northern New Hampshire. Bethel. Sheldon, of course, along with every other sentient adult in the country, was aware of Flight 1611 and the captain who wasn’t Sully Sullenberger. He knew precisely who Emily was. He said that he had seen her name among the possible buyers who requested more information on the agency’s Web site in Littleton, New Hampshire, and that he had the perfect house for them. His voice was serene and warm, and it sounded as if he really did have an intuitive sense of what the Linton family needed: a world where they would be far from both the stares-some judgmental, some pitying-and the averted eyes. A world where people were not defined by their successes and failures. A world that was, in some ways, oblivious to the inexorable media-the twenty-four-hour news cycles, the relentless blogs, the wonder walls of gossip and innuendo and supposition on the Web-that constantly had stories likely to trigger self-hatred and despair in the captain, even though it wasn’t his fault.
The house he had in mind, the Realtor said, had character, space, and absolutely spectacular views. It sat alone on a hill up the road from the village. And the town had a first-rate public school system. Sheldon actually described the property as regal before sending Emily a link to it on the agency’s Web site.
Consequently, the Lintons agreed to visit Bethel, New Hampshire. They drove, though the captain insisted he had no fear of flying. They drove because this way they could look at four other possible houses along the Connecticut River, two in western Massachusetts and two in New Hampshire.
All of those houses were intriguing in some fashion, and all of them felt more authentically Yankee than the development Colonial in which they lived in Pennsylvania-a house that wasn’t that much older than the stadium where the Phillies played baseball. But none of them cast a spell over Emily or Chip or their girls. They were too small or too damp or simply not as interesting as they had seemed on the Web sites. Two of them were in a condition that was almost too good. It felt to Emily as if they were strolling inside the pages of Martha Stewart Living and there was no need to fix the place up and make it their own. It seemed like someone was about to walk in the door and ask them to take their shoes off. Consequently, the Lintons’ expectations were not especially high when they finally reached a sparsely populated corner of northwestern New Hampshire and met the real estate agent in the driveway of the house just outside of Bethel. The Canadian border, Chip realized, couldn’t have been more than forty-five or fifty miles distant.
Sheldon was delightful and he was obese. His stomach pillowed over his belt like a beanbag chair and he walked with a cane. He said he was sixty-eight, but he was diabetic and Emily doubted he’d reach seventy. But he was charming, and immediately he commented upon young Hallie’s remarkable cheekbones and Garnet’s thick mane of red hair. Emily presumed this was his way of trying to build commonality with prospective buyers. And if she was being manipulated, Emily decided that she didn’t mind; anyone who complimented her daughters made her happy. But the girls were far more interested in the greenhouse and the barn on the property than they were in the kind words of a grandfatherly real estate agent. They were intrigued by the idea that the house came with a carriage barn. Then the whole family wandered through the Victorian’s three floors, the rooms and the corridors handsome, though even Sheldon admitted that they were a little dark once they went beyond the entry foyer. The air was particularly musty in the bedrooms, but it was thick everywhere with emptiness and disuse. They listened attentively as the real estate agent explained how it would be deceptively easy to lay down a concrete pad across the entire basement floor, and how the three stories above were not nearly the fiscal nightmare to heat in the winter that a person might fear they would be. There was, for instance, that beautiful soapstone woodstove in the den. Supposedly, it alone heated the den, the kitchen, and the dining room.
But neither the captain nor his wife was troubled by the basement with its dirt floor and low ceiling or how costly it might be to heat the massive structure above it. They saw only a magnificent three-story Victorian with that gingerbread trim and its fish-scale clapboards along the three porches. They saw only its carriage barn and that greenhouse. They saw only its views of Mount Lafayette and the cannonball-shaped foothills that rippled beneath the mountain’s tectonic heft, and the house’s proximity to a village green with a gazebo and a Civil War cannon, an immaculate white clapboard firehouse for the volunteer firefighters, and an iconic, squat brick library built with Carnegie money in 1911.
If they noticed a door with thirty-nine carriage bolts partially hidden by a moldering pile of coal, the image never registered in either of their minds. It certainly didn’t register in the minds of their daughters. And so the Lintons offered more or less what the absentee owner was asking for the property-they chalked up his unwillingness to budge much on the price to the fact that he had grown up in the house, and with both parents and his lone sibling dead attributed profound sentimental value to the brown and red clapboard walls and elegant slate roof-and he accepted. The very next day, Sheldon Carter died of a heart attack. But the closing was still seamless, and the Lintons moved in on Groundhog Day.
It was only on their third afternoon there, when Chip Linton descended the basement steps with their first ever load of laundry in their new home, that he would sense something from the corner of his eye and turn toward it, realizing as the hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle that behind all that coal in the corner was a door.
Chapter One
You see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS painted in billboard-size letters along the side. You recognize it as Burlington’s runway 33, facing to the northwest. When your first officer lifts your plane off the ground, you know there will be a slight bump in about eight or nine seconds as you rise up and cross over the ravine churned out by the Winooski River. There is always a slight updraft there, even on a muggy afternoon such as today’s. The sun has begun its descent in the west but is still high above the Adirondacks.
Already, however, you feel yourself sweating, and so you know on some level this must be a dream. But, unfortunately, you don’t know how to wake yourself up. No idea. Emily, your wife, can do that, but not you. Still, you wouldn’t be sweating unless this were a dream because in reality you never broke a sweat when you were flying. Why would you? And if it is a dream- that dream -you know what’s next. Your heart starts pummeling your ribs even before they appear. And then there they are. The geese. You are upon them or they are upon you. Doesn’t matter. You’re somewhere between two and two and a half thousand feet above the ground, and there are the Bonnie and Clyde-like machine-gun blasts as you plow through them. (Why Bonnie and Clyde? You’re unclear on this, too, but your therapist has told you with a smile what an odd place the unconscious world is. And so it is Bonnie and Clyde’s Browning automatic rifles that you think of when you think of that sound.) Your engines will go-one in flames, one with grinding, steel-cutting-steel immolation, in both cases the nine-, ten-, even eleven-pound birds displacing the compressor blades and sending them spinning like shrapnel through the engines-although your forward thrust will bring you to about twenty-five hundred feet before you will begin your glide and start to lose altitude.