The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  Bethesda laughs and sits down on the edge of her desk. “By an angry Native American ghost,” she says. “Yes, I’ve heard the legend. Don’t tell me that’s what you’re putting in your book. I didn’t realize it was horror as well as romance.”

  “It’s neither, really,” I say, smiling. “I just wondered if you’d come across anything that validated the actual cause of Frank Campbell’s death.”

  “Yes, of course.” She turns from me and leans over her desk, one hand resting on the small of her back, the other rustling the slips of paper with her fingertips. She unpins a slip of paper, sliding the long pin into her sleeve so carelessly I’m surprised she doesn’t stick herself, and hands it to me. “This is Campbell’s death certificate. Heart attack. See.”

  “Of course,” I say, noticing that one of the witnesses was Corinth Blackwell. “I just thought I’d check—”

  “There’s no substitute for careful research,” Bethesda says, waving a stern finger at me, and then, leaning over the desk, she spears the death certificate to the muslin curtain with the pearl-tipped pin, where it flutters for a moment like an impaled moth.

  I rush back to my room as quickly as if I am cupping a handful of water that I have to carry to a dying person before it spills out between my fingers. I’ve been stuck at the first séance for weeks now, trying to imagine the moment when Frank Campbell died. My desk is littered with aborted versions of the scene, each thin pile of paper weighted to the wooden surface by a smooth white rock. Spread out, its pages held open by another one of the rocks, is the pamphlet A True and Intimate Account of the Blackwell Affair. I read, for the sixth or seventh time, the account of Frank Campbell’s death during the first séance.

  Mr. Campbell was known to have a sensitive nature, as many artists do, and it is well known that such natures are often accompanied by an organic weakness of the body. In Mr. Campbell’s case, this weakness resided in his heart. He had confided in a letter written to Aurora Latham the very day of the séance that he had experienced a sense of “oppression” all day in anticipation of the séance. No doubt, it was this strain on his heart combined with the effects produced in the séance—wind blowing and footsteps approaching, drums and Indian war whoops, the voices of children and their little hands everywhere (whose ghostly handprints we afterwards saw on the ceiling of the grotto), even a frog dropped down the back of one of the ladies’ dresses—that hastened him to his untimely demise.

  The voices of children and their little hands everywhere. For a moment the words summon the prickling sensation I’d felt before in Nat’s room, but I dismiss it as an aftereffect of the pot and concentrate on the reference to the letter. Frank Campbell wrote a letter to Aurora on the day of the séance—that was the letter pinned to Bethesda’s curtain, from which she had gotten her title Muse of Water. I’d managed, while she unpinned the death certificate, to read the rest of it. Now I copy it down before I forget it.

  To My Muse of Water!

  All day long my heart has been oppressed by a sense of dread at what will come tonight. It is not that I fear the supernatural, but that I fear for your reason and goodness. I know what you are trying to do, dear Aurora, and I know that it will never work. No one could blame you, but still I implore you to abandon your plans. If you don’t I may be forced to take actions that I would sincerely regret but that my conscience, nevertheless, compels me to perform.

  Ever your faithful servant,

  Frank Campbell.

  What could Aurora have been planning that Frank Campbell wanted to stop? Did he simply wish her to abandon what must have seemed a fruitless effort to contact her lost children? Or was there a more sinister plan he’d learned of? Whatever he was alluding to, it seems suddenly clear to me that Aurora could have easily read the letter as a threat. Was it a coincidence that he died the same day he sent her that letter?

  I look up from the page and out the window toward the garden. After a minute I realize that I’m scanning the garden—but for whom? Nat? No, I can hear the sound of his typewriter coming from his room and, besides, I think, pressing my fingers against my lips, it’s not as if he really kissed me. David, though . . . ever since we almost kissed in the grotto I’ve had disturbingly erotic dreams. That’s the real reason I haven’t gotten any writing done, I think, looking with despair at the notes I’ve scrawled across the sheets of paper that lie sprawled on my desk amidst the white stones he gave me. While Nat’s desk had been barren and Bethesda’s a beehive of activity, mine strikes me now, with its litter of white stones, as a graveyard. Half the time I’m sitting here my body is present but my spirit is drifting up the secret passageway to David’s room, into his rough-hewn bed with its quartet of bears standing guard and the eagle taking flight over the headboard. At night I’m making love in that bed, the wings of the eagle, come to life, beating above me, my hands wrapped around a rough bedpost. When I wake in the morning, I find myself holding on to a post of my own bed, splinters embedded under my fingernails. What scares me the most about the dreams is that I’m never able to see the face of the man I’m making love to.

  I look down at my hands now and see that I’ve picked up the shard of china I found in the grotto and pressed its sharp point into my palm as if the physical pain could bring me back into my body. I drop it when a bead of blood rises to the skin and look up, out the window, and catch a glimpse of something white shimmering in the garden. For a second I think it’s snow, but then I realize I’m thinking of the beginning of “Snow White” where the queen pricks her finger and, looking from the drop of blood to the snow, wishes for a child with lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow. There’s no snow in the garden. But there is a woman dressed in a long, flowing white robe standing on the lowest terrace staring directly at me.

  Chapter Ten

  “You can’t really mean to leave him here all night? He’ll be eaten by wild animals!” Mrs. Ramsdale is teetering so close to the grotto’s pool that Tom Quinn is obliged to leave Corinth to draw his employer back from the edge. The moment he is by her side, she leans heavily on his arm and begs for her smelling salts.

  “Norris will stay with him,” Aurora reassures her houseguest. “She will keep the animals at bay.”

  The housekeeper has already posted herself at the head of the body, which Lantini and Quinn have stretched out on the stone bench. She looks as solid and impassable as the stone statues that ancient Egyptians placed at the doorways to their tombs. Corinth, for one, can’t imagine any animal getting past her. Mrs. Ramsdale, though, is still not satisfied.

  “But why not take him back to the house?”

  “I would rather wait until Milo returns,” Aurora answers. “He will know how best to handle the situation. You must realize, Violet, that Mr. Campbell is beyond our help, but his legacy and the legacy of Bosco is not. If Bosco is to be a haven for artists, we can’t have it said that the very first artist invited here died under mysterious circumstances.”

  “But how did he die?” Tom Quinn asks. “That arrow didn’t fly into his chest by itself.”

  The remaining five members of the séance turn to the body stretched out on its stone bier. For a moment the only sound in the grotto is the sound of water falling from the fountain, and then a tentative voice breaks the silence.

  “I bambini.” Signore Lantini, his eyes wide and gleaming, translates for the sake of his American audience. “It was the children.”

  As they walk back up the hill, it is impossible for Tom to get a word alone with Corinth. He practically has to carry Mrs. Ramsdale up the steep steps along the fountain allée and then, even at the house, she is unwilling to let him go.

  “I would feel better,” she tells him at the foot of the main staircase, “if you would have a look in my room to make sure it is quite safe. I don’t want to wake up and find a murderer hiding in the armoire.”

  “So you don’t believe Mr. Campbell was murdered by the ghosts of the Latham children?” Tom asks, allowing his lips to curl into a
faint smile.

  “Please, Tom,” she says, returning the smile, “this is real life we’re talking about, not one of my novels.”

  Squaring her shoulders, she precedes him up the stairs, no longer relying on his support. He’s seen her rally herself like this after treatments at the spas and clinics that would melt a strong man’s resolve. He’s seen her gird herself in her finery and sit up half the night at dinner parties and balls even though, he knew, she was in pain. “Material,” she would tell him when he suggested she turn down some of the invitations. “I must take every opportunity to study the aristocracy, Tom, or my readers will be disappointed.” And in the morning she would be up at the crack of dawn with another whole chapter in her head to recite to him. This is what’s made the years of his employment with her bearable—well, that and the generous salary she pays—that beneath the pretty face and soft flesh and silly novels there’s a core of strength that he can’t help but admire.

  As she opens her door he hears the door to the next room open. He lingers behind long enough to see Corinth looking out into the corridor.

  Meet me in the library. He mouths the words, knowing how good she is at reading lips. It was part of the act she had worked out with her father. For a second, though, he thinks she might not have understood him—she seems to be looking right through him—but then she nods and retreats into her room.

  “Well, unless you want me to save you from the brigands who might be hiding under my bed . . .” Mrs. Ramsdale’s voice summons him into her bedroom. She’s seated at her dressing table taking down her hair. When he turns around he hears a chiming sound and knows that she’s dropping those pearl-tipped pins, one by one, into a china cup on the dressing table. He’s not supposed to notice that she’s had to let out her dress and pin it up, so he takes his time checking under the bed and examining the insides of the tall oak armoire with its carved panel depicting an Indian maiden paddling a canoe on a pine-fringed lake. He even inspects Mrs. Ramsdale’s Saratoga trunk, although only a midget intruder could be hiding in there. When he turns around to tell her that all is safe, he sees that the china cup is full of the pearl-tipped pins and she’s lowered the bodice of her dress to her waist. Her bare shoulders gleam white in the moonlight, the hollow between her finely carved shoulder blades—a space just wide enough for a man’s hand—glowing with a thin sheen of dampness. He meets her eyes in the reflection in the mirror.

  “All the same,” she says, “I would feel safer if you stayed with me . . . a little while longer.”

  In the library Corinth has fallen asleep on the divan while waiting for Tom. She’s dreaming of the Indian girl, Ne’Moss-i-Ne, who’s escaped her bondage and is running toward the cliff above the Sacandaga River to throw herself over it. Corinth can see her running through the dense underbrush, her legs and arms scratched by the thorns, her bare feet shredded by the rough forest floor. A fog is rising past the cliff face, obscuring the valley beyond. When she reaches the edge of the cliff, she turns and Corinth is looking at herself; she’s the one falling into the fog . . .

  She startles awake on the divan to catch herself from falling and falls instead into Tom Quinn’s arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She leans into his arms, but then she catches the smell of something sweet on his skin. Laudanum. She straightens herself and moves away.

  “I was having a bad dream,” she says. “The Indian girl in the garden, Ne’Moss-i-Ne . . .”

  “Don’t tell me you’re beginning to believe your own creations! You told me once that was the most dangerous mistake a professional medium could make.”

  “I’m beginning to think there are worse mistakes,” she says, “like coming to Bosco.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way—that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You must leave Bosco.”

  “I must leave? Since when do you tell me where to go, Tom Quinn? If I remember correctly, the last time you told me to stay in a place and wait for you—”

  “I came back, Cory, but you had already left. They told me you’d gone to work at Latham’s factory. What was I to think?”

  That I must have been truly desperate to go to Milo Latham, Corinth thinks, but she says nothing. It’s too late. Instead she stands up to leave, but he catches her hand. He pushes back the hem of her gloves and turns her hand over, tracing the scars that circle her wrists.

  “Whatever happened back then is over and done with, Cory. What I care about is right now. A man was killed tonight, and I, for one, do not believe the murderer was a ghost.”

  “You think I had something to do with it? That I rigged the séance?”

  “No”—his lips curl into a faint smile—“at least not all of it. You couldn’t have created all those effects working alone.”

  “Ah, so all I lack is an accomplice to have committed murder?” Corinth tries to pull her hand away, but Tom closes his fingers around her wrist, his thumb and forefinger describing a loop that exactly matches the mark that circles her wrist. The minute he sees the expression in her eyes he releases her.

  “I don’t believe you’re capable of murder,” he says, “but clearly someone here at Bosco is. Promise me you’ll at least think about leaving. I’ll do anything I can to help you go. I’ll go with you if you’ll let me.”

  She holds her hand to her chest, rubbing the wrist to ease the ache that’s never wholly gone from there. Even now she can feel the bands tightening, closing in on her . . . Maybe Tom is right. Whatever happened ten years ago matters less than getting out of here. Maybe it’s not too late.

  “I’ll think about it,” she tells him. And then, before he can say anything else, she turns and leaves the library.

  Corinth has little choice, she reflects when she’s back in her room, but to think about Tom’s offer. She’s certainly not going to sleep after the dream she had in the library. Although Tom is certain that Campbell was killed by a living person, Corinth is less sure. She knows, of course, how to fake a séance, but she didn’t fake this one. She can imagine, though, how most of the effects were produced in the grotto: a wooden form on a telescoping stick to print the hand marks on the ceiling, an accomplice outside—Corinth sees the stony face of Mrs. Norris—to create the sound effects, someone armed with a bow to shoot the arrow into Campbell’s chest while everyone was preoccupied with the sounds. But there’s one detail that troubles her. When she came back to herself in the grotto, someone—or something—had its fingers around her wrist, just as Tom had a moment ago in the library, only these fingers were unable to complete the circle because they were too small. It was a child’s hand. Corinth is sure of that much.

  She looks down at her wrists and sees that the marks there have nearly faded. If you didn’t know they were there . . . but Tom did know, because he was at the show where she got them.

  It was her last night performing at the Lyceum in Gloversville. By then it was just her and her father on the road. Her mother had died a few years before, shortly after giving birth to her younger sister, and her father had left the baby with a childless couple (the man had a good job at the glass factory in Corning, New York), promising that they would come back to get her once they had enough money.

  “We can’t have an infant with us on the road,” he’d told Corinth. “You’ll be of more use to her making money than trying to take care of her yourself. Besides, what do you know about keeping house?”

  It was true. Corinth knew precious little about any of the ordinary domestic skills. Once her father had learned of her talents—Wanda White Cloud had told him after she lost at poker one time too many—he’d taken her to a revival meeting in Buffalo for her “debut.” At first her act consisted of telling people what they had in their pockets or what card they were holding, but once Mike had seen a few other spiritualists perform, he started adding to her repertoire. She learned to produce rapping noises by cracking the knuckles of her toes, and she learned how to “throw her voice”
so that she seemed to be speaking to inanimate spirits. She learned the trick “one ahead” in which she would read written messages from the audience by holding up a piece of folded paper to her forehead and reciting a prearranged message that was confirmed by someone Mike had hired. Then, when she opened that message, she knew what the “next” message would be. After a while they had acquired enough tricks that Corinth no longer had to bother going into a trance state. In fact, an actual trance state interfered with the performance.

  As her act gained in popularity, though, she drew as many doubters as believers, hecklers who would cry fraud and charlatan and worse from the back rows. Mike’s approach was to meet any skepticism head-on. At the beginning of each night’s show he invited any authenticating tests that the audience could dream up. The burliest men were invited to hold on to Corinth’s ankles and hands. It wasn’t long before ropes were suggested to bind her hands and ankles to the chair on which she sat.

  At first the sensation of being bound drove her wild. She had to be carried off a stage in Utica kicking and screaming. After that her father made her wear loops around her wrists and ankles to get used to the sensation—but she never did get used to it. Instead she learned to leave her body at the first touch of the rope on her skin. It wasn’t a full trance—she kept her spirit tethered to her flesh, hovering just a few inches above, her body so relaxed that she was able to slip her hands and feet out of their bonds and so perform the tricks of her act. In time she learned to manipulate the knots without feeling the touch of the ropes on her skin.

  It worked until that night in Gloversville. The night before, a man had approached them after the act. He’d lost a son in the war, he explained to Mike. Instantly Mike made up a fictitious sibling for Corinth also slain at Antietam. Real tears stood in Mike’s eyes while he talked about “Charlie’s” last letter home and Corinth half wondered if he wasn’t thinking about the baby abandoned in Corning, New York. The man wasn’t softened by Mike’s story, though.