River Road

by Carol Goodman

  The climb back up the hill was rough. The snow had melted in the sun and then turned to ice as the day grew colder, making the footing slippery. I kept sliding backward on my skis and falling. I fell over and over, my feet and hands clumsy with the cold. By the time I reached the top of the hill I staggered out of the woods like the last survivor of a new ice age—and blundered straight into another skier.

  We went down in a tangle of legs and skis and poles. The other skier was wearing a face mask and sleek neoprene leggings and jacket. I couldn’t even tell gender until she ripped off her mask, unleashing a Medusa’s nest of braids.

  “Cressida?”

  “Nan? What are you doing here? You ran right into me. I was going too fast to stop.”

  “I-I-I . . .” My teeth were chattering too hard to talk.

  “You’re suffering from hypothermia,” Cressida said with clinical calm.

  I tried to protest but I couldn’t form the words. My lips felt swollen and clumsy, my thoughts sluggish and confused.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Cressida said, deftly unsnapping her boots out of her skis and helping me up. “We’ll go to my house—it’s closer.” I tried to tell her that my house was just down the hill but I couldn’t find the words. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted Cressida to see the sad state of my house. Even if I was suffering from hypothermia.

  Though we were friends, I’d never been to Cressida’s house. I had gotten the feeling over the years that she cherished her privacy. I could never live with anyone, she’d once told me. I think writers are naturally reclusive. So, even though she lived just up the hill from me in the old Blackwell gatehouse, I’d never “popped in” to borrow sugar or to ask if she wanted to take a walk. We did most of our socializing trading quips across the hall between our offices, at department parties, and over the occasional drink at the Black Swan. Now, approaching the tiny brick house with black-and-cream gables overlooking the river, I felt like I was being admitted to the inner sanctum. I was expecting something like the witch’s gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel.” Instead, she led me inside to a spare but comfortable room with gleaming hardwood floors, a cream-colored sofa and sleek Scandinavian chairs, and uncurtained glass windows with spectacular views facing east over the orchards on one side of the house and west toward the river on the other side. She turned on a gas fire in a circular glass hearth that glowed over crystal shards.

  “Take off your clothes and I’ll get you something to put on.”

  Embarrassed, I plucked at my soaked clothing ineffectively. When she came back with fleece leggings and a silk T-shirt I’d barely gotten one sock off. She did the rest, in a businesslike fashion that spared me any further embarrassment. I might have been a Barbie doll she was undressing. The leggings and shirt she put on me felt delicious, like they were made of spun clouds. She put wool socks on my feet and wrapped me in a sheepskin throw, then went to make tea. I sat on the couch and looked around me, feeling like I’d landed in Valhalla. Everything was neat and polished. Even her desk—a gleaming length of pale wood cantilevered beneath a wide window with practically the same view I had from my desk—contained only a neat stack of papers (graded, I was sure) and an open laptop displaying a muted seascape—a familiar-looking seascape.

  I got up and shuffled across the floor in stocking feet to get a closer look. Yes, it was the picture posted over the thread on “Overheard at Acheron.”

  “I think it’s unconscionable how social media is spinning your story, Nan.” Cressida had come up behind me on silent slippered feet. She led me away from the screen, sat me back down on the couch, and handed me a glass mug of steaming hot liquid. I wrapped both hands around it and took a cautious sip. It tasted sweet and faintly medicinal, some kind of herbal tea with something alcoholic added, brandy perhaps, or some kind of Nordic glogg.

  “I tried to add a more reasoned voice to the discussion but things had gone too far. Fama volat, as Virgil says, and this is indeed a monster with a hundred eyes and a thousand tongues beneath each wing.”

  I shuddered at the image and Cressida twitched the sheepskin throw over my shoulders. “It must be awful being the target of such vitriol. I can imagine that you needed to get out. Is that what you were doing in the woods? Or were you coming from the river? Your clothes and shoes were wet . . . you weren’t . . . ?”

  Her voice trailed off and she lifted her eyebrows expectantly. I stared at her, my mind still so sluggish that it took a moment before I realized that she was asking me if I had tried to drown myself.

  “No!” I said, sloshing tea in my eagerness to correct what she was thinking. “I didn’t . . . I wouldn’t . . .” I could feel my face and hands burning, the blood that had fled from my extremities rushing back in a hot, shameful flood. Because I had been thinking about it. The heat at least released my tongue. “I went down to the river because I followed Troy Van Donk to the old boathouse. Apparently it’s where our students go to get high.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Cressida said, steadying my hand and guiding the mug to my lips. The hot liquid was bringing feeling back to my body but my words must have been coming out slurred. “I didn’t know you were so concerned about student drug use.”

  “Of course I am,” I said automatically, “but that’s not . . . I followed Troy because . . .” I tried to reconstruct the logic of the morning. I’d gone to the woods because of the dream I’d had, but I couldn’t tell Cressida that.

  “I was trying to remember what happened the night of the accident.”

  “What do you mean? You said you hit a deer—are you unsure of that now?”

  “Not that part. After, when I was in the woods looking for the deer, I sat down . . . and fell asleep for a while . . .”

  I waited for Cressida to express the astonishment that others did at this point in the story but she only waited patiently for me to go on. She would have made a good therapist. Or a good cop.

  “. . . and then I had a dream, someone calling ‘Come back.’ I thought it was the dream I always have about Emmy but now I wonder if it could have been someone calling Leia back that night . . . someone who . . .”

  “Ran her over?” Cressida asked coolly. “Was it a woman’s voice?”

  “I don’t know. I thought so because it always is in my dream, but now I’m not sure.”

  “You could have superimposed your dream on what you heard. You know my theory about why Jane hears Rochester’s voice at the end of Jane Eyre?”

  “No,” I said, smiling. Leave it to Cressida to turn everything back to a literary criticism. “What is it?”

  “She’s really hearing her own voice, but she superimposes Rochester’s voice over her own because she’s still in thrall to the male patriarchy. So you did the opposite—you superimposed a female voice over a male’s because it’s what you expect to hear in your own dream.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a little blurry—as I often did when my colleagues discussed recondite literary theory. “I suppose that’s possible. At any rate I went to the woods to remember it better.”

  “And did you?”

  “I didn’t really get a chance. I saw Troy and this sleazy older guy. They were arguing about something they’d hidden—drugs, I think.”

  Cressida rolled her eyes. “I’m not surprised. I know you’ve always thought well of Troy Van Donk but I’ve always thought he was low-life scum.”

  “That’s a little harsh,” I said, “but I am afraid that he may have fallen in with the wrong crowd—Leia too. Troy mentioned her. He said that he didn’t think I killed her.”

  “Well, you are his favorite teacher.”

  “I am?” The pleasure I felt was immediately followed by a surge of embarrassment that I would still feel pleased that a drug-using student liked me. “How do you know?”

  “He told me on the day he came in to castigate me for upsetting Leia at the party. He said you were the only teacher he’d had at Acheron who gave a damn about him.”

  “Oh,”
I said, thinking guiltily that I hadn’t spent much time worrying about him lately. Maybe if I had I would have noticed that he was on a downward path. “He’s a good writer. But I’m afraid there might be another explanation for his being so sure I didn’t kill Leia.”

  “You mean if he knew who did?”

  “Actually . . . Ross came over last night to tell me that the police have found evidence that his car was involved in the accident.” The words were out before I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that. Now that I had warmed up I couldn’t seem to stop talking.

  “Ross’s car? You mean his Volvo?”

  “No, the Peugeot. He keeps it in his barn and his keys were in a dish in the kitchen. Anyone could have taken them.”

  Cressida laid her hand on my arm. “Or Ross could have driven the car himself.”

  Although I’d had my own doubts about Ross’s innocence I was horrified to hear Cressida voice them. “I don’t believe that. Ross wouldn’t have run over Leia and left her for dead.”

  Cressida looked at me pityingly. “You still have feelings for him, don’t you?”

  “No—I mean, yes, as a friend. But we haven’t . . . not since . . .”

  “I know you stopped sleeping with him after we talked. I’ve always admired you for your resolve. But it must have been hard giving him up . . . and then, for what? You didn’t get tenure in the end anyway.”

  Tears pricked at my eyes. I rubbed at them and my vision blurred. I felt suddenly very, very tired. The hot tea had warmed me up but it had also spread a sluggish lethargy through my veins, an aftereffect of the hypothermia, no doubt. Seeing the exhaustion on my face, Cressida took the cup from my hands and adjusted the throw on my shoulders. I leaned back against the cushions.

  “I’ve even wondered if I was wrong to intervene,” she said as she adjusted a pillow under my head. “I did what I thought was good for you, but Ross, well, he would have been better off with you. Maybe he would have stayed away from the students.”

  “Students? You mean there’s been more than one?”

  “I’m afraid so. There was that girl from Long Island—Emily Auerbach—the one who went on to work at Random House—”

  “Ross got her that internship,” I said drowsily.

  “Yes. Have you ever wondered why it’s always the prettiest girls whom he helps to the internships and recommends for MFA programs?”

  I searched my brain for a male student who’d been helped by Ross but my head was swimming. When I closed my eyes I saw Leia’s face sinking under dark water.

  “I’m afraid Leia was just the latest in a long series of conquests. But Leia at least had the good grace to feel bad about it. When she came to see me that day it was clear she was feeling guilty about something.”

  “When did she come see you?” I asked.

  “Just before she went to your office. I thought she might have gone to you for a more sympathetic ear.”

  I grimaced. “I’m afraid I was no better. I didn’t even make time to talk to her.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about that, Nan. These students act like they own us. Leia wouldn’t even come out with what she’d done. She wanted me to sit there and play guessing games. She asked me if I thought confession was good for the soul—if she would feel better about something she’d done wrong if she confessed it or if she made amends some other way.”

  “You think she was talking about having an affair with Ross?”

  Cressida shrugged. “I can’t imagine what else she was on about. You can’t have helped noticing how much time she spent with him. I think she was asking me if she ought to make it public. Like ruining Ross’s career would make up for her actions. I told her that maybe she should worry more about her own sins than exposing anyone else’s. I’m afraid I might have been a bit harsh on her.”

  I pried open my eyes to stare at Cressida, surprised at the bitterness and jealousy in her voice. Cressida was so beautiful—and barely forty. Why envy a girl like Leia? But then I took in the beautiful room we were in—the bare shelves and desk surface, the abstract photographs on the walls. There were no photographs of friends or family, no sign of any human being at all. In her memoir Cressida had described a loveless childhood with a workaholic father and a perfectionist mother who watched over every morsel of food she put in her mouth and hounded her to become a ballerina to fulfill her own unfulfilled dreams. No one in her family had spoken to her since she’d published the memoir. “It’s hard to be the one who tells the truth,” she’d once said to me. “And lonely.” It wasn’t Leia’s beauty that Cressida would envy, but her likability, the easy way she had of drawing people to her. I knew because I envied it myself.

  “Leia could be a bit hard to take sometimes,” I said, working carefully to get the words right despite the growing numbness in my lips. “That’s why I didn’t make time for her that day.”

  Cressida looked at me with such gratitude I thought she was going to hug me. She made do with patting my arm and tucking the throw under my feet. “You mustn’t feel guilty about that, Nan. She could be very demanding. They all are, this generation, expecting you to answer their emails within minutes and read their novels, as if you had no work of your own, and to drop everything to listen to their moral quandaries.” She shook her head. “I told her that whatever she felt bad about she should examine her own conscience rather than exact retribution from someone else. She didn’t like that one little bit. She left in a huff. That’s why Troy thought I’d upset her at the party. She must have gone to talk to Ross, perhaps she threatened to make their affair public.”

  She squeezed my arm, startling me completely awake. Her eyes were wide. “Ross would have offered to drive her home. She might have gotten out of the car—he would have tried to follow her—it could have been an accident. The roads were slippery, the visibility poor. . . .”

  Come back! I heard the voice calling, only now it was Ross’s voice. I closed my eyes and felt tears sliding down my face.

  “She was afraid,” I said. “She knew something bad was going to happen to her. The painting she did in the boathouse—”

  “She did a painting in the boathouse?”

  “A self-portrait—her face shadowed. Beneath it she wrote ‘The dark is rising.’ ”

  “How melodramatic,” Cressida said, her voice suddenly cool and disinterested. “No wonder it upset you. You need to rest. I bet you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in days.”

  Dimly I was aware of her putting another blanket on me and then I heard and saw her turning off a lamp, her steps retreating from the living room.

  The last thing I saw before falling asleep was Leia’s face, rising out of the dark water, and then I was falling into that icy cold river. . . .

  When I awoke the room was dark. Cressida was sitting on the edge of the couch. She leaned over me, her braids clicking together like icicles, and switched on a lamp. The light blinded me. When I opened my eyes again Cressida handed me a mug of coffee.

  “Are you feeling better? You were really out.”

  “I think so.” I sat up and inhaled the coffee to clear the fog in my brain. “How long was I asleep?”

  “A couple of hours. I didn’t want to wake you, but there’s someone here to see you.”

  “To see me? But how . . .” I was going to ask who knew I was here when I looked up and saw a broad figure silhouetted against the dark window and recognized Sergeant McAffrey. My first thought was that the lab had come back with evidence linking my car to Leia and he’d come to arrest me. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Dr. Janowicz called me. She told me about what you found in the boathouse.”

  Cressida squeezed my hand. “I thought the police should know. I knew you’d want to protect Ross, even if it meant not clearing yourself.”

  “Protect Ross, what—”

  “If you don’t mind, Dr. Janowicz, I’d like to handle this.” He stood over Cressida until she got up and retreated, murmuring that sh
e’d be in the kitchen if I needed her. Then he took her place on the couch. I could feel the cold coming off him, the way I’d felt the cold rising up from the river in the boathouse. “Can you tell me why you went to the boathouse today?” he asked me.

  “I was down by Leia’s shrine and I saw Troy Van Donk.” I told him what I’d overheard and how I’d followed Troy and the other man, whom McAffrey made me describe in detail. He asked me to repeat what I heard them say. Then he asked why I followed them without calling him. I told him I hadn’t had a phone and I didn’t want to lose them. That I thought I might find out something about what happened to Leia.

  “And did you?”

  “Only that she was troubled by something on the day she died. Did you see the self-portrait she painted?”

  He nodded. “Did you see anything else? Or . . . leave anything there?”

  “No, what would I leave—”

  “Did you see this?”

  He held up a plastic bag with something metal in it—something silver that winked in the lamplight. I had to focus on it to make out what it was. A silver disk with a shield etched on it, lettering inside the shield . . . “A cuff link,” I said, “with the Harvard insignia. Ross has a pair just—”

  I looked closer. Snagged on the swivel bar were a few dark hairs. “Where did you find that?” I asked, although I already knew.

  “You’ve seen Dr. Ballantine wearing a cuff link like this one?”

  “Yes, but I’m sure he’s not the only one with a pair of Harvard cuff links—”

  “Thank you, Ms. Lewis. That’s very helpful. I’ll be in touch.” He got to his feet. I swung my legs off the couch and started to get up but the sudden movement made me feel nauseated.

  “Wait,” I said, “it can’t be Ross. He wouldn’t hurt Leia. He—” I was about to say that he loved Leia, but that suddenly didn’t seem like a good idea. “Anyone could have taken his car—”