River Road

by Carol Goodman

  She was right, of course, but it was too late. The irony was that I could hear her voice now. There was nothing else to hear but the creak of the ice and the stir of wings in the loft overhead.

  I stopped and did what Leia was asking me to do. Listen. There was something stirring overhead in the loft. The last time there’d been the owl. I remembered looking up when it flew toward Scully. It came from the boat loft built high in the rafters, the place where the Blackwells had stored boating gear—life jackets, blankets . . . a person could hide in there and insulate themselves from the cold—

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of facing Princess Leia,” Cressida snapped. “Or do you believe those ridiculous ghost stories the students tell?”

  I looked back over my shoulder at Cressida. The light from the flashlight cast ugly shadows on her face, making her look like a ghoul from a horror movie. But it wasn’t just the light; there was fear in her face. She didn’t like looking at Leia’s portrait either—and she didn’t like the idea of ghosts.

  “You mean like the ice hag?” I asked. “You know, Hannah told me she’d seen her lurking around the house, looking in my windows.”

  “I’m sure Hannah Mulder sees a lot of things after a drink or ten at the Swan.”

  “I think she saw you that night Leia died. I think she’ll tell Joe that if I die.”

  “And do you think anyone will believe anything Hannah Mulder says? But thank you for the heads-up. I can easily arrange for Hannah to have a little accident on her way home from the Swan. Just as easily as I arranged for her to ‘leave’ that bottle of Four Roses on Leia’s shrine.”

  A floorboard in the loft creaked. I spoke quickly to cover it up.

  “How many people will you have to kill, Cressida?” I asked. “Do you really think you can have all these deaths on your conscience without paying a price? Leia, Troy—”

  Another creak came from the loft. There was someone up there. It could be some homeless person taking shelter, but I was hoping it was Troy. That he hadn’t drowned in the river, that he’d dragged himself out and found shelter in the loft. He would be half frozen to death. The only way he could help would be if he could pounce right on top of Cressida. I had to get her directly underneath the edge of the loft.

  I turned back to the painting of Leia and walked up to it, feeling a prickle at the nape of my neck as I passed under the edge of the loft.

  “You can’t even look at her, can you?” I said to Cressida. “A girl with her whole life ahead of her cut short because you were afraid of people finding out you plagiarized her story.”

  Cressida moved forward but stopped a foot or two away from the edge of the loft, her head tilted as if consulting Leia’s face.

  “It wasn’t just that,” she said. “When she came to me to ask—no, demand—that money she called me a leech. She said I didn’t have any more of my own life to write about so I had turned to other people’s lives to steal from—as if that’s not what all writers do, as if that’s not what she did when she wrote her precious poems about quilting circles or your boy Troy when he hung out with drug dealers in the projects.”

  I heard another creak from overhead.

  “You’re right,” I said, hoping the surprise of hearing me agree would distract Cressida from the noise. “We are leeches. That’s why I stopped after Emmy died. Because I’d cared more about getting something down on the page than about her and that moment’s distraction—”

  My voice wobbled. Cressida smiled, which only made her look more ghoulish in the flashlight’s glare. “Poor Nan, what a terrible thing to live with. That’s why artists should never have children. Well, you won’t have to live with it much longer. Here—” She reached into her coat pocket. She had to hold the flashlight and gun in one hand in order to take out a red Sharpie. “You’re going to write ‘I’m sorry, Leia. I’m sorry, Emmy’ beneath the painting. Then I’ll let you take the rest of the pills and you can have a nice, quiet nap on the ice.”

  She was holding the pen out for me. I didn’t move. I held my breath, waiting for her to come to me, hoping it was Troy up in the loft, hoping he saw his opportunity.

  She stepped forward, the boards creaked—

  She stepped back, dropping the pen and grasping the gun with two hands, the flashlight crossed over it, both aimed at the loft. “I see you, Troy Van Donk,” she shouted. “Come down slowly or I’ll blow your brains out.”

  I took a step forward and she aimed the gun at me. “And your favorite teacher’s. Come down and join the party. You, Nan—over here so you can see your pet student.” She waved me out from under the loft. I came forward, hoping now that I’d been wrong, that it wasn’t Troy.

  “Don’t come down!” I called. “She’s just going to kill us both.”

  “Yes, but it can be a quick bullet to the head or a slow, agonizing gang war execution. Which do you prefer, Mr. Van Donk?”

  A hooded figure appeared at the edge of the loft and lowered himself down to the floor. The young man was so thin and scared-looking that for a second I barely recognized my cocky student, but then his eyes skittered toward me and I did.

  “I’m sorry, Professor Lewis, I was gonna try to jump her but I was shaking so bad.”

  “Have you been hiding here since the fight with Scully?”

  “Yeah. He left me for dead in the river but I got out, made a fire, found some clothes up there . . .” He pointed to the loft. “I thought you were dead until I heard you two come into the boathouse yesterday.” He switched his gaze toward Cressida. “Did you really kill Leia, Professor Janowicz, all because she asked you for money?”

  “She didn’t ask, Van Donk, she was threatening to blackmail me.”

  “It was so she could give me the money to pay back Scully. So I didn’t get killed.” His eyes were glassy in the glare of the flashlight as he looked back at the painting of Leia.

  “I guess Saint Leia wasn’t so bad after all,” I said.

  “Well, you’ll all have a chance to be reunited,” Cressida said. “In the great writing workshop in the sky. Troy’s eleventh-hour appearance calls for a change of plan, but I can accommodate this plot shift. Maybe I could write fiction after all! So, let’s see, Nan, what do you think of this: kindhearted but too trusting Professor Nan Lewis went looking for her lost student, but when she found him hiding in the boathouse he shot her and then, in a surge of grief and self-pity, shot himself—all with a gun he got off the lowlife scum drug dealer who tried to kill him. How’s that for a narrative even your dim-witted cop boyfriend can follow? Do you see any holes in it? Come on, don’t be shy, let’s workshop this sucker!”

  There was a manic glee in Cressida’s voice that made my skin prickle. The fact was, I couldn’t see any flaws in the story she’d outlined. Then I looked down.

  “Your footprints,” I said.

  “Thanks for the reminder, Nan. I’ll clean up in here. As for outside . . .” She looked over her shoulder at the open berths. “Look, it’s snowing again. The weather has been very accommodating, although I must say that when my book takes off—which I’m sure it will, with all the publicity it will get after the recent tragic events the author witnessed at Acheron—I may chuck this job and move to someplace warmer. So”—she smiled at us—“let’s move this party outside. I think an open-air shooting on the river is so much more poetic, don’t you?”

  I looked at Troy and nodded. We’d have a better chance of making a run for it outside, which Cressida must have known. So why didn’t she shoot us right here? Was she losing her nerve?

  As she waved the gun to make us move, I saw her eyes snag back on Leia’s self-portrait. Was that it? Did she not want to kill us in front of those accusing eyes? Troy looked at me questioningly. I was the older one, the teacher, I should have a solution. I nodded for him to go first. I followed, Cressida behind me. If I turned on her quickly, maybe I could divert her long enough that Troy could get away. But I saw how weak and faltering Troy’s steps were. He’d never
be able to run fast enough.

  Cressida was right. It was snowing. Light, lofty flakes falling out of a black sky. I turned my face up and felt their feathery kiss on my skin. They seemed to carry their own glow with them, lighting up the frozen river. I could see the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge arcing south of us, its lights a string of garland against the looming mountains. The mountains were edged with a greenish glow as if the sun, long gone, still burned somewhere on the edge of the world. If that’s where I was going, if Emmy was waiting for me there, I wouldn’t mind dying so much . . . but Troy didn’t deserve to lose his life.

  I turned at the edge of the frozen river to face Cressida. “Let Troy go,” I said. “No one will take his word against yours.” I turned to him. “You’ll take the blame for Leia’s death and mine, but at least you’ll be alive. You’re young. You can survive this.”

  “No,” Cressida said, pointing the gun at Troy. “Actually, he can’t.”

  I think I already knew that she wouldn’t spare him before the gun went off, because I was already moving, already putting myself in between Cressida and Troy. Still the impact was shocking—a fireball exploding in my chest. I heard the crack of ice as I landed flat on my back. Cressida was staring down at me, shocked by this development. But Troy wasn’t. Good boy, I thought, he’d seen it coming. He lunged at Cressida and knocked the gun from her hand. It skittered across the ice. I followed it with my eyes; it seemed to leave a trail of lights behind it and multiply into two guns that swam and bobbed and then blurred. I closed my eyes and felt something brush against my face, something soft and feathery as a kiss, silky as a child’s hair—

  I opened my eyes and she was there, her face lit up from within, blond braids held back by pink barrettes, breath that smelled like cherry Chapstick—

  “Emmy.” The word came out a wet rasp. There was something blocking my throat and liquid filling my mouth as though I was already beneath the ice, already drowning.

  “Wake up, Mommy,” Emmy said, shaking me.

  I tried to keep my eyes open, taking in every millimeter of her, but that black water was rising—

  She shook me. “Wake up, Mommy, and look!”

  She was pointing at something. I didn’t want to look at anything that wasn’t her but her voice was imperious. I looked where she was pointing. The gun lay a few feet away on the ice.

  “You have to get it,” she said, shaking me again.

  Her touch seemed to rouse me. “Okay, honey,” I told Emmy, forcing my eyes open and making myself turn over on the ice. “Mommy’s getting it.”

  I crawled across the ice, dragging myself with my arms because I couldn’t feel my legs, digging my fingernails into the ice, until I reached the gun. The cold, hard reality of it shocked me awake. This was real. I tried to wrap my hand around it but I couldn’t grip. Then I felt Emmy’s small hand on mine steadying me. I grasped the gun and turned to find Cressida and Troy. They were a few yards away in a patch where the ice was broken. Cressida was on top of Troy, pressing his face down into the water, drowning him. I pointed the gun at Cressida, Emmy’s warm hand steadying mine, and fired.

  Cressida was knocked back so hard that the ice below her broke off and floated free. Troy struggled to his knees, watched her go, and turned toward me. I felt Emmy’s hair brush against my ear, heard her sweet, happy voice.

  “Bon Boy-Osh, Scuffy!”

  I started to laugh. Blood bubbled from my lips instead. I turned to find Emmy, to see her face once more—

  But she was gone. The only trace of her the red lights of her sneakers retreating to the riverbank. “Come back!” I cried.

  And she did. The lights stopped and then came toward me, growing larger, joining with the roar of an engine and a familiar voice. It was Joe on a snowmobile, bringing Emmy back to me. She’d be safe now. I closed my eyes, content, and let the black water rise up to take me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Joe told me later that when he reached me I had no heartbeat and wasn’t breathing. He administered CPR there on the frozen river, the ice breaking up around us, Cressida floating down to the sea, Van busy getting his son out of the water, until I drew in breath.

  “That ice could have broken underneath us,” I scolded him from my hospital bed. “You could have drowned trying to save me.”

  “And you could have died stepping in front of a bullet meant for Troy Van Donk. We make quite a pair.”

  He’d given me a smile that told me he meant us to remain a pair. He visited me every day for the next month, bringing flowers, books, and, one day, news from the aftermath of Cressida’s death. When her house was searched the police found a glove with Leia’s blood on it—presumably the one she used to spread blood on my tires—and a journal that Leia had kept when she was doing the prison class.

  “So much for Cressida’s eidetic memory,” I said, glad of the distraction from the pain in my chest. The bullet had punctured a lung and narrowly missed my heart. “And all that about Leia’s words leaking into her own work was a load of crap.”

  Not that I didn’t have plenty of visitors to keep me distracted the rest of my hospital stay. Dottie came nearly every day bearing fresh-baked cookies and departmental gossip. Ross had agreed to step in to handle the fallout from the news story that one of the school’s tenured professors had plagiarized a student’s work and then killed her to keep her quiet. Dottie worked full-time through the intersession with him, answering emails, writing press releases, arranging interviews. For a while it looked like the publicity would destroy the college. If Chad and Marie Dawson had chosen to sue it might well have, but instead, just before the spring term began, they issued a statement that they were satisfied that their daughter’s killer had been brought to justice by another Acheron English professor, Leia’s favorite teacher, Nan Lewis.

  “You’re a hero, Nan,” Dottie told me, her sewing needle flashing over a square of bright blue cloth.

  “You’re the hero,” I countered. “If you hadn’t called Joe . . .”

  When I had left the chapel Dottie had sat there thinking about the first line I had read of Leia’s story. “I knew it sounded familiar,” she told me later. She opened the copy of The Sentences, which she’d looked at before the reading began, and read the first chapter. She said she heard Leia’s voice behind the words as she sat in the chapel reading it.

  “I just knew Leia had written it. She talked to me about that quilting circle all the time. I recognized things she had said to me about it and I heard her love and passion in it. I knew Cressida didn’t have that kind of love for her students.”

  She called Joe right away and told him her suspicions. He was driving back from Poughkeepsie, the anonymous lead having dissolved into thin air, and gunned it back to my house. When he saw I wasn’t there he went straight to Cressida’s house. He’d walked around the dark and empty house, frantic, a bad feeling rising in him. Then, as he stood on the hill overlooking the river, he heard a voice in the distance say his name. He recognized it as my voice.

  “At first I thought I was going crazy. It was like that part in Jane Eyre when Jane hears Rochester calling her name—”

  “You’ve read Jane Eyre?” I interrupted.

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “I read it in your class. Don’t you remember? You said it was your favorite book, so . . .”

  I told him then that I loved him.

  “Because I’ve read Jane Eyre?” he asked incredulously. “Not because I realized the voice really was yours and ran down the hill to find you?”

  “Both,” I told him. “But mostly because of Jane Eyre.”

  Hearing me say his name hadn’t been the only bit of luck he’d run into that night. He’d almost collided with Troy Van Donk Sr., out on his snowmobile, still looking for his son. Van took him to the boathouse and was able to get Troy out of the river while Joe resuscitated me.

  “If Van hadn’t been there with the snowmobile I don’t know how I’d have gotten you up to the road and to
the hospital in time.”

  “Remind me to thank Van,” I’d said.

  But it was Van who spent the rest of the winter thanking me. After Troy told his father that I’d stepped in front of a bullet meant for him, my driveway was miraculously plowed after every snowfall. When I brought my car in for its inspection (late, since I’d been in the hospital when it expired), it came back with a new bumper to replace the one dented by the deer. More than free plowing and auto care, Van spread the word throughout the village that I had saved his son’s life. It turned out that Van’s word in the community was stronger than any internet gossip. By the time I was released from the hospital my reputation was rehabilitated. The checker at the supermarket smiled at me and double-bagged my groceries, the proprietor of the Acheron Baking Company gave me free pie whenever I had lunch there, and when I ordered a latte at the café it was delivered with a heart inscribed in the foam. When I went to my first AA meeting in the basement of the Lutheran church, people came up to me and squeezed my hand. “Maybe they always do that at AA meetings,” I told Joe afterward.

  “Nah,” he replied, “you’re a local hero.”

  But I still wasn’t sure about going back to the college. As hard as it had been to stand up in front of a group of strangers and tell them I was an alcoholic it seemed even harder to stand in front of a classroom of students knowing that the events that had led to Leia’s death had at least partly come out of my writing class. Truthfully, I didn’t even know if I believed in teaching writing anymore.

  Can you even teach writing? My stepbrother-in-law Cooper liked to hector me over holiday dinners with that old chestnut.

  I’d always thought it was a stupid question. No one asked if you could teach the violin or how to play basketball. But now I found myself asking another question: Should I teach writing when I haven’t written a word of my own work for years? Writing hadn’t pulled me out of the pit. The people who loved me—Joe, Dottie, Anat, the Van Donks—had. Could I really stand in front of a class of twenty students and tell them writing could save their lives?