PART THREE
The Ice Harvest
Chapter Twenty-four
E VEN THE AIR HERE IS TAINTED, DYED A CITRINOUS green that shimmers under the frosted dome like green Jell-O. We spend the day splashing in murky water the same color and temperature as the air. Or Olivia swims and I lie in a plastic lawn chair staring up at the pale green bubble of sky. We play putt-putt on spiky green plastic grass. We eat our meals at a restaurant next to the pool and so even our food tastes like chlorine. Our room’s only window looks onto the interior dome. By the third day I’ve lost all sense of night and day; it seems like we’ve been here for years, not days. When I turn out the light for bedtime, the green light from the dome seeps through the cracks in the curtains. Even Olivia is restless and spends the night clinging to me in the oversized bed. I awake, tangled in her damp hair, breathing in its comforting smell of bleach and salt.
I thought it made sense to stay in a hotel with an indoor pool, so I spent the last of my savings on two weeks at the Westchester Aquadome. When I gave Dean Buehl the phone number she asked how long I planned to stay and I realized that I might not have a job anymore. When I told her I didn’t know she said to call her in two weeks and we’d talk it over.
“Take some time to think about what you really want to do, Jane.” The words sounded familiar and I realized it was the same thing she had said to me the day I graduated from Heart Lake. She’d come down to the train station to see some of the younger girls off. She did this every year and usually she was a cheerful sight, calling a hearty “see you next year” and waving her handkerchief at the departing trains. But that year a lot of girls wouldn’t be coming back. Two students and a town boy had drowned in the lake and a teacher had been let go because she had somehow been involved. Parents reacted by pulling out their children and their money. I saw Miss Buehl first on the opposite side of the tracks, the northbound side, fussing nervously over Albie, trying, unsuccessfully, to slick back her pale wisps of hair into a large bow pinned to the back of her head. When she saw me she hurried over the bridge leaving Albie looking small and lost beside a tower of matching monogrammed suitcases.
“I wanted to wish you luck at Vassar, Jane,” Miss Buehl said when she had crossed to the southbound side. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be getting out now.”
“Have that many girls been pulled out?” I asked.
“About half,” she said, lowering her voice. “Of course, we’ll get more girls, but not of the same sort.”
“Albie’s been pulled out?” I asked in a low voice even though the girl couldn’t possibly hear us from across the track.
“I’m afraid Albie’s been kicked out,” Miss Buehl said in a quaking whisper, leaning her head close to mine. I thought I smelled liquor on her breath and I noticed for the first time how haggard she looked. “We discovered it was she who broke the fanlight over the doors to the mansion. She threw half a dozen rocks through it.”
“Really? Albie did that?” It was hard for me to imagine frail little Albie having the strength to throw even one rock that high.
“Yes, I tried to argue on her behalf, but then there were other infractions, curfew breaking, erratic behavior…”
“Where is she going?” I asked, trying to keep from stealing a look across the tracks. I felt sure she was watching us and that she guessed she was the topic of our whispered conversation.
“St. Eustace,” Miss Buehl answered.
“Oh.” St. Useless. The school Deirdre’d been so afraid she’d end up at. I did look at Albie then, but she had turned away from us and set her small, pinched face into an expression of bland indifference, as if she were on her way to a tedious but necessary luncheon, and not to the Siberia of girls’ boarding schools. Then the northbound train pulled in and blocked my view of her.
“So you see how lucky you are, Jane,” Miss Buehl had said to me. “You can put this whole thing behind you and take some time to think about what you really want to do. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” She said it like she almost envied me. That she wished she were getting out, too. But then I might have imagined that. After all, Heart Lake was her whole life.
THIS TIME SHE DIDN’T TELL ME I HAD MY WHOLE LIFE ahead of me. We both knew my options were limited, they had narrowed to… what? Did I even have more than one option? “Maybe it’s not too late to work things out with your husband,” she had added instead.
I suppose she would feel better firing me if she knew I had somewhere to go.
The idea of working things out with Mitch was the furthest thing from my mind when I came here, but he has been unexpectedly kind.
He joins us for dinner almost every night and has even offered to pay part of my hotel bill. When I told him, on the first day while we both watched Olivia swimming in the pool, about what the police had found in the lake along with Aphrodite’s body, he thought I meant, at first, that the baby in the tea tin had been Aphrodite’s. I had to explain, for what seemed like the hundredth time since the diver had emerged from the lake with that tin, that the baby belonged to my old roommate Deirdre Hall. I told him, as I told the police and Dean Buehl, that Lucy and I had helped her by sinking the tin in the lake.
“Are they charging you with anything?” he asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Good,” he said. “You were a minor and you were only an accomplice in disposing of the body. The baby was dead at birth, right?”
I nodded. “That’s what Lucy told me.”
He paused for a moment, perhaps seeing my uncertainty. Even as I assured him, I realized I was no longer so sure. Maybe it’s being in this place—the warm humid air and the way voices echo under the dome. Since I’ve been here I’ve remembered standing in that damp, overheated dorm corridor listening to a thin wail of crying. “Well, if it was a lie, it was Lucy’s lie. You should be OK. I’ll call Herb Stanley in the morning.” Herb Stanley was Mitch’s lawyer. He’d drawn up our separation agreement. “Don’t talk to anyone without consulting him first. You say you knew this police officer back in school?”
“He was Matt and Lucy’s cousin. I met him once or twice.”
Mitchell smiled at me. “An old boyfriend?”
I was surprised to detect a note of jealousy in his tone.
I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered holding hands with Roy Corey on the swimming beach, stroking my hand along his face. “Not exactly,” I said.
“Not exactly no either. Maybe he still likes you.” I thought of the way Roy Corey flinched when I touched his arm. No, I didn’t think he liked me, but I wasn’t obliged to tell Mitchell that.
“You’re looking good by the way. That north country air must agree with you.”
I saw his eyes moving up and down my body and I felt, suddenly, self-conscious in my bathing suit. It was true I had lost weight over the fall semester, finally shedding the pounds I’d gained having Olivia. I knew Mitch had minded how I’d changed after Olivia was born. And I had minded how he minded.
“I’m sure Roy Corey is busy with his job right now. Aphrodite’s… I mean Melissa’s death will probably be declared a suicide, but now he’s got this other body…”
I stopped myself, appalled at how the word “body” echoed in the watery air. I lowered my voice and went on. “They’re going to exhume Deirdre Hall’s body—she was buried in Philadelphia—and Matt Toller’s body.”
I stopped again, remembering the day they found Matt and Lucy. Although it had felt like spring the night I went to meet Matt at the icehouse, it had been a false spring. One of those premature February thaws we get in the Adirondacks. Overnight the temperature had plunged and the lake froze over again. They tried sawing holes in the ice the way they used to for the ice harvest. It turned out that the extension agent had all the equipment and had been thinking of doing an ice harvest for a history demonstration. When they couldn’t find the bodies, though, they brought in a small ice cutter from the Hudson and tore the whole lake apart.
I was in the woods behind the icehouse on the day they found them. The divers carried the bodies into the icehouse while they sent for the family to identify them. It must have been hard on the divers, pulling that tangle of limbs up from the lake bottom. They stood on the shore afterward, smoking cigarettes, their backs to the icehouse. One skipped a stone over the water, but stopped because there was too much broken ice. They didn’t notice me when I came down from the woods and stood in the doorway.
They had laid the bodies on one of the ledges where they used to store the slabs of ice. At first I thought they’d only found Matt, but then I saw, tangled in his hair, the small hand and, nestled below his ribs on the side farthest from me, in the shadow of the ledge, her face, pressed against his chest.
They had been bleached clean by the lake, their flesh the same marble white. It was hard to tell where his body stopped and hers began.
“I THOUGHT YOU SAID IT COULDN’T BE MATT’S BABY.” Mitchell’s voice broke into the memory of those twisted limbs.
I took a deep breath of the warm chlorinated air.
“I may have gotten it wrong,” I told Mitchell. “Roy Corey seems to have some other idea.”
When I told Roy Corey what had happened—from the day I came back to the school early to the last argument between Matt and Lucy—he didn’t seem completely surprised. “I thought something was wrong that night Matt left to hitch back to Corinth. He said he’d gotten a letter from Lucy and he was afraid he’d ‘really messed something up.’ He wouldn’t tell me what. I was afraid… well, never mind what I was afraid of. We’ll have our answers in two weeks.”
That’s how long it would take to get the results of the DNA tests. They’d found an aunt of Deirdre’s who agreed to the exhumation. As for Matt, Cliff and Hannah Toller had both died in a car accident four years after their children’s deaths. Ironically, Matt’s next of kin was now Roy Corey. I asked if he’d call me when he got the results.
“Oh, you’ll be hearing from me, Jane,” he said.
“AT LEAST HE DIDN’T TELL YOU TO STAY IN CORINTH,” Mitchell said. “That’s a good sign.”
“Yeah, but he told me not to leave this hotel without telling him where I could be reached.”
Mitchell nodded. “Why don’t you call and say you’re staying at the house.”
I thought I had misheard him in the weird acoustics of the Aquadome, but when I looked at him I thought I saw tears in his eyes. But then it might have been the way the air here stings your eyes.
“What are you saying, Mitch?”
He shrugged. “I never understood what went wrong, Janie. I never understood why you left. Was it that bad… living with me? I know I could be preoccupied.”
I looked down at Olivia paddling in the pale green water. With her purple and pink bathing suit and orange water wings she looks like one of those paper flowers they float in exotic cocktails. The truth was I didn’t understand completely why I left either.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mitch,” I said. Yes, he had been preoccupied, but hadn’t that been what I was looking for—someone who wouldn’t pay too much attention, someone who wouldn’t look at me too closely?
“Maybe it’s not too late for us.” He reached out across the space between us and laid a damp hand on my bare knee.
I felt an odd mixture of hope and nausea. I hoped that any look of queasiness was covered by the green tint that lay on everything around us, because it had occurred to me that I shouldn’t be too quick to turn down Mitch’s offer.
“I have to think it over, Mitch.”
“Of course, Janie, take all the time you need.”
TIME IS SOMETHING I HAVE AN ABUNDANCE OF HERE AT THE Aquadome, but when I try to attend to the question at hand my thoughts slither around like slippery fish in the green air. I try to go back, in my mind, to when I met Mitch and decided to marry him. I think that if I can remember loving him I can salvage some of that feeling now and it will be enough to build a new future on, the way a seed crystal teaches the other molecules to make ice. All I need is a seed, but I can’t really remember ever deciding anything. When I met Mitchell, a few years out of college working in the city, I was nearly drowning.
Take some time to think about what you really want to do. That’s what Miss Buehl had told me that day at the train station. But I didn’t have to think about it. My path had already been laid out for me the day I listened to Helen Chambers’s plan for Lucy. I see her as a Vassar girl and then she’ll go to the city and work in some arts-related field—publishing, I think. I had rejected, that day, Helen Chambers’s plan for me to go to the State Teacher’s College and teach Latin, and decided instead to do what she meant for Lucy.
I worked hard at Vassar and got reasonably good grades. My Latin professor urged me to apply to graduate school, but I was tired of treading the same pattern of paths that meandered around the pretty campus. Wouldn’t graduate school just be another set of paths around another campus? I felt something like Lucy’s impatience with the snowbound paths of Heart Lake and decided to do what I thought she would have done.
After graduation I moved to New York City and got a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I shared an apartment with two other girls—both from good colleges—who worked at the same company. I wore the same kind of clothes as they did: short black skirts and silk blouses, a simple strand of graduated pearls. So what if my blouses were polyester instead of silk, my pearls paste instead of real? I stayed up late reading the manuscripts the company asked us to read on our own time. I packed my own lunch and walked to work because it was hard to make my share of the rent on the little money I made.
I turned down invitations to drinks and dinners after work because I couldn’t pay my way. Besides, I told myself, it was better to spend the evenings reading manuscripts while my roommates went out. Sometimes one of the boys—they still seemed like boys to me, in their sloppily ironed Oxford shirts and slim khaki pants—would ask me out, but I always declined. I told myself it was better not to get involved with anyone just yet. But really, it was the way they all reminded me of Matt, of what Matt might have become. I’d look at one of these nice, clean-cut boys in his prep-school tie and button-down shirt and think: Matt would be his age now, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.
One day, when I was twenty-five, I was sitting in an editorial board meeting looking at a young man who worked in copy editing and always passed my desk on his way to the Xerox machine even though it wasn’t really on his way. As I looked at him a shaft of weak sunlight came in through the dirty, sixteenth-floor windows and touched his mousy brown hair, turning it a bright and shining red. I felt a chill move through me as if I had just swum through a cold current and the air around me seemed to shimmer. I was seized with an unreasoning panic that the next breath I took would choke me. I left the meeting and told my boss that I’d suddenly felt ill.
“A late night?” she asked, nodding with complicity. She, I knew, stayed out to all hours in the clubs and spent the morning hours nursing hangovers with V8 juice and Tylenol. I hated to think she attributed my illness to the same cause, but it was easier to nod and agree to her sympathetic smile.
When it happened again, that same rush of cold followed by a fear that I couldn’t breathe—this time in a conference with an author and his agent, she was less sympathetic. When I emerged from the ladies’ room, still trembling and sweating, she asked if there was anything I wanted to tell her. What could I tell her? That I had begun to be afraid of drowning on dry land? That I could no longer go to movie theaters, supermarkets, subway stations, or any other place where I had once had that sensation of drowning for fear of it happening there again?
I quit the job. I took another job as a secretary at a temp agency. That way, I reasoned, if I had an attack in a particular setting I wouldn’t have to go back. My roommates had decided to move to a bigger apartment in Brooklyn. Since the subway was on my list of places I couldn’t go anymore, I moved into a women’s hotel near Gramercy Park. I could walk to most of the places the temp agency sent me. It was on one of those jobs, filling in for the receptionist at a building contractor’s office, that I met Mitchell. He was older than I, his hair already thinning, his build a little thicker than a boy’s. When he asked me to lunch, I accepted. When I told him I liked to take the stairs instead of the elevator for the exercise he not only believed me, but he approved. He told me he admired what good shape I was in. It was true that I had gotten very thin, mostly because I had so little money to spend on food and I walked everywhere.
He was impressed that I had gone to a private girls’ school and Vassar, but he didn’t ask me many questions about either place. We mostly talked, on our dates, about his job and his plans for the future. He wanted to go out on his own—build houses in the suburbs. He said the city wasn’t a good place to raise children. He seemed to me, above all else, cautious and polite. When he asked me to marry him I didn’t ask myself if I loved him. I had assumed that my chances of loving anyone had vanished into the black water of Heart Lake the night Matt and Lucy drowned below the ice.
Those first years of my marriage to Mitchell were peaceful. He built us a house north of the city and I helped out in the office. Mitch did seem disappointed that I didn’t get pregnant right away, but when I did conceive I thought everything would be all right.
What I hadn’t counted on was how much I would love Olivia. When I first saw her, her body glistening with blood, I was overcome by violent shivering. The labor nurse explained that the convulsions were caused by my body’s inability to adjust to the change in mass. But to me it felt like something was breaking up inside of me, setting something free that had been frozen all these years. I wanted to hold her, but Mitch said I was shaking too hard to be trusted with her.
In an unguarded moment I had told Mitchell about my panic attacks. He had seemed, at first, unconcerned, but after Olivia was born he wanted me to see a psychiatrist to make sure I wouldn’t have an attack while I was watching Olivia. “You might drop her,” he said, “or hurt her during an episode.” He spoke as if I had epilepsy. The psychiatrist prescribed an antianxiety drug that made my mouth dry and prevented me from breast-feeding Olivia. Still, Mitchell worried. He made me promise not to drive with Olivia. Our new house was in a housing development far from anything. I spent my days wheeling Olivia in her carriage around the winding streets that always seemed to dead-end in a cul-de-sac.
I thought, because he was so worried about me watching Olivia, he would come home right after work, but instead he stayed at the office later and later. After I got Olivia fed and bathed and put to bed I would go through my old books, which were stored in boxes in the basement. One night I took out my Wheelock’s Latin grammar and started at the beginning, memorizing the declensions and conjugations all over again. I was reciting the third declension to Olivia in her high chair one night when Mitchell came home unexpectedly early.
“What the hell are you teaching her, Jane, that mumbo-jumbo witchcraft you practiced in high school?”
I stared at him, pureed yellow squash dripping from the spoon I held out to Olivia. My journals, all of them except the fourth one which had disappeared, were in the same box in which I had found my Wheelock. I’d left the box, opened, in the basement.
Olivia, impatient for the proffered spoon, slammed her small fist on the high-chair tray. Startled, I dropped the spoon and Olivia began to cry.
Mitchell pulled her out of the high chair. “That’s OK, Livvie, Daddy’ll take care of you.”
I knew that in five minutes Mitchell would give her back to me to do the bath and bedtime, but in that instant I felt, as he intended, his power to take her from me. There were things in those journals that made me sound like an unfit mother. There were things in the psychiatrist’s files that made me sound insane. I didn’t know when Mitchell had started to hate me, but I suspected it was when he discovered I had never loved him. And in a way, I couldn’t blame him. I had thought it was all right to marry someone I didn’t love, but what I hadn’t counted on was how it felt to share someone I loved with someone I didn’t.
And so I decided to make the first move. For the next few weeks, while I wheeled Olivia around the endless maze of suburban streets, my mind moved around in the same dead-end circles, trying to find a way out. When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live? When I met you, you couldn’t even hold a secretarial job for more than a week.”
I knew he had me. If I went to work in the city I’d have to put Olivia in day care ten hours a day. A lot of Mitch’s business was off the books, which meant the child support he’d be obliged to pay me wouldn’t amount to more than a few hundred dollars a month. I had no family or friends to turn to. I read ads for jobs I could do from home, but anyone could see that I’d never make enough to support myself, let alone Olivia. I had no skills to speak of.
“For God’s sake, Jane, you majored in Latin,” Mitch was fond of saying to me. “How impractical can you get?”
One day, though, I read in the newspaper that Latin was making a comeback. I knew that Mitch would never pay for the classes I’d need to get certified to teach in the public schools, but maybe I could get a job in a private school. I’d already started relearning my Latin. Now I set myself a passage of Latin to memorize each night. I found it oddly soothing. As I picked away at case endings and declensions, alone at the kitchen table, the tangled words unraveled into flowing strands of lucid meaning.
When I had memorized most of Catullus and Ovid, I called Heart Lake and asked to whom should I write about a teaching position. The secretary told me that all hiring decisions were made by the dean, Celeste Buehl. I hung up the phone. I realized then that I had been lying to myself. I didn’t want a Latin teaching job at some private school. I wanted to go back to Heart Lake. But how could I ask for a job from Celeste Buehl, who knew everything.
It wasn’t until Olivia was three and a half and I overheard Mitchell telling her, along with her bedtime story, that she should tell Daddy if Mommy ever acted funny, that I called Heart Lake again. I asked to speak to Dean Buehl. When the secretary asked who was calling I gave my maiden name, Jane Hudson, but I didn’t say I was an alumna.
“Jane Hudson, class of seventy-seven!” Dean Buehl sounded as if she were greeting a celebrity.
“Yes, Miss Buehl, I mean Dean Buehl, I didn’t know if you’d remember me.”
“Of course I remember you, Jane. Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”
When I told her that I was looking for a job teaching Latin the line went quiet and I steeled myself for the inevitable disappointment.
“You know we’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers.”
My heart sank. I hadn’t thought that by applying for the Latin position I was trying to take Helen Chambers’s place. How could I ever?
“But then,” she went on, “we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” It had taken me a moment to realize that by “old girl” she meant me. I vaguely heard her bemoaning my generation’s lack of interest in teaching. My attention came back when I heard her say that she couldn’t think of anyone better to take the place than one of Helen Chambers’s girls.
When I finally got off the phone, having arranged to come up to see the new preschool and the cottage where Olivia and I would live (“It’s the one I lived in when I taught science. It’s not much, but, as you might recall, it has a lovely view of the lake”), I felt so warm I felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. It wasn’t, I realized as that warm feeling stayed with me instead of fading over the next difficult months of arguing with Mitchell, just that I had been offered a job. It was what Dean Buehl had called me. One of Helen Chambers’s girls. That was what my problem had been all these years. I had forgotten who I was. I had forgotten where I belonged.
NOW I WONDER, AS I JOIN OLIVIA IN THE WARM GREEN pool, how I could ever have thought that that was what I wanted. One of Helen Chambers’s girls. I had been lured by that old attraction, the old game that we had played—Lucy and Deirdre and me—to be like her. Look what had become of them. Deirdre and Lucy were dead. And me? I had taken Helen Chambers’s place at Heart Lake and one of my own students had died just as hers had. I have nothing to offer those girls. My place is here with Olivia. So what if I’m not in love with my husband? How many wives are?
I swim several laps with Olivia paddling behind me. I do dolphin dives under her and spring up in unexpected places making her squeal with delight. Her screams echo off the opaque surface of the dome. I dive deep, all the way to the bottom, and as I begin to come up for air I see, on the other side of the water, a familiar face. The green water seems, suddenly, thick and heavy, pressing me down to the bottom of the pool. I can feel its weight pressing against my mouth, waiting to fill my lungs. I struggle to the top, but even when I break the surface I’m afraid to take a breath. Afraid that breathing in this shimmering air will drown me.
The man at the edge of the pool reaches out his hand for me and helps me up the ladder. It’s only Roy Corey. I take a breath, gasping in the chlorinated air. I’m so relieved it’s him that for a second I don’t even question what he’s doing here—two hundred miles from his police district—but then he tells me.
“I went to talk to my old forensics professor at John Jay,” he says, “and now I’m heading up to Cold Spring to visit my mother. You were on the way, so… here,” he says handing me a towel, “you look cold. And pale. Don’t tell me you’ve been in this fish bowl for the whole two weeks.”
“Has it really been two weeks already?” I ask, toweling myself down and then wrapping the towel around my waist.
“Yeah. Time flies. Isn’t there a saying in Latin for that?”
“Tempus fugit,” I say.
“Yeah, that’s it. Mattie used to say that.” He motions for me to sit down on one of the plastic picnic chairs that surround a glass table. I have the feeling as he settles himself down on the creaking, insubstantial plastic that what he has to tell me about the DNA results requires sitting.
“The baby was Matt’s.” I say it so he won’t have to.
He nods. “Yeah, it was Matt’s all right.” He’s looking at me to see how I’m taking the news.
“I guess I knew all along,” I tell him. He looks so pained to be giving me this information that I find myself wanting to reassure him. “That’s what they argued about the night they drowned. Matt kept asking Lucy whose baby it was. He must have realized it was his.” Roy Corey puffs up his cheeks and blows air out. He reminds me of those drawings of the wind. “But it was Deirdre he should have been mad at,” I add.
Roy shakes his head. I notice the way the flesh around his mouth shakes a little. Matt would never have turned out like this, I think.
“No, Deirdre had nothing to do with it.”
I feel myself smiling a tight, polite smile that makes my skin, dry from so much chlorine, crease. “What do you mean?” I ask.
“Deirdre Hall wasn’t the baby’s mother,” he says. “The baby was Matt and Lucy’s.”
Chapter Twenty-five
B UT HOW?”
Roy Corey holds up one hand, palm out like a traffic cop. It reminds me that he is a cop and I had promised Mitchell not to talk to him without consulting a lawyer first.
“I gotta tell you something before you say anything else,” he says.
I think he is going to read me my Miranda rights, but instead he tells me that he’s read my journal.
“You did what?” My voice is so loud that everyone under the Aquadome—Olivia in the pool, a family playing putt-putt, the waiters in the poolside restaurant—stop what they are doing to look at us.
“I’m sorry, Jane, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, but it’s evidence. We found it with Melissa Randall’s effects.”
“So she’s the one who had it.”
Corey nods. “Dean Buehl and Dr. Lockhart agree that she must have found the journal hidden in your old room, under the floorboards, maybe?”
I nod to indicate that this is not outside the realm of possibility. Lucy must have hidden it that night she followed me to the icehouse. Maybe she was afraid that something in it would reveal that the baby was hers. But what? If I hadn’t guessed her secret, how could my journal reveal it? Could I have written something that revealed the truth without even knowing the truth? The idea that my journal contains secrets even I do not know makes the fact that it has been in the possession of one of my students even more alarming. Even if the student is dead.
“. . . and in acting out her paranoid fantasies of persecution…” I catch a shred of what Roy Corey is saying, mostly because the language he is using no longer sounds like his own.
“Dr. Lockhart’s diagnosis?” I ask
He nods and grins. “Yeah. Basically she thinks Melissa decided to reenact the events of your senior year and torture you along the way.”
“But what about Ellen’s suicide attempt?”
“Melissa had a prescription for Demerol—for cramps, her mother said, can you believe that, letting your daughter take a jar full of Demerol away to school—which she could have used to drug Ellen and then cut her wrists.”
I wince. “Then Athena was telling the truth. She didn’t try to kill herself.”
“It was a fake suicide attempt—just like Lucy’s was a fake.”
“But then why take her own life? Shouldn’t Vesta have been the next target?”
“Dr. Lockhart says the guilt was probably too much for her. I think she was afraid of being caught. Same difference, I guess. I’ve seen guilt and fear unhinge tougher characters than that poor kid.”
I look up and see that he is looking at me hard. I feel, like I did with Mitchell, an awareness of being exposed, only I know that Roy Corey is not scanning my body the way Mitch had. He leans closer to me, his hands on his broad thighs, and I can hear the plastic chair creak under his weight.
“You’ve had a lot to carry all these years,” he says. His voice is husky. When I answer my own throat feels tight.
“I guess I should have told someone about the baby.”
“Yeah, you should’ve. But then, who did you have to tell?”
I think that this is an unconventional line for a policeman to take, especially this policeman who had lectured me about personal accountability, but then I remember that he has read my journal. He knows just how alone I was.
I pull myself up and adjust the towel around my legs. “Am I being charged with anything?” I ask. “Because if I am—”
“You’ll want to call your lawyer? What would we be charging you with, Jane? Keeping a journal? Trying to help your best friend? Believing your best friend? I know it’s embarrassing for you that I read your diary, but the one thing it does is establish your innocence. You had no idea what was really going on.”
I almost laugh at the bluntness of his last comment, but instead the sound that comes out is more like a sob. I think of the night Matt and Lucy drowned, of those last moments on the ice when he kept asking her whose baby it was. He wasn’t asking if it was his; he was asking if it was hers. Matt and Lucy were lovers. How many other things had I missed? Roy Corey is right. I had no idea what had really been going on.
Corey moves his hand as if he’s going to pat me on the knee, but then thinks better of it. He is so scrupulous in avoiding physical contact with me that I wonder if he has attended some workshop on how to avoid a sexual harassment suit. “Don’t feel bad. No one knew the full story. I suspected there was something different about Matt and Lucy…”
“But my God… it was incest.”
Roy puffs up his cheeks and blows out air again, but now he looks less like a jovial wind cloud than a very tired middle-aged man. “Well, that’s the other thing. When we got the DNA results we noticed that Matt’s and Lucy’s were entirely different.…”
“They didn’t have the same father,” I say. “Everybody knew that.”
“Yeah, everybody knew Cliff Toller wasn’t Lucy’s father. But what no one knew was that Hannah Toller wasn’t Lucy’s mother. Matt and Lucy weren’t brother and sister. Apparently, they weren’t related at all.”
THE DAY AFTER ROY COREY’S VISIT I DECIDE TO GO BACK to Heart Lake. I tell Mitchell that I owe it to Dean Buehl, who has generously forgiven me all my lapses of judgment, to finish out the year. We arrange that I will come to visit Olivia every other weekend and I will stay, whether at his house or the Aquadome we don’t say, for spring break. Mitchell says he is disappointed, but I think I see some relief as well. I’m not sure how that makes me feel. I have been trying, these last two weeks, to understand my marriage by reviewing the past, but now I see that I have to go back even further. I don’t think that I can come to any decision without understanding what happened at Heart Lake all those years ago.
Olivia cries when I tell her I am going. I tell her I will see her every other weekend and talk to her every night but she keeps shaking her head at whatever I say. I say, “Don’t you believe that Mommy will come see you?” and she answers, “But what if the Wilis don’t let you?”
“Oh honey,” I say, “no Wili will ever keep me away from you. I promise.”
“But what if they drag you down into the lake and hold you under the water until your face turns blue and the fish come and eat out your eyes?”
It is such a horrible, vivid image that I am sure it comes from someone else. “Olivia, the day I found you on the sister rock and you told me the Wili lady took you there, did she tell you that would happen to you?”
Olivia shakes her head. I am relieved, but then she says, “No, she said that’s what would happen to you if I told anyone about her.”
DRIVING NORTH ON THE TACONIC PARKWAY I TRY TO SORT out all the new information I’ve received. My parting with Olivia is uppermost in mind for the first part of the drive. I am horrified by the idea that she has been living with that threat against me all these months. It’s the sort of thing that a child molester would say to intimidate his victim. Not his, I correct myself, her. Child molesters can be female, too. I have to wonder now if anything else happened to Olivia out on that rock. When I asked Olivia to describe the Wili all she would tell me was that she was a “white lady.” But I couldn’t get out of her whether she was referring to race, hair color, or clothing. Melissa Randall’s hair had been bleached. Can I assume that since it was Melissa who had my journal, Melissa who staged Athena’s suicide, and Melissa who fell from the rowboat at the sisters rock, that Melissa was the Wili? I’m not sure if I can assume it, but I do hope it. Then, at least, the whole thing would be over.
Still, when I try to imagine Melissa Randall threatening Olivia, or drugging Athena and cutting her wrists, my imagination balks. She simply didn’t seem the type to do such awful things. But then, how good have I been at judging types? I bring to mind another young, blond girl: Lucy Toller, my best friend. I replay in my mind that whole last year. The way Lucy looked when she came back from Italy, rounder and curvier, but also happy and smug. Had she known she was pregnant? With her own brother’s child? Did she know he wasn’t her brother? And did that make any difference? After all they had grown up together as brother and sister.
I remember the morning I came back from Albany, how Lucy met me at the door to the single while Deirdre slept. How fast she had thought it through! Deirdre was asleep, so she could tell whatever story she wanted. How had she made Deirdre agree to the deception? But I also remember how Deirdre had adored Lucy, how anxious she had been to please her. She had been almost as devoted to Lucy as I had been. I remember all the times I blamed Deirdre for being ungrateful. We cleaned up her mess, I said, again and again, to Lucy. How cool Lucy had been! And that whole trip to the lake and back. She had just given birth. All that blood on the bed—it was hers.
When I think of the blood on the bed I nearly swerve off the curving road and I see that I am clutching the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles are white. I get off at the next exit and pull to the side of the road. When I pry my hands off the steering wheel they are cold and damp and I feel nauseous. I open the car door and throw up on the grassy verge. All that blood. I don’t know why it is worse that it was Lucy’s not Deirdre’s. I guess it’s something like the difference between seeing someone else’s blood and seeing your own. It explains, I realize, how weak she had been when we’d walked back from the lake.
B Y THE TIME WE GOT BACK TO THE DORM IT WAS SNOWING SO hard we could barely see two feet ahead of us. I begged Lucy to take the path—what would it matter, now, if we met someone?—and she agreed placidly. Halfway back she took my arm and leaned her whole weight on it so I had to struggle to keep us both upright in the driving snow. I didn’t know how I’d get her up the stairs to our room, but she held on to the banister and hauled herself up the two flights of stairs.
When I opened the door to our room Deirdre was sitting up on the edge of Lucy’s bed facing the door.
“You got rid of it?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lucy answered.
“What are you going to do about that?” Deirdre pointed toward the single and the bloody bed. I was amazed at Deirdre’s tone—as if we were her servants and this was our problem instead of hers. But Lucy seemed unfazed.
“I’ve got an idea about that.” Lucy went over to Deirdre and sat next to her on the bed. They both looked at me and I think that Deirdre finally took in that I was back.
“She knows?” Deirdre asked Lucy.
Lucy took Deirdre’s hand. “She won’t tell anyone,” she said to Deirdre, and then to me, “Jane, your suitcases are still in the lobby. Someone might notice and come up here. Could you bring them up please?” Lucy seemed calm and steady now, and in control. As I turned to leave the room I saw Lucy and Deirdre leaning their heads together, whispering.
I walked back downstairs. Five steps from the bottom I lost my footing and fell the rest of the way down, landing painfully on the base of my spine. I clutched the newel post at the foot of the stairs, leaned my head against the soft wood, and wept noisily for I don’t know how long. I kept thinking someone would come—a cleaning lady, the night watchman, Miss Buehl—and I’d have to tell them everything. From my mother dying to the thing we’d put in the lake. I’d tell them everything. It was ridiculous, I realized now, to have gone along with Lucy’s plan. We would never be able to explain all that blood. Deirdre would just have to fend for herself. What did I care what happened to her? I’d tell everyone I had been with Matt so the baby couldn’t be his. I’d sacrifice my name for him.
When I finally realized that no one was going to come I pulled myself up and lugged my suitcases back upstairs. The room was empty and the door to the single was closed. Putting my suitcases down next to my bed, I went to the door and put my hand on the knob. Like the outside knob when I first came back, it was warm to the touch. I turned it but something was blocking it.
“Who is it?” Deirdre’s voice came to me from behind the closed door. From the direction it came I guessed she was sitting on the floor, her back against the door.
“It’s Jane,” I called. “Let me in.”
I heard something shift along the floor and the door opened as if of its own volition. Deirdre was sitting on the floor, facing the bloody bed. Lucy wasn’t in the room. Then I heard her voice behind me.
“OK,” she said, brushing past me. Something silver glinted in her hands. “I know what to do, but you both have to promise me not to freak out. Jane’ll take me to the infirmary and Deirdre should stay behind and bundle the sheets up. They won’t be able to tell exactly how much blood there was.”
I looked at Deirdre to see if she understood what Lucy was talking about, but for once she was as much in the dark as I was.
Then we both looked up just as Lucy, sitting in the middle of the bloodied sheets, took a razor to her left wrist and slashed her wrist.
WHEN I HAVE STOPPED SHAKING I DRINK A LITTLE WATER from the bottle I bought at the last rest stop. I look at the road I have pulled off of and notice a green-and-white sign with a stylized drawing of a figure in a cap and gown. It points to a local college, and even without reading the words beneath the generic picture I realize that i’ve gotten off at the pough-keepsie exit and the sign is pointing to Vassar. It’s funny, I think, that the sign shows a male figure for what has been, for most of its history, a women’s college. Then I think of another picture: the yearbook picture of Hannah Toller and Helen Chambers at the Freshman Formal with the mysterious man off to the side. Hannah Toller had come back from her freshman year at Vassar with a baby. Although she would never tell who the father was, everyone assumed she was the mother. But if she wasn’t the mother, who was?
I have been thinking, on the road to Heart Lake, that the answers lie there, because that is where my story began. But now it occurs to me that the story started elsewhere.
I pull onto the road and drive, not back toward the Taconic, but west, toward the river and Vassar.
THE CAMPUS, AS I PASS THROUGH THE ARCHED GATEWAY and drive toward Main Hall, looks even prettier than I remember it. There is a light dusting of snow on the ground and icicles hang from the row of pines flanking the drive. The winter sun warms the bricks of Main and sets fire to the green patina of the mansard roof. There is a certain clarity of light here that I instantly remember even though it has been over fifteen years since I saw the campus. I have not been back since I graduated, not for my fifth reunion, not for my tenth or fifteenth. It had always seemed pointless; I had made no friends at Vassar. And when I thought of the questions people asked at reunions, I knew I did not have the kind of life that would translate easily into polite cocktail banter at the reunion banquet.
I park my car in front of Main and get out. I notice instantly how still and quiet everything is—it is still winter break here. I am glad, as I walk toward the library, that I am unlikely to meet any of my old teachers. It occurs to me, though, that for the first time since I graduated it might not be so hard to answer the inevitable questions. True, teaching Latin at a private girls’ school is no one’s pinnacle of success and Heart Lake isn’t exactly Exeter or Choate, still, it used to be considered rather good, and not everyone would know of its slow slide into second-rate.
I pass under the giant London plane tree that spreads its dappled boughs before the library’s gothic facade. I remember the feeling of peace I had, each evening after dinner, walking beneath the ancient tree and through the arched doorway of the library. After the tumult of high school, the years I spent behind these gray stone walls, toiling away at Latin translations like some medieval monk, had seemed like a cool balm applied to a feverish forehead.
The girl behind the main desk is young, probably a financial aid student working over the break to make her tuition. It’s what I used to do. I almost think to tell her that, but I am enjoying the silence of the library too much. I ask her, briefly, where I can find the old yearbooks and she directs me to a room that contains not only yearbooks but the college’s archives.
I take down the 1963 yearbook and slowly leaf through the pages. I look for Helen Chambers’s picture in the seniors’ photographs, but I can’t find it. It seems unlike Domina Chambers, with her love of tradition and adherence to form, not to have posed for her yearbook picture. I have to go through the book twice to find the picture of the Freshman Formal. Then I find it toward the end of the book, between the lacrosse team and a candid picture of the bridge club. “Freshman Formal,” the caption reads, “Helen Liddell Chambers ’63 and Hannah Corey Toller.” There is no year following Hannah Toller’s name. In this book where every name is followed by those two digits, the final mark of belonging, their absence seems like a brand. The girl who dropped out after freshman year because she had a baby out of wedlock. That’s how her classmates would have remembered her. But that wasn’t what happened. She had taken the blame for someone else.
I look closely at the picture. I remember thinking that the handsome blond boy on the edge of the picture smiling at the girls—why had I thought he was smiling at Hannah?—looked like Lucy. How blind had I been not to notice the resemblance? It’s Helen Chambers, young, her pale swept-up hair shining like a swan’s wing, who looks like Lucy. Like mother like daughter, I think. Just as Lucy pretended that Deirdre had been the one to give birth to that baby, so Helen Chambers had let her friend assume the shame of an out-of-wedlock baby. It explains, of course, all the extra attention Helen Chambers had lavished on Lucy. No wonder Domina Chambers had been so horrified the night Lucy cut her wrists.
I PRACTICALLY HAD TO CARRY L UCY TO THE INFIRMARY. E VEN though Deirdre had wrapped her wrist in a thick linen napkin, blood splattered the snow at our feet. When I looked behind us, though, I saw that the drops of blood were already covered by the fast-falling snow.
When we reached the infirmary we found the door locked and a 3 x 5 card taped to the window. “HOLIDAY HOURS: 9 A.M. TO 4 P.M. FOR EMERGENCY CALL THE CORINTH FIRE DEPARTMENT.”
Lucy was leaning against the wall of the building while I read the card to her. When I finished she slid down the wall and wrapped her arms around her knees. Her jeans were already damp from the snow, but I thought I saw a new stain spread over her left knee where her wrist lay against the cloth.
“We’ll have to go back and call an ambulance,” I told her.
“I can’t walk anymore,” she said. “I’m too tired. You go back and call. I’ll wait here.”
“I can’t leave you here, Lucy, you’ll freeze to death.”
She didn’t answer me. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to have fallen asleep. I looked out into the snow, spinning in a cone of light from the porch lamp. At least Lucy was out of the snow here. Maybe I should go back to the dorm and call from there.
I took off my coat and laid it over Lucy. When I stepped off the covered porch and out of the lamplight I was immediately enveloped in a world of spinning snow. I could barely make out where the path split off to go back to the dorm. I couldn’t even tell if I was on a path, let alone if I was on the right one. I walked for several minutes when I realized I was no longer walking on a dirt path covered by snow, but over rocks sheeted with ice. I stopped and slowly turned in a circle and realized I had lost all sense of direction. I must have missed the path leading back to the dorm, but then where was I? Under the sounds of wind and snow falling I heard another sound—a creaking noise, like a door opening. I moved toward it and lost my footing on the ice.
When I stopped sliding headlong down the curved surface of the rock I was looking down into a void of swirling snow. The creaking sound was directly below me now, but still far away. I stared into the glittering whirlpool below me and it was like looking into deep water when you opened your eyes and looked into the deepest part of the lake and saw the drifting silt lit up by the sun shining through the water. I was on the Point hanging over the edge of the cliff. The creaking sound I’d heard was new ice cracking in the wind.
I tried crawling backward from the edge but when I lifted myself to my knees I slid forward a few more inches. I took off my mittens and felt around me for the deep cracks in the rock I knew were there. Chattermarks, Miss Buehl had called them, left by a retreating glacier. When I found one deep enough I dug my fingers into it and pulled myself around so I was facing away from the lake. I only moved forward when I found a crack deep enough to use as a handhold. By the time I’d worked my way up to level rock, my fingernails were broken and bloody and I’d realized I’d left my mittens behind. I crawled over the rock face, not daring to stand until I’d gotten to the woods.
I stood up and realized that I still had no idea how to get back to the dorm or how long it had been since I’d left Lucy. She could have bled to death by now. Even if I found the dorm it would take too long for an ambulance to get here. I stood in the falling snow and thought about the icy plunge from the Point to the lake.
Then I noticed a light shining through the woods. At first I thought it was the infirmary porch light and I was amazed at how little distance I had traveled, but then I remembered the nights we had sneaked over the Point to avoid Miss Buehl’s cottage. Could it be Miss Buehl’s light? And was it possible she was in her cottage? I knew she stayed for part of the break. Also, I remembered that before she’d become a science teacher she’d been a nurse. She helped out, sometimes, when the infirmary was understaffed. She’d know what to do for Lucy.
I headed straight for the light even though it meant walking through the deeper snow in the woods. I didn’t take my eyes off the light until I reached the cottage and started beating the door with my frozen, bloody hands. When the door opened I couldn’t see who opened it because burning spots blurred my vision.
Someone pulled me inside and rubbed my hands. I was pushed into a chair and wrapped in a blanket. I closed my eyes and tried to get rid of the light spots dancing in front of my eyes. I was sure the afterimage of Miss Buehl’s porch light would be seared into my retinas forever.
When I opened my eyes, though, I could see perfectly. Miss Buehl was holding a towel around my hands and behind her Domina Chambers was offering me a steaming tea cup.
“Drink this before you try to talk,” Miss Buehl said, taking the cup from Domina Chambers.
I looked around the room and took in the cozy scene I’d stumbled upon. A fire in the fireplace, a teapot and cups on a low table, classical music on the radio. Both women in sturdy corduroys and ski sweaters.
“It’s no night to be out, Jane,” Miss Buehl said in the same scolding tone she used when we played around with her Bunsen burners. “Miss Chambers has been over all day working on the advanced placement curriculum and we were waiting for the storm to pass so she could go back…”
“Lucy,” I said, interrupting Miss Buehl.
“What about Lucy?” Domina Chambers knelt down next to me and hot tea from her teacup splashed my already soaked jeans.
“She’s at the infirmary. Bleeding.” For a moment I couldn’t remember the story we’d concocted. I was confused by the other blood I’d seen that day. Birth blood.
“She slit her wrists,” I finally said.
“Lucy? No, I don’t believe it.” Domina Chambers gave me the very same look she gave me when I mistranslated my Latin homework, but Miss Buehl took me at my word. She was already pulling on boots and a coat.
“I’ve got the key to the infirmary in my book bag, Helen, would you get it for me?”
“But this is absurd, Celeste,” Domina Chambers said, rising to her feet, “this child is hysterical.”
“Hysterical or not, something is obviously wrong and if Lucy Toller is out in this storm—bleeding or not—we’d better find her.”
Domina Chambers opened her mouth as if to argue, but at another look from Miss Buehl she clamped her mouth into a tight line and turned on her heel. I heard her rummaging around in the other room muttering under her breath. I’d never seen Domina Chambers so cowed by anyone.
I thought I’d had enough surprises for one night, but then a small figure appeared in the doorway of the room Domina Chambers had gone into.
“Oh, Albie,” Miss Buehl said, “I’d forgotten all about you. You’ll have to come, too. Go get dressed in your warmest things.” She turned to me. “Albie’s grandmother dropped her off a little early from break,” she said, and then, lowering her voice, “She must have gotten the dates mixed up.”
I thought to tell Albie that my father made the same mistake, that we had that in common, but she’d already gone back in the other room, slamming the door behind her.
BEFORE I LEAVE, I ASK THE GIRL BEHIND THE DESK—SHE’S yawning over a copy of Dante’s Purgatorio—if the library has a copy of the Vassar alumnae directory. She puts down her copy without bothering to save her place and slips out from behind the desk. Following her, I notice she’s wearing sandals and thick white gym socks. The socks have holes at the heels. I can see her bare, unshaven calves between the hem of her skirt and the tops of her socks. I imagine how cold she’ll be walking home tonight. It makes me think of my students, Athena especially, and I am, for the first time, really anxious to be back at Heart Lake.
She asks what year I’m looking for and when I tell her 1963 she gives me a scrutinizing look.
“You don’t look that old,” she says.
I laugh. “I certainly hope not. I was class of ’81.” I realize as I say it how glad I am to have those digits to name. Unlike Hannah Toller. “No, I’m looking for a friend… for a friend’s mother.”
“Oh,” she says without interest. She pads back to her desk and picks up Dante at any old place and yawns into the book.
I run my finger down the list of names. Most of the names, I see, are in bold type followed by another name in lighter typeface. The names in bold are maiden names, the ones following are married names.
When I get to Helen Chambers’s I see it, too, is in bold. So Helen Chambers got married after she left Heart Lake. I’m surprised but also somehow relieved. Watch out you don’t turn out like Helen Chambers, Dr. Lockhart had said to me. Well, maybe she didn’t turn out so bad after all. Maybe there was a life for her after Heart Lake.
But then I see that the record keepers have made a mistake. The name following Chambers in light typeface is Liddell. Someone must have mistaken her middle name for a married name. I pull my finger across the page to locate her address, but instead my finger comes to rest on a single word: deceased. It is followed by the date May 1, 1981. She died only four years after leaving Heart Lake. Dr. Lockhart was right after all. Helen Chambers had ended badly.
Chapter Twenty-six
W HILE WALKING TO MY CAR I NOTICE THE GIRL FROM the library leaving the building. She is wearing a light denim jacket and carrying a heavy backpack. I offer her a lift back to her dorm and she tells me she lives in the student housing across Raymond Avenue. I remember the complex is a good mile’s walk from campus and again I urge her to take a lift from me. I see her assess me and decide I’m probably not dangerous—after all, I’m Jane Hudson ’81. She is quiet, though, in the car. I ask who she’s reading the Dante for and she names a medieval history professor I had junior year.
“When you do your term paper include a map of Dante’s underworld and compare it to a map of Virgil’s underworld,” I tell her. “He loves that kind of thing—the geography of imaginary places—I think there’s even some name for it…”
“Really? Thanks, I’ll remember that.”
Then she gets out of the car and runs quickly up the steps of the dilapidated housing complex. I remember that these units had been built as temporary housing five years before I came here. They were already falling apart then. I wait until she’s inside and I see the lights go on, and then I drive back to the main road and, from there, to the Taconic.
I am sorry, after a few miles, that I didn’t take the better lit and straighter Thruway. The road is icy, especially on the curves. Each time the back of my car fishtails on the slippery road my stomach lurches. I keep thinking about the astounding coincidence of Helen Chambers and Lucy Toller both pretending their babies belonged to someone else. Is it just coincidence though? I think of the two of them. Both beautiful with the kind of rarefied beauty of a fairy-tale princess. It was more than their beauty though; it was a certain look they each had of possessing some secret charm. They inspired, in others, not only admiration but the desire to please and emulate. I’ll never know what Lucy said to Deirdre to convince her to let me think the baby was hers, but I can imagine the way Lucy looked when she asked. And I realize that if Lucy had asked me to say the baby was mine I would have. And it wasn’t just me and Deirdre who idealized Lucy. There was that younger girl, Albie. I remember how mad she was at me when we went back to the infirmary and found Lucy nearly half dead on the steps.
W E FOUND L UCY CURLED IN A BALL ON THE INFIRMARY doorstep, like a cat locked out in the cold. It broke my heart to think how long it had taken me to bring her help.
“I’m sorry I was so long,” I told her, but she didn’t wake up.
“How could you leave her here?” The voice at my ear was so low I thought it was my own conscience, but it wasn’t, it was Albie.
“I had to go find help,” I tried to explain, but Albie shook her head.
“You left her to die,” she hissed at me, leaning close so Miss Buehl and Domina Chambers couldn’t hear, so close that I felt her hot spit prick my skin.
I watched in silence as Domina Chambers picked her up while Miss Buehl unlocked the door. What could I say? Maybe Albie was right. I should have stopped Lucy from cutting herself. I should have come back sooner. I should never have left.
Inside the infirmary, Albie switched on the light and ran to get the things Miss Buehl asked for. She seemed to know her way around. Everyone seemed to have something to do but me, so I sat down on the extra bed across from where they put Lucy and watched. They went to work quickly, peeling away the cotton cloth from Lucy’s wrists, getting her out of her wet clothes, taking her blood pressure.
“She’s stopped bleeding,” Miss Buehl reported. “Thank God she didn’t sever the arteries.”
“But doesn’t she need stitches?” Domina Chambers asked.
“Yes, but I can do that. Don’t worry, Helen, I’ve done it before. What I’m worried about is her blood pressure. It’s quite low. Do you have any idea how much blood she lost, Jane? Had she been bleeding long when you found her?”
I shook my head. I thought of the blood on the sheets, but remembered that wasn’t Lucy’s blood.
“We found her right away,” I said, trying to remember the story we’d agreed upon. “She went into Deirdre’s single and we heard her crying so we went in.” I had heard crying, I remembered, but when Lucy had opened the door her eyes had been dry.
“We?” Miss Buehl asked.
I pushed away the memory of what really happened and concentrated on what we’d agreed upon. “Yes, me and Deirdre Hall.”
“Well, then, where is Miss Hall?” Domina Chambers asked.
“She stayed in the dorm.” I realized now that this was a weak spot in our story. Why had Deirdre remained behind? I knew the real reason—to dispose of the bloody sheets—but what reason had we agreed upon?
“Um, she was so upset and the blood was on her bed, so she stayed behind to clean it up.”
Domina Chambers clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Imagine thinking about such a thing while your roommate is bleeding to death. There’s something very off about that girl. At least you had more sense, Jane.”
I smiled at the rare compliment even though I knew it wasn’t fair to Deirdre, and caught Albie glaring at me again. It was almost as if she knew that Lucy had told Deirdre to stay behind to get rid of the sheets.
“So there must have been quite a bit of blood,” Miss Buehl said. She was bending over Lucy, peeling back her eyelids and listening to the pulse at her throat. “I wish we could get her to the hospital for a transfusion but I’m afraid that will be impossible in this storm. The phone lines have been down and the roads closed for hours.”
“Is there anything else we can do, Celeste?” Domina Chambers asked. I noticed she was shaking and thought it was probably from the cold, and yet the room felt quite hot to me. “Will she be all right?”
“I’ll give her a saline drip to get some fluids in her. That should help her blood pressure. Otherwise, we’ll just have to wait. I’d feel better if she regained consciousness.” Miss Buehl shook Lucy’s shoulder and called her name. “Maybe you should try, Jane, you’re her best friend.”
I got up off the bed and walked across the room. It seemed like a long way. I noticed that the floor was slanting. I knelt down by Lucy and called her name. Amazingly, she opened her eyes.
“Jane,” she said.
“It’s OK. Lucy, we’re in the infirmary.”
“You’ll stay here?” she whispered to me. “Don’t go back to the dorm.”
I was so touched that she wanted me to stay that my eyes filled with tears and the room went all blurry. Then it went black.
I’D BEEN TOUCHED WHEN LUCY HAD ASKED ME TO STAY AT the infirmary, but of course the real reason, I realize now, is that she didn’t want me to talk to Deirdre. She had to make sure Deirdre went along with the plan to pretend that the baby was really hers.
It is one thing, though, to assume the parentage of a baby lost in childbirth, and another to drop out of college and raise someone else’s baby. As I make the trip from Vassar to Corinth, less than 150 miles but worlds apart, the person I think more about is Hannah Corey Toller, class of —. Class of Nothing. Why had she agreed to take Helen’s baby, return in shame to her hometown and raise a child not her own?
It’s this question that plagues me as I drive slowly down River Street looking at the big Victorian houses set back on their snow-covered lawns. Most still have their Christmas lights up and the colored bulbs spill jewel-like pools onto the sparkling snow crust. At the end of the street I pull up opposite the gatehouse on the intersection of Lake Drive and River Street and turn off the car so as not to draw attention to myself. Really, though, I needn’t be so cautious; it doesn’t look as if anyone is in the old Toller house. Not only are there no Christmas lights, but there are no other lights on in the house. The house has a general air of neglect—the driveway hasn’t been plowed since the last snow and one of the shutters has come loose from its hinges and hangs from the window askew. I remember that I used to think the house looked like Snow White’s cottage, but now I think it looks more like the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.”
I wonder if anyone has lived in it since Cliff and Hannah Toller died in that car accident. It happened my last year in college and I read about it in an Albany newspaper. They had been driving back from Plattsburgh when a freakish May snowstorm swept across the Adirondacks. Their car was found at the bottom of a deep ravine. The newspaper made a big deal out of the fact that, like their children, the Tollers had died together. DOUBLE DISASTER STRIKES TWICE FOR ADIRONDACK COUPLE, the headline read.
I remember feeling unsurprised at the Tollers’ fate. It was harder to imagine the two of them going on after losing both their children.
But only one of them was their child.
I wonder if at the end they thought of Lucy as an interloper—the changeling who dragged their own child to his death.
Just as I put my hand on the ignition key I see a light come on in the house and a figure pass behind a curtained window. It comes so hard upon my thinking of Lucy as some fiendish demon that the sight strikes me as a reproach—and indeed, there is something in the profile silhouetted in the top floor window that reminds me of Lucy. I feel that rush of cold and inability to breathe that marked the panic attacks I experienced in my twenties. I turn on the car and put the heater on high, but the cold persists and now I am sweating as well. I’m too afraid to drive like this. I look at the house again to reassure myself that the figure in the window is not Lucy, but the window is dark again. Instead, a rectangle of light appears in the doorway and a woman steps out into the deep, unshoveled snow and walks straight for my car. She taps on my window before I fully take in that it’s Dr. Lockhart.
“So you decided to come back,” she says when I lower the window. “Better to face your demons, eh?”
I wonder what demons she is referring to, but I am determined, for once, not to let her control the direction of the conversation.
“What are you doing in the Toller house?” I ask.
Dr. Lockhart smiles. “It’s not the Toller house anymore, Jane. This is where I live.”
“You live here? But…”
“Where did you think I lived, Jane? In one of those cozy little apartments in the mansion? I don’t think so. In my profession it’s very important to maintain a distance. And I like my privacy. These boarding schools can be such fishbowls. Fascinating to study as cultural microcosms, but such parochial bores to live in twenty-four hours a day. Doesn’t it get to you sometimes, being watched all the time?”
I hadn’t thought of myself as so visible, but when I think of the events of the last semester I realize that I have felt observed.
“From whom did you buy the house?” I ask, if only to steer the conversation away from last semester. She straightens up and glances back at the house. I can tell she is surprised by the question.
“From the estate. The house was empty for many years…” She trails off and I decide to pursue the subject if only because I’ve never seen her look this uncomfortable.
“Since the Tollers died? Maybe people thought it was an unlucky house, everyone who lived there is dead now.”
“I’m not superstitious, Jane. People make their own fates. Believing this house is unlucky is like… like believing in the three sisters legend. It’s the superstition that causes the problem. If Melissa Randall hadn’t read about the three sisters legend in your journal she might still be alive today.”
There is a note of triumph in her last comment. Finally, she has brought our conversation to where she wants it. I can’t avoid talking about the events of last semester now.
“I told you and Dean Buehl that someone had my journal. What else was I supposed to do?” I ask.
“You should have told us what was in your journal: sex with masked strangers, sacrificial rites, a dead baby in a tea tin…”
“I take your point, Dr. Lockhart. Yes, I should have told someone, but it was a rather unusual circumstance. What would you think if pieces from your old journal started appearing on your desk?”
“I wouldn’t know because I’ve never kept a journal. I would never be so foolish to commit such incriminating evidence, if I had ever done such things, to writing.” I can believe it. She doesn’t look like she’d give anything away.
“Well, I’ll certainly be more careful in the future. Now I’d better get back to campus. I want to see if Athena and Vesta are back yet.”
“If you mean Ellen and Sandy, they’re both back. Perhaps you ought to consider dropping the goddess names. Didn’t your old Latin teacher use Roman names like Lucia and Clementia?”
Is it just coincidence she picked my old Latin name and Lucy’s? Is it something else she gleaned from my old journal?
“Yes, but I can’t see what harm there is in the girls keeping their names. Doesn’t it just make a bigger thing out of it?”
“Miss Hudson, one of our students is dead. How much bigger do you want it to be?”
“All right. I’ll suggest they take other names. Look, can I give you a lift back to campus?” I try to make my voice conciliatory. The last thing I want is this woman for an enemy.
“No thanks, I’m going skating.” She turns her right side to me so I can see a pair of worn ice skates with decorative stitching hanging over her shoulder. “There’s a shortcut through the woods behind my house. I can skate straight across the lake to the school.”
“Be careful,” I tell her. “There’s a weak spot in the ice near the mouth of the Schwanenkill.”
“Don’t worry, Jane,” she says, smiling, “I know where all the weak spots are.”
I TAKE LAKE DRIVE AROUND THE EAST SIDE OF THE LAKE. Through the pines lining the drive I catch glimpses of the frozen lake, shimmering under a full moon. Dr. Lockhart has picked a beautiful night to skate. I believe her when she says she is not superstitious. It’s hard to imagine, otherwise, how she could bear to be alone on that ice at night. I don’t think it’s something I could do.
I turn off Lake Drive and park in the faculty parking lot. I’ll have to haul my suitcases up the long path to my house without a light—of course I hadn’t thought to leave any light on in the house when I left. Two weeks ago I hadn’t even been sure I’d be coming back. It occurs to me it might be better to go up to the house first and turn on some lights before trying to navigate the path with a heavy suitcase.
I look in my glove compartment and find a flashlight, but the batteries are burned out. I resign myself to finding my way in the dark, the moon is full so it shouldn’t be too bad, but when I get out of my car I notice the path on the opposite end of the parking lot, the one to the dorm, is ablaze with light. Dean Buehl must have had extra lighting installed after Melissa Randall’s death to reassure worried parents—although how extra lighting is supposed to prevent girls from taking their own lives, I do not know.
I decide I’ll go to the dorm first. It’ll give me a chance to visit with Athena and Vesta before it gets too late. Maybe the dorm matron will have an extra flashlight to lend me. As I walk up the well-shoveled (Dean Buehl must have had to call in a plow to clear the paths enough to install the lights) and well-lit path I realize that all my prevarication about going up the unlit path to the cottage amounts to one thing: I’m not ready to be alone in that house yet.
The dorm matron has a plentiful supply of flashlights and she is happy to give me one as long as I sign it out. She also has me “sign in” to the dorm and leave a photo ID. I notice, as I walk up to the second floor, hand-lettered signs posted exhorting students to travel in pairs and flyers for community counseling groups. I think I recognize Gwen Marsh’s handwriting. The thought that poor Gwen has spent her Christmas holiday making up flyers, with carpal tunnel syndrome no less, and planning how to help the girls cope with returning after the trauma of Melissa Randall’s death, suddenly makes me feel guilty and self-absorbed. It makes my two weeks at the Aquadome seem like a luxury vacation by comparison.
The second floor is quiet except for the hissing of the steam radiators. One of the flyers advertises a “Welcome Back Sing” for tonight and I’m afraid that Athena and Vesta will be there, but when I knock on their door I hear the familiar shuffle and window shutting that tells me they are in, and they haven’t given up smoking over the break.
Vesta unlocks and opens the door, but only a few inches. When she sees it’s me she scrunches her eyebrows together suspiciously and reluctantly opens the door the rest of the way.
“Sandy,” I say, determined to avoid the girls’ classical names as per Dr. Lockhart’s suggestion, “nice to see you. How was your break?”
Vesta shrugs and sits down on the bed underneath the window. Athena turns around in her chair and smiles at me. I notice right away that her face looks less drawn and, somehow, more open. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but she looks healthier. The two weeks away from Heart Lake have done her good.
“Salve, Magistra,” she says, “quid agis?”
“Bene,” I say, “et tu, Ellen?”
“Ellen? Why aren’t you calling me Athena?”
I shift uncomfortably from foot to foot. The room is hot and damp.
“Here,” Athena says, getting up from her chair and seating herself cross-legged on the floor, “take off your coat and sit down. They keep it like a sauna in here.”
I sit down at my old desk. Now that Athena is sitting beneath me I can see one thing that’s different about her. She’s let the dye grow out of her hair. I can see several inches of her natural color—a light mousy brown—showing at the roots. I scan her books and realize that I’m still looking for the black-and-white notebook. I see instead Wheelock’s Latin grammar and a paperback copy of Franny and Zooey. “I read this when I was your age,” I say.
“You didn’t answer the question,” Vesta says. “Why have you dropped our Latin class names?”
“Dr. Lockhart thinks the goddess names might not be appropriate…”
Vesta snorts. “The names are the best part,” she says. “I always hated Sandy. My real name is Alexandria, which is even worse. If you stop calling me Vesta, I’ll drop Latin.”
“Yeah,” Athena chimes in, “I’ve always hated ‘Ellen.’ ”
“OK, Athena,” I say, “and Vesta, I can’t have you all dropping out of Latin.”
Immediately I notice a change come over the girls. They seem more serious and somehow embarrassed.
“A bunch of girls have,” Athena says. “Some of the parents didn’t want their kids in the class after what happened to Melissa.”
“Yeah, there’s this rumor we were sacrificing babies and stuff.”
I look at Vesta when she says “babies” but she doesn’t seem to attach any significance to the example she’s chosen. Dean Buehl said that no one was told what was found in the tea tin. But then if Melissa had my journal, she might have shared its contents with her roommates.
“It’s our fault,” Athena says. “If we hadn’t started that stuff with the three sisters and making offerings to the Lake Goddess none of it would have happened.”
“Who thought of that?” I ask. “Going out to the rocks and offering prayers to the Lake Goddess?”
Athena and Vesta look at each other and shrug. “I don’t know. We all kind of did. I guess Melissa got into it the most because she was worried about Brian.” I remember the night I watched the three girls at the stones. Melissa had asked for loyalty from her boyfriend, Vesta for good grades, but I hadn’t been able to hear what Athena asked for. I find myself wondering now what it was she asked for and whether she has gotten what she wished for.
“Did you notice that Melissa had a black-and-white notebook?” I ask.
“Like this?” Athena opens a desk drawer by my feet and takes out a marbled notebook. I see that the name written on the white box on the cover is “Ellen (Athena) Craven.”
“Yes,” I say, “something like that.”
Athena shakes her head, but Vesta is looking at me strangely.
“Why do you want to know?”
I see that I have wound myself into a trap with my own questions. If the girls really don’t know that Melissa had my old journal (and Athena, at least, seems innocent) I certainly don’t want to tell them.
“I just thought that if she kept a journal,” I say with feigned casualness, “we’d understand more about what happened to Melissa.”
Vesta looks unconvinced. “You think she wrote down why she drugged Athena and slit her wrists?” Vesta points at Athena’s wrists and Athena tugs at the cuffs of her sweater even though they already reach down to her knuckles. I notice that the cuffs are frayed and unraveling, as if they’d been plucked at again and again. “Jesus,” Vesta says, “who would be stupid enough to write down all that stuff?”
I MAKE AN EXCUSE TO LEAVE BEFORE VESTA CAN ASK ME any more questions about the journal. I realize as I leave their room that I’ve made a tactical error visiting the girls before talking to Dean Buehl and finding out what exactly they were told about Melissa’s death. I promise myself that I’ll call Dean Buehl as soon as I get into the cottage, but I see that I won’t have to. Dean Buehl is waiting for me at the matron’s desk.
“Ah, Jane, I saw your name in the sign-in book and thought I’d wait for you.”
The matron hands me back my driver’s license without looking up at me. I wonder if she called the dean to tell her I was here in the dorm. I wonder if she had been instructed to do so.
“Did you see the note I left on your door?” Dean Buehl asks. “Asking you to call as soon as you got in?”
“I haven’t been back to my house yet,” I tell her. “I came here first to get a flashlight.” I hold up the flashlight as corroborating evidence.
“Ah,” Dean Buehl says, nodding. “I remember the path up to that cottage could be tricky. Of course I’ve walked all these paths so many times I think I could find my way around the campus blindfolded. Let me walk you back to the parking lot and help you with your luggage. We can talk along the way.”
IN ADDITION TO MY SUITCASES I’VE BROUGHT BACK SOME boxes of books from the house in Westchester. Although I tell her they can wait until the morning, Dean Buehl cheerfully hoists up two and takes off down the darkened path so quickly I am hard put keeping up with her with my one box. I am reminded of the nature hikes she used to take us on when she was the science teacher—the way she strode through the woods, leaving her students scrambling over rocks and puddles, desperately trying to stay close enough to hear her lecture. We’d be tested on every rock and flower identification, we knew, and inability to keep up was no excuse. “The race goes to the swiftest,” was one of her favorite sayings and in her class it was literally true.
Twenty years haven’t slowed her down a bit. When I do finally catch up with her I have to stay behind her because this path hasn’t been plowed. Fresh snow covers the narrow track that had been shoveled before Christmas break and the sound of our boots crunching in it makes it doubly hard to hear what Dean Buehl is saying. She is talking over her shoulder to me as if I had been right behind her all along and I realize I’ve already missed half of her “getting me up to date on the Melissa Randall affair” as she calls it. She is tossing out autopsy and DNA findings the way she used to rattle off the names of trees and wildflowers. I gather, though, that there’s nothing I haven’t learned already from Roy Corey. Then I hear her refer to “that journal you kept senior year” and I interrupt to ask how many people know about it. “Well, Dr. Lockhart was there when we found it,” she tells me. We have reached the door of the cottage, so this I get to hear clearly, “but the only people who have read it are me and that nice young detective. Of course, I told Dr. Lockhart a little about the contents so she could assess their influence on Melissa. It should make an interesting chapter in the book she is writing on teenage suicide.”
I am somewhat unnerved by the idea of my journal figuring in Dr. Lockhart’s research, but I smile at Dean Buehl in a way that I hope is ingratiating. “Thanks for helping with my stuff. I’ll make us some coffee, we can sit and talk…” I gesture toward the old Morris chair by the fireplace, the armrest of which still holds the teacup I drank from the night before I left. I see her follow the sweep of my hand and take in the little living room, the battered, old floral love seat under the window, the coffee table stacked with Latin books and Lands’ End catalogs and piles of ungraded blue books. The lines of her face, which had looked firm and rosy from the cold air and exertion of our walk, seem to settle downward and her skin pales. I think it is my untidiness, but then I remember that this was once her home. The furniture was here when I moved in and, now that I think of it, is arranged just as it was that night I stumbled out of the snowstorm and into this room. Only then there was a fire in the fireplace and classical music on the radio and the room shone with a kind of brightness that has now dulled with dust and the usage of uncaring tenants.
She walks out my door and heads in the opposite direction from the parking lot.
“Beautiful night…” I hear her say as she disappears down the path to the Point. “Better to talk out of doors.”
I follow her to the Point where she has taken a stance—legs spread apart and arms clasped behind her back, like a general surveying her troops—on the curving rock above the frozen lake.
“Always find this a good place to think,” she says as I come up beside her.
“Yes,” I say, “the view is beautiful.”
She shakes her head impatiently and scuffs at the snow with the heel of her heavy hiking boot like a horse pawing the ground. “Not the view,” she says with the weary patience of a teacher used to hearing the wrong answer, “the rock. Right where we’re standing was a mile-high glacier. This rock here is so hard it’s barely eroded in ten thousand years, but the marks the glacier left are still here. Puts things in perspective.”
“Yes,” I say, although I am not exactly sure what the perspective is. Is it that human suffering is insignificant in the face of the majesty of nature, or that the scars of the past are still with us and always will be?
“You’re embarrassed,” she says. Actually, I’m more perplexed at the moment but I nod.
“Because I’ve read your old journal.” Dean Buehl sighs and relaxes her stance a bit so I can see, suddenly, the slight curve in her shoulders and the droop in her once taut figure. “Don’t be, it was a great relief to me.”
I can no longer pretend to understand what she’s talking about. “My journal was a relief to you?” As the words come out I realize I can no longer hide my anger either. First the outpourings of my foolish young heart are appropriated by a hysterical teenage girl, then they are co-opted as a research tool for an ambitious psychologist, and now they are balm to my former teacher and present boss?
“Yes,” she says, ignoring the outrage in my voice. She looks down at the rock where she’s kicked away the snow. “All these years I’ve felt it was my fault what happened to Helen. I thought if only I had spoken up at the hearing she might not have been fired and if she hadn’t been fired she wouldn’t have killed herself…”
“Killed herself? Domina Chambers killed herself?” I picture my old Latin teacher—her proud and haughty profile, the way she lifted one eyebrow when a student mistranslated a line of Latin. She is the last person I can imagine taking her own life.
“Yes.” Dean Buehl looks away from the rock as if the perspective the rock has offered has vanished and the scars of that distant calamity are fresh again. “Four years after she was let go. It was a terrible blow for her. For me, too.” When she doesn’t go on I turn to look at her. The lines in her face stand out starkly in the moonlight, like fault lines that have deepened after a quake and then I realize that the trembling that passes over her face is her trying to keep from crying.
“I even tried to get her a teaching position at a Catholic school up north,” she says when she has regained control of her voice. Up north from here? That could only mean St. Eustace. I couldn’t blame Domina Chambers for turning that down. “Some of the girls from here had gone there after… after the scandal… and I thought she might take an interest in keeping up with them, but she didn’t. Instead she went down to Albany and got work as a substitute.”
“Really? A substitute? Domina Chambers?” This surprises me more than the idea of her killing herself, even as it goes some way to making that idea more plausible.
“You can imagine what she thought of that.” Dean Buehl tries to smile, but the effort seems to release that trembling again and she gives it up.
I remember how we treated substitute teachers at Corinth High. I have a sudden picture of Domina Chambers standing at a blackboard (she would have been reduced to writing on the board if only to write her name), her elegant black dress besmirched with yellow chalk, the silver hair coming undone from its intricate twist.
“When I heard she had killed herself I thought it was because of how she had come down in the world and perhaps I could have made a difference. And then, our relationship didn’t help at the hearing…”
Dean Buehl’s voice hoarsens and trails off. There’s a final shudder and then her face gleams in the moonlight, her emotions so naked and exposed that I have to make an effort not to look away. “You mean you and Miss Chambers…” My words sound childish and prurient even to myself. I remember Deirdre Hall’s salacious conjectures about Miss Buehl and Domina Chambers. I remember again the cottage the night of the snowstorm, the fire and the teapot and the classical music… What was it she had said? That they had been working on some curriculum project together?
“Domina Chambers was staying at your cottage,” I say.
Dean Buehl nods. “She spent every break at the cottage. It was the only time we really had to ourselves, but then that girl showed up and we had to pretend that Helen had come by to work on the AP curriculum. We had to make up a story. Do you know what it felt like? Having to pretend—like schoolgirls caught breaking curfew?”
I remember the tangle of lies I’d been caught in and nod—yes, I know what she means—but she doesn’t notice; she’s lost in the past.
“We had to pretend even when we knew they all knew. We knew what you girls whispered about us behind our backs and the stories our so-called colleagues carried back to the board. I knew that was why they were so hard on her at the inquest, but I was afraid that if I spoke in her defense I would be fired, too. I’ve been so ashamed… all these years… not for what we were but that I denied it. And it wasn’t just Helen who was hurt. The girls who had to leave the school because of the scandal… I felt such a responsibility for them. It’s why I took the dean’s job even though it was like taking over a sinking ship.…” She breaks off and I look away while she struggles to get her voice under control. On the lake I see a black speck circling on the white ice. I think it’s a bird but then realize it’s a skater. Dr. Lockhart, no doubt.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” I say, “even if you had spoken at the hearing…”
Dean Buehl waves her hand at me impatiently. “It’s not just that,” she says. “You see, it was my fault Lucy found out that Helen was her mother, and I always thought that must have been what Matt and Lucy were fighting about when they went through the ice.”
I look away from the skater and back at Dean Buehl. “You knew that Lucy was Helen’s daughter?”
She smiles at me. Finally, I am the student with the right answer. “You guessed, too. You always were smarter than people gave you credit for, Jane.”
I wonder what people.
“Of course Helen told me. We told each other everything. And it explained so much. The way Helen missed her freshman spring semester at Vassar… oh, I was at Smith,” she fills in hurriedly when she sees my perplexed look, “but I wrote to Helen often. I remember her writing that she had to go nurse a sick relative. It sounded very odd at the time. Of course I realized later she must have had the baby then and given it to Hannah.…”
“Why did Hannah Toller go along with it?” I ask.
Dean Buehl stares at me as if I had interrupted her lecture on cell division to ask a question about thermodynamics.
“Well, Hannah adored her of course. From the ninth grade on. The only reason Hannah even went to Vassar was to be near Helen.…” I detect a note of jealousy in her voice that she shakes off like a dog shaking off cold water. “Helen said she had first planned to give the baby up for adoption and it was Hannah’s idea to say the baby was hers. She wasn’t really cut out for college life, and there was a boy from back home who would marry her in a heartbeat. It made so much more sense for Hannah to give up college than for Helen, who had such promise.…”
“Then why did she come back here?”
Dean Buehl looks down at the rock as if the answer were in the glacial inscriptions.
“She missed the girl. She wanted to be closer to her. I told her she might as well tell the girl she was her mother.”
“When did she tell her?”
“In February. A week before she died.”
I remember the day Lucy came back from tea with Domina Chambers and wrote Matt that letter. She told Matt that Helen had told her something that changed everything.
“That’s why she wrote Matt and asked him to come,” I said. “She was going to tell him they weren’t brother and sister.” Only she had never gotten the chance.
“Of course I had no idea what disgusting things they had been up to. All of you cavorting around the campus like a pack of wild dogs and right on my doorstep.” Dean Buehl flings a hand in the direction of the cottage so abruptly she nearly hits me. I step back and, for a moment, lose my balance on the snow-covered rock. She grabs me by the arm before I can fall. We’re quite a way from the edge, but still I feel that queasy sensation of vertigo, like when you stand on the beach and feel the tide sucking the sand out from under your feet. Dean Buehl must also be aware of the precipitous drop not so far away, because she does not release her grip on my arm right away. I can feel her strong fingers digging painfully into my forearm. I look at her face and see that the tears are gone and that look of naked grief I’d glimpsed a moment earlier has hardened into something else, something I find harder to read.
“But when I read your journal, Jane, I realized it wasn’t all my fault. I may have been responsible for Lucy learning who her mother was, but you must have let on to Matt about the baby, didn’t you? That’s what happened out there on the ice, isn’t it?”
I nod, amazed she has put together so much from that last journal entry. I had written, “Tonight I will go down to the lake to meet him and I’ll tell him everything.” I think of what I had written next and blush to think of Dean Buehl reading that very last line.
“I didn’t tell him the baby was Lucy’s and his. I didn’t know that.”
“But you told him enough so he guessed.”
“Yes,” I agree limply. If not for Dean Buehl’s grip on my arm I might sink down to the cold rock.
“It was my fault,” I say. Mea culpa, I say to myself, mea culpa. This is what Roy Corey had been talking about. Taking responsibility for the sins of the past.
“And that’s what they were arguing about when Lucy ran out onto the ice.” I nod weakly. “At the inquest you said they were arguing about Helen, but that wasn’t it? Unless Lucy told Matt what Helen had told her… that she and Matt weren’t brother and sister…”
“No,” I say, “she never got the chance.”
“So you lied at the inquest.” I expect now that she will shake me, even hurl me from her, but instead she relaxes her grip on my arm and smiles at me. I’ve told her what she wanted to hear. I’ve cleansed her of sin. I can see the weight of it, lifting from her, the burden of all the guilt and shame she’s carried with her all these years. She’s shed it like the layer of dust the sculptor’s chisel leaves and now her face is as smooth and firm and pale as marble in the moonlight. “Well, dear, don’t be too hard on yourself. The thing to do now is put the past behind you. That’s what I’m going to do. I’ve made what amends I could and now I’m going to put the whole thing behind me. Can you do that, Jane?”
I almost laugh. Now that she’s shifted the blame from herself to me she tells me to forget. But I nod to let her know I’ll try.
Then she turns on her heel and leaves abruptly, that fast stride taking her into the woods and out of sight before I realize that she is leaving.
I stand for a few moments trying to collect my thoughts, but all I hear is Dean Buehl’s advice to me. Forget the past, forget the past. For the moment the words seem to block out any thought, but can I really do it? Can I forget the past? Do I even want to?
I look at the skater on the lake. It must be Dr. Lockhart, but it’s hard to connect the stiff and forbidding psychologist with this ethereal figure dancing on the ice. She skates over the ice like a black swan on white water. So effortless do her movements seem I am reminded of those magnetized skaters on the ornamental ponds that decorate shop windows at Christmastime. The ones with little plastic figures that turn in the same magnetized grooves over and over again. It seems that the loops Dr. Lockhart inscribes on the lake follow some pattern, too, so that if I could see the lines her skates cut in the ice some intricate mandala would be revealed.
It reminds me of a dream I’ve been having lately. In the dream I am skating on the lake, as beautifully and skillfully as Dr. Lockhart is now skating. I feel, in the dream, finally free of the past, but when I look back from the shore I see I’ve cut a pattern in the ice and the pattern is Matt Toller’s face. As I watch his face sink into the black water I can clearly read his expression. He is disappointed in me. I can’t hear the words his lips are forming, but I know what he is saying. You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?
I suppose this is the sort of thing Dean Buehl would say is best left forgotten. Yet as painful as it is to see that look in Matt’s face every night in my dreams, it’s far more unbearable to think of never seeing his face again at all.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I FIND, IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, THAT IT IS EASIER TO FOLLOW Dean Buehl’s injunction to forget the past than I would have imagined. My own unpreparedness comes, blessedly, to the rescue. Since I hadn’t quite believed I’d be back at Heart Lake, I didn’t spend my break getting ready for the next semester. It was a sort of hedge, I realize now, against the possibility of being fired. It makes me realize how much I was afraid of being let go (my predecessor’s fate) and how glad, after all is said and done, I am to be back, even though I miss Olivia so much I feel physically ill. Again, it’s a blessing of sorts to be so busy. And when I make the drive down to Westchester she seems happy enough. Happy with her father, happy with the young college girl who watches her during the week, happy to see me when I come down every other weekend. It’s only when Sunday comes and I have to say good-bye that she seems to fall apart a little. When I get back to the campus on those Sunday nights I throw myself into translating to catch up on the time I’ve lost.
Because even though my classes are smaller, I have to scramble to prepare translations. Often I am only one step ahead of my students in the reading and occasionally I have to sight read second year’s Catullus and third year’s Ovid. I can’t take that chance with fourth year’s Virgil, though. For one thing the class is now so small (besides Athena and Vesta it’s just Octavia and Flavia, who are too worried about their classics scholarships to quit the class) that I have to shoulder at least an equal load of translating or we’ll never get Rome founded before the end of the year. For another thing, the Latin has gotten harder. As we approach Book Six of the Aeneid, I find myself dreading the visit to the underworld. I remember that even Domina Chambers admitted that certain passages were almost untranslatable. It was as if, she told us, the syntax becomes as twisting as the minotaur’s maze that is carved on the Sibyl’s gates through which Aeneas must pass before his visit to the underworld.
I tell my advanced girls they won’t be tested on the really hard parts.
“Why did he make it so hard?” Vesta asks. “I mean, didn’t he want people to be able to read his stuff?” There’s a note of irritation in her voice that goes beyond annoyance with Virgil. It feels to me as if she’s asking why I’m making it so hard on her and I begin to suspect we’re not just talking about Latin. I think she holds me at least partly responsible for what happened to Melissa, and therefore it’s my fault they have to go to all these counseling sessions and communal sings.
I tell the girls Domina Chambers’s theory about the language being a maze. “After all, he’s about to take us into the underworld…” I notice that the girls always perk up when I mention the underworld, the way a toddler might at the promise of a trip to Disneyland. “. . . and that’s not supposed to be easy. It’s like a secret he’s not supposed to reveal, so he has to disguise the instructions.”
“Like they use five-five-five phone numbers on television,” Athena suggests.
“Exactly.” Excited, I write a passage on the board and have them take turns linking up the adjectives and nouns, the nouns and verbs, the relative clauses with their antecedents. When we are done the lines we have drawn between the words do look like a maze.
“A maze with no exit,” Vesta points out. “Where’s Ariadne with her thread when you need her?”
“The thread is the way the words link up,” Athena says, raising her hand in her excitement even though I have long dispensed with such formalities in this little class. “When you see which words go together you solve the puzzle.”
I look at her with amazement. Not only because of how she has caught on, but because of how suddenly beautiful she looks. The light coming in the classroom window touches her straggly, multicolored hair, and where the light brown is showing through the dye I see flashes of red. Her green eyes shine back at me with the pleasure of getting it right and for a moment it’s as if we were alone in the classroom, teacher and student sharing that rare flash of illumination that comes after slogging through the muck. But then she notices how in raising her hand her sweater sleeve has slipped down her arm, revealing the tangle of scarred flesh. She sees Octavia staring at her wrist and whispering something to Flavia. She looks away from me and tugs the unraveling cuff down over her knuckles.
The next day Octavia is absent and Flavia explains to me, apologetically, that her sister is dropping the class because every time she looks at Ellen Craven she thinks about the suicide legend. “Our grandmother says that the ghost of a murderer is never at rest.”
I ask Flavia if she shares her sister’s superstitions. “Nah. Besides, Octavia has a good shot at a tennis scholarship, but my backhand sucks.”
I am so concerned with preparing the girls for Book Six that I forget how Book Five ends. It’s only while Athena is reading aloud the part where Aeneas’s boat is approaching Italy that I remember this is where Palinurus, the helmsman, drowns.
As she reads I tell myself that it’s not going to be so bad. After all, we can’t ignore every reference to drowning just because Melissa Randall drowned. This is about the helmsman of a boat, not a seventeen-year-old girl. But there’s something in the way the god of sleep tricks Palinurus into falling in the water that makes me uneasy. I look around my dwindling class and see it’s making everyone uneasy.
“Datur hora quieti,” Athena reads. “The time for rest has come?”
I nod. “Yes, you noticed the passive. Bene.”
“Pone caput fessoque oculos furare labori—put your head down and rest your eyes?”
“Basically,” I say.
“Sounds like a good idea,” Flavia says, putting her head down on her desk and closing her eyes. Athena reads on, alternating between Latin and English, her words barely audible above the hiss of the steam heat and the gurgling of the radiators. I can tell from Flavia’s breathing that she is asleep. I’m certainly not supposed to let the girls fall asleep in class, but I don’t have the heart to wake her. Before class she told me she hasn’t been sleeping because of bad dreams.
“I keep thinking about Melissa Randall in the lake,” she said. “I know they found her body, but I keep thinking she’s still there. Octavia says she can hear her voice coming from the lake.”
“It’s just the ice buckling,” I told her, but I know what she means. The noise has been keeping me up, too.
“Mene huic confidere monstro?” Athena reads. “Would you have me put faith in such a demon?”
The noise the ice makes sounds like a monster trapped under the ice.
“Ecce deus ramum Lethaeo rore madentum vique soporatum Stygia super utraque quassat tempora… Look! The god shook a branch at Lethe who was sleeping.”
She has totally mangled the translation, but I say nothing. The God of Sleep coaxes Palinurus into forgetfulness as the drip of the radiators lulls my students into a drugged stupor. Forget the past, Dean Buehl said, drink deep of Lethe’s water and forget.
Palinurus falls headlong (praecipitem, from praecipitare, my favorite Latin verb) into the Mediterranean Sea and Aeneas sails on to Italy, narrowly avoiding the Sirens’ rocks, “. . . which once were hard to pass and whitened by the bones of many men,” Athena translates. “Far out we heard the growl and roar of the stones where the salt surf beats unceasingly.”
Even my eighth graders have noticed the sounds coming from the lake. “They come from where the rocks are and isn’t that where that senior fell in?” one of them blurted out in the middle of a lesson on the passive periphrastic today.
Athena finishes her translation and there is a moment of silence when we all listen to the sound of the steam hissing in the pipes and the incessant crackling that comes from the lake.
“I think it sucks that Aeneas went on without Palinurus,” Vesta says. Vesta hasn’t liked Aeneas since he ditched Dido in Book Four.
“Yeah, but what else was he supposed to do? Stop the boat and go back? I mean, he had to get past those Sirens and found Italy. Right, Magistra? It was his duty. Like you gotta go on.”
I am so grateful for this reading of the Aeneid that it is all I can do to stop myself from hugging Athena. We’ve navigated another minefield, gotten through another day of Latin. Aeneas is within sight of the Italian shore. Outside the lake has quieted down. But then Vesta pipes up, “Yeah, but Palinurus’s death comes back to bite him on the ass.”
“Vesta!” Athena says so loudly that Flavia wakes up. They look at me to see if I’ll reprimand Vesta for inappropriate language, but instead I commend her for reading ahead.
“That’s right, Palinurus meets Aeneas in the underworld and tells him the truth about his death and begs him to give him a proper burial.”
“The dead sure are a whiny lot,” Vesta says just as the bell rings. There’s not much I can do but nod my agreement, but I notice Flavia turns pale at such a cavalier dismissal of the demands the dead make upon the living, and the next day I learn that she has dropped out of the class.
Now it’s only Athena and Vesta and me. I have the feeling, when the three of us convene in the drafty classroom overlooking the lake, that we are the last survivors of some monstrous ice age. Each night it snows, and although Dean Buehl has asked the board for extra money for plowing, the footpaths grow narrower and narrower between the rising walls of snow that guard the edges of the woods.
One Friday afternoon the snow accumulates so fast I’m unable to get my car out of the faculty lot and I have to call Olivia and tell her I’ll be late for our weekend together. She seems unconcerned enough at first—wrapped up in some television show she’s watching with Mitchell, but when I call her Saturday morning to tell her I still can’t get my car out she cries. Mitchell complains that he’ll have to pay the baby-sitter overtime because he has plans for the evening. I try not to wonder what plans. We haven’t talked since Christmas break about the possibility of getting back together and I sense that particular window of opportunity has closed.
All weekend the snow falls and I shovel my car out only to watch the snow fill in the space I’ve cleared. I feel like one of those tortured souls in Hades condemned to perform some meaningless task over and over again. Beneath the soft snow the wipers are frozen onto the windshield. I spray chemical de-icer on the windshield and then reach inside to turn on the wipers. They quiver under the snow, like small animals trying to break free, and then, when they do break free, they sweep a handful of slush and de-icer into my face. The chemical burns my eyes and I have to scoop up handfuls of fresh snow to flush the de-icer out of my eyes. My vision remains blurred for the rest of the weekend, making it impossible to drive to Westchester even if the roads were cleared. When I call, Olivia is calm and tells me she understands in a voice so uncannily grown-up I am simultaneously proud and grief-stricken.
I stay in bed that Sunday and have to cancel my classes on Monday. Gwen Marsh stops by to check on me and bring me some soup and a stack of papers she’s collected from my students. I’m touched by the soup, but wish she hadn’t bothered with the papers. My eyes hurt too much to read or grade papers, so instead I watch the snow mounting in the window frames, depositing layer upon layer of white and gray sediment like the cross sections of mountain ranges Miss Buehl used to show us. Above these miniature ridges, large lofty flakes cling in clumps that look like cumulus clouds—a dioramic landscape to make up for the fact I can’t see the real world behind the falling snow. It’s the same sense of enclosure I had the January of my senior year that I spent in the infirmary.
L UCY NEEDN’T HAVE BEEN CONCERNED THAT I’ D STAY IN THE infirmary. As it turned out, I stayed longer than she did. When Miss Buehl and Domina Chambers picked me up off the floor after I lost consciousness they discovered I was burning up with fever. I guess all those hours roaming around the campus in wet clothes had done their trick. They kept me in the same room with Lucy because, Miss Buehl later informed me, Lucy insisted I stay with her.
“She wouldn’t let you out of her sight,” she told me.
I remembered sometimes waking up and seeing Lucy in the bed across from me, lying on her side facing me. I tried once to talk to her about what had happened. I wanted to know if they had believed our story—if Deirdre had gotten rid of the bloody sheets, if anything had been discovered in the lake. But each time I tried to talk about it, Lucy shushed me. I heard her tell the nurse once not to bother me or try asking me questions.
“You should leave the poor kid alone,” I overheard her say once to Miss Buehl. “After all, her mother just died.” It seemed as if Lucy was the only one who remembered that. Even my father, who came to visit me only once, spoke about his new job at the glove factory with such enthusiasm that I thought I had dreamt up the hospital room in Albany and the funeral afterward. And if I had imagined that, maybe I had imagined everything that followed, the overheated dorm room, the baby in the tea tin…
But then I woke up one day to find Deirdre standing next to Lucy’s bed. They seemed to be arguing about something in angry whispers and I knew then I hadn’t imagined any of it.
Domina Chambers came often and I heard her questioning Lucy about what had happened, about why she had tried to take her own life.
“I don’t think I really meant it,” she told Domina Chambers. “I think I knew Jane would find me and save me.”
I was touched by the story even though I knew it was a lie.
Then one day I woke up and found the bed next to me empty. I was so alarmed I managed to get out of bed and walk out into the hall where I found the nurse. “Where’s Lucy?” I asked as I was led back to bed.
“She’s been discharged, honey,” the nurse told me, “and if you want to be you’d better stay in bed.”
Lucy visited me that day. She brought me my Latin homework. I was amazed to think that classes had started. I’d had a feeling, in the whitewashed infirmary room, its windows filled with snow, of suspended time, like in a fairy tale when the whole world goes to sleep with the heroine. But then if anyone were the heroine, I thought, it was Lucy, and she looked as if she had rejoined the world of the living. Her cheeks were pink, her hair shiny, and she was wearing one of the nice outfits she had gotten in Italy. She hadn’t looked this good since October.
“I’m trying to impress them that I’ve regained my mental health,” she said when I complimented her appearance, and then, leaning closer to whisper, “If I’d had any idea what a bother this suicide thing was going to turn out to be, I think I’d have done it for real!” She giggled. “But I don’t think I hate it nearly as much as Deirdre.”
“Deirdre? But she didn’t try to kill herself.”
“No, but they’ve called in this psychologist from Albany who says that suicide is contagious. And since Deirdre’s my roommate and they think she acted funny about the sheets they’re giving her the third degree. They’ll probably start bugging you once you’re well enough.”
“Well it serves her right,” I said. “If she’d just told someone she was pregnant in the first place…”
Lucy frowned. “I guess she was too scared,” she said. “Anyhow, it’s over now.”
“I hope she doesn’t tell anyone,” I said, “I mean with all this psychiatric interrogation. Then it might come out that you and I got rid of… the thing.”
Lucy turned pale and I was immediately sorry I’d reminded her of what we’d done. “She’d better not tell,” Lucy said. “Get better soon, Jane, I might need your help with her.”
I wasn’t released until the next week. I still felt wobbly but I convinced the nurse that I was all right and pleaded that I was afraid of falling too far behind if I didn’t go back to class. I walked back to the dorm on a bright, sunny day, half-blinded by the glare of the sun glancing off the frozen lake. Girls passed me on the path and greeted me, but I felt like they were all moving at a sped-up rate and I became conscious of how slowly I was walking. It made me feel apart to see them all, with their shiny hair swinging against their down vests, their pastel shetland sweaters bright in the sun. These were the girls I had admired in the town drugstore; they were the reason I had wanted to come here, but I was no closer to them—no more like them—now than I had been when I was still a townie. I hadn’t made any friends at Heart Lake. I hadn’t tried to. Lucy had always been enough.
When I got back to the dorm I ran into Deirdre in the hall just outside our room. “Oh good,” she said when she saw me. “Maybe the shrinks can spend some time picking your brains. I’m tired of explaining that I’m not suicidal.”
Lucy was coming out of the single when I came in the suite. “Did you just run into Deirdre?” she asked me. “I thought I heard you talking in the hall. What was she saying to you?”
I told her what Deirdre had said. I was a little disappointed in Lucy’s greeting, but then I guessed she was preoccupied.
“She’d better hope the shrinks don’t get a hold of this,” Lucy said, holding up a notebook covered in red Chinese embroidered silk.
“Is that Deirdre’s journal?” I asked, a little surprised that Lucy would be snooping.
“I don’t think you could call it a journal,” she said, “more like a book of the dead. She keeps quotes about death in it. Listen to this, ‘He who saves a man against his will as good as murders him.’”
“Horace,” I said. “Didn’t Domina Chambers give us that quote?”
“Yes, half the quotes in here come from Helen. Honestly, I don’t think it would look good for her if Deirdre did kill herself. I’ll have to talk to her at dinner tonight.”
I must have looked baffled. “Oh yes, since my so-called suicide attempt Helen has insisted I eat with her every night. Frankly, it’s driving me batty. She keeps asking me questions about my ‘outlook,’ as she calls it, and giving me mimeos of poems that are supposed to cheer me up. Only they’re pretty morbid, too. Here.” Lucy put down Deirdre’s journal and picked up a folded sheet of paper with blue printing on it. She read aloud. It was Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” We’d had it in Miss Macintosh’s class last term. What struck me now were the last lines: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
“You know,” I said, “those last lines remind me of the three sisters story. The way the girls are supposed to be lured to the lake to kill themselves by the sound of the water lapping against the rocks.”
“How clever of you, Jane. I thought exactly the same thing.” Lucy folded the sheet in two and laid it on her bed next to Deirdre’s journal.
“Aren’t you going to put that back?” I asked.
“Oh, I guess,” Lucy said, yawning. “Would you do it for me? It was in her bureau in the top drawer. I’d better go now. Helen hates it when I’m late.”
When Lucy left I went into Deirdre’s single and replaced the journal in the top drawer of her bureau. I felt nervous and, I realized, not just because I was afraid of Deirdre catching me with her journal. It was the bed. I was afraid to look at it, afraid that when I looked at it the blood would somehow still be there. But when I did force myself to look at it I saw only rumpled sheets—Deirdre almost never made her bed—and a blue and gold Indian bedspread that used to hang on the ceiling over the bed. The Balinese dancers were still dancing on their tapestries as if nothing unusual had ever happened in that bed. I thought I saw a splotch of red over one of their breasts, but when I looked closer I saw it might be part of the pattern.
I went back into the room I shared with Lucy and noticed that my suitcase had been stored underneath my bed. I pulled it out and opened it. It was empty. I opened my bureau drawers and found my clothes neatly folded (more neatly than I remembered packing them that last morning in Albany) and put away. Under one stack of clothes I found my journal. I leafed through it, wondering if Lucy had read my journal, too, and what she’d have made of what I’d written. There was nothing bad about her in it, but there were embarrassing things, like how jealous I’d felt of Deirdre and Lucy’s friendship and how much I missed Matt. As I read through it I was startled by how much of what I had written could be misinterpreted. So many of the things I had written could mean so many different things, depending on who the reader was. I read through parts pretending I was Lucy or Deirdre or Domina Chambers or Miss Buehl—or even myself when older—and with each new “reader” what I had written shifted in meaning as if it had been translated into another language.
I’d better put it back under the floorboards, I thought. But first I wrote about what happened the night I came back from Albany. It felt risky committing to paper that awful moment when I watched the tea tin sink into the lake, but there was something in me that needed to get it out, if only to my journal. “You’re the only one I can ever tell,” I wrote. And then I hid the journal under the loose floorboards beneath my desk.
I tried to do a little Latin translation, but the words swam in front of my eyes and I started seeing spots. At first they were only small glints of light, like gnats flying in front of my eyes, and then they merged into one large sun spot that spread across my vision like a hole burning through a home movie. I closed my eyes and lay down on my bed, but I could still see the burning spot on the inside of my eyelids. Even when I fell asleep I saw the light. I dreamed it was Miss Buehl’s porch light and I was crossing the woods to reach it, only I went the wrong way and ended up back at the Point. I slipped on the icy rock and fell into black space flecked with white sparks. Snow, I thought in my dream, but then the darkness turned green and the flecks of light were golden silt drifting down to the bottom of the lake. I looked up at a pattern of white shards on black; I was under the broken ice, which, even as I watched, knit back together, sealing me beneath it. Drifting down beside me was a tea tin painted with golden mountains and blue skies. It turned as it sank, spinning like a leaf, and then, when it reached the bottom, its lid slowly opened.
IT’S THAT SAME FEELING—OF LYING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE lake looking up at the underside of the ice—I have lying in my room, my vision blurred, the snowscapes on the window screens like distant mountains. I think of Deirdre, of how the ice must have looked to her as she sank into the lake. In my dreams I try to tell her that I know now that the baby wasn’t hers, but when I reach for her she turns away from me, just as Dido turns away from Aeneas when he meets her in the underworld. The dead sure are a whiny lot, Vesta had said. But she was wrong. The dead are silent.
When my vision clears, I feel curiously energized. I decide to go skating. I had been afraid that part of Dean Buehl’s “forget the past” campaign might include banishing ice skating, but I had forgotten how much she liked to skate.
“Best thing for these girls,” she says on an unusually mild day in late January. “Exercise. Fresh air. And just look at this ice! Best ice we’ve had in twenty years.”
“Coldest January in twenty years,” Simon Ross, the math teacher, says gliding by on hockey skates, “until today, that is. A few days like this and that’ll be it for the skating season.”
“It’s supposed to get cold again tonight,” Gwen Marsh says, backskating a circle around me.
“But first we’re going to get some sleet and icy rain,” Meryl North, who is skating with Tacy Beade, says. “We might have a real ice storm on our hands.”
I turn to say something else to Gwen, but she’s gone. I wonder if I’ve offended her in some way. Since I’ve been back she’s been distant. I had thought at the beginning of the school year that we might be friends, but I realize now that I’ve done very little to build on the promise of that friendship. As I watch my fellow teachers skating together in pairs and small groups I realize how little I’ve connected to anyone here at Heart Lake. It’s the same feeling I had walking back from the infirmary senior year, that I hadn’t bothered making other friends because Lucy had always been enough. And, in a way, she’s kept me from making friends all these years. At first, I told myself, because I was afraid of being hurt again. But later it was because when I did come close to someone I would hear Lucy’s cool assessing voice, criticizing something about my new acquaintance. This one was too fat, that one was too earnest, this one a little loud, that one just plain dumb.
I tried to ignore the voice, but it put a distance between me and the girls I might have befriended. Who might have befriended me. It wasn’t as if there were that many candidates.
I make an effort today to talk to everyone. I skate with Myra Todd and listen to a long drawn-out tirade against animal rights activists. I discuss a plan for a reenactment of an old-fashioned ice harvest with Dean Buehl. I catch up to Gwen, who’s skating now with Dr. Lockhart, and offer to help with the literary magazine. I join Tacy Beade and Meryl North and ask Miss Beade if she’d come give a lecture on classical art to my juniors. She says she’s busy right now with plans for ice sculptures to accompany the ice harvest, but will be happy to come later in the year.
“It’s time to turn back, Tacy,” Meryl North says. “See, we’re at the Point.”
“Oh,” my old art teacher says, “yes, of course.” That’s when I realize, watching Meryl North steer Tacy Beade along the ice, that Beady can hardly see. I remember watching her set up her art room, everything in its place, and wonder how long she’s been losing her sight and how long she would keep her job if the board knew. Meryl North must realize I suspect something because, as we skate back toward the mansion, she chatters enthusiastically about the coming ice harvest. I notice, though, that she keeps confusing the dates and at one point I realize she thinks it’s 1977 and I’m still a student here. When Dr. Lockhart and Gwen Marsh skate by, Meryl North says, “There goes your little friend.” It’s sad, I think, that my two old teachers have lost the aptitudes most important to their fields: the art teacher, her sight; the history teacher, her sense of time.
My ankles have begun to hurt, but when I see Athena and Vesta I skate toward them. Vesta is wearing a fleece headband that makes her lavender-red Little Mermaid hair stick up in spiky points. Athena is wearing a Yale sweatshirt over red plaid pajama pants. Her mottled hair, which is now about half brown and half black, makes her look like an Australian sheep dog. I realize, skating toward them, that I’d far rather talk to them than to any of my colleagues.
As I skate closer, I notice someone else approaching the two girls and it gives me pause. I try to slow my forward progress by digging the serrated tips of my skate blades into the ice, but instead of slowing down I trip and sail headlong into Roy Corey, who has reached the girls just as I do. I slam hard into his chest and I’m sure we’re both going down, but instead I feel his arm curve around my waist as we spin across the ice.
“All right, Magistra!” I hear the girls cheering me on, as if I had just completed a double axle instead of nearly crashing to the ice. And I do feel suddenly graceful, with Roy’s arm around my waist, but then he takes away his arm and crosses his arms behind his back. We skate side by side, but not touching, around the western edge of the lake. I’m impressed with how well he skates and then I remember him telling me, all those years ago, that he’d grown up skating on these ponds. Just like Matt. At the thought of Matt I catch the tip of my blade on the ice and pitch forward. I see the hard white ice speeding up to my face but he catches me just in time.
“Whoa,” he says, “are you OK?”
“Sorry,” I say, “my eyes still aren’t so good. I had a little accident with some de-icer.”
“Yeah, Dean Buehl told me. I called last week to ask you a few questions.” I remember suddenly that he is a police officer and that he probably isn’t here just for the ice skating.
“A few questions?” I ask. “What about?”
Before answering I see him look quickly around us. We’ve stopped just where the Point juts into the lake, not far from where the third sister rock curves out of the ice like the back of a whale arrested mid-dive. The rest of the skaters are in the west cove. They’re too far away to overhear us, but I see he still looks nervous.
“Wasn’t there a cave around here,” he asks, turning to face me. “You took me to a cave that morning.”
It’s the first reference he’s made to that night we spent together and it makes me blush. But why? Nothing happened. He was asleep when I touched his face. I notice that he’s blushing, too. Was he asleep?
“There are a bunch of caves in the Point,” I say, “but I think the one you’re talking about is over here.”
I lead him to a shallow opening in the cliff wall just where the ice meets the shore. It’s not even really a cave, just an indentation in the rock covered by an overhanging ledge and partially blocked by the second sister stone.
He wedges himself into the tight space and pats the rock by his side. Embarrassed, I squeeze in next to him. He takes up quite a lot more space than he did when he was boy. But then, so do I. Only the view from the cave hasn’t changed. I can see the tall stone casting a long shadow on the ice, which the setting sun has turned a creamy orange. The cave itself is full of this orange light, reflecting off the ice and onto the limestone walls.
Roy is also looking at the view from the cave. When he looks back at me I guess I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about the last time we were here.
“So what did you want to ask me?” I ask. I wonder if I should have asked to have a lawyer present. I almost laugh out loud imagining a lawyer crammed into this narrow space.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking this isn’t your typical interrogation room. Can I assume this won’t be a typical interrogation?”
He doesn’t smile, neither does he confirm or deny what I’ve said. “I’m just trying to get a few things straight in my head,” he says, “about Deirdre Hall’s death.”
“Oh,” I say.
“I’ve been going over your journal…”
“I thought you said there was nothing to incriminate me in there. I believe your exact words were ‘You had no idea what was really going on.’ ”
“Well, maybe I didn’t give you enough credit. I read over the part about Deirdre’s death and I think there was something you felt uncomfortable about. I want you to tell me what happened that night.”
“But why? What’s the point? Are you investigating Deirdre Hall’s death now?”
He shrugs. “Humor me, Jane.” He grins at me then with the kind of boyish grin that Matt might have given me to coax me into another fifteen minutes of Latin study. So I do what he wants. I tell him everything I remember about that night.
I HAD BEEN ASLEEP, DREAMING THAT AWFUL DREAM ABOUT sinking under the ice, the tea tin drifting down through the water beside me, when their voices woke me. They were in the single, arguing.
“I’m going to tell.”
“You can’t.”
“There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I’ve had enough.”
Someone rushed through the room I was in. The door to the hall opened, letting in a slice of light, and then slammed shut. Someone else followed from the single and opened the door. I could see in the light that it was Lucy and I called to her.
Lucy spun around and then closed the door. She came over and sat on the bed next to me. “I didn’t know you were awake,” she said. There was a little light coming from the single, but I couldn’t make out Lucy’s face in the shadows. “Did you hear?”
“I heard you arguing with Deirdre. Where’s she gone?”
“She’s going to Miss Buehl. To tell.”
“Tell what?”
Lucy paused before she answered. “About the baby,” she said.
“Why would she tell Miss Buehl she had a baby?”
Lucy sighed. “I guess she wants to get it off her chest,” she said. “Confession’s good for the soul, and all that junk.” I thought about my journal writing guiltily, but at least that wouldn’t get anyone in trouble.
“But then everybody will know we helped get rid of it.”
Lucy nodded. “She doesn’t care,” Lucy said. “She doesn’t care about anyone but herself.”
I sat up in bed. “Can we stop her?” I asked.
Lucy took my hand and squeezed it. “Good old Jane,” she said, “that’s an excellent idea. Come on. Maybe we can catch up with her.”
We didn’t bother going down the drainpipe. The dorm matron was asleep at her desk, so we just tiptoed by. Once outside I started running down the path, but Lucy stopped me. “I’ve got a shortcut through the woods,” she said. “We might be able to catch up with her before she gets to Miss Buehl.”
We followed the narrow trail that Lucy had carved out of the snow. I noticed that it was freshly trodden and was surprised that she had obviously used her trails after the last snow. The trail led directly to the Point. When I saw where we were I stopped at the edge of the woods, thinking of my dream. I didn’t want to go out onto the rock.
“I think I see her,” Lucy hissed, “get back.”
Lucy motioned me back until we were hidden by the shadows. Only when Deirdre was directly in front of us on the path did Lucy step out from the shadows, blocking her way. Deirdre was startled when she saw Lucy and moved toward the trees, but then she must have seen me, because she moved off the path in the other direction, toward the Point. When she was on the rock Lucy started walking toward her, but not on the curved surface on top of the Point. She took a step down to the ledge on the east side of the Point and approached Deirdre slowly but steadily.
“I think we should talk this over, Deir,” I heard Lucy say. Her voice sounded calm and reasonable.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Lucy, just get away from me.” I heard the fear in Deirdre’s voice and it surprised me; Lucy was so much smaller than Deirdre. What did Deirdre have to be afraid of? It made me, suddenly, angry. I stepped out of the woods and walked carefully onto the icy rock. My anger quickly turned to fear, though, when I saw how close Deirdre and Lucy had gotten to the edge.
“Hey,” I called. My voice sounded feeble. “Let’s go back to the dorm and talk this over.”
Deirdre snorted. “Yes, Jane, let’s have a nice long talk. There’s a lot you might be interested to learn.”
Lucy turned toward me and in turning lost her balance. Her arms flailed wide and beat the air like the wings of some large, awkward bird. I tried to grab her, but she was too far away, below me on the ledge, and I stumbled before I could reach her. Just before I landed on the rock I saw Deirdre reach for Lucy’s arm and then I heard someone scream and the sound of something cracking. I looked up and saw one figure crouched on the rock. I crept toward her and found it was Lucy. She was looking over the edge of the cliff at the frozen lake below where a long black gash had opened in the ice.
“YOU SAY LUCY WAS BELOW YOU ON THE LEDGE AND THAT when you stepped forward Deirdre stepped back?”
I nod. He seems lost in thought for a moment. “What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says, “at least, I have to take a look at the Point again to tell if it’s anything. Go on, tell me what you did after Deirdre went through the ice. Did you go down and try to help her?”
“There was nothing we could do.”
He looks at me without saying anything. I remember that he’s read my journal. “Whose decision was it to leave without trying to help her?”
“Mine,” I say, and when he still stares at me, I add, “Well, first it was Lucy’s and then it was mine.”
I TRIED TO PULL L UCY AWAY FROM THE EDGE BUT IT WAS AS if she were stuck there, transfixed by that long dark opening in the ice.
“We have to go down and see if we can help her,” I said.
Lucy looked at me, her eyes wide. “I saw her when she hit the ice,” she said. “Trust me, she was dead before she went into the water.” I saw the horror in Lucy’s eyes and it frightened me.
“We can’t just leave her. We have to be sure.”
Lucy nodded. She let me lead the way down to the beach. When we got to the edge of the ice I stopped but Lucy walked right out onto the ice, to the edge of the hole where Deirdre had fallen through. I caught up to her and grabbed her arm and she wheeled around on me so suddenly that I almost lost my balance and fell in.
“You said you wanted to be sure,” Lucy said. “One of us has to go in. Obviously it should be me. It was my fault she fell.” She spoke softly but her words chilled me. She had that look she got when she was determined to have her way. I didn’t doubt that she’d be willing to plunge into the icy water to find Deirdre’s body. I had the feeling she wouldn’t stop until she found her, not even if it meant following Deirdre to the bottom of the lake. I realized I might lose her, too.
I stared into the black water. Already I could see a thin film of ice forming on the top. How many minutes had passed since Deirdre fell? Even if she had survived the fall wouldn’t she have drowned by now? Why should Lucy risk her life if Deirdre were already dead?
I put my other hand on her arm and turned her to face me. “I don’t want you to do it,” I said. “It’s bad enough Deirdre’s gone. I don’t want to lose you, too.” Her eyes regarded me as if I were far away, as if that thin film of ice that was forming over the black water had gotten in between us. I couldn’t tell if she even understood what I was saying and then she looked back at the water and I saw such a look of longing on her face that I immediately started pulling her back to the shore.
“But we have to tell someone,” she said.
“Of course, you were right in the first place. We’ll go back to Miss Buehl’s cottage. . .”
“But what if she’s gone out? No. It’s safer to go back to the dorm and wake up the matron.”
Lucy led the way because she knew a shortcut following one of her narrow footpaths. We went single file, Lucy walking so fast I could barely keep up with her. I was glad she had shaken off the trancelike lethargy that had come over her at the lake, but I was surprised that when we got to the dorm Lucy climbed up the drainpipe to the second-story bathroom. When I caught up with her inside I asked her what she was doing. “Why are we sneaking in? We’ve got to wake the dorm matron anyway.”
“I need to check something first,” she said. “Deirdre was writing in her journal before she ran out. What if she wrote about what we did, Jane? Do you want people to know you drowned a baby in the lake?”
“Drowned?”
“Not so loud.” Lucy put a finger to my lips. Her hands were ice cold.
“The baby was dead,” I said.
“It’s our word against hers. What if she wrote it was born alive and you and I killed it? Do you want people thinking that about you? Do you think you’ll get that scholarship to Vassar if that gets around?”
I shook my head and Lucy opened the bathroom door, poked her head out and then gave the all-clear sign. It wasn’t until I was following her down the hall that I wondered how she knew about the scholarship. I hadn’t told anyone but Miss Buehl and Miss North, who had written my recommendation letters. It didn’t seem the right time to ask, though, so I followed Lucy in silence.
We crept down the hall and Lucy opened our door slowly so it wouldn’t creak. We’d done the same thing countless times, but always with Deirdre. I kept looking behind me expecting to see her and then I would think of her in the lake, below the ice. I remembered my dream and hoped, for Deirdre’s sake, that Lucy was right about the fall killing her.
Lucy went straight into Deirdre’s single and I heard a drawer opening. When she came out she was holding Deirdre’s journal. She sat down at her desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the notebook to the last written page. I stood behind her and read over her shoulder. Under the Horace quote, which had been the last thing in the journal when I’d seen it this afternoon, Deirdre had written another line: “Whatever happens now, it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas.” There was nothing about the baby being alive at birth.
“What does she mean?” I asked. “She makes it sound like it’s all your fault. That’s not fair.”
Lucy looked up at me. “She blamed me for hiding the truth. She said it would have been better if it had all come out into the open.”
“But you were only trying to help.” I was getting angry at Deirdre, forgetting that she wasn’t around to be angry at.
Lucy shrugged. “Apparently she didn’t see it the same way.”
“Well, we can’t let anyone see this,” I said. “We’ll hide it. We’ll dump it in the lake. I’ll never tell.”
Lucy smiled. “You’re a good friend, Jane, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Listen.” She read the line out loud. “ ‘Whatever happens now it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas.’ It’s perfect! All that shrink from Albany has been going on about is how one suicide attempt leads to another. Like it’s catching. They expected Deirdre to do this. Especially since I had the bad manners to cut my wrists in her bed. They’ll probably pat each other on the backs for seeing it coming.”
“But she didn’t kill herself,” I said. “It was an accident. We’ll just explain…”
“Don’t be silly, Jane. It looks like a suicide. It even fits the three sisters legend because she landed right in between the second and third sister. It’s what they’ll want to believe. They’ll lap it up like cream.”
“Maybe it was a suicide,” I said. “I mean, think how bad Deirdre must have felt about the baby…” I thought Lucy would be glad of my theory, but instead she seemed distracted. She looked around the room as if she had lost something.
“There’s just one more thing needed to make it perfect.” She popped up from her desk and crossed to the bed. I was a little startled at her energy. She snatched a piece of white paper from her bed and flourished it above her head.
“Voilà!” she said, sitting back down at the desk. “Ecce testimonium.” It was the mimeograph of Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” “I think just the last stanza will do.” Lucy cut out the last stanza of the poem, being careful to cut evenly. Then she taped it into Deirdre’s journal, again taking time to line it up perfectly.
“Even if it was her suicide note,” Lucy said, “Deirdre was so fucking precise.”
“SO YOU TWO MADE IT LOOK LIKE A SUICIDE. YOU CHANGED her journal and then took it to the dorm matron.”
“Yes. We said that I’d woken up and saw Deirdre’s door open, her bed empty, and her journal lying open on the bed. I know it sounds bad, but I thought she really might have killed herself, that she felt so bad about the baby…”
“But it wasn’t her baby.”
“No.”
“And what was it Deirdre said just before she fell?”
“ ‘Yes, Jane, let’s have a nice long talk. There’s a lot you might be interested to learn.’ ”
Roy watches me, waiting for me to take the next step.
“She would have told me it wasn’t her baby, that it was Lucy’s baby…”
“And you say Lucy flailed her arms just before Deirdre fell?”
“Yes, because she lost her balance…”
“But you say she was on the east ledge. You can’t fall from there because there’s a rock blocking the edge of the Point. But it is close enough to the edge of the Point to reach out and push someone…”
“I didn’t see that.” I’ve raised one hand to my mouth and I feel the wool of my mittens dampen with my breath. Roy reaches over and pulls my hand away from my face.
“Because you were trying to reach Lucy and fell. You wouldn’t have seen anything.”
I snatch my hand away from Roy and press both hands over my eyes as if to blot out the picture Roy is drawing. I grind the heels of my hands into my eyes until bright sunbursts bleed into the blackness, sunspots that turn into the glitter of rock and ice, a miniature landscape of glaciers from which I look up and see, against a moonlit sky, like actors performing in front of a silver scrim, Lucy’s small pale hand reaching up and pulling Deirdre’s foot. A swift hard yank the strength of which must have surprised Deirdre because I see her mouth form a little O before she falls back.
Roy pulls my hands away from my eyes and when I open them I am looking directly into his eyes and I read there the hope that I have remembered something.
“What does it matter?” I say, too angry at being forced to relive that night to give him the satisfaction that he’s right, that maybe I did see something more. “It happened twenty years ago. Both Lucy and Deirdre are dead. So is Melissa Randall. Whatever she read in my journal, whatever it made her do, it’s all over now.”
“Is it?” Roy asks. “First there’s a fake suicide attempt—that’s like what Lucy did at Christmas—and then a girl drowns in the same spot Deirdre drowned. Two of the events from your senior year have recurred, but what about the last act? What about what happened to Matt and Lucy? We’ve been assuming that Melissa Randall did it all, but why? Because we found your journal with her things. But isn’t that also like what happened twenty years ago? You and Lucy tampered with Deirdre’s journal so everyone thought it was a suicide. What if someone planted your journal in Melissa’s things?”
I stare at him now not so much with anger as with horror. What he is suggesting is my worst fear, that the events set in motion twenty years ago would never really be over until they have swept over me, counting me a victim: the third girl. And really, why should I have been spared?
I close my eyes and see once again, sharper now, Lucy reaching up to grab Deirdre’s leg and know the memory’s always been there. I open my eyes again and nod. “Deirdre’s death wasn’t an accident,” I say. “You were right. It doesn’t matter that we were young; I’m responsible for what happened back then. For Deirdre’s death, too…”
Roy puts his hand over mine. I notice the fine red hairs that catch the light reflected from the ice at the opening to the cave. “Jane,” he says, “that’s not what I meant…” I look up at him, into the green eyes that look so familiar, and then I notice the light is gone.
I turn toward the narrow entrance to the cave just in time to see the long shadow cast by the sister stone split in two and half of the broken shadow move away. It’s as if the stone’s shadow had come to life and skated away across the ice, but Roy disabuses me of this notion. Getting to his feet, he skates out of the cave and I stumble along clumsily behind him. I catch up to him on the other side of the Point where he stands watching the skaters in the west cove. There’s Dean Buehl, Tacy Beade, Meryl North, Gwendoline Marsh, Simon Ross, Myra Todd, Dr. Lockhart, Athena, Vesta, and a dozen more teachers and students. It’s impossible to say, though, which one had been listening to our conversation inside the cave.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I HAVE THE SKATING DREAM AGAIN THAT NIGHT, ONLY IN this dream I can hear the ice cracking beneath me, fissures erupting in the wake of my blades. I keep skating, though, around and around, in an ever-tightening circle, as if following a magnetic track laid below the ice. Whereas in the dreams I had before there was a feeling of lightness, now there is weight, a heaviness that pulls my blades deep into the ice. When I look behind me I see the fissure open into a crevasse: a pale green tunnel descending for miles beneath my feet. It occurs to me that I am no longer skating on the lake, but on Miss Buehl’s glacier. I stare into the pale green crevasse. Its walls are bubbled, like old glass, only the bubbles are moving. I look closer and see, miles beneath me yet impossibly clear, figures suspended in the ice. Matt and Lucy and Deirdre and Aphrodite, even Iris Crevecoeur, small and brown like a sepia photograph come to life, are all there, streams of bubbles spewing from their mouths.
There’s another figure in the ice, but when I move closer to see I slip into the crevasse and as I slide down, deep into the pale green ice, I can hear the ice cracking closed above me.
I awake to the sound of something cracking above my head. My room is filled with an eerie green light. The light, I realize after a moment, comes from the luminescent dial on my alarm clock, which reads 3:33. As I stare at it something crashes on the roof above my head and skitters down the walls of my house. It sounds as if the house were bursting at its seams. I swing my legs out of the bed, half expecting to feel the floor trembling beneath my feet. I am thinking earthquake, tornado, another ice age, glaciers already on the march. But the floor, though icy cold, is reassuringly solid.
I get up and shove my bare feet into felt-lined boots and pull my down parka on over my nightgown. In the living room the crashing is louder. It sounds as if an army of raccoons were bivouacking on my roof. Raccoons? Hell, it could be bears. Wishing I had a rifle, I fling open the front door and switch on the porch lamp, hoping that any nocturnal intruder will be startled by the light just long enough for me to slam the door and call Animal Control.
Instead I see, in the nimbus of light from my porch lamp, a world made out of glass, a crystal world, like the inside of a candy Easter egg. Every branch and pine needle in the woods is glazed in ice. As I step out into the clearing in front of the house I can feel a light, needle-sharp sleet falling. Tree branches, weighed down by the ice, crack and crash to the forest floor. I should go back inside but I’m enchanted. I haven’t seen an ice storm like this since I was little. I know how dangerous they can be, dragging down power lines and taking down trees, but for the moment I’m enthralled by the precision of it. The way the ice turns each blade of grass and dead leaf into an artifact.
Between my house and the Point there’s a giant white pine. Each feathery needle is encased in ice. I can hear, above me, the rustle of them, rubbing against each other in the wind, a sound like muted chimes or bells tolling underwater. In the light from my porch they glitter like the eyes of some woodland animal, and then I think I can actually see a face of some sort of animal in the pine needles, watching. I move closer and see that the needles have twisted themselves into an animal face—a horned animal with its bloody prey dripping from its mouth. I reach out and pull the face from the tree and feel, under the thin ice casing, metal. I am holding three interlinked hairpins: a corniculum.
IN THE MORNING I GO OUT TO THE POINT. I SCRAPE THE ICE on the ground with my boots and shake the branches, but find not one hairpin. There’s just the three in my pocket. I walk onto the Point and look out at the lake. The storm has passed, leaving clear skies. The rising sun sets the lake on fire. I look down at the three sister stones and see that they, too, have gained a mantle of ice during the night. The third stone looks like an opal set in gold, the middle stone casts a long shadow like a crooked finger pointing toward the cave where Roy Corey and I sat yesterday. I remember how we saw that shadow, pointing in the opposite direction in the setting sun, split in two.
I look down at the three hairpins in my hand. Miss Macintosh once said that the question the reader should ask the narrator of any book is, “Why are you telling me this now?”
I’ve been back at Heart Lake for four weeks and it has been, above all else, quiet. No messages from the past, no torn journal pages or totem hairpins or dead girls. I’d assumed it was over, that the messages had stopped because Aphrodite was dead. But apparently I had assumed wrong. Someone had been keeping quiet. So why send me this message now? A sign that would appear innocent to anyone else—what could I say: that someone was threatening me with hairpins?—but which is full of menace to me.
It is menace I feel, and that I have felt since yesterday when I saw the shadow split away from the stone. Someone listened to the conversation between me and Roy. Something in that conversation has awakened an avenging spirit. But what? I go over in my mind what we talked about and instantly I remember the image of Lucy toppling Deirdre into the lake. I’m standing now at just the place where I stood the night Deirdre fell. To my left is the ledge where Lucy stood. I step down to that level—it’s only about three feet below the top part, and work my way to the edge of the Point. The rock is flatter here and it almost reaches to the edge, but then there’s an outcropping of stone and a stunted pine tree that blocks the edge of the cliff. Was that why Lucy stepped down here? Because the footing was better than the curved surface at the edge of the Point? She’d have known this from the nights we climbed down from here to the swimming beach. From where I’m standing I could reach up and touch someone standing at the edge of the Point. Or reach up and trip someone standing there. Once again I see the scene as I saw it yesterday in the cave. I climb back up to the curved stone of the Point and, staying on my hands and knees, inch myself as close to the edge of the cliff as I can before vertigo forces me to creep back.
I look down at the rock and see that I’ve dug my nails into the narrow crevices as if I were a rock climber ascending a vertical wall. The glacial chattermarks remind me of my dream—the pale green crevasse opening in the glacier.
Whoever listened to our conversation yesterday heard what I said about Lucy and me covering up Deirdre’s death. They also heard Roy say that he didn’t believe Melissa Randall killed herself, that whoever “faked” Athena’s suicide attempt and killed Melissa Randall might still be alive. If he’s right, if that person were still alive and listening, it would have sounded like a challenge. And the corniculum is an answer to that challenge.
THROUGHOUT MY CLASSES I AM SO DISTRACTED BY THIS question that I can hardly follow the easy faked Latin in the Ecce Romani textbook (today we follow our Roman family to an inn on the Via Appia) let alone the advanced girls’ translations of Virgil. We have followed Aeneas into the underworld where he encounters his spurned lover Dido and tries to apologize for abandoning her in Carthage. Dido, however, will have none of it. She turns away from Aeneas and refuses to talk to him.
I remember the dream I had of Deirdre turning away from me.
“I’m glad Dido doesn’t talk to Aeneas,” Vesta, never a fan of the Roman founder, says.
“She should have done more than just give him the cold shoulder,” Athena says, tugging her unraveling cuffs over her wrists. “People… people who hurt other people…”
Vesta starts to hum the Barbra Streisand song, “People, people who need people…”
“Can it, Vesta,” Athena screams, clutching her Aeneid as if she were going to hurl it at her classmate.
“Puellae!” I say rising to my feet and clapping my hands. “Tacete!”
Both my students glare at me.
“What’s up with you girls?”
“We’re just tired and we’ve got a big chemistry exam with Moldy Todd next period.”
I can’t help but laugh at the sobriquet, even though I know it’s the height of unprofessionalism. At least it gains me a smile from Vesta, but Athena glares all the harder at our shared mirth.
“Vesta,” I say, “why don’t you go out in the hall? I’ll give you both some extra time to study; I just want to have a word with Athena.”
Athena rolls her eyes—overdoing, I think, the role of student asked to stay after class.
“Hey,” I say when Vesta is gone, “I thought we were friends. What’s bothering you?”
“People…” remembering Vesta’s jibe she amends, “some of the girls are making fun of me because of this.” She holds up her arm and shakes her wrist so that the loose sweater cuff falls down to her elbow. “And it’s not fair. I haven’t cut myself since last year. Someone else did this.”
“You mean Melissa?”
Athena shrugs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, giving me an even better view of the savaged skin. “Well, Dr. Lockhart keeps telling me it was Melissa, but I still find it hard to believe. I mean, we were friends…”
“Keeps telling?” I ask. “How often do you see Dr. Lockhart?”
“Twice a week, which, like, really sucks. She keeps asking me how it made me feel to have my roommate kill herself. Like what am I going to say? It makes me feel good? It makes me feel like shit—sorry—but it doesn’t make me want to off myself. She acts like killing yourself is a kind of germ and maybe I’ve got it. The other girls act that way, too, like I’ve got cooties or something.”
I almost laugh at the childish term, something Olivia would say, but stop myself.
“I know what you mean. When one of my roommates killed herself my other roommate and I had to go to counseling.”
“Did it bother you?”
“Well, I didn’t love it, but it really drove my other roommate crazy.”
“Yeah, it would.” Athena gives me a small, tentative smile. “People thinking you’re crazy could make you go crazy.”
The smile encourages me to reach out and rub her arm. “Well, you’ll just have to prove them wrong.” The advice comes out a little forced, a little too cheerleaderish, but Athena nods and dries her eyes and tries another smile.
“Thanks, Magistra,” she says gathering her books to go, “that’s the best argument I’ve heard for not plunging through the ice and drowning myself.”
DURING LUNCH I KEEP REPLAYING ATHENA’S LAST WORDS, trying to convince myself that it’s a coincidence that the method of suicide she chose to cite was the way Matt and Lucy died. What I can’t help thinking, though, is that if someone were playing out the events from twenty years ago, that would be the next method of death. I’m roused from these morose musings by a harsh, jangling sound in my ears. I look up and see Dr. Lockhart standing by the empty seat next to me, dangling a silver key chain in her right hand and absentmindedly shaking it while she answers a question from Gwen Marsh.
“No, Gwen, I don’t think we should cancel midterms because the girls are having a tough semester,” she says. When she sits down she lays the keys next to her plate. Not only doesn’t this woman carry a tote bag bursting with books or papers like the rest of us, she doesn’t even feel the need of a purse or pockets. No doubt the clutter would disrupt the line of her tailored suits.
I reach into the pocket of my baggy cardigan and find a pen, chalk stubs, and a note I confiscated from one of my sixth graders. I take the wadded paper out of my pocket and see that it’s a “cootie catcher”—a fortune-telling device popular with prepubescent girls. There are colored dots on the outside folds and numbers on the inside, which you pick to find out which flaps to open.
Gwen Marsh reaches over and takes the cootie catcher from my hands. “Ooh, I loved those when I was a girl. Let me tell you your fortune.” She slips her fingers into the folds. “Pick a color.”
“Green,” I tell her.
“Gr-ee-n.” Gwen opens and shuts the paper mouth for each letter. When she’s done she asks me to pick a number.
“Three.”
“One, two, three, open the door to your destiny.”
I reach to open the flap but Gwen’s already folded it back, “ ‘You are such a fake, go drown in the lake.’ Oh my,” she says. “We had stuff like, ‘You will marry a millionaire.’ You see, Candace, what I meant about the girls being under so much pressure. How can we give the midterms…”
“If you go easy on them, they’ll take advantage of you,” Dr. Lockhart says, rising from the table even though she has barely touched her lunch.
“I don’t think my girls take advantage of me,” Gwen says. “They mean everything to me… this school… it means everything.…” Her voice wobbling between tears and anger trails after Dr. Lockhart. I wonder if she’ll turn back, but it’s Dean Buehl who calls her back to the table. “Candace, you’ve left your keys again, here.” Dean Buehl scoops the keys up and tosses them to her. She catches them neatly in one hand and turns to go without a thank-you to Dean Buehl or a word or apology to Gwen.
Gwen sniffs noisily. “Well, I’m still going to bring up the issue at today’s faculty meeting.”
“We have a faculty meeting today?” I ask.
I hear Myra Todd click her tongue at my forgetfulness and what she no doubt believes to be my reluctance to attend. But she’s wrong. Although I usually hate faculty meetings, it’s given me an idea. I’ve finally hit on what’s been bothering me about my talk with Athena this morning. It wasn’t just the comment about plunging through the ice. When I told Athena that my high school roommate killed herself she wasn’t surprised. It’s something she could only know if she had read my old journal. It makes me wonder what’s been going on at those twice weekly sessions with Dr. Lockhart. I remember a pale green folder with Athena’s name on it in Dr. Lockhart’s file cabinet and I’m quite sure that the key to that file cabinet, and to her office door, will be lying on the table at tonight’s meeting.
I ARRIVE EARLY TO THE MEETING, BUT THEN LOITER AT THE door to the Music Room, pretending to read the notices on the bulletin board. Along with the usual chess club and suicide intervention group notices there’s a new flyer with a black-and-white photocopy of an old Currier and Ives print. The print is of a frozen pond. A horse stands in the middle of the pond, harnessed to a wagon filled with what look like giant sugar cubes. In the right foreground stooped figures stand around a hole in the ice. One of the figures holds a long, spear-tipped rod which he uses to prod a square of ice. In the left foreground a slant-roofed shed, which looks exactly like the Schwanenkill icehouse, stands at the edge of the ice. In the background, tiny figures skate on the ice.
“ICE HARVEST MEETING TONIGHT,” it says under the picture. “8:00 P.M. IN THE MUSIC ROOM. SLIDE SHOW AND LECTURE BY MAIA THORNBURY, COUNTY EXTENSION AGENT.” Under the typed print someone has hand-drawn, in jagged print intended to look like icicles, but which look more like daggers, a promise of ice pops for refreshments. The notice is dated yesterday. It’s just the type of thing I should be attending to get back in Dean Buehl’s good graces.
“Jane,” I hear from behind me, “are you interested in the ice harvest?”
I turn to Dean Buehl. “Yes,” I say, “I’m sorry I missed this, I was busy sewing stolas for our Lupercalia Festival.” The lie comes so easily to me that I blush with shame at myself.
“Well, then you’re in luck,” Myra Todd, coming up behind Dean Buehl, informs me. “The meeting was postponed till tonight right after the faculty meeting. I could use some help bringing the ice pops up from the basement freezer.”
Before I can think up an excuse, some classical garment I need to sew, like Penelope’s shroud perhaps, Myra Todd passes me and goes into the Music Room. I can see the table is filling up. If Dr. Lockhart doesn’t get here soon I won’t get a seat next to her.
I see her then, descending the main stairs unhurriedly, the silver key chain dangling from her right forefinger. I try not to look at the keys as she comes up to me in the doorway.
“Dr. Lockhart!” I say cheerily. “Are you going to the Ice Harvest meeting later?”
She looks at me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses, but at least it makes her slow her pace enough so we walk into the room together. “I think it’s appalling,” she says, as she makes for a solitary seat at the near end of the table. “It’ll ruin the lake for skating.”
“Why, you’re right,” I say, enthusiastically grabbing her elbow and steering her toward two seats at the far end of the table. “I hadn’t thought of that. Let’s sit together and oppose the project.” I feel her arm flinch away from my touch, but she allows herself to be herded into the chair next to mine. I watch to see if she’ll lay the key chain on the table, but instead she folds her hands in her lap, keeping the key chain between them. At lunch she needed her hands to eat, but here she could keep her hands in her lap the whole time.
Dean Buehl is calling the meeting to order. I notice that most of my colleagues have produced paper and pens for note taking. I scramble in my tote bag and find a Xeroxed handout I’d prepared for the senior class. It’s a maze I drew of Aeneas’s route to the underworld that can only be solved by following a word trail. You have to connect an adjective to the noun it modifies and then find a verb to match the noun, and so on and so on. I am quite proud of it and I admire it for a moment before turning it over and scribbling the date and “faculty meeting” on the reverse side. Dr. Lockhart apparently feels no compulsion to take notes.
The first order of business is reviewing the costs of snowplowing the main paths and installing the new lighting system.
Myra Todd, who serves as secretary to the Board of Trustees, reports that the costs were approved by the board, but that the board expressed concern over any further expenditure, “especially considering that the school’s lease is coming up this spring.”
I scribble “What lease?” on the back of my handout and slide the paper over to Dr. Lockhart’s place at the table. She scowls at me and waves her right hand, which, I notice, no longer holds the keys, dismissively.
When the financial business is concluded, Dean Buehl asks Dr. Lockhart to report on the status of the suicide intervention program.
“We haven’t lost any more students, have we?” Simon Ross says loudly. “So I guess it’s going pretty well.”
Dr. Lockhart gives Ross a withering look as she rises from the table. I notice that, in rising, Dr. Lockhart has placed the key chain on the table.
“I’ve had three girls come to me complaining of nightmares about Melissa Randall’s death. Curiously, the common thread in these nightmares seems to be a conviction that somehow Melissa is still in the lake, below the ice.”
I think of my dream of the figures trapped in the crevasse. I feel suddenly cold. I reach into my bag for my sweater, but instead of pulling it out I haul the bag onto the table with a loud thump. Myra Todd purses her lips at me and makes a shushing sound. I smile apologetically.
“Several girls have also reported that the noises from the lake keep them up at night. They think that the noises are the moans of the dead girl.” Dr. Lockhart raises her voice to be heard over the commotion I am making with my tote bag, but otherwise she doesn’t in any way acknowledge the disruption I’m causing during her speech. In pulling out my sweater, my Cassell’s Latin-English Dictionary and Oxford History of the Classical World thud noisily to the table and slide onto the floor.
“Such ignorance!” Myra Todd exclaims.
I lift my head, thinking she’s talking about my behavior, but I see that even my rudeness at a faculty meeting can’t compete with attributing superstitious beliefs to a natural phenomenon.
“I’ve explained again and again,” Myra says, thumping her hand on the table with each “again,” “about contraction and expansion of the ice, but they just don’t get it!”
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it.”
Everyone at the table stares at Gwen Marsh. Two red spots have appeared on her face. I’ve never seen her this angry. I’m so taken aback that I forget my plans to get the key for a moment.
“Don’t you see what a shock Melissa Randall’s death has been to them? They haven’t just lost a friend, they’ve lost their faith in Heart Lake. It’s supposed to be a haven for them, a safe place to come back to, a place where everybody knows them…”
Someone, I can’t tell who, starts humming the theme song to “Cheers.”
“You can mock if you like, but unless we go easier on them there will be another death.”
“If we go easier on them,” Dr. Lockhart says in slow, measured tones, “we’re enabling their helplessness.”
“I am not an enabler!” she says so shrilly that I wonder if she’s been accused of this before. I reach over to touch her arm and she shrieks.
“That’s my bad arm, Jane. You know that.” She stands up and leaves the room. Everyone watches her go. Except me. I use the moment to sweep my books, along with Dr. Lockhart’s keys, into my tote bag. As soon as I’ve got them, I rise from my seat.
“I’ll go after her,” I say, and I’m out the door before anyone else can offer to help.
I sprint up the main stairs to the second floor and head, not to the Lake Lounge, but to Dr. Lockhart’s office. At the door to her office I have to dig in my bag to find the keys, and when I do find them the metal slips greasily through my sweaty fingers. The first key I try doesn’t fit. The second does, but it won’t turn. I remember that in my old dorm room you had to pull the door toward you to make the key turn. I pull the knob toward me and the door bangs against its frame so loudly the sound echoes down the hallway. I stop to look down toward the stairs, but then feel the key turn and the door, taken by a draft in the hall, pulls me into the dark office.
I have to push the door against the draft to close it and again the sound it makes is horribly loud. I’m afraid to risk turning on the light, but fortunately, Dr. Lockhart has left her drapes open and the moon reflecting off the lake fills the room with silvery light. The varnished wood of her desk, which is empty except for some stone paperweights, gleams in the moonlight like a pool of still water. The round stones cast elliptical shadows on the smooth surface. I pick up one and immediately feel that I’ve disrupted some pattern that Dr. Lockhart will notice has been disturbed.
I place the stone back again, aligning it with the other two in what I hope is the same spot, and cross to the file cabinet. The middle drawer, I remember. The little key opens the drawer, which slides silently forward on its metal casters. I walk my fingers along the tops of the files, which are neatly labeled in an elegant, sloping script. They’re arranged alphabetically within class years, so I find “Craven, Ellen” about two thirds through the drawer. I pull out the pale green folder and move into the moonlight to read its contents.
The first few pages are the standard forms everyone at the school fills out. I notice that Athena’s parents are divorced and that the emergency contact number is an aunt in Connecticut. I flip through the pink insurance forms and Athena’s transcripts from previous schools. She started at Dalton, transferred to Miss Trimingham’s in Connecticut, and then went to some place called the Village School in southern Vermont. Her grades had gone from As and Bs at the good schools to Cs and Ds at the worse schools. While she worked her way up the northern seaboard, she’d been steadily sliding down the academic scale.
Until this semester at Heart Lake. In the first quarter she’d still gotten mostly C’s except for the B I’d given her in Latin. In the second quarter she’d gotten an A in Latin and Bs in the rest of her subjects. It looked like she was trying to turn herself around. So why did she seem so out of sorts? And why was she seeing Dr. Lockhart twice a week?
I turn next to a sheaf of handwritten notes on unlined paper. The date of each session is entered in a beautiful flowing script in the right-hand margin. The notes are in the same precise and elegant hand, written apparently with a fountain pen. I’ve never seen notes taken from a psychiatric session, but I would have imagined that there would be cross-outs, abbreviations, additions in the margins. There are none. Dr. Lockhart wrote from one margin to the other in a steady, slanting script. The sentences could have been exercises from a calligraphy workbook.
The story they tell flows smoothly from one session to the next. If not for the dates in the margins I would think I was reading from a novel. What stands out the most, though, is the compassion Dr. Lockhart feels for her patient.
“Ellen has been shuttled from one institution to the next with little concern for her emotional well-being,” I read. “Such displacement readily explains her tendencies toward depression and self-loathing. No wonder she inflicts harm on herself when the adults closest to her take so little responsibility for her.”
Farther down the same page I read, “Ellen claims to have made several friends here at Heart Lake. It is obvious, though, that she has become emotionally dependent on these girls to an unhealthy degree. She would do anything to keep their friendship. Clearly she is using these friendships as a replacement for the affection she’s failed to receive from her mother.” This interpretation has never occurred to me and I’m ashamed at myself for having had so little insight into my student—a student whom I thought I was close to. It’s even more chastening to see here Dr. Lockhart’s empathy for Athena’s situation. In fact her notes read not so much like a transcription from oral conversation as a direct channeling from Athena’s mind onto the page—as if Dr. Lockhart had access not only to her mind but to her heart and soul.
I notice, too, that as I page through the stack of notes, the handwriting changes. It becomes not exactly messier so much as tighter, as if Dr. Lockhart were trying to cram more into each line, as if the story she were getting from Athena threatened to swell beyond the confines of the written words. I have to move closer to the window to make it out.
“While it is probably true that the suicide attempt in October was faked, it is unlikely that Ellen had no complicity in it. It is more likely that she agreed to fake the suicide attempt to assist her friends in their persecution of Jane Hudson. Clearly their attempt is to discredit their teacher and get her fired.”
I am so startled by the appearance of my name that for a moment the words in front of me blur. Has Athena truly revealed some calculated plot to torture me? Or is this Dr. Lockhart’s interpretation? The notes are maddeningly obtuse, and now, nearly illegible. I take another step closer to the window and realize, finally, that the reason I can’t see is that the moonlight is gone.
I look up at the window, expecting, I think, to find it blocked by some hovering figure outside the glass. But that’s ridiculous. Dr. Lockhart’s office is on the second floor. It’s only a cloud passing over the moon that has blocked the light. As I watch, the moon reemerges and its white light pours down on the curved rock face of the Point so that I can see, directly across from me at roughly the same level as this second-floor window, a figure standing close to the edge of the cliff. The figure lifts its arm to its forehead so that for a moment I have the absurd notion it’s waving at me. But then I see a glint of moonlight on glass and realize it’s worse; the figure on the Point—whoever it is—is watching me through binoculars.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I LOWER THE FOLDER TO THE DESK AND THE FIGURE ON THE Point eerily mirrors the motion by lowering its own arm. For a moment I feel as if I’m looking into a mirror and I briefly wonder which would be worse, for the figure on the Point to be a figment of my imagination or a real observer who’s caught me ransacking school property? But then the figure turns and disappears into the woods. A moment later it reappears on the path leading toward the mansion.
“OK,” I whisper under my breath, “better it’s real and I’m not going crazy, but still, that’s a real person heading this way.”
I know I should leave right away, but I’m compelled to read to the end of Athena’s file. I scan through the remaining pages looking for my name, searching for some explanation of why my students would want to persecute me. Instead I find something finally in Athena’s own words.
“When asked how she feels about her teachers, Ellen replied, ‘Miss Hudson acts like she really cares.’ I asked her why she used the word ‘acts.’ Did she think Miss Hudson was faking her concern? She said that she’d had a lot of teachers who had seemed to care about her, but in the end they’d never go out of their way to help her. In the end they were too wrapped up in their own problems. ‘It’s not like I’m her kid or anything,’ Ellen told me. ‘She has a daughter.’ I asked if she felt jealous of Miss Hudson’s daughter and she claimed she did not, but…”
Here the handwriting becomes so cramped I can’t make it out. I flip to the last entry. It’s dated today. I read the last line and then hurriedly reorder the papers and place them back in the green folder. I check the path again before putting the folder back in the file drawer. Both the path and the Point are empty.
I lock the file cabinet and let myself out of the office, holding the door carefully so it won’t bang again in its frame. As I head down the stairs I find myself repeating the last lines of Dr. Lockhart’s notes on Athena.
“A person who has been shut out from love her whole life may form unhealthily close attachments. When someone (a teacher or an older girl) finally seems to care about her she may become obsessed with that person. If that person fails her, betrayal may be shattering. There’s no telling what the betrayed one might do.”
DOWNSTAIRS I FIND THAT THE FACULTY MEETING HAS BROKEN up and students are filing in for the Ice Harvest slide show. There are quite a few students. Either they are really bored or some teacher has offered extra credit for attendance.
Myra Todd, who is rearranging chairs for the slide show, scowls when she sees me. “There you are. Did you find Gwendoline?”
“No,” I say. “I looked all over the building for her, but she must have gone outside.”
“That’s just great. She was supposed to get the ice pops and run the slide projector. How am I supposed to get this meeting started on my own?”
“Where are Dean Buehl and Dr. Lockhart?”
“Dr. Lockhart misplaced her keys, so she went to her car for her extra set. Dean Buehl and the extension agent went out to look at the lake and decide where to cut the ice.”
“I see. Well, I guess I can get the ice pops.”
“Do you know where the freezer is in the basement?”
“Sure, the cook used to send us down for stuff all the time.”
“Well, it would be a help… ,” Myra says, “but you won’t be able to carry them all—I’ve had my girls making them for a week now.”
“I’ll take a student,” I suggest. I notice Athena and Vesta milling around the front of the room near the slide carousel. Octavia and Flavia are skulking at the back of the room, embarrassed, I think, to be seen by me after defecting from the class. Several of my eighth graders are clustered at the door, their heads bent together over something. As I approach them I see one girl is holding another cootie catcher. Her fingers open and close the folded paper so quickly it’s like watching a speeded up film of a flower opening and closing. When the girls see me approaching they whisper to the girl holding the cootie catcher and the white flower disappears in a blur into a pocket.
I change my mind and head over to Athena and Vesta. “Would one of you like to help me bring up ice pops from the basement?”
Vesta stares at me blankly as if I were speaking a foreign language.
“I’ll do it, Magistra,” Athena says, rolling her eyes at Vesta. “Miss Pruneface is in a bad mood. She failed her chemistry exam and had to show up here for the extra credit.”
“Shut up, Ellen. I wouldn’t have failed the exam if you hadn’t kept me up half the night with your light on. Baby’s afraid of the dark,” Vesta says sneeringly to me. “She’s afraid the lake monster’s gonna get her. Afraid the curse of the Crevecoeurs is gonna make her off herself.”
I see Athena’s already pale skin go a shade paler. “Cunt-sucking dyke,” she says very quietly, and then turns on her heel and heads out the door. I follow her.
I catch up to Athena on the stairs leading down to the basement. “Why are you and Vesta fighting?”
“She’s such a bitch, Magistra Hudson. She’s acting like I really tried to kill myself in October. She says she doesn’t believe it was Melissa who cut my wrists…” Athena’s voice cracks and trails off. She turns from me and puts her head against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The only light down here is a naked bulb hanging from a wire at the foot of the stairs. The walls of the basement are bare, damp, moss-covered rock that swallow up the faint light and smell like dead fish. The Crevecoeur family carved the cellar out of the living rock and used the natural springs to keep their food cold down here. I shiver and wonder what the hell they needed to cut up ice from the lake for. It’s cold as the grave down here.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed about,” I tell Athena. I’m thinking about Dr. Lockhart’s notes. What she said about Athena being in on the faked suicide. I touch her arm and she turns on me. I see such fury in her eyes that I instinctively step away from her and back up against the cold stone wall.
“You don’t believe me either,” she says. “I thought you were different.”
When someone finally seems to care about her she may become obsessed with that person.
“Athena, I do want to help you, but I can’t do that unless I understand what’s been going on.” Because of the cold my voice shakes and it makes my words sound to my own ears nervous and false. Athena wraps her arms around her chest and glares at me. The lightbulb hanging above us makes her eyes glitter feverishly. The shadows make her multicolored, jaggedly cut hair look even wilder than usual.
But if that person fails her, the betrayal may be shattering.
Athena looks like someone who has been shattered. In fact, Athena looks like the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre. Only we’re in the basement not the attic. I can feel icy water dripping down between my shoulder blades. I would far prefer an attic to this basement.
“You know what’s going on,” she says. I start to shake my head, but I see she’s not looking at me anymore. “It’s the Crevecoeur curse,” she says.
“Athena, that’s just a story…”
“It’s what made those girls drown themselves in the lake. You should know—it happened to your friends and now it’s happening to us. It’s because you came back. The lake wants the third girl. That’s what the motto means: Cor te reducit. The heart—meaning Heart Lake—pulls you in.”
I am about to correct her translation, but then I realize she’s right. Leads back, pulls in, both are acceptable translations for reducit.
“How do you know about my friends?”
Athena shrugs and wipes her eyes. The gesture makes her look like a tired child. It reminds me of Olivia. I want to tell her that—that she reminds me of my own daughter—but I remember what Athena said to Dr. Lockhart. It’s not like I’m her kid or anything. I picture Olivia standing on the rock. Could it have been Athena who lured her there? Out of some obsessive jealousy?
Athena sees, I think, the look of suspicion on my face.
“Someone told me,” she says. “I don’t remember who. I bet you’ve felt bad about it all this time—about your friends dying.”
How can I deny it? I nod.
“It feels pretty shitty when you let someone down, doesn’t it?”
I nod again. There’s no telling what the betrayed one might do.
“Don’t worry,” Athena says, almost kindly. “It’s not half as bad as being the person who’s let down.”
BY THE TIME WE GET UPSTAIRS WITH THE ICE POPS, THE LECTURE is already in progress. There aren’t two seats together, so Athena takes a seat at the end of a middle row. A few rows behind her, Octavia and Flavia reluctantly make room for me to sit between them. I look around for Vesta, but don’t see her. Dr. Lockhart is sitting in the first row. If it’s possible for good posture to convey disapproval her ramrod-straight spine is speaking volumes of contempt for the proceedings.
I notice that Gwen is back and that she’s manning the slide projector. I try to catch her eye, but she stares resolutely ahead at the screen.
Meryl North presents a short lecture on the history of ice harvesting in the Northeast. She tells us that giant ice blocks could be preserved in sawdust so well that blocks were shipped as far as India. Tacy Beade presents her idea for using the harvested ice for ice sculptures. She shows some slides of Michelangelo’s series of unfinished statues called “The Captives.” “Michelangelo believed the figures were in the stone waiting for the sculptor to free them,” she concludes. “Who knows what figures we’ll find hiding in the ice.”
There’s a smattering of embarrassed applause as Miss Beade goes back to her seat. “Figures hiding in the ice,” I hear Simon Ross whisper. “Where has she been all year? Does she even know there’s been a death on campus?”
Maia Thornbury takes the floor to present a history of ice harvesting on the Crevecoeur estate. She is a small, middle-aged gnome with a cap of graying hair cut in a style that I think used to be called a Prince Valiant. Her round eyeglasses reflect the mote-filled light from the slide projector and make her face appear even rounder. After all these years hearing about the county extension agent this is the first time I’ve actually seen her. I remember how we worried she would catch us using the boat and that she was the one who found Matt on May Day. I had always pictured her as some imposing, Girl Scout Valkyrie. She is all of four feet five. More wood sprite than Valkyrie.
“The Crevecoeur family were descended from the Huguenots who fled religious persecution in their native France in the seventeenth century,” she lectures. I can hear several girls yawning. They must really want those popsicles or else they really need that extra credit. “Unlike most of the Huguenots, who settled in communities farther south along the Hudson or in New York City, the Crevecoeurs preferred solitude and self-sufficiency.”
The screen darkens and then resolves into muted tones of brown and white. A row of men with old-fashioned sideburns and tall, sturdy women with strong, square jaws stand in front of a small slant-roofed hut. The women are carrying tin milk pails.
“Like most Frenchmen, the Crevecoeurs loved their homemade cheeses and butter, but they needed ice to keep them fresh in the humid Adirondack summers.”
The sideburned men and square-jawed women fade and a family portrait of the Crevecoeurs, in full skating regalia posed on the ice, appears. I’ve seen the picture before—it’s the same one that hangs in this room right behind where the slide projector screen hangs now—so I recognize India Crevecoeur as the stately matron in the foreground, her head tilted coquettishly under a fur cloche. Although it is hard to connect the woman in the picture to the desiccated old woman who accosted me on May Day junior year, I do recognize the arrogant glint in her eyes that I saw in the old woman when she realized that her former maid’s granddaughter was attending her school. I remember that the way she looked at me made me feel like an impostor, and that’s just how I feel now. The caring teacher. One of Helen Chambers’s girls.
The two blond amazons on either side of India must be her older daughters, Rose and Lily. A little to the right, a smaller girl stands unsteadily on the ice, her arms held akimbo for balance. I recognize the plain sepia face from my dream of the night before; it’s Iris Crevecoeur, who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. I wonder if Maia Thornbury will mention her, maybe this would be a good opportunity to point out that one girl died, not three, and so dispel the legend. Looking at the skinny, sallow girl next to her fair, hearty sisters it’s not surprising that she was the one to fall victim to illness. The way the servant hovers anxiously over her—my grandmother—also says something about her frailty. But Maia Thornbury doesn’t bring up Iris Crevecoeur’s fate; she has another ax to grind.
“India Crevecoeur and her daughters loved to skate on the lake, but their favorite activity was attending the annual ice harvest.”
If Dr. Lockhart’s spine could get any straighter it does so now. I’ve always wondered why she seems to dislike me and now I think I know. Twice a week she listens to Athena talk about me, about how I pretend to care but really don’t. No wonder she seems to see right through me.
The next slide shows the icehouse from the lake. A long narrow channel has been cut out of the ice leading to the open doors. On one side of the channel a muffled figure leans over the ice with what looks like a large saw. Another figure holds a long pole up toward the camera. He looks like an angry Eskimo shaking his spear at an intruder.
“After the snow was scraped off the ice, saws were used to cut out a ‘header’—a channel through which the ice could be moved through the water to the icehouse. Then a plow marked out cakes of ice. Pike poles were used to push the cakes of ice down the channel and onto a conveyer belt into the icehouse. Would someone turn on the lights for a moment?”
I close my eyes against the sudden light and when I open them I see Maia Thornbury wielding a spear-tipped pole nearly twice her height. She shakes the pole with both hands. Perhaps my original idea of her as Valkyrie wasn’t so far off.
“This is one of the original poles used on the Crevecoeur estate for ice harvesting. It’s eight feet long.”
“Oooh,” someone coos, “what a long pole you have there.”
The girls giggle while the teachers make shushing noises.
“Is that point sharp?” someone else asks.
“Oh yes,” Maia Thornbury says, hefting the pole up and angling it so we can all see the six-inch-long steel tip. “It had to be to grip the ice. Would you like to touch it?”
More hysterical giggling as the girl who spoke rises from her chair. I’m surprised to see it’s Athena. I wouldn’t have expected her to express such an interest in ice harvesting after our scene in the basement, but here she is, walking up to the front of the room where the extension agent holds the pole parallel to the floor. As Athena walks toward the spear I have the disturbing thought that this is how Roman senators killed themselves: by falling on their own swords. I am poised to rush toward Athena, but she only lifts her arm and touches the point of the spear with the tip of her index finger.
“Sharp, isn’t it?” Maia Thornbury asks like a magician testing the veracity of some trick with a volunteer from the audience.
Athena nods without taking her eyes off the spear point. Then she turns and walks back to her seat. Before the lights go out I see her look down at her finger, to a drop of blood poised there. Then she puts the finger in her mouth and sucks.
“To celebrate the ice harvest, the villagers carved decorative statues out of the ice,” Maia Thornbury says as the lights go out. I am still looking at Athena when the next slide appears, so when I hear the rest of the audience gasp I have the awful thought that there’s been some accident with the ice pole. But when I look up I see it’s the slide that has made everyone gasp. This picture is in color. It shows a girl, nearly naked except for some flimsy white drapery, stretched out on the second sister stone. The girl and stone are so pale they could be almost mistaken for some particularly skillful ice sculpture. Except for the gash of bright red blood across her throat. I immediately recognize the girl as Lucy, but it takes me a few moments to recollect where the picture is from. As the lights go on and Dean Buehl tries to calm the now hysterical girls I try in vain to explain to someone that what the picture portrays isn’t real. It’s just Lucy Toller playing Agamemnon’s daughter in our senior year production of Iphigenia on the Beach.
BY THE TIME I MAKE MY WAY TO THE FRONT OF THE ROOM I can see that my explanation won’t help. Dr. Lockhart is arguing with Myra Todd about the wisdom of going on with the ice harvest given the inevitable connotations the girls will now have. Maia Thornbury is going over her numbered slides with Dean Buehl to prove to her that the picture of the slaughtered girl was not part of her original demonstration. The slide itself has been passed from Maia Thornbury to Meryl North to Gwen Marsh to Dr. Lockhart to Myra Todd, and, finally, to Dean Buehl, so any fingerprints that might have been found on it are probably now obscured. I surprise myself by thinking of fingerprints. Could I, perhaps, take this slide to Roy Corey and ask for it to be fingerprinted? Maybe, but now it’s too late. I promise myself, though, that if any other relic from my past shows up I’m taking it straight to him. I pick up the slide now and look at it. Lucy as Iphigenia. I remember watching the play from the eastern shore of the lake. This picture shows the reflection of the setting sun on the side of the rock nearest to the camera, so it must have been taken from the opposite side.
Someone plucks the slide from my fingers. “Like a scene from a Greek tragedy, don’t you think, Miss Hudson?” Dr. Lockhart smiles at me as she slips the slide into a plastic bag. I’m not sure if she means the slide itself, or the furor its appearance has caused.
“I was thinking we could have it fingerprinted,” I say, even though I had already rejected that idea.
“How convenient then that there will be an explanation for your prints on it,” Dr. Lockhart replies as she hands the bag to Dean Buehl.
“I guess the same goes for you,” I say. “Since you handled the slide as well.” I hadn’t really planned to insinuate that Dr. Lockhart could have been responsible for planting the slide, but as I see her already pale skin go a shade paler it occurs to me that it could have been her as well as anyone else. I wonder, though, how she could have come by it in the first place.
IT’S AFTER ELEVEN BY THE TIME I LEAVE THE MANSION AND walk back to my cottage. I take the same path that the person I saw on the Point would have taken. I look at the packed snow underfoot for some clue, but dozens of people have traversed the path since the last snow. I pause on the Point and look back toward the mansion. I can see Dr. Lockhart’s window. Although the office is unlit I can see now how the light from the hall filters in and makes the interior room faintly visible. A person standing in there would only appear as a vague outline, though, like the shadowy shape her desk and filing cabinet make now. I turn from the Point and follow the path to my cottage, which is less trodden than the path from the Point to the mansion. Still I can tell that someone else has been walking there since the last snow.
When I get to my house I see that the porch light has burned out again. It takes me a moment to fit the key in the lock, and when I do my hand is trembling so hard I can’t make the lock turn. And why shouldn’t I be afraid? I ask myself. Someone obviously bears me some grudge.
“Then why not just come out and knock me over the head or something,” I say aloud to my own door. “Get it over with. Why so coy?” My voice, I notice, sounds more angry than afraid. Good, I think. I’m tired of this game of signs.
As I enter the house I feel sure that someone has been there in my absence. I am not afraid, though, that the intruder is still there. Whoever it was would have gone back to the slide show. Why miss out on the fun? I go through the rooms, flicking on the lights, scanning the walls and tabletops for something missing, or something new. I’m expecting, I don’t know what. Some bloody scrawl on the walls? For the first time it occurs to me that whoever is sending these signs is as frightened of me as I am of her. Whoever she is, and I’m certain it is a she, was silent until I talked to Roy Corey in the cave. Then she sent the corniculum. Tonight, when she saw me in Dr. Lockhart’s office, she retaliated by dropping that slide in Maia Thornbury’s carousel. It’s as if we are playing tug-of-war with the past, you look into my past, she is telling me, then I’ll fling your past back at you.
“Well, what have you got for me tonight,” I call into the empty rooms. When I get to my bedroom and see the lump under the bedclothes and what’s seeping from that lump my bravado fades.
“Oh, fuck,” I cry as I fling the blankets off the bloody deer’s head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I say maybe a dozen times over until I realize it’s only a felt mask of a deer’s head, with red paint dripping from its felt neck.
Chapter Thirty
D O YOU RECOGNIZE THIS?” I ASK, FLINGING THE MASK on Roy Corey’s desk. It nearly topples a Styrofoam cup half-filled with grayish coffee, but I am not sorry. I have been wanting, since eleven o’clock last night, to fling the mask at someone. After a sleepless night I called Dean Buehl to cancel my classes.
“I was up all night with a toothache,” I lied, “I’ve got to go into town and have this thing out.”
She seemed neither suspicious nor interested in my excuse. “I’ll have your girls help Maia Thornbury with the ice harvest,” she told me.
“It’s still on?” I asked.
“I will not let some saboteur change my plans,” Dean Buehl replied. “That would be like giving in to the demands of terrorists.”
Apparently I was not the only one tired of this game of cat and mouse.
“Hey watch… ,” Roy Corey says looking up from the mask to me, but when he sees my expression he stops the complaint he’d been forming. He looks back down at the mask, picks it up, sniffs at the dried red paint and inspects the stitching along its seams.
“Look familiar?” I ask.
To my surprise, Roy Corey turns white.
“It’s not real blood,” I say, my anger deflected by his reaction.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Jane?”
“You recognize it, don’t you?”
Roy picks away some of the red paint, revealing a green embroidered heart. “Where did you find it?”
“In my bed, a là The Godfather,” I tell him. “Did you hear about the little surprise at our slide show?”
Roy nods. “Your dean called me last night. I went out there and took the carousel and slide. We’re having both dusted for prints, but both were handled by so many people we don’t expect much. This happened afterward?”
“When I went home. Which was around eleven.”
“Must’ve given you quite a start.”
I shrug. “I’m getting used to it.” I tell him about the corniculum in the tree the night of the ice storm. “It was right after our conversation in the cave. Someone overheard us and then the signs started again.”
He nods. “I thought they might.”
“You bastard! You knew someone would eavesdrop on us in the cave.”
“I couldn’t be sure, but what with the whole school there on the ice, I thought it was possible someone might take advantage of the situation.”
“You took advantage of me,” I say rising to my feet. I wish I still had something to throw at him, but then I see the effect my words have had on him. It’s as if I have thrown something at him. He’s looking down at the mask, still fingering that green heart, as if he can’t bear to look me in the eyes.
“It was only a matter of time before this person surfaced again. We’re talking about a murderer—someone who drowned one teenaged girl and drugged another and slit her wrists with a steak knife.”
“Unless it was Athena who slit her own wrists.”
“You mean a real suicide attempt?”
“I mean she faked her own ‘suicide’ and then killed Melissa.” I tell Roy about the conversation I had with Athena in the basement. I don’t tell him about Dr. Lockhart’s file because I’d rather not admit to breaking and entering, but I manage to filter some of the information I gleaned there into my observations. “I hate to think Athena’s the one,” I conclude, “I’ve always liked her and I thought she liked me, but now she feels I’ve let her down and she’s gotten it into her head that I’ve started the whole Crevecoeur curse again since it was my roommates who died.”
“How does she know about that?”
“I don’t know. She’d know from the journal…” I pause, remembering something Athena said to me in the basement. “She said she knew I felt responsible for my friends’ deaths. That’s what I said to you in the cave, that I knew Deirdre’s death wasn’t an accident. So it might have been her listening to us in the cave.” I sink back into my chair, exhausted and disheartened. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted not to believe it was Athena who was trying to hurt me. I look at Roy, hoping he’ll contradict my theory. He’s still peeling the red paint away from the mask and smoothing the brown felt.
“Did she say anything else?”
“She said it felt pretty shitty to know you had let someone down, but worse to be the one who’s let down.”
Roy looks up from the mask. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “I think it’s a draw. I think the guilt of hurting someone you care about can last a long time, maybe even longer than the love itself.”
He whisks the red paint flakes off his desk with the side of his hand and crumples the mask in a ball.
“You mean Matt, don’t you? You think he’d still be alive if you hadn’t let him come back to Heart Lake that night?”
He nods. I try to think of something I could say to relieve his burden, one I understand only too well, but anything I say would only mean taking more of the burden on myself, and I don’t feel up to that. Instead I throw him a crumb, a relic of the person we both miss. “You know,” I say, “that’s the mask Matt wore that morning. His was the one embroidered with the green heart. He must have dropped it in the woods and someone found it.”
Roy looks at me through narrow, tired eyes and sighs. He gets up and passes behind me to close the office door. When he comes back he doesn’t sit down behind his desk, but instead sits on its edge, so close to me the stiff cloth of his uniform brushes my leg and I can see the fine red hairs on his arms where he’s rolled up his sleeves. He’s still holding the mask. His thumb brushes the last of the red paint off the green embroidered heart. By this sign you’ll know your heart’s true love, Deirdre had said, embroidering a different color heart, green, blue and yellow, on each mask.
“You’re right that it was dropped in the woods, Jane. And I suppose someone must have found it there. But this isn’t the mask Matt wore, Jane.”
“But I saw that green heart…” I stop and look up at him, into familiar green eyes.
“This is the mask I wore.”
I AM STILL LIGHT-HEADED DRIVING BACK TO HEART LAKE. Exhaustion, I tell myself, fear and aggravation and frustration. All natural emotions considering what I’ve been through. But I know it’s something else. Since that moment in Roy Corey’s office when I realized who it was I was with that May Day morning all those years ago I have felt something vibrating through my core, like a hot wire snaking up from the base of my spine. When I touch the cold metal handle of my car door I’m surprised I don’t set off sparks in the dry air. I feel electric.
“So what,” I had said over and over again to the hard glitter coming off the Hudson, “So what. So what.” I had parked my car across from the old Toller house, facing the river, and waited for the hot, wobbly feeling to go away. “So it was Roy Corey I had sex with on May Day morning and not Matt Toller. What earthly difference does it make?”
By this sign you’ll know your heart’s true love.
Crap. It was just a stupid superstition Deirdre’d made up. Only I had believed it and believed, for all these years, that my heart’s true love had drowned in the lake under the ice.
“Crap,” I told myself, pulling into the faculty parking lot at Heart Lake. “Stupider than believing in the three sisters story and the curse of the Crevecoeurs. And it doesn’t solve anything. Doesn’t tell you who’s sending these signs from the past or who killed Melissa Randall.”
In the end Roy was unconvinced that it was Athena. But maybe that was because I didn’t really want to convince him because I don’t want to believe it’s Athena either.
He thought it had to be someone connected with what happened to Matt and Lucy and Deirdre twenty years ago. Who else would know so much about what happened then? Who else could have found that mask, which Roy said he abandoned somewhere in the woods that morning. Helen Chambers was dead. Dean Buehl had been there, but why would she deliberately wreak havoc on her own school now? Didn’t she have more to lose? I told Roy my suspicions about Dr. Lockhart—“She certainly wants to stop the ice harvest”—but neither of us could come up with a motive for the other events. What could she possibly have to do with what happened twenty years ago?
“Whoever it is obviously has some grudge against you, Jane. I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay in that isolated cottage all by yourself.”
“Where do you suggest I stay?” I asked, half-shocking myself with the provocative tone of my own voice. I hadn’t meant it to sound like that, had I? But I was disappointed when he only shrugged and suggested I stay in the mansion.
I shuddered, thinking about what Dr. Lockhart said about living in a fishbowl.
“The dorm then?”
I thought of the hothouse atmosphere of the dorm, the hissing steam radiators, all those girls in flannel nightgowns damp from just-washed hair. The rancid smell of burnt popcorn and face creams.
“No,” I told Roy. “Like Dean Buehl says, that’s like giving into the demands of terrorists. I’ll be OK.”
He’d looked at me in silence for a few moments and then leaned down to search for something in his drawer. A lock of hair fell over his forehead and, catching the light from the grimy window, briefly flamed red. When he lifted his head, his hair fell back, extinguishing the bright color so that I could see the ashy gray at his temples. “Here,” he said, holding out something in a clear plastic bag. “I’ve been meaning to give this back to you. We don’t need it for evidence anymore.”
I look through the thick plastic and recognize my old journal. “Thanks,” I say, trying not to sound too disappointed. I’d thought he was going to give me his phone number.
I GET OUT OF MY CAR AND WALK TOWARD MY HOUSE, BUT halfway there I hear shouts coming from the lake, so I cut through the woods and head out onto the Point. At first, when I see the black gash in the ice and the figures with poles I think the worst: Someone has fallen through a crack in the ice and they’re trying to save her with long, lifesaving poles. I look for someone thrashing in the icy water, but instead I see a neat rectangle of ice floating down the dark channel toward the icehouse and I realize it’s only the Ice Harvest.
They’ve made remarkable progress in such little time. Or else I’ve been gone longer than I realized. I look at my watch and see it’s already four o’clock. I hadn’t realized I’d spent so long in Roy’s office—or sitting in my car looking at the river. While I’ve been gone, Maia Thornbury and the girls have cut out a long narrow channel, perhaps four feet across, from the icehouse at the southern tip of the lake to halfway to the Point. Some of the girls are wearing skates and others, under Gwen Marsh’s direction, are wielding the long ice poles, pushing cakes of ice up onto a ramp into the icehouse. The scene is as cheerful and bucolic as the Currier and Ives print I’d seen on the flyer last night. In fact, it seems more populous than I would have thought possible. Everyone must be out.
Then I look again and see that some of the figures on the ice aren’t people.
What I’d taken for stationary children dressed in white are actually statues carved out of ice. As I watch I see two girls carry a cake of ice from the icehouse and stack it on top of three or four more. Other girls are chipping away at stacks of ice to form rudimentary bodies. Tacy Beade is using a pick and hammer to shave the ice away. Even from here I can hear the steady thwack of metal hitting metal with a force that’s alarming considering Beady’s half blind. Chips of ice fly under her hands like sparks from a forge. The shape emerging, though crude, already has the feel and motion of the human form, something trying to break free of the encasing ice.
There are about a dozen of these figures standing on the lake. I can see now that they are half-formed and incomplete, but as the last rays of the sun catch each one they seem to gain a spark of life. I look directly below the Point and for an instant the whole lake seems to spin before my eyes. The sky on the eastern shore is black with storm cloud, so that the ice, lit by the low-lying sun, burns with a fierce, white light. Beside each of the sister stones stands an ice statue. Or rather the first one, the one closest to shore, stands. The second kneels, and the last one lies, supine on the white ice, only half of its body visible above the surface, so it’s as if the girl is half in, half out of the lake, one arm lifted and crooked as if suspended in midstroke. But what really unnerves me is the impression made by the dark backdrop of storm cloud. It’s as if the black water is rising from the ice and the pale figures are shapes seen underwater.
What I feel is a kind of seasickness. A vertigo of reversal. I tilt my chin up and focus on the horizon, a trick to avert motion sickness Miss Pike taught us when we went canoeing. At the horizon line of deep green pines I see a figure standing still as the trees. At first I think it’s another ice statue, she’s standing so still, but then I realize it’s Dr. Lockhart. She’s wearing her skates, but she isn’t moving. When she sees me looking at her, though, she lifts out her arms and flexes her wrists, like a ballerina getting ready for a pirouette, and begins to spin, effortlessly, on her skates. She spins in a small tight circle, her skates sending up sprays of ice into the darkening air, like a whirlpool spiraling through dark water.
I GO BACK TO MY HOUSE AND EAT ALONE. I TELL MYSELF I don’t want to get caught out in the approaching storm, but it’s a weak excuse. Although the clouds in the east appear menacing and a wind has come up since the sun set, there’s no snow in the forecast. Just wind and cold. On the television I tune into an Albany station just long enough to hear that electrical storms, rare for this time of year, have been reported in the southern Adirondacks, and then the broadcaster’s face dissolves in a blizzard of static. I turn on the radio, but I can’t even get the country-western station in Corinth.
The truth is that I don’t want to talk to anyone. I can’t imagine what Dean Buehl was thinking by going ahead with the Ice Harvest. And old Beady really must be senile as well as blind to have the girls make those macabre statues. I know it’s all anyone will be talking about in the dining hall and I can’t bear right now to field innocent questions about the three sisters legend. Even my cold, rattling cottage—shack, I think to myself tonight, it’s really a shack—is more appealing than that.
So I turn up the heat as high as it goes and fry eggs over a gas burner that spits blue flames at the frying pan. Outside the wind seems to be moving in circles around the house, like an animal trying to get in. I put on wool socks and pad around on the worn rag rugs, pulling curtains shut and double-checking window locks. Twice I check the phone to make sure I’ve got a dial tone. The third time I pick up the phone I get such an electric shock I drop the heavy old-fashioned receiver on my toe. All that padding around in wool socks, I tell myself. Still, it keeps me away from the phone for the rest of the night, even though I’d been planning to call Olivia to remind her I’m coming this weekend. “I’ll see her tomorrow,” I tell myself, but I have to admit that part of the reason I don’t call is that I’ve begun to detect a distance in her voice, a guardedness that I might cancel on her again.
I get in bed early. My old journal, that Roy gave me today, sits on my nightstand. I flip through it, not really reading, and notice that the pages flop loosely between their covers, like a person who’s lost weight wearing old baggy pants. I remember that pages have been ripped out. I flip to the end and see that the very last page is missing. Yet that’s not one of the pages that was sent to me.
I put the journal back on my nightstand and decide to read The Aeneid. Nothing like a little classical literature to calm the nerves, I think. Unfortunately, I’m at the part in Book Seven where Juno sends a fury to goad the Trojans and Latins into war. The description of the fury is so gruesome—a shape-shifting monster writhing with snakes—that I’m unable to read on. I remember that Helen Chambers told us that the Furies were sent out to avenge unavenged deaths. Curses personified, she said, the flip side of the three graces so beloved of Renaissance painters. I turn out the lights and burrow deep under the heavy wool blankets, covering my ears so that I won’t hear the wind and imagine some grotesque avenging monster hovering above Heart Lake, sowing dissent and suspicion among us.
But I can’t drown out the sound of the wind. And under the high-pitched keening of the wind I hear a lower sound, a deep basso profundo moan that makes my hair stand on end. I slowly lift the blankets away from me and a shower of sparks cascades through the charged air. As I get out of bed, my hair lifts off my back like a fan. I walk to the front door and open it. Outside the trees are thrashing and fine ice particles spiral up from the ground like miniature tornadoes. I listen to all the tumult of the wind, but deep and steady, under the fitful tossing of the wind I can hear the moan, like a background theme that’s always there beneath the flightier variations.
I know it’s got to be the lake, the ice contracting and expanding, a natural process that I’ve heard described a dozen times by Dean Buehl and Myra Todd. But I’ve got to see for myself. I walk into the woods in my thick socks and flannel nightgown and I hardly feel the cold at all. It’s as if all the electricity I’ve stored during the day is burning inside me now, keeping me warm. The lake is shrieking like a creature that’s been ripped in half and of course it has, hacked down the middle with saws and poked at with steel-tipped spears. I feel now it’s calling me and who can resist the call of something so wounded?
It’s only when I reach the Point that I see the danger. The wind is all around me, pushing like a hand at my back, tugging at my nightgown with tiny icy fingers. It lifts my hair and nightgown up and I feel myself being borne light and charged as ionized electrons toward the brink. Then I feel another grip, hard and warm, and something pulls me back into the sheltering woods.
“Jane, are you crazy? What are you doing out in this?”
It’s Roy Corey who’s pulling me out of the wind and holding me by both arms, my back brushing against the rough bark of a white pine. My flannel nightgown rubs against his flannel shirt and the little shocks of electricity bring me back to my senses.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I say, surprised at the calmness of my voice.
“There was something I wanted to see.” He points to the ledge on the west side of the Point. “I wanted to see if someone could hide there. You didn’t see me when you came out onto the Point, did you?” I shake my head. His hand is still on my arm and it feels warm. The wind is kicking the hem of my nightgown up, baring my legs.
“But I saw you. I saw you moving toward the Point just as you did that night Deirdre died. If someone was hiding on the west ledge that night she would have seen you come out of the woods and approach the Point. She would have seen Deirdre back away and fall. What she wouldn’t have seen is Lucy on the east ledge reaching up to grab Deirdre’s ankle.”
“So it would have looked like it was my fault?”
He nods. Suddenly I feel the cold and I start to shiver. Roy takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders. He has to pull me away from the tree to get it around me and as he does my flannel nightgown catches a charge from his shirt and clings to him.
“So you decided to conduct this experiment in the middle of an electrical storm?” I ask through chattering teeth. He releases his grip on my arms, but I don’t move away. I can’t move back, anyway, because of the tree.
“I also wanted to keep an eye on your house,” he tells me. “I didn’t feel you were safe.”
I lay my palm flat on his chest, expecting another shock, but instead his shirt feels damp and warm and I can feel his heart beating wildly. “Maybe you ought to come inside then.”
He nods, but neither of us move. I hear the moan again, only now I realize it’s not coming from the lake. It’s in my throat and his. I lightly touch the back of my hand to his face and he slides his fingers under the collar of my nightgown and strokes my collarbone. I feel the cold air brush against my breasts and I start to shake. He moves up against me so that I’m wedged between his body and the tree and I can feel he’s shaking, too. When he ducks his head to my throat my head arches back and I can see the pine boughs above us, moving like bodies in a dance, moving the way we start to move. I lead him back to my house. We get under the blankets and, wordlessly, he makes love to me, slowly, never taking his eyes away from my eyes. I understand. This is not a fluke, he’s telling me, we know each other this time.
When I have breath enough to speak I turn to him and say, “How you must have hated me.”
He touches my forehead, strokes the damp hair back. “I didn’t hate you, Jane. I hated myself for not telling you there and then who I was.”
“We had Miss Buehl and her Girl Scouts shrieking and pointing at us. Hardly the moment to unmask.”
He lifts himself on one elbow and runs the back of his hand down the length of my arm. I feel his breath cooling the sweat in the hollow of my collarbone. “But that’s not why I didn’t show you who I was. I didn’t want to see the look of disappointment when you saw I wasn’t Matt.”
I look at him hard so that I don’t, by looking away, admit the truth of what he’s saying. I want to tell him he’s wrong, but I can’t. I would have been disappointed—more than disappointed, crushed—to have seen any face but Matt’s beneath that mask. And for a moment, I do see Matt’s face, rising in Roy’s features, as if the seventeen-year-old boy is looking out of his cousin’s eyes. I see him so clearly I feel as if every minutest hair on my body were sheathed in ice. And then he’s gone. Matt’s face fades from Roy’s, just as in my dream it sinks into the black water, only I suspect that this is the last time I will see that face.
I can’t lie to Roy, so I tell him the next best thing. “I’m glad it’s you. Here. Now.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I T’S STILL DARK WHEN THE PHONE WAKES US. I SEE FROM the glowing green numbers on the digital alarm clock that it’s 5:33. The phone is on Roy’s side of the bed and he answers it by saying his name. I’m surprised by how unsurprised I am at this. As if I’d been with him for years and known how a cop always knows the call in the middle of the night is for him.
He listens without saying anything and then says, “I’ll be right there.” He swings his legs over his side of the bed and finds his jeans and shirt on the floor. When he stands up he sees me propped on one elbow, watching him, and he sinks back onto the bed and cups my face with his hand.
“I’m afraid this time it’s worse than getting interrupted by the Girl Scouts.”
ROY DOESN’T HAVE FAR TO GO. I FOLLOW HIM DOWN THE steps to the swimming beach where a little group is huddled in a circle of flashlights. I recognize three seniors, none of whom take Latin. The only one whose name I know is Mallory Martin, the girl whom my girls call Maleficent. She doesn’t look too maleficent right now, crying and shaking under a trooper’s heavy leather coat.
“We came out to watch the sun rise,” she’s telling someone. I get the feeling she no longer needs an audience to tell this story. She’ll be telling it for the rest of her life. “We thought it would look cool—with all the statues? A bunch of girls talked about doing it yesterday at the Ice Harvest. At first we thought it was a statue.” She points a wobbly finger in the direction of the stones. On the lake, police officers bundled in heavy coats are moving slow-footed over the ice, their arms held out to their sides for balance. Their posture reminds me of something—it’s how Miss Pike told us to move through water looking for drowning victims, toes feeling the bottom, arms held out to feel for dead limbs. It reminds me of the morning they found Melissa Randall’s body.
I walk past Mallory Martin and her circle. I’m going to follow Roy onto the ice, but at the edge of the lake a police officer holds up his hand to stop me.
“I’m sorry, miss, we don’t want any civilians on the ice.”
Roy turns and sees the look on my face.
“It’s OK, Lloyd, she’s with me.”
I don’t even think about the slipperiness of the ice, but stride out to where Roy is. We pass the first stone and the ice statue standing next to it. I look at its face and am startled to see the detail there. Someone went to a lot of trouble. The surface of the ice is smooth and glowing, as if the wind last night had polished it.
At the second stone the kneeling ice figure has been whittled down by the wind, so that it looks more like a lump on the ice than a statue. I look from it to where the third statue should lie, but although the first light has reached that part of the lake there is nothing there. It’s as if the supine figure had sunk beneath the ice.
I turn to Roy to ask if this is what all the fuss is about and see the fourth statue. It’s stretched out on the second stone, a girl’s smooth marble-white body arched up as if in some terrible throes of pain or pleasure to meet the eight-foot ice pole thrust through its middle. It’s only when the light creeps over her and touches her mermaid-red hair that I recognize Vesta.
“SHE SAID SHE COULDN’T SLEEP AND WAS GOING TO GO skating on the lake,” Athena is telling us for perhaps the third time. “She thought it would be cool to skate around the statues. Some other girls had talked about doing it at the Ice Harvest. I offered to go with her but she was still mad at me about keeping the light on. She said if I was going to go she’d just as soon stay and turn out the light.”
Athena looks up from the low chair in front of Dean Buehl’s desk and we can all see the deep shadows under her eyes. A lock of stringy, multicolored hair falls over her left eye and the hand she lifts to push it back is trembling so hard she quickly returns it to her lap and clasps both hands together. I can see from my seat on the couch along the side wall that her cuticles are ragged and bloody. She squints in the glare from the early morning light on the ice outside Dean Buehl’s window. I look away from her to the frozen lake. Mercifully, the view of the east cove is blocked by the Point. I wonder if they have removed Vesta by now or will they still be taking pictures of the body? I notice two police officers standing on the Point looking down into the east cove. One has set up a tripod and is taking aerial shots of the crime scene.
“And you heard nothing, Jane?”
I flinch at the sound of my name and look up at Dean Buehl, but it’s Dr. Lockhart, who is standing at the large plate-glass window behind Dean Buehl’s desk, who has asked the question. For a moment I don’t understand what she thinks I would have heard, then I remember the shrieks and moans coming from the ice last night. Could they have been Vesta’s cries for help and not the ice?
“There was a storm,” I say. “I heard wind and the ice buckling.”
“The ice buckling?” Dr. Lockhart repeats. I look up at her, but the glare from the lake ice surrounds her like a harsh aura and I have to shade my eyes to look in her direction. Even so, I can’t read her expression.
“Yes,” I say, “cracks and pops and…”
“Moans?” she asks. “Shrieks? That’s what the ice sounds like. Did you go out and look?”
“I did go out,” I say, “I went to the Point, but I never looked over.”
Even Athena swivels her head and stares at me.
“I ran into Officer Corey—he was… um… patrolling the area.”
There’s a moment of silence during which I vividly remember what happened on the Point after I ran into Roy Corey. I look down at my hands and see they are bright pink and for a moment I’m sure I must be blushing, but then I realize it’s only the morning light from the window.
“So did you both look over the Point to see where the sounds were coming from?” Dean Buehl finally asks. I think we’re both surprised that Dr. Lockhart isn’t the one to ask, but she has turned back to the window, her attention drawn to the two men taking pictures on the Point.
“I was going to, but Officer Corey led me back from the Point—I guess he was afraid it was too dangerous out there…” I’m mercifully interrupted by a soft knock on the door, which opens to admit Roy Corey. For a moment I’m so happy just to see his face that I don’t think about the fact he’s a police officer.
“What’s going on here? Why is this student here?” he directs the question to Dean Buehl, but it’s Dr. Lockhart who answers.
“It’s her roommate you’ve been peeling off the rocks out there. We thought she might know something about it.”
At the word “peeling” I see Athena’s face crumple. She turns to look at me. “What does she mean? I thought she was stabbed to death.”
“Why did you think that, Ellen?” Dr. Lockhart steps away from the window, walks around Dean Buehl’s desk and perches on its edge. She crosses one long, gray-stockinged leg over another and waits for Athena to answer. I notice there’s a small pull in her pantyhose, just where her skirt rides up, and for some reason it makes me absurdly happy to see some tiny flaw in Dr. Lockhart’s usually perfect ensemble. Otherwise, she is as calm and cool as ever. I wish I could say the same for Athena.
“Ss-someone told me,” Athena says. I remember that’s what she said to me when I asked her how she knew about my roommates’ deaths twenty years ago. I’ve never heard her lisp before. “Didn’t someone say she was stabbed? I mean, I thought with all those big ice poles lying all over the place…”
“Which you took such an interest in during the slide show…”
“Dr. Lockhart, if you have some theory to share with the police, perhaps you’d like to come down to the station…”
“Yes, I’d like that, Officer Corey. I’d like to know why a police officer was on the Point last night, preventing one of our teachers from looking over to see where all those awful sounds were coming from?”
Roy looks at me.
“I didn’t say he prevented me…” I start to explain, but then I think about what happened on the Point last night and it occurs to me that, effectively, that’s what he did. I falter and look up at Roy and he sees my hesitation.
“It was windy and the rocks were icy,” he offers the explanation to me instead of Dr. Lockhart, but it’s she who replies.
“So did you look over the Point to see where those noises were coming from?”
“I assumed it was the ice,” Roy answers.
“Then you’re either even stupider than the average cop or you’re trying to cover up something you did see,” she says calmly.
I can see a muscle in Roy’s jaw flinch, but it’s Athena who loses her composure. She springs out of her chair so abruptly it topples, hitting Roy in the kneecap and forcing him to step back.
“Why are you so mean?” she screams, lunging at Dr. Lockhart. The impact of Athena’s collision with Dr. Lockhart knocks the desk back a good six inches, sending Dean Buehl’s swivel chair careening backward into the window. I hear glass shatter, and for a sickening moment I imagine Dean Buehl propelled out into the air, but it’s Athena I’m moving toward. I throw my arm over her head in a shoulder hold that I learned from Miss Pike’s lifesaving class and pull her back, her arms flailing as though she really were a drowning victim. Apparently she’s a victim who doesn’t want to be saved, because as soon as she gets her balance she sinks, sidesteps, and drives her elbow into my solar plexus. While I crumple over in pain, she runs from the room. When I can lift my head, I look for Dean Buehl, afraid of what I’ll see, but she’s all right, visibly shaken but untouched by the glass of the shattered window behind her, every inch of which is veined by an intricate maze, somehow magically suspended, as if held in place by the bright morning sun streaming in now through the cracks.
ROY HELPS ME TO A SEAT ON THE COUCH. DEAN BUEHL moves gingerly away from the shattered window and sits down next to me on my other side.
“Are you all right, Jane?” Dean Buehl asks. “I had no idea that girl was capable of such violence.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “It wasn’t Athena’s fault. She was…” I falter, unable to come up with a plausible explanation for my student’s behavior. The word “provoked” comes to mind. “Upset,” I say instead, which sounds weak in view of the destruction left in Athena’s wake. “I should go talk to her.”
“I think it’s better if I go,” Dr. Lockhart says. “I’ve been working with her. I think I understand her issues.”
“She seemed pretty angry with you,” Roy says.
“That’s all part of the therapeutic process,” Dr. Lockhart says, putting on her coat. I look to Dean Buehl and she nods to me.
“Candace is right, she should go.”
Dr. Lockhart smiles at me like a child who’s won at some squabble mediated by grown-ups. When she’s gone Dean Buehl adds, “Candace has a special empathy with these girls—she had the same sort of upbringing. Over the years I’ve seen so many girls like Ellen and Candace, girls whose parents have too little time for them and leave their care to us.”
“Abandon them to you,” Roy says.
“Don’t be too harsh, Detective Corey. It’s what they know; it’s how they were brought up. I’m sure they think they’re doing what’s best for their children. Maybe it’s the best they can do for them.”
I have a sudden vision of Olivia, left with Mitch for safekeeping, that reawakens the pain in my stomach where Athena jabbed me with her elbow. I’m supposed to go see her this weekend.
As if reading my intention, Roy stands up, reassuming an official air. He addresses Dean Buehl, but I understand the message is for me. “You understand now that this is an official murder investigation no one should leave the campus.” Dean Buehl nods and, when he looks in my direction, so do I.
I CAN TELL ROY WANTS TO COME WITH ME WHEN I LEAVE Dean Buehl’s office, but there’s the phone call to be made to Vesta’s parents and Dean Buehl asks him to stay. I stand in front of the mansion for a moment wondering where Athena and Dr. Lockhart have gone, but there’s no sign of them. I’m stalled here trying to think of the words I’ll use to explain to Olivia that I have to cancel again. I canceled the last weekend I was supposed to visit because of the snow. How can I disappoint her again?
I head back to my cottage to pick up my purse and the overnight bag I’d packed yesterday with clothes and papers to grade. I cut through the woods to avoid the police officers on the Point. I find, to my surprise, a narrow trail carved through the snow that leads me right back to my house. I find another one that gets me to the faculty parking lot. Someone’s grown tired of staying on the regular footpaths and made their own, just as Lucy used to.
It’s only when I’m in the car, waiting for my windows to defrost (I still have the chemical de-icer in my glove compartment, but I’ve avoided using it since almost blinding myself with it) and the heat to thaw my hands so I can drive, that I realize the seriousness of what I’m doing. It will look as though I’m fleeing a crime scene. But Roy will know I couldn’t have anything to do with Vesta’s death. He was with me after all.
But can I say the same about him? Do I really know what he was doing up on the Point? I think about what he said. Whoever was behind these events had something to do with what happened twenty years ago. Matt was Roy’s cousin. For twenty years he’s felt responsible for his death. What if he suddenly had someone else to blame for it? The thought is so monstrous that all I want to do is get away from Heart Lake. And even though I still can’t see through my rearview window, I back up blindly and drive as fast as I can to the Northway.
Chapter Thirty-two
S
OUTH OF ALBANY I GET OFF THE THRUWAY TO TAKE THE Taconic the rest of the way south. Driving south on
the Taconic I watch the Hudson Valley unscrolling toward the Catskill Mountains. It’s a familiar, gentle landscape and for a while it takes my mind off Athena and Roy Corey and Heart Lake. I think instead of how so much of my life has been played out along this corridor. I remember taking the train from Albany to Corinth after my mother died, of how I felt I was moving into my future even as I was traveling back to Heart Lake. Now, even as I’m fleeing Heart Lake as fast as I can, I feel as though I’m traveling into my past.
I think about Matt and Lucy. I’ve shied away from thinking about them since I learned the baby was theirs, but now I force myself to imagine them together. It would have been May Day. The same morning I was with Roy Corey. I remember how Lucy and the masked boy faced each other on the beach and how Lucy calmly walked into the water, daring the boy to follow. When I’d thought it was Ward Castle, I thought he wouldn’t brave the cold water. I didn’t have time to wait and see; I thought it was Matt, below me on the steps, waiting for me to flee so he could follow.
Now I imagine what happened after I turned my back on them. Lucy slipped into the mist rising from the water and started swimming for the icehouse and Matt followed her. He would have had to take off his mask. They were strong swimmers, used to swimming side by side in the lap lanes at the local pool. I picture them, cleaving the lake, their arms curving over the green water like two wings of the same bird. They would have been cold by the time they got to the icehouse. I picture Lucy, her lips blue and trembling, and Matt wrapping his arms around her to keep her warm. Maybe it wasn’t the first time. I remember the way they danced through the falling leaves on the first day I walked home with them, and how Matt spun Lucy on the ice when we skated on the lake. Maybe it was the first time.
I imagine they told each other it wouldn’t ever happen again. But then Lucy found out from Helen Chambers that Matt wasn’t really her brother. She thought that changed everything. People still might have talked—after all, they grew up like brother and sister—but Lucy wouldn’t have cared and she could always talk Matt into doing what she wanted. It might have worked out for them, if I hadn’t let slip to Matt about the baby.
I think about the night they died. Matt would have hitchhiked up this same road to get to Heart Lake after he got the letter from Lucy. He probably didn’t know what to make of it. Neither had I, when I read it.
I T WAS AN AFTERNOON AT THE END OF F EBRUARY. S HE HAD just come back from dinner with Domina Chambers. She said she’d learned some things that were going to change her life and she had to write and tell Matt. I assumed that Domina Chambers had outlined some plan for where Lucy would go to college and what she would do afterward.
“Also, I want to make sure he’s not worried about me with all this nonsense about my so-called suicide attempt,” she told me. “D’you want me to put in a message from you?” she asked. “Like… oh, I don’t know… Come, my Matthew, come, let’s go aMaying?”
I stared at her but she kept on writing with her head resolutely bent over the pale blue stationery that Domina Chambers had given her. After May Day I had copied over Robert Herrick’s poem “Corinna’s Maying” into my journal. In the last line I had substituted Matthew’s name for Corinna’s. Had Lucy read my journal? Or had she just made up the line herself? After all, we had both read it in English last year. Either way, I was surprised at her for referring to what happened on May Day so casually.
She must have finally noticed me staring at her, because she looked up at me. “Jane, you’re blushing. I’ll just write the line at the end of the letter without mentioning your name. He’ll know what it means, right?” She winked at me and bent back over the page. “How do the lines go again? ‘And sin no more, as we have done, by staying, but, my Matthew, come, let’s go aMaying?’”
“Those come earlier in the poem,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, happily folding the letter and stuffing it in an envelope. “One more thing, have you got any more hairpins?”
I had a broken teacup on my desk in which I kept paper clips and hairpins. I handed it to her. She took out two Ushaped hairpins and one bobby pin. I watched as she fashioned a corniculum and put it in the envelope, carefully slipping it between the folds of her letter.
“Why are you sending him that?” I asked.
“So he’ll meet me at the icehouse.”
“But he’s away at school,” I said. “How can he meet you anywhere?”
Lucy smiled. “I have a feeling that once he gets this letter he’ll find a way to come.”
I PASS A SIGN FOR BEACON AND REALIZE I’M NOT FAR FROM the military school Matt had gone to. It’s been more than two hours since I left Heart Lake. I wonder how long it took Matt to make the trip. He must have come as soon as he got the letter. It was only a few days after she’d written that I came back to the room after dinner and found, thumbtacked to our door, a corniculum.
L UCY WAS AT DINNER WITH D OMINA C HAMBERS AND THE ONLY other person who knew about the corniculum was Deirdre. I shivered for a moment, imagining it was somehow a sign from her, but then chided myself for being so melodramatic. Obviously it was from Matt. He must have sneaked up to the room and left it as a message for Lucy to meet him at the icehouse. She’d be so happy when she saw it.
I left it on the door and went into the room. I tried to start my Latin translation for the next day, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was lonely doing the work by myself. I had always studied in a group, first with Matt and Lucy, and then with Deirdre and Lucy. I remembered that first day, in ninth grade, walking home with Matt and Lucy chanting declensions and how Matt had taught me what they meant, and how he had presented me with a red maple leaf. I still had the leaf, pressed in my Tales from the Ballet. I took the book down from the shelf above my desk and turned to where the red leaf lay, pressed in between the pages of Giselle.
And then something occurred to me. What if the corniculum wasn’t a sign for Lucy, but was, instead, meant for me? After all, Lucy had put that line about going aMaying at the end of her letter. Wouldn’t Matt know it had come from me?
I got up and opened the window. A gust of wet air blew into the room, but it wasn’t cold. It wasn’t exactly warm either, but there was something in it—the smell of snowmelt maybe—that made me think of spring. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths. A fine white mist rose from the melting snow as if all the snow that had fallen that winter was rising back to the sky. I could hear water dripping from my window ledge and from the pine trees and, farther away, the sound of water moving in the lake where the ice had broken.
I felt, suddenly, as if something were breaking up inside of me. When I closed the window I felt restless. I took out my journal and wrote, “Tonight I will go down to the lake to meet him and I’ll tell him everything,” before I knew that was what I meant to do. I paused with the peacock blue pen hovering over the page, waiting to see what I’d write next. I wrote, “I know I shouldn’t go, but I can’t seem to stop myself.” Was that true? Could I stop myself? Would I even try? I wrote, “It’s like the lake is calling me,” and I thought, yes, that’s what it is, that restless sound of water moving through the night, not just in the lake, but rising from the snow and dripping from the trees, a whole watery world out there calling to me. I wrote, “Sometimes I wonder if what they say about the three sisters is true. It’s like they’re making me go down to the lake when I know I shouldn’t.” I’d come to the end of a page. I turned it and saw I’d come to the last page of the notebook. I wrote one more line and then closed the book and went out.
THAT’S HOW DESPERATE I’D BEEN TO SEE MATT; I BLAMED my going on the three sisters legend. It’s almost funny. I notice, though, that I’m not laughing. I’m crying so hard it’s difficult to see the road. It doesn’t help that the sky has darkened and a sharp wind is buffeting the car. I take a curve too fast and feel my tires skitter on the gravel on the shoulder. Shaken, I pull into a scenic overview and stare at rain clouds massing over the Catskills while waiting for my crying jag to stop.
What had Matt thought of the May Day reference in Lucy’s letter? Did he suspect that Lucy had gotten pregnant on May Day? Is that why he rushed up to Heart Lake? I shake my head. How will I ever know? Matt’s dead. Lucy’s dead. Everyone who could tell me is gone.
I stare at the soft folds of the Hudson Valley as if the landscape could answer my questions, but even this familiar vista fails me as the clouds from the west move across the valley, darkening the land and obscuring my view. But not everybody from back then is dead. Roy’s alive. He was with Matt when Matt got Lucy’s letter, with him at his parents’ house in Cold Spring when he decided to leave for Heart Lake. Hadn’t Roy said, when he met me at the Aquadome, that he’d just been visiting his mother in Cold Spring? (Our aunt Doris in Cold Spring, I hear Lucy’s voice, as if she were there beside me in the car, whispering in my ear.)
I wipe my eyes and look at the car clock. It’s only one o’clock in the afternoon. Olivia will still be at school. I have time, I think, to make one quick stop.
As I pull back on the road I know I’m being foolish. What can I possibly expect to find in Roy’s mother’s house? If Matt hadn’t told Roy why he was he leaving for Heart Lake, he certainly wouldn’t have told his aunt. But even as I tell myself all the reasons I shouldn’t be going I’m getting off the exit for Cold Spring and looking for a gas station so I can look up the address. If it’s not listed, I tell myself, I’ll take it as a sign that I’m on a fool’s errand and drive straight to Mitchell’s house.
Not only is Doris Corey listed, she lives right on the main street of town. The road into town slopes steeply down toward the river. I can see, on a bluff overlooking the river, a low dark building with crenellated towers. The Manlius Military Academy for Boys. Matt’s old school. I look away from it and concentrate on looking for the Coreys’ house. It’s almost the last house on the street, a small yellow Victorian just before the train tracks and a stone’s throw from the river.
The woman who answers the door looks so much like Hannah Toller that for a moment I think the report that I’d heard all those years ago of her death in a car accident must have been a mistake. When she smiles at me, though, me a stranger standing at her doorstep in the pouring rain, I see she’s softer than Hannah Toller ever was. I realize how guarded and strained Lucy and Matt’s mother had always been—bowed down, no doubt, by all the secrets she had borne.
This woman, Doris Corey, has me into her house before I can even explain that I live in Corinth and know her son. “Is it Roy?” she asks, her hands arrested in reaching to help me off with my down parka. “Are you with the police, dear? Have you come to tell me something’s happened to Roy?”
For all the panic in her eyes she’s still polite. If I were to tell her that something had happened to Roy she wouldn’t scream and make a scene; she’d know I was only the blameless messenger of bad news. I think of all the sadness she’s lived through. Her niece and nephew drowning in a lake, her sister and brother-in-law dying in a car accident. She holds herself like someone braced for tragedy.
“Oh no, Mrs. Corey. Roy’s fine. You see…” I try to think how to explain to her why I’m here and can think of nothing better than to tell her my name.
“Jane Hudson,” the hand that was tugging at my wet coat comes to rest on my forearm and squeezes, “weren’t you Mattie’s girl?”
The noise I make must sound as if I’m choking. Mattie’s girl. It’s all I ever wanted to be. But I can’t lie to this woman. “I was a friend of Lucy and Matt’s, Mrs. Corey, but that’s all.”
She waves a dismissive hand at my disclaimer.
“Oh, he talked about you all the time, dear. He told me about the time Lucy fell through the ice and you pulled her out. He said you were the bravest person he knew.”
You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?
My tears are falling again, mixing with the rainwater dripping from my hair, before I can do anything to stop them. Mrs. Corey makes a soft sound at the back of her throat, something between a tisk and an ahh, and pulls me down next to her on the couch. She pulls a brightly colored afghan from the back of the couch and tucks it around my shoulders, but the scratchy wool only sets me to shivering.
“I know, I know,” she says, over and over. “It still comes to me some days, the thought of those two drowning. I confess it’s Mattie I think of most often. I guess because we’d come to feel he was like our own all those weekends he stayed here. Lucy… well, she was always a quiet one—not one to let you get too close. Even when she was a baby she’d struggle in your arms…”
“Did you know she wasn’t Hannah’s?”
Mrs. Corey sighs and smoothes the afghan over my shoulders. “Hannah was my little sister,” she says. “When she came home with that baby everyone else believed her when she said it was hers, but I could tell. She didn’t nurse her—when Mattie was born she nursed him. It’s not that she didn’t treat Lucy good—she took extra pains with her. She seemed… I don’t know… almost in awe of her. And then she didn’t look a bit like her or any of us…”
“Did you confront her?”
“Only once. When she let Matt and Lucy start school together. I asked her if she thought it a good idea, encouraging the two of them to be so close. She asked me what I meant, weren’t they brother and sister? When I didn’t say anything to that she looked away and told me to mind my own business. We never spoke of it again, but when she asked me to keep Mattie here… well… she said she was sorry she hadn’t listened to me before.”
She sits back and folds her hands in her lap. She looks away from me to the mantel. I follow her gaze and see there the picture of Matt. It’s a posed portrait with a flag in the background. His school picture for his senior year at Manlius. His hair looks darker than I remember it and longer, the seventies haircut looks dated. I look away from the picture to Mrs. Corey. I want to ask her what else Matt said about me. What else did he say to give the impression that I was his girlfriend. But I realize suddenly how little it matters anymore.
“Did you know who Lucy’s real mother was?” I ask instead.
“I guessed it was that friend of hers, Helen Chambers. That’s who the girl looked like, after all. And then after Hannah died I found out that Helen Chambers had owned the house on River Street. She’d left it to Cliff and Hannah when she… when she passed on.” She unfolds her hands and plucks on the tufts on the upholstery. She doesn’t want to say “killed herself.” I look down at the worn chintz pattern on the couch and realize I’ve seen it before.
“And then you inherited the house from Hannah.”
“I was the only one left,” she says, “but I couldn’t hardly bear to be in that house for five minutes. Roy helped me move some of the furniture—Hannah’d always had better than what we could afford—but neither of us could bear to clear out the attic rooms. We figured whoever bought the house would clear it away, but then the house never would sell. People must’ve thought it was unlucky.”
I remember that it’s what I suggested to Dr. Lockhart, but then, how had she come to live there?
“But you sold it eventually?” I ask.
“Only last year. I’d been renting it out summers, and then I got this letter from someone at Heart Lake…”
“From someone at Heart Lake?”
Doris Corey frowns. “I don’t remember. Let me see, I think I still have the letter. It had something nice in it about Lucy, so I saved it.” Doris Corey gets up and pushes open the top of a rolltop desk—a desk I suddenly remember as standing in the Tollers’ front hall. I look around me and recognize other pieces of furniture from the Toller household—a highboy carved of some dark wood, a wingback chair, a grandfather clock. They crowd around the couch, these relics from the past, like the dead heroes clamored around Aeneas in the underworld.
“Something nice about Lucy?” I repeat. “But how…”
Doris Corey comes back to the couch and hands me a letter written on pale gray stationery in blue-green ink. “Dear Mrs. Corey,” I read. “I’d like to inquire about purchasing the house on River Street. I know it’s been vacant for many years and I understand how you might be reluctant to part with your sister’s old house.”
Doris Corey points to the first paragraph. “I thought this girl must be either very naive or very rich. Or both. Imagine keeping a piece of real estate for sentimental value!”
I continue reading.
“I’d like to assure you that the house would be in very good hands. You see, I, too, have sentimental reasons for wanting to live in the house on River Street. I attended Heart Lake for three years in the late seventies (because of circumstances outside my control I had to leave) and that was how I came to know your niece, Lucy. Although she was several classes ahead of me, she was kind enough to take an interest in me. I had a very lonely childhood and I’ve never forgotten the kindness she showed me, almost as if she were an older sister. When she died I felt as if I had lost a part of my family, almost, indeed, a part of myself. Now that I’ve returned to Heart Lake (I often think that my decision to work with troubled adolescent girls is a way of repaying my debt to Lucy) I would cherish the opportunity to live in her old house.”
There followed a generous cash offer for the house.
“Can I use your phone?” I ask, handing the letter back to Doris Corey.
I dial Dean Buehl’s office. She answers on the first ring and at the sound of my voice nearly shouts at me. “My God, Jane, we’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where are you? Are Athena and Dr. Lockhart there with you?”
Doris Corey must see how pale I get because she wraps the afghan around my shoulders.
“No. How long have they been missing?”
“Since Athena stormed out of my office this morning. We’re afraid she’s done something to Dr. Lockhart—”
“Dean Buehl,” I interrupt. “Was Dr. Lockhart a student at Heart Lake?”
“Well, yes, for a few years, but she didn’t like people to know because she was expelled. But you know all about that, Jane, I told you…”
I remember standing at the train station looking across the tracks at the small girl posed rigidly beside her luggage, her face set in a frozen glare, while Miss Buehl told me that she had been expelled for breaking the fanlight above the front door of Main.
“She’s Albie. You hired Albie, didn’t you? You felt sorry for her and you hired her.”
“Well, yes. That poor girl had been through so much. All she wanted was to come back to Heart Lake. But I didn’t lie, she wasn’t an old girl because she didn’t graduate…”
“But you should have told me.”
“But Jane, I thought you knew. After all it’s what her name means in Latin: white. That’s why she was called Albie.”
Candace. It means fire-white. That’s what I feel now—a mix of fire and ice that tingles in my veins and gets me to my feet, Doris Corey’s afghan falling to the floor like a pile of brightly colored leaves.
“Listen,” I say to Dean Buehl, “explain all of this to Roy Corey. Tell him that Dr. Lockhart is Albie and tell him I’m on my way back.”
BEFORE I GET BACK ON THE TACONIC I STOP AT A PAY PHONE and make another call. I could have used Doris Corey’s phone but I’d been ashamed to make this call in front of anybody. I’m out of change so I call collect.
Mitch accepts the charges and without a word to me hands the receiver over to Olivia.
“Mommy? Are you almost here? I’m waiting up for you so you can read me my bedtime story.”
“Honey,” I say, and then pause, letting my head rest on the cold, grimy metal pay phone booth, “Mommy’s going to be a little late, but I’ll try to be there when you get up.”
There’s a silence so long that I think the connection’s been broken, then I hear a small voice, which sounds in the rushing static as though it were underwater. “But you promised.”
There’s just nothing I can say to that. I tell her I’m sorry and that I’ll try to make it up to her and I get off the phone before she can ask me just how I think I’m going to do that. Then I get in the car and drive north and try not to think about Olivia. I think, instead, about another little girl: Albie.
I try to remember what Deirdre and Lucy told me about her, but the truth is I was never that interested. She was a homely little kid who tagged along following us all over campus. Lucy seemed to accept her adulation as her due. Deirdre felt sorry for her, because, like herself, she was shuttled from school to school, unwanted. Even Domina Chambers had taken an interest in her. I had tried to talk to her once or twice, but she never seemed to like me. Maybe she saw me as a rival to Lucy’s affections.
As I drive farther north, the rain turns into icy sleet. My windows frost up and my car slithers and fishtails on the upgrades. I drive fast, though, wiping the frost away from the windshield with the heel of my hand like a child pushes tears away.
Or was it the other way around? Had I seen her as a rival? After all, how many poor scraggly “orphan” girls could Lucy befriend? I think of all the times I caught her spying on us in the woods. How many times had she watched us without me knowing? I remember the figure I thought I saw on the Point when Lucy and I sank the tin in the lake, the sense I had of being watched the night Deirdre died… What was it Roy had said? If someone was hiding on the west ledge it would have looked like I was the one who made Deirdre fall to her death.
When I reach the Northway I expect better road conditions, but instead I hit fog. The sleet, which I expected to turn to snow as I got farther north, turns back to rain. Most of the traffic stays in the right lane and crawls slowly through the dense white shroud. I get in the left lane and do eighty.
And that last night… the night I’d gone down to the icehouse to meet Matt. I had that same sense of being followed through the woods. What would she have made of that final scene on the ice? I close my eyes against the picture and nearly run into the guardrail. She would blame me for Lucy’s death. Had I even thought, twenty years ago, of looking for her after Lucy died? To comfort her? No, I was too busy with my own grief. The next thing I knew about her was that she’d been expelled for smashing the stained-glass fanlight. The one inscribed with the school’s motto. I remember the day Lucy explained to Albie what the motto meant. “It means there’s always a place for you here. And it means I will always be here for you, too…”
But Lucy hadn’t been able to keep that promise. In her rage, Albie had thrown rocks through the window—through the broken promise of those words. Then she had been sent to St. Eustace. St. Useless. Where they sent you when you were no use to anyone.
I spot the Corinth exit with barely enough time to cut across two lanes of slow-moving traffic and skid onto the exit ramp. The fog is even worse now that I’m off the highway. I can barely see the side of the road. I roll my windows down and fix on the little reflective bumps that mark the median to gauge the two-lane road that climbs up to Corinth. About halfway, I come up against a slow-moving lumber truck that is crawling up to the mill. There’s no way to pass it, so I put my car in low gear and tail so close behind that I can smell the sickly sweet smell of fresh-cut pine.
I can tell I’ve reached town by the yellow tinge to the fog as I pass the mill. I sniff at the familiar scent of pulp. I used to think when I was little that the yellow smoke that rose from the mill was the ghosts of trees, and the white paper the mill produced their earthly remains—the bleached white bones of northern forests.
Finally, the truck pulls off and I accelerate through the rest of the village, crossing the bridge so fast my teeth vibrate. I’m on River Road, passing the old Victorians, which loom out of the fog like prehistoric monsters. At the end of the road, just before the turn off to Heart Lake, is the little house that always seemed to me like something out of a fairy tale. The only thing I hadn’t realized was that as far as the woman living in it is concerned, I’m the bad witch. I made Deirdre fall off the Point. I let Lucy drown under the ice. I lied at the inquest and got her favorite teacher fired. I sent her into Siberian exile.
I turn the engine off, wishing I’d thought to park farther down the road or at least turned my headlights off. When I do that now I see that the house is not completely dark. Like the first night I found Dr. Lockhart here, there’s a light in the attic.
What I should do is find a phone and call the police—see if they can reach Roy. What I do instead is reach deep into my book bag until my fingers graze cold metal. Dr. Lockhart’s keys. I still have them. That I should use them seems the next logical step. I open my glove compartment and look for something I can use as a weapon. There’s the flashlight, but its batteries are still dead and it’s made of cheap, light plastic. The only other thing in the glove compartment is the small aerosol can of de-icer. I slip it into my pocket, figuring I can use it like mace. Then I get out of the car as quietly as I can and walk through the unshoveled snow to the front door. By the time I make it there my jeans are soaked to the knees and I’m sweating under my down parka. The snow, I notice, is slushy and steaming, exuding a thick white fog like some pestilential vapor. When I touch the doorknob I find it’s warm.
There are only three keys on the chain and I already know that two of them are for Dr. Lockhart’s office and filing cabinet. I put the third key in the lock and it turns easily. I push open the door into a darkness that feels smoky, as if the fog from the melting snow had somehow gotten inside and turned black. I look around the living room, trying to make out the shape of furniture, but after a moment I realize that the room is completely empty. There isn’t a single stick of furniture on the first floor.
But the light I saw was coming from the attic. As I go up the stairs the darkness pales and turns pink. When I get to the head of the stairs I see why. There’s a night-light in the shape of a pink poodle plugged into an outlet. The only other source of light comes from the room on the left. Matt’s room. I go in and see that the light comes from a green-shaded banker’s lamp on one of the desks by the window.
Lucy’s desk. There’s no other word for it. Even before I walk across the room and reach it I know it will be exactly as I saw it the last time I was in this room twenty years ago. The same lumpy pottery cup that Matt made for her in second grade holding the same collection of peacock-blue fountain pens. A brass eternal calendar in the shape of a globe, the day marked February 28, 1977. There’s a blue Fair Isle cardigan hung across the back of the chair, which, when I lift, holds the shape of the chair in its shoulders. I see by its faded label it’s from Harrods. It’s the sweater I borrowed from Lucy and left in the woods.
When I drop the sweater back to the chair a moth flutters out of its folds and beats itself against the lamp. I slowly turn in a circle, taking in the whole room. Matt’s hockey stick is propped against the bookshelf where Wheelock’s Latin leans against Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds. Matt’s collection of Hardy Boys on the top shelf. Lucy’s Nancy Drews on the middle. Over Matt’s bed hangs a pennant for Dartmouth College. I’d forgotten that’s where Matt wanted to go to college. He said he liked that it was founded by an Indian.
I look back at the desk and notice a few sheets of stationery with “Exeter” printed on top. The letters from Brian. There, too, are a supply of hairpins. A piece of lined paper, its edges ragged where it was ripped out of its stitched binding, lies under a smooth gray-green rock. I lift the rock and see there’s only one line written on the top of the page. It’s the last page from my journal. The last line I wrote before going down to the lake to find Matt. I won’t let anyone stand in my way, I’d written, not even Lucy.
As I put the stone down I hear a sound from the back of the house. There’s no window facing the back in the attic, so I run down the stairs, through the dark house, thankful there’s no furniture to bump into. I unlatch the back door and step into the fog. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me and when I try to listen all I can hear is the drip of melting snow and the rush of moving water somewhere in the woods. It must be the Schwanenkill, thawed out, flowing out of Heart Lake. Then I look down at my feet and see that I’m standing in a narrow groove, a footpath carved out of the snow, just wide enough for one. And something gleaming in the wet snow. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a tiny silver skull earring. A macabre thing, but I recognize it as Athena’s. It’s impossible, in this fog, to see where the path goes, but I’m already following it into the woods.
Chapter Thirty-three
A T FIRST THE PATH RUNS PARALLEL TO THE SCHWANENKILL. I know, not because I can see the stream but because I can hear it—a faint watery whisper like the murmuring of an unseen companion passing through the woods beside me. Then it veers abruptly left and plunges into the deep, fog-white woods.
It’s like entering a white tunnel. On either side the snow rises steeply and where the snow leaves off the white fog rises, like a curtain being lifted from the ground to shield… shield what? I’m reminded of a slide Tacy Beade showed us in her ancient art lecture of two handmaidens holding up a draped cloth to shield the goddess at her bath. The face I see staring out behind the curtain now is the wide-eyed frightened face of a lost child. The awkward little girl we called Albie who used to follow us through the woods. The little girl who’s turned the game around and become the leader instead of the follower.
The path loops around tree trunks and meanders through the forest. When I come to the first branch I don’t know which way to go and stare hopelessly into the white mist. Then in the stillness of the woods I hear a faint chiming. At first I think I’m imagining it—a tinny bell that might be the ringing of my own blood in my ears—but when I follow the sound to the left branch of the trail I catch the faint glimmer of metal swinging from an overhanging branch. Three hairpins linked in the shape of a horned animal dangling among the pine needles. I take that trail and from then on, at every divergence, I look for the corniculum like a trail blaze and follow it. I’ve soon lost any sense of direction or time. The convolutions of the trail seem to grow tighter and more erratic, folding back on themselves like a Mobius strip, until I feel as though I am no longer following a path through the woods but a train of thought in some addled brain. But whose addled brain? Because even though I know it’s Albie’s path I’m following, I feel as if I’m traveling into my own past, taking the same path I took that night twenty years ago when I went down to the lake to meet Matt at the icehouse.
W HEN I LEFT THE DORM I GRABBED A JACKET ONLY HALF noticing that it was Lucy’s pale blue parka instead of mine. I was halfway down the hall before I remembered that I had left the corniculum on the door. Should I go back and take it down? If I left it on the door, Lucy would no doubt come along to the icehouse when she got back. Then I wouldn’t be alone with Matt. I thought of going back, but I felt too impatient, too anxious to be out, breathing the wet, sweet air. I was already past the matron’s desk (I told her I’d left a book in the dining hall); I was already on the path heading around the west side of the lake.
Outside the night was even more stirring than it had promised to be. The wind moved through the trees spraying pine-scented water across my face. The lake was still coated with a white layer of ice but its surface was dull and I could hear the water moving restlessly beneath the surface as if trying to break free. Patches of ice, gritty and opaque, still littered the path. When I stepped on them pale air bubbles raced beneath my feet. All around me, the melting snow rose in a pure white mist, like a linen cloth pulled away to reveal some magical transformation: paper flowers, the flutter of pale wings. I kept looking into the woods, expecting something to show itself behind the shredded wisps of fog, but although I heard, once or twice, the snap of a branch or a watery sigh, I saw no one and I dismissed my sense of being followed to my imagination. I thought about Matt waiting at the icehouse and the thought that I was going to be with him soon moved through my body like the wind moving through the pine trees.
SHE MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING ME THAT NIGHT, JUST AS she’s watching me now. When I have wandered in enough circles to wear myself out will she pounce on me from behind the white fog? Or will she merely leave me in the woods to freeze to death while she makes away with Athena? The thought of Athena sharpens my wits for a moment. What does she have in mind for her? I am beginning to understand why Dr. Lockhart hates me. As she sees it, I killed her two best friends and caused her favorite teacher to lose her job and ultimately kill herself. She spent the rest of her school days in a rigid, loveless place. She must have felt she was in exile. How Heart Lake and the memory of Lucy and Domina Chambers must have grown in her mind. It must have infuriated her to see me come back here and take Domina Chambers’s place. Think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students, she said to me at that first meeting. And from that moment on my life has been a replica of what happened to Helen Chambers. That is the punishment she devised for me.
I stop for a moment on the path and stare into the impenetrable fog. I hear, again, the whisper of water on the wind and together with the fog it reminds me of that last night I went down to the icehouse to meet Matt. I think about that last meeting and try to see it through Albie’s eyes.
A S I ROUNDED THE END OF THE LAKE, I SAW THAT THERE WAS a light coming from the icehouse. I crossed the Schwanenkill carelessly, crashing through the thin ice in the middle. He must have heard me, because as I struggled up the bank I saw him above me, reaching out his arm to give me a hand up. I took off my mitten so I could feel the warmth of his flesh right away.
“I knew you’d come,” he said, pulling me up the bank. His voice sounded hoarser and deeper than I remembered. He pushed back the hood of my parka and touched my face.
“Jane!” he said. I couldn’t tell if it were surprise or excitement that I heard in his voice. And then I saw the unmistakable look of disappointment in his face and I knew.
“Where’s Lucy?” he said. “Why didn’t she come?”
I stared at him and tried to keep the tears from coming. After all, just because he’d expected his sister didn’t mean he didn’t want to see me as well.
“She was with Domina Chambers so I came first. I left the corniculum on the door, though, so she’ll be here soon.” I was glad, now, that I had left it. “I thought… well, I thought, you might want to see me, too.”
Matthew sighed and put his arm around my shoulder. “Of course I want to see you, too. Good old Jane. It’s just that I’m worried about Lucy. I heard about what happened at Christmas and then about what happened to poor Deirdre. And then Lucy sent me a very confusing letter…”
“She told you about what happened at Christmas?”
“Well, I heard from my parents that she tried to kill herself. At first I just couldn’t believe it, and then I thought I might understand why…”
“But didn’t she write and say she didn’t really mean to kill herself?”
“Yes, but don’t people always say that after they’ve tried and failed? That they didn’t really mean it? She did cut herself, didn’t she? I can’t stand the idea of her hurting herself especially when it’s probably all my fault.”
I saw the look of pain on his face and I thought to myself, well, at least I have the power to do something for him. “She didn’t try to kill herself at all, Mattie, it was all a sham.”
“A sham?”
“Yes, it was a cover-up. For Deirdre. Not that she appreciated it, although I guess I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
“What are you talking about, Jane?”
“Look, let’s go inside the icehouse and sit down. I’ll explain everything.”
THE PATH, I NOTICE, IS BEGINNING TO SLOPE DOWNWARD. At one point it becomes so steep I have to hold on to branches to keep from sliding down the icy chute. I hear a soft moaning sound and I strain to hear if it’s Athena. It’s me you want, I say to myself, over and over. And then I call it out. “Albie, it’s me you want for letting Lucy die, not Athena.”
My own words come back in an echo as if they’ve bounced off a rock wall. And then I see why. I’ve come to the end of the path and it ends in sheer ice. I’m at the edge of the lake, on the southern tip, not far from the icehouse. Directly across from the rock wall of the Point. I could have gotten here in fifteen minutes from the Toller house if I’d followed the Schwanenkill instead of following the crazy meandering of Albie’s path. She’s worn me out and given herself more time and gotten me just where she wants me.
I hear again the sound of bells, louder than the tinny chime of the cornicula, and when I look up I see, hanging like Damocles’ sword, twin silver blades. I step out from under them and see that they’re skates hanging from a branch by their knotted laces. An index card has been threaded through the laces and on it, in childish scrawl, is written “Lucy’s Skates,” only the name Lucy has been exxed out and under it there’s my name, crossed out as well, then Deirdre’s name, crossed out, and then, finally, my name again. Jane’s skates, it is then. I take them down and, as I’m meant to, put them on.
They’re a little tight (it’s a good thing I’m wearing thin stockings), but otherwise they fit well, and, I notice as I stroke out over the slick ice, the blades have recently been sharpened. As tired as I am I seem to be skimming over the surface of the lake effortlessly. I even do a little spin and land looking back at the icehouse, at the doors left open from the recent ice harvest, creaking in the wash from the channel that’s been carved out of the ice. Is that where Albie hid that night, behind the doors? If she had, she would have heard everything I said to Matt.
H E’D LEFT HIS FLASHLIGHT ON THE LEDGE; THAT WAS THE light I’d seen coming from the icehouse. We sat down in the boat and leaned against the stern, next to each other so we could both look at the lake. I remembered the last time I had looked out these doors onto the lake. It was when Lucy and I were putting back the boat. The blizzard had started and the air was so full of snow it had blotted out the lake. Now the air was white from that same snow evaporating back into the sky. I liked the idea of the snow returning to the sky; it was the past rewritten with all its mistakes rubbed clean.
While I talked Matt bowed his head so that I couldn’t see his face. I told him everything that had happened the day I came back from Albany, from the moment I walked into the dorm room to the last glimpse I had of the tea tin sinking into the black water. When I finished he asked one question.
“Whose baby was it?”
“Lucy thought it was Ward’s because that’s who Deirdre was with on May Day.”
Matt lifted his head, but he didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the lake, as if drawn there by some kind of magnetism.
“Why did she think the baby was conceived on May Day?”
“Because Deirdre hadn’t been with… anyone… for weeks before. Because of the rain, remember? And the time before that, well, that would have been too long. Lucy said the baby was small so it was probably early and the time worked with May Day.” I was beginning to realize what Matt was afraid of.
“Did you see it?”
I nodded and then realized he still wasn’t looking at me. I decided then to say no, but he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye.
“Who did it look like?” he asked.
“Oh Matt, it hardly looked like a person. It was tiny.” I remembered the way the skin had glowed like opals and the pale red hair like fire.
Matt turned to me and took me by the shoulders. “Did it look like me, Jane? Tell me the truth.”
“Matt,” I cried, surprised at how hard he was gripping me. “It couldn’t be yours because you weren’t with Deirdre on May Day.”
“Shut up, Jane.”
The words startled me more than the way Matt was hurting me. They came from behind us. Matt got up and stepped out of the boat, which rocked so hard I slid and knocked my head on the stern. When I scrambled to my feet and got out at the front of the boat I saw Matt facing his sister, his hands balled into tight fists. I’d never seen him look so angry. Actually, I couldn’t remember ever seeing him angry at all.
“Whose baby was it, Lucy?” he asked his sister.
“It was Deirdre’s baby, Mattie. Isn’t that what Jane told you?” Lucy looked toward me and the coldness of her look shocked me. “She promised not to tell anyone, but that doesn’t matter now. Don’t you believe her, Matt? You know Jane would never lie.”
“I also know she’d believe anything you told her.” Matt came around the boat toward me. He looked so unlike himself that I took a step away from him, but when he took my hand he was gentle.
“You saw it, Jane. Tell me, what color hair did it have?”
“Babies don’t always have hair,” Lucy said. I heard an unfamiliar note of panic in Lucy’s voice. She came around the other side of the boat and stood next to me. We were all three standing in the doorway facing the lake.
“Did it have hair, Jane?”
I looked from Matt to Lucy. Lucy shook her head and, seeing her movement, Matt dropped my hand and whirled around on her. “Was it red like mine, Lucy?” He took a step toward her and Lucy backed up to the edge of the doorway.
“Your cousin has red hair, too, Matt,” I called over his shoulder. “Maybe Deirdre was with Roy on May Day.”
Matt looked back at me and laughed. “Oh, Janie… ,” he began, but before he could finish what he was going to say he was silenced by a sound that made my whole body go cold. It was a high keening moan, like no sound I’d ever heard a human being make, and yet there was something like human emotion in the sound. We both turned to the lake and saw that Lucy had run onto the ice. The moan was coming from the ice itself, buckling under her weight.
I STAND ON THE ICE NOW, PICTURING LUCY COMING OUT OF the icehouse onto the melting ice. She’d run in a straight line from the icehouse out into the middle of the lake, the ice shuddering and moaning at every step, leaving black water in her wake. The path she took is now marked by the channel. When Matt tried to follow her he had to stay on the east side of the lake. That’s how I go now, making toward the east cove and the sister stones. I look down at the ice to see if I can see the mark of skate blades, but the fog is so thick I can’t even see my own feet. It makes me feel queasy, as if I’ve become invisible.
Then I see a figure up ahead, standing still in the fog. I skate toward it, trying to glide on each skate as long as I can so as not to make too much noise. The figure seems not to hear me and I’m afraid I’ll find that it’s Athena, frozen and dead on the ice, but when I reach it I see it’s only one of the statues left over from the ice harvest. I look around and realize they’re everywhere, standing on the ice like sentinels before a tomb. I skate from one to another, looking for some sign that Albie and Athena have passed this way. I stare into each face as if it might speak and tell me where they have gone, and so animate are they it seems they might at any moment gain voice. The crudely hewn features have softened, the caverns of their chisel gouged eyes deepening, rough-cut lips separating as if about to speak. I wonder for a moment how these hastily crafted sculptures have become so lifelike, and then I realize what it is. They’re melting.
I think of the rain I’d encountered on the Northway. The temperature’s been rising steadily since the electrical storm last night. That’s why there’s so much fog. How long, I wonder, before the lake ice melts and cracks? I listen to the low moan of the ice as if it could tell me, and then I realize the moan I’m hearing isn’t coming from the ice, it’s coming from the sister stones, which, I now see, are directly in front of me. I skate toward them, stilling inside myself the terrifying impression that the stones themselves are calling out to me. It’s just another trick of the ice, I tell myself, and then, when that doesn’t work I recite a little Latin to calm myself down.
“Tum rauca adsiduo longe sale saxa sonabat,” I whisper to myself, choosing the Virgil passage Athena translated only last week in class, which describes how Aeneas’s ship navigates around the Sirens’ stones and makes its way to the Italian shore and the sibyl’s cave safely.
I’ve reached the second sister stone where the sound seems to be the loudest and, I can no longer deny, human. But this cry of human anguish is not coming from the sister stone, but from the rock face of the Point. Someone is in the cave. I shuffle forward on my skates as I approach the entrance to the cave, sure that at any moment Dr. Lockhart will pop out and impale me with one of those horrible ice pikes. I take out my can of de-icer and hold my finger over the spray top. But when I peer into the dark cavern I see only Athena, kneeling gagged and tied on the narrow ledge above the ice.
I take off the gag first.
“Dr. Lockhart,” she gasps, “she’s crazy.”
I nod and put a finger to my mouth to shush her.
“Tace,” I say, “I know. Let me untie you and get you out of here.”
The ropes around Athena’s wrists and ankles are too tightly bound to come undone. The more I pluck at the wet, frozen cords the tighter they seem to grow. Her trembling makes it all the harder to undo the knots.
“I need to cut them,” I tell her, as if she could go into the next classroom to borrow a pair of scissors.
“Don’t leave me,” she cries, swinging her head toward me so that I feel the wet ends of her hair brush my cheek. I look up and see the wild fear in her eyes and the tears that streak her muddy face. “She wants to kill me. First she called me Deirdre, then Lucy, then Jane. She didn’t seem to be able to keep straight who I was.”
Athena sobs and I pat her shoulder clumsily. I tell her I won’t leave, but she’s got to help me think of a way of getting these ropes off her. I sit back on my heels to consider our predicament and sit down hard on the ends of my skates.
I’ve got the left skate unlaced and off before I can think through how vulnerable this leaves me if Dr. Lockhart should show up at this moment. What difference does it make though? I’m not leaving here without Athena. I hold the skate by the boot toe, place the blade over the ropes on Athena’s ankles, and start to saw. My travels over the ice have dulled the blades slightly, but they still cut through the ropes, one thread at a time. Or so it seems, so slowly does the rope finally unravel and give way under the metal.
I go to work on her wrists next, twice slipping and nicking her skin in the dark of the cave, but Athena doesn’t call out or complain. When I’ve got the ropes off I help her to her feet, but she ends up having to hold me up. My legs have cramped and I’m off balance with one skate on, one skate off.
“I better put the other one on,” I say. I stuff my left foot into the skate. It feels like I’m forcing my foot into an iron vise. My feet have swollen and blistered and my stocking has torn, so it’s like I’m cramming my bare foot into the stiff leather. I pull the laces tight and try to ignore the searing pain.
“OK,” I say, straightening up, “let’s try to get across the ice to the mansion.” We step out onto the ice and for a moment, after the dark of the cave, I’m blinded by the white glare of the fog. I can barely make out the black mass of the second sister standing guard at the mouth of the cave. The looming shape seems to quiver before me and then to split in two as if I’d started seeing double. But then that second shape comes into focus and sprouts a horrible horn.
It’s Candace Lockhart, crouched and wielding an eight-foot ice pike like a javelin, its steel tip quivering only a few feet from our throats.
“You run for the shore,” I whisper without looking in Athena’s direction, “she’ll follow me.”
“But Magistra…”
“Do what I say.” I say it in my strictest, no-more-fooling-around-I’mthe-teacher voice and not only does it silence Athena but I see from a slight narrowing in her blue eyes that it momentarily unnerves Dr. Lockhart. I think I know why. For a moment, I sounded just like Domina Chambers.
I decide to take advantage of the resemblance. “Alba,” I say sternly as I start to back skate along the edge of the Point, heading out onto the lake, “What do you think you are doing with that thing?”
I see out of the corner of my eye Athena making her unsteady way over the ice to the shore and then she disappears in the fog. Dr. Lockhart appears not to notice, she is staring at me. Then she blinks and laughs.
“As if you could ever take her place.”
“I have taken her place,” I say, putting a few more feet between us. I’ve never been much good at skating backward, but I remember Matt showing me how to do it. In and out, little figure eights with your feet, it’s all in the inner thighs. The insides of my thighs feel like melting ice and I can’t even feel my feet, but I widen the distance between us while keeping my eyes locked on hers. I’m afraid that when she notices she’ll throw the pike or rush me, but instead she starts skating toward me, slowly, as if maintaining a polite conversational distance.
“That’s what you wanted to do with Lucy,” she says. “You wanted to take her place. First you took her scholarship away, then you wanted Matt.”
I lift my shoulders in an attempt at a casual shrug, but it feels more like cringing. “Lucy wanted me to try for the scholarship,” I say.
She laughs. I’m surprised at the high-pitched nervousness of it, like a child caught stealing. Something about this conversation is getting to her, unraveling some carefully preserved veil she keeps in place. I have to keep her engaged—entertained, so to speak—or she’ll tire of it and I’ll end up impaled on that ice pike just like Vesta.
It’s a mistake thinking of Vesta. She sees, I think, the fear in my eyes, but instead of attacking me with the pike, she digs in another way. “Poor stupid Jane,” she says in a voice that’s suddenly not her own. “Thought we were competing for the Iris, as if I wanted it. As if I wanted to be separated from Matt. We picked you that first day as the best one to win it so I wouldn’t have to leave Mattie. Didn’t realize what a slow study you were, though. Didn’t even know what a declension was! Mattie thought that was hilarious.”
The mimicry is so precise it almost stops me on the ice. But of course that’s what she wants. I keep my feet moving. In and out, little figure eights. Press my thighs together until tears sting my eyes.
“God, what an idiot you were, Janie. You actually thought we were skating those nights we went to the icehouse,” the voice has changed, now it’s Deirdre’s voice. “But we saw you come creeping out on the lake to spy on us, me and Mattie. That’s why you wanted to get rid of me, isn’t it? So you could have Mattie to yourself?”
“I didn’t want to get rid of Deirdre, it was Lucy—”
“Who drove her out onto the Point? You were glad to see her die. Why else didn’t you go and pull her out? You let her die there, clinging to the ice.”
“That’s not how it happened,” I say, although I know I can’t win an argument with a crazy woman; all I can hope is that as long as I keep her talking she won’t throw that spear. “We went down to the hole in the ice where she went in. She wasn’t there. She didn’t cling to the ice.”
Dr. Lockhart shakes her head. “I saw it all.” Her voice is small now, the voice of a small, frightened child. “I hid behind the sister stones and watched her until she couldn’t hold on any longer. She said your name over and over again. ‘Jane,’ she called, ‘Jane, you promised.’ ”
This time her mimicry does stop me dead on the ice. Because it’s not Deirdre’s voice she’s imitating. It’s Lucy’s.
“You mean Lucy,” I say. “You watched Lucy clinging to the ice.”
She has stopped, too. She lifts the back of her right wrist, the hand still gripping the lower end of the shaft, to wipe her eyes. The point of the ice pike tilts up and I realize, a moment too late, that it’s my best opportunity to rush her, but she sees me coming and lowers the pole again so that I nearly impale myself on it. The metal tip slices through my down parka as I backskate away from it.
“You killed her,” she cries, moving forward again. “You left her to die even though you promised you’d come back for her.”
M ATT FOLLOWED L UCY ONTO THE ICE AND I FOLLOWED HIM. I saw cracks shooting out in all directions from his footsteps and the ice seemed to scream as if it were human flesh being torn. The black water crept between the cracks. But still Matt walked forward as if he didn’t notice the ice breaking all around him. For every step he took forward Lucy took one backward. It was like a dance along an invisible tightrope and I realized they were walking over the same ice that Lucy and I had broken through with the boat. It was where the underground spring fed into the Schwanenkill and the ice was always the thinnest.
I called to them but they paid no attention to me.
“Matt,” I called, desperate to get his attention, “I’ll tell you. I did see the baby and his hair was red.”
Matt turned to me and in that instant a crack opened up in the ice just behind Lucy. She staggered for a moment, beating the air with her arms. For a moment I thought she had caught her balance. Matt turned back to her. He was so close to her that all he’d have to do is reach out his hand and grab her and she’d be safe. But when he turned to her I saw something change in Lucy’s face. It was the first time, I think, that I’d ever seen her truly frightened. She took a step back and fell into the black water.
“IT WAS BECAUSE YOU TOLD HIM,” DR. LOCKHART SAYS IN a whisper so low I can barely hear it over the scrape of her skates moving steadily toward me. “You should have seen the look on his face when he knew it was his baby. It killed her.”
“But how did you see…” and then I understand. She wasn’t hiding behind the door of the icehouse. She’d been hiding behind the sister stone. The only part of the argument she’d heard that night was when I told Matt that the baby was his. “But Dr. Lockhart,” I say, “Albie, I tried to save her. I loved her, too.”
She lowers the ice pike and for a moment I think I’ve gained some ground. I think she’s going to drop the pole to the ice, but instead she lifts one knee and, drawing her lips back like a snarling cat, snaps the pole neatly in two. The crack it makes echoes over the ice. “Liar,” she hisses, “I saw everything,” and then, holding the lighter weapon like a hockey stick, comes at me.
I turn and tear into the ice with my skates. I feel cold metal graze my neck and I fall headlong to the ice, splaying out on the slippery ice. She’s on me at once. Her knee digs into the small of my back and she pulls my head up off the ice by yanking my hair back. I can feel the serrated tips of her skate blades grinding into my legs.
“You left her to die,” she hisses into my ear. “You promised to save her and you left her on the ice to die.” She wraps her hand once in my hair and slams my face to the ice. I hear a loud crack and I think it must be my skull. Before my eyes darkness spreads like a cool green blanket waiting to envelop me. OK, I think, OK. Somewhere far above me I hear a child crying.
“She said she’d never leave me. She promised, she promised.” With every promise my head slams into the ice and the darkness spreads, like blood pooling. It is blood pooling. My blood. It’s seeping between the cracks in the ice. Dripping into the black water. Through the red-stained blackness I see Lucy’s face. Her lips are forming a word but I can’t hear what she’s saying because all around us the ice is cracking.
W HEN HE SAW L UCY STEP BACK INTO THE WATER, M ATT FROZE. I thought he’d go to her, but he stood on the ice as if he’d become a part of it. When I passed him I brushed against his arm and I felt that he was trembling. I saw why. Between him and Lucy the ice had broken into three pieces. The piece that Lucy clung to was loose. When she tried to move her elbow forward on it, the slab tilted toward her. I got down on my hands and knees and held down the other end of the ice.
“Look,” I said to Matt. “If you hold this still, maybe I can help her back up.” I looked back over my shoulder to see if he had heard me. His eyes were fixed past me, on Lucy’s face, just as her eyes were fixed on his. It was like I wasn’t even there.
I tugged on his pant leg and pulled him down to his knees. “Just hold this,” I yelled. He didn’t move his eyes off Lucy, but he did what I told him to. He crouched on the edge of the unbroken ice and held the slab of ice that lay between us and Lucy. I crawled onto the slab of loose ice and felt it rock in the water, but I also felt Matt adjust his grip to steady it. I got on my belly and crept forward. When I got to Lucy I could see that ice was clinging to her hair and her lips were blue. She was trying to say something, but her teeth were chattering too hard for me to understand her. I tried to move closer, but just as I touched her hand the ice beneath me rocked free and I saw Lucy’s eyes widen in fear. I looked over my shoulder and saw Matt crouched on the edge of the ice. He was still looking at Lucy, but he’d let go of the ice and stretched his arms over his head, his two hands coming together as if in prayer. I tried to remember where I’d seen him in this pose before and then remembered. At the swim club.
He only looked away from Lucy at the last moment to tuck in his chin. He went into the water without a splash. His form perfect.
“Jane,” Lucy said, “Jane.” I could see she was struggling to control the shaking so that she could speak. “You have to save him.”
“I can’t,” I told her. “He’s below the ice. Let me help you.” But as I spoke we both saw him surface a few feet away. He got one arm onto the ice, but made no effort to pull himself up. He looked around and when he saw us—or saw Lucy, I should say, because he seemed to look right through me—he shook his head.
I took Lucy’s hand and tried to pull her up but she pulled her hand out of mine. “No,” she said, “I won’t come out until he’s safe. Go help him and then me. Promise, Jane. Promise you’ll save him first.”
I could see it was no good arguing with her. I turned on the ice and crawled toward Matt. I could hear Lucy behind me. Every time I stopped she called my name. “Jane,” she said, over and over, “you promised.” And so I kept going away from her.
When I was a few inches from Matt I think he finally saw me. He smiled. Like a boy playing keep away. Then he took a deep breath and sank back under the water. I saw his face, like a pale green star under the black water, grow smaller and smaller and then disappear. I turned back to Lucy, and saw that she’d sunk lower in the water, her lips touching the surface. She was going under. There wasn’t time to crawl to her. I threw myself down on the ice and reached for her hand. I felt her fingers under mine—felt them pull away from me and saw her slip into the darkness.
THE ICE FEELS COOL AGAINST MY CHEEK NOW THAT DR. Lockhart has stopped slamming my head into it. At some point, she promised became you promised. I picture her—I picture Albie—hiding behind the sister stone and listening to Lucy saying these words to me as I crawled away from her. I can’t blame her for thinking I left her to die. Even if I could explain that the promise I made was to save Matt, the truth would be the same. I let her convince me. She knew how I felt about Matt. Knew I would go. And when I reached for Lucy’s hand what Albie saw was not Lucy pulling her hand away but me prying her fingers off the ice and sending her to her death.
“You promised, you promised,” she whimpers. She sounds like a child and I know she isn’t just repeating Lucy’s last words. I wonder how long Albie stayed there that night, hiding on the ice because there was no one to come for her. Not even Lucy who had promised always to come for her. When she finally left she stole into our room and found my journal. She’d read the last line I’d written that night. I won’t let anyone stand in my way. Not even Lucy.
When they tore up the ice on the lake Albie smashed the fanlight above the doors to Main Hall. She smashed the heart and the words of Lucy’s broken promise. I picture shattered glass, like the window in Dean Buehl’s office this morning, only instead of light pouring through the cracks there’s black water—a blackness that’s swallowing me, making it hard to think.
You promised, I hear, and there is something about the childish refrain—you promised, you promised—that I think I should remember.
I feel the weight lift off my back and something sharp and metal gnaws into my side. I remember who said that last. Olivia. But you promised, she said on the phone.
The knife in my side is Dr. Lockhart’s skate. She’s kicking me over, rolling me like a log. I roll once, and feel something dig into my side. It’s not Dr. Lockhart’s skate though. It’s the can of de-icer in my coat pocket. I open my eyes and through a blur of blood see where I’m being rolled. We’re inches from the open black water of the ice canal. She only has to roll me once more and I’ll be in the water, my heavy skates pulling me to the bottom.
And then I won’t see Olivia tomorrow. She’ll wait and wait for me and think she wasn’t worth coming for. After all, I’ve already abandoned her once.
I wait for the sharp metal to mash into my skin again and when the searing pain blooms there, I wrap my left arm around her ankles and pull her down. When her face is close enough I pull out the de-icer and spray it directly into her eyes. She screams and tumbles over me, almost gracefully, and would, I later think, have neatly regained her balance if she’d landed on ice and not the edge of the canal. She teeters for a moment and then slips into the black water.
I lie on the ice for a moment, trying to hear above the sound of my own ragged breath sounds of struggle in the water. But there’s nothing. She’s dropped as silently as a stone into the lake. After a minute, I turn myself painfully onto my stomach and creep along the ice to the edge of the canal. I’m only an inch or two from the edge when I see the fingernails embedded in the ice. I try to push back, but my hair trails in front of me and she grabs a handful and pulls herself up by it. I see her blue eyes, like painted eyes on a marble statue, just above the surface of the ice, fixed on mine. But then I realize that the chemical spray has blinded her. She can’t see me.
I reach out my hand along the ice, and lay it over her other hand, the one not holding onto my hair. She tries to pull away, but I talk softly. “It’s OK, Albie,” I say, “It’s Lucy. I’ve come to get you. Let me help you.” I see her trying to dig her nails out of the ice to take my hand, but she can’t. So I move forward another inch and take her hand, prying each finger out of the ice until I’ve got a good grip. I’ve never noticed how small and slender her hands are. Just like Lucy’s.
And like Lucy she has a grip like a vise. She snakes her hand around my wrist and pulls. I slide forward on the ice and would slide in, except now I feel another pull, someone pulling on my feet. I begin to slide away from the canal, but she won’t let go of my hand and she won’t try to help herself up onto the ice. A clump of my hair tears away in her hand and she slips down under the water, but still she holds on to my wrist.
“Let go!” I hear someone shout behind me. It’s Roy. “You can’t save her. The ice is cracking.”
I turn my head a little to one side and see dark cracks, like fine veins in marble, radiating out all around me.
“She won’t let go of me,” I say, so faintly I’m sure he won’t hear me, but he does. I feel him creeping up beside me, careful to keep one arm around me so I won’t slip into the canal. He must see the dark veins widening under his weight, but he doesn’t stop until his face is near mine and we are both looking over the canal’s edge into the water. Candace Lockhart’s face is a few inches below the water, the whites of her open eyes tinged green by the lake. Roy reaches over me to where she’s got my wrist and tries to unpry her fingers from my hand.
“No,” I breathe.
“She’s gone, Jane. Look at her.”
I look back into the water. Her eyes are open, her lips slightly parted, but there are no air bubbles coming from her mouth. Still, I can feel those eyes watching me, some will rising up toward me through the filter of cold green water, and then I see her, just as I saw Matt’s features rise up in Roy’s, I see Lucy, her eyes looking out of Albie’s blue eyes.
I reach forward with my other hand, but just as I do I feel her fingers, one by one, lifting off my wrist and her small, white hand, relaxed and open, slips below the water, the fingers slightly curled. She sinks, straight and slow, her white hair fanning up around her face, her blue eyes burning like twin stars until they’re extinguished by the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-four
W HATEVER MADE THEM PICK MAY DAY FOR THE Founder’s day Picnic?” Hespera, the eighth grader whose stola I am fixing, complains. “It’s too cold up here to frolic half naked around a Maypole.”
I try to smile but my mouth is full of hairpins.
Athena answers for me. “It’s the founder’s birthday, or close to it.”
I nod, taking the pins out of my mouth. “Yep, India Crevecoeur was born on May 4, 1886. So this would be her one hundred and tenth birthday and it’s the seventieth anniversary of the school’s founding. I actually met her once.”
“Really, Magistra? You couldn’t possibly be that old,” Octavia, who’s sewing up a seam on Flavia’s stola, asks wide-eyed. Flavia rolls her eyes at her sister. When the sisters came back to Latin they demanded a Latin club. To revive our classical spirit, they said. Now they vie with one another to see who has the most classical spirit and who can be nicest to their teacher who valiantly saved the life of one of their classmates. It was their idea to stage a Procession of Floralia for the Founder’s Day Maypole dance.
“Prima,” I say, “I am that old, and secunda, she was ancient. Ninety, I guess, because it was my junior year and the fiftieth anniversary of the school’s founding.”
“Wow, was she like all senile?” Mallory Martin, although not a Latin student, has volunteered to join in the Procession of Floralia. Mostly because, Athena asserts, she thinks she looks good in a sheet.
“No, actually she was sharp as a tack. She recognized me as the granddaughter of her maid, who’d worked for her fifty years before.”
“Your grandmother was a maid here?” Athena asks, pushing her hair, recently dyed sea-green, out of her eyes. I’d been looking forward to seeing its natural shade grow out, but she’d gone to the city last weekend and “caved in to peer pressure” at some East Village clip joint. I was disappointed at first, but now that I’ve gotten used to the color I have to admit that with her green eyes and pale skin it’s kind of arresting. Especially today. For her role as goddess of the lake for the Procession of Floralia she’s robed in a green satin sheet, a sheet volunteered by, of all people, Gwen Marsh. Satin sheets, Gwen? I say every time I see her now. It’s just one of the surprising things I’ve learned about Gwen Marsh in the last few weeks as I’ve tried to get to know her better. The other is that under those Ace bandages are old scars.
“Uh-huh,” I say absently as I notice the time. “But we’re going to be late for our meeting. Hadn’t you better change?”
Athena shrugs and pulls on a denim jacket over her sea-green stola. “Why? Is it a formal thing?”
“I don’t know what kind of thing it is. Dean Buehl just said it was Heart Lake business and she wants both of us in the Music Room at noon.”
“I think they will give you a medal for saving Athena’s life,” Octavia says.
“And for defeating the evil Dr. Lockhart,” Flavia adds.
I could say for the hundredth time that I tried to save Dr. Lockhart and failed, but even I am getting tired of hearing myself say it.
“Well, if that’s the occasion,” Athena says, “I definitely think I should go as Goddess of the Lake.” Athena strikes a pose—one finger to her left temple, her right hand curled in the air as if holding a scepter—much like a figure of a Greek goddess I once saw on an Attic vase. For not the first time I think there is something regal in Athena’s bearing. Maybe that’s why her name seems to suit her so well.
“All right,” I say. “Deo parere libertas est.” Before Octavia can get out her book of Latin quotations I provide the source and translation. “Seneca,” I say, “To obey a god—or in this case, a goddess—is freedom. OK, then, Octavia and Flavia, I leave it to you to organize the procession. You’ve got the wreaths and garlands.”
“Check.”
“Athena and I will meet you outside the mansion at one o’clock then. Bona fortuna, puellae.”
We have to stop twice on the path to the mansion to pin closed the seams on Athena’s stola which keeps blowing open in the wind. Most of the girls have opted to wear clothes under their stola, but Athena, always a purist, is not even wearing underwear. Luckily I have a pocketful of safety pins. I remember that Domina Chambers always kept a supply of pins on hand for errant toga and stola seams. When we get to the foot of the mansion steps she stops and walks a few feet away to the edge of the lake. I think there must be a problem with her outfit again, but when I catch up to her I see that she’s started to cry. I sit down on a rock by the edge of water and pat the stone for her to sit next to me.
“We’re already late,” she says tucking the folds of the sheet up around her knees so she can sit down on the rock. I’m glad that the stone has been warmed in the sun. Even though Hespera is right about it being too cold to frolic half naked around a Maypole, it is an extraordinarily beautiful day. The lake, under a cloudless blue sky, is so bright it’s hard to look at it.
“They’ll wait,” I tell Athena. “After all, how can they start without the Goddess of the Lake?”
“Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, considering…” Her voice trails off as she stares into the hard glitter of the lake. We both know how much there is to consider. I wonder if Athena will ever look at this lake without remembering the two friends she lost to it. I know I can’t.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say, something I’ve said, and had said to me, countless times in the last two months. Still we go on blaming ourselves. Roy and I have gone around and around it. He suspected, as soon as I found the deer’s mask, that it must be Albie because she was there on May Day and could have found the mask after he left it in the woods. But he hadn’t guessed that Albie was Dr. Lockhart.
The only one who knew that for sure was Dean Buehl and she holds herself accountable for hiring Dr. Lockhart in the first place.
“I felt so awful when the girl was expelled. I told her she’d always have a home here at Heart Lake and she took me at my word. How could I turn her away again? Then she asked me not to tell anyone she’d gone here and been thrown out. You see, she wasn’t really an old girl.”
“She took advantage of you,” I’ve said many times to Dean Buehl. “You couldn’t have known she was crazy. Maybe she would have been all right if I had never shown up here.”
“Well, that certainly isn’t your fault.” And so it goes—the two of us absolving each other of our sins. Sometimes I wonder if there’s any end to this cycle of guilt and retribution. Even Athena has been sucked into the whirlpool of blame.
“But she couldn’t have done it without me,” she says now. “I told her we’d taken the boat out from the icehouse…”
“You certainly couldn’t know she’d use it to take Olivia out to the rock that day,” I say trying to keep my voice from shaking. It’s still unbearable for me to think of Olivia and Dr. Lockhart in that boat. Or to think of Dr. Lockhart lurking around the preschool, seeding the ground with cornicula.
“I also told her you left your homework folder on your desk.” Athena sighs. She’s determined, I see, to confess all. Maybe she needs to finally get it all out.
I nod. “That’s how she sent me that first journal page, but she would have found another way.”
“I told her about Melissa’s crush on Brian and she sent her those awful letters from Exeter pretending to be a girl who knew Brian.”
“Yes,” I say, remembering the Exeter stationery I saw in the attic bedroom, “and then she must have called Melissa and pretended that she was that girl, to lure her down to the lake.” I remember how well she was able to change her voice. A natural mimic.
“And I told her I was mad at Vesta for planning to go skating alone that night and she waited for her out there and killed her.”
“Athena, you thought you were talking to a psychologist. You were supposed to tell her things. You couldn’t have known what she would do with the information. She used you,” I say, “but it was to get at me. She wanted me to relive that whole awful year only, this time, not to survive it.”
“But it wasn’t your fault what happened twenty years ago.”
“From where she stood it was.” And she may have been right, I add to myself. Some part of me wanted Deirdre gone so I could have Lucy to myself and some part of me was willing to save Matt at the risk of losing Lucy. The part of me that didn’t want to be left out again. In many ways, I was a lot like Albie.
“So why didn’t she kill me, too?” Athena asks, shading her eyes from the glare off the lake so she can see my eyes when I answer.
I tuck a strand of sea green hair behind her ear. “I think you reminded her of herself. Her notes on your sessions, she wasn’t talking about you anymore, she was telling her own story through you. A girl who had been shuttled from school to school…” Athena looks away and I wonder if I should go on. “Whose parents don’t seem to care…” I stop. How many of these girls, I wonder, have a little Albie inside of them?
I shiver at the thought and Athena, as if reading my thoughts, sets me straight. “I’m not that girl,” she says. “And neither are you.”
THEY’RE WAITING FOR US IN THE MUSIC ROOM. LUNCH TODAY is a barbecue on the swimming beach, so we’ve got the room to ourselves. Sitting on one side of the long table, their backs to the long windows facing the lake, are Dean Buehl, Meryl North, Tacy Beade, Myra Todd, Gwendoline Marsh, and one man in a dark suit whom I don’t recognize. Roy Corey sits next to two empty chairs on the other side. The long expanse of polished mahogany is bare except for a pitcher of water and some glasses and a manila folder in front of the man, who rises as we come in to introduce himself as the lawyer in charge of the Crevecoeurs’ estate. I shake his hand and sit down next to Roy. Athena is still standing.
“And you must be Miss Craven. I know your aunt. She wanted to be here today…”
“But she’s got something, somewhere, I know.” Athena ignores the lawyer’s outstretched hand and plops down in the chair next to me. Two of the pins in her stola pop open, but, much to my relief, the folds of Gwen Marsh’s satin sheets stay in place. I notice Myra Todd staring at Athena’s outfit, pursing her lips to comment, but before she can the lawyer slaps his hand down on the manila folder.
“Well, since all the principals involved are present,” he says, “let’s begin.”
“I don’t see why Jane Hudson is here,” Myra says. “She isn’t on the board and she isn’t a principal.”
“A principal in what?” I ask, more confused than insulted. “Would someone please say what this is about.”
“India Crevecoeur’s bequest,” Miss North, the historian answers. “When she turned the property over to be made into a school her relatives were furious. She agreed that she’d give the family a chance to reclaim the property.”
“But not until the seventieth anniversary of the founding,” Tacy Beade finishes.
“When most of them would be long dead,” Dean Buehl adds. “It was her idea of a little joke.”
We all instinctively look up at the family portrait that hangs at the end of the room from which India Crevecoeur, dour as Queen Victoria, looks down on us.
“She doesn’t look like she would have much of a sense of humor,” Roy says.
I’d be inclined to agree, but then I look at Tacy Beade and remember that May Day morning twenty years ago when the old woman escaped from her and Miss Macintosh and found her way into the mansion.
“So, the school could go back into private hands?” Across the table seven heads nod in agreement.
I am surprised at how bereft I feel at the thought of Heart Lake closing. After Dr. Lockhart’s death I told Dean Buehl I’d stay to the end of the term but I just couldn’t say for sure what I would do after that. She said she understood the place must have bad memories for me and promised that she would write me a good reference. But now, at the thought of Heart Lake closing its doors forever, I am suddenly enraged.
“That bitch,” I say so loudly even Athena looks shocked. “How could she do it? What about all the girls here? Where are they supposed to go?” I imagine all of us—teachers and students—in a procession north to St. Eustace’s. I wonder if it still exists. Or has Heart Lake become the last stop, the school of last resort? And if it has, what refuge is left if Heart Lake closes?
“Jane,” Dean Buehl says, “I know how you feel. But the school won’t close if the Crevecoeur descendants don’t want it to.” Her eyes slide from me to Roy and Athena. Roy shifts nervously in his chair and Athena slides a little lower down in hers and bites a cuticle.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, “my aunt said we were related to those people. That’s why she sent me here, because she got a break on tuition or something. Well, if it’s up to me, I say, sure, the school should, like, go on.”
“Wait a second,” I say, “Athena’s only just turned eighteen. Shouldn’t she have a lawyer present? She doesn’t have to decide right now, does she?”
“Now you’re worried about Miss Craven’s rights?” Myra Todd asks. “A minute ago you were all upset about the school closing.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Roy says. “I’m the only other descendant, right?”
I look over at him incredulously and he shrugs. I remember then, that May Day, old Mrs. Crevecoeur telling Lucy that the Coreys were related to the Crevecoeurs if you went back far enough. Then it hits me, what any good Latin teacher should have noticed long ago. Craven and Corey. They each derive from one half on the name Crevecoeur.
Myra Todd shifts uneasily in her chair, releasing a whiff of mold into the room. “That settles it then, the bequest becomes permanent and the board now has access to the whole estate—”
“With Mr. Corey and Miss Craven installed as lifetime board members for which they will be paid a stipend…” Dean Buehl is already rising from her seat. All the women on that side of the table are following suit when the lawyer stops them.
“Well, that would be the case,” he says, “if not for the codicil.”
“The codicil?” Dean Buehl echoes, falling back to her seat. One by one the rest of the women sink down, like sails in a regatta becalmed by a lull in the wind.
“Yes, India Crevecoeur added a codicil to her bequest on May 4, 1976. It was, I understand, prompted by her visit to the school on the fiftieth anniversary of the Founder’s Day. If you will all listen patiently now, I will read to you the terms of the codicil.” He looks at each of us in turn to see if any one of us will object, but when we all remain silent, he extracts a thick sheet of cream-colored writing paper from a folder and reads, at first in a hurried monotone as he dutifully repeats the legal formulas, and then slowly when he comes to the substance of India Crevecoeur’s missive.
“It was my intent, after the death of my youngest daughter, Iris, to transform a scene of grief to one of communal productivity and improvement for young girls. I had some qualms, though, that in providing for strangers I might be impoverishing the children of my children, and so I made my bequest provisional. I confess I was afraid, as well, that a school founded so on grief might founder, and I wanted to give my descendants an opportunity to reclaim their inheritance if such were the case.
“It is not surprising, though, that in my grief-stricken state I overlooked one thing. I’d meant the school to honor the memory of my lost daughter, Iris, and so I should have provided especially for her relations instead of just my own.”
Myra Todd clucks her tongue. “She must have been senile. The girl died at twelve! She wasn’t old enough to marry. How could she have relations that weren’t Crevecoeur descendants?”
The lawyer glares at Myra and resumes. “My daughter Iris was adopted.” He pauses a moment for us to take in this piece of information. We all look again at the family portrait at the end of the room. There’s little Iris standing off to one side of the group, closer to her nursemaid than the rest of the family. She’s small and dark, where everyone else in the family is large and fair.
“She was the natural child of an unfortunate girl who worked in our mill. I’d long wanted a third daughter, but the good Lord had chosen not to bless me with that boon. When I was made aware of the mill girl’s predicament I proposed to give the innocent baby a good home—and offered the mill girl a position in my own household. When our little Iris left us, her natural mother chose to leave as well. I could understand her reluctance to remain on the scene of such a tragedy. I tried to make what amends I could, but I’m afraid her daughter’s death left the poor woman distracted with a grief that turned to bitter gall in her heart. She even blamed my own two daughters, Rose and Lily, for the death of her child.”
I look up at the portrait. Rose and Lily, smiling smugly at the camera. What use would they have had for this strange dark interloper? I remember the story of how the two older girls had taken the youngest out in a boat and she’d fallen in. She’d been saved, but she’d gotten a chill and fallen ill with the flu that was ravaging the country. When I look away from the picture, I notice that Dean Buehl and Roy are both staring at me.
“When it recently came to my attention that my former servant—Iris’s mother—had subsequently married and borne a child of her own, who in turn had her own child, I realized that the chance to make amends had finally arrived. Better late than never, as the girl herself said to me.”
It’s that phrase, so out of tune with the rest of India Crevecoeur’s language, that finally wakes me up. I remember the way the old woman looked at me when I said it. I thought she was appalled at my cheek. Appalled to find her servant’s granddaughter attending her school.
Although the lawyer is still reading I get up and walk over to the picture. I look, not at poor, spindly legged Iris, but at the nursemaid, my grandmother, who bends down to fix her charge’s ribbon. At least, that’s what I always assumed she was doing. Now that I look more closely I see she’s giving the girl a little push, trying to send her closer to her sisters so that she’ll be part of the family group. Why didn’t I ever wonder how the maid got in the family portrait? Was it because Iris would never have been far from her? I look at the maid’s face; her brow, dark and plain, is pinched with worry, but under that anxiety, that her child will never really fit in with her adopted family, I think I can read, in the plain brown eyes, familiar to me as my own, something like love.
“And so, Miss Hudson,” the lawyer is saying, as I turn back to face the table where everyone is now looking toward me, “Mrs. Crevecoeur left the deciding vote to you. The granddaughter of Iris’s mother.”
“Well, then I say make the bequest permanent.”
“As you told Miss Craven,” the lawyer says, “you don’t have to decide right now. Certainly you’ll want to consider the amount of money you’d be giving up.”
Dean Buehl claps her hand to her breast and begins to weep as if she’d been holding back this uncharacteristic flood of emotions the whole time. Athena looks at her and starts to giggle, but stops herself by biting her thumb. Roy gets up and puts his arm around me.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Why? Would you like me better if I were an heiress?”
The smile he gives me comes slowly but reaches into someplace deep, someplace that feels as if it’s never been touched until now, like the cold bottom of the lake that the sun has never warmed before this moment. “You forget,” he says, “you’re my heart’s true love.”
“Oh yeah,” I say.
Then the others are around us, all talking at once, but it’s Athena I hear.
“You’re going to be late, Magistra.”
“Yikes, you’re right.” I look down at my watch.
“The procession?” Roy asks.
“Something else,” I tell him, giving him a quick, hard kiss on the mouth. “A surprise.”
I RUN DOWN THE STEPS OF THE MANSION. MY GIRLS ARE gathered there, the flowers in their hair trembling in the light breeze coming off the lake. I wave to them and tell them that Athena will lead the procession and I’ll join them at the Maypole. Beyond them I see the car parked down by the lake. As I step off the path, the car door opens and she gets out. For a moment, she is only a dark figure silhouetted against the bright fire of the lake; a small girl standing alone in an enormous swirl of atoms. Then she sees me and comes running, arms open wide.