Free The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian Page B

are. But their father is an airline pilot who survived a plane crash. Most of his passengers died.”
    “You really don’t like to fly, do you?” Reseda observed.
    “You know I don’t.”
    “When was the last time you were on an airplane?”
    “I was twenty-three. Laurence and I flew to Aruba on our honeymoon. It took three planes to get there back then.”
    “Was it pleasant?”
    “The honeymoon? Absolutely. But I was scared to death every moment I was in the air. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.”
    “I don’t like that expression: scared to death .”
    “It’s apt.”
    “It demonstrates both fear and naïveté.”
    “Perhaps in my case it’s a control phobia—or the lack of control. That’s why many people dislike flying. But I think my point is still valid. Captain Linton crashed a plane into a lake.”
    Reseda went to the table with the motherwort and the hypnobium. She felt Anise’s eyes on her back. Anise loved working with hypnobium. She was one of the few women who was capable of using it in food as well as in potions. She was almost able to mask its bitterness with dark chocolate and sugar; no one could hide the taste completely, but Anise was able to make it edible. “The captain had help,” Reseda reminded her. “It wasn’t his fault.”
    “True. But here is what I keep thinking about: The family came to us. The girls came to us. Sheldon Carter was an old fool selling a house. He had no idea what we needed. Lord, he had no idea even what we are.”
    “What you are. I wasn’t there.”
    “Sometimes I think you don’t approve of us, Reseda.”
    “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
    “My point is simply that it wasn’t you who found the family and enticed them north. They found the house on the Web and Sheldon responded.”
    “That’s true.”
    “And so it must mean something. You of all people should see that.”
    “Perhaps,” Reseda murmured, but she didn’t turn around. She honestly couldn’t decide if it meant anything at all. The world was awash in coincidence and connection; usually, it took time to deduce which was which.
*  *  *
    C hip told Emily that the worst of the flashbacks were of the moment when he was upside down, disoriented, the water starting to enter the flight deck through the edges of the door to the cabin, and he suspected the plane behind him had broken apart. But he had other flashbacks, too, such as when he was pulling his first officer through the upside-down door of the flight deck and saw how deep the water already was in the fuselage. He said he didn’t recall seeing any passengers strapped in the bulkhead seats, their feet above the waterline, their heads below it, either drowning or drowned. But he knew one woman had been there. She would manage to unbuckle her seat belt, but apparently she did so before registering where the exit was and, upside down, she went to the side of the plane with the lavatory. She had been sitting right beside the exit, and yet she would drown pressed against the floor of the fuselage, which, as this piece of aircraft fell to the bottom of the lake, had become its ceiling. Chip presumed he would have seen her when he was opening the door had she remained in her seat or not swum in the wrong direction.
    What would remain a mystery to Chip and Emily and everyone who investigated the ditching was why the flight attendant had unlatched himself from his harness and not tried to open the exit. He had survived the initial impact, that was clear, and yet his body would be found lodged in the third row of seats. One possibility? He, too, had been disoriented when he was upside down and underwater, and he’d simply gotten lost when he tried to find the exit. Or, perhaps, he had tried to help someone. That seemed likely to Chip. He hadn’t known Eliot Hardy well, but in the few days they had flown together before the crash, he had found him patient, firm, and