The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  “What do you mean, ‘kill the others’?”

  “James and Cynthia and Tam.” Corinth trembles as she says their names out loud, hearing, like an echo in a well, the words she’d superimposed on their names during the séance: water, wood, and stone. “She’d lost so many children already, I think she lost a little of her sanity with each one. She grew used to them sickening and dying, but if James and Cynthia and Tam could live, then it would be as if she’d saved the others.”

  “You mean she made her own children sick?” He whispers it, his voice thick with revulsion, and Corinth feels bile rising in her own throat, a nausea that reminds her of the first weeks of her own pregnancy.

  “Yes,” she says, her eyes shining in the darkness of the coach. “The hellebore given in small doses would just make them weak, but she meant to nurse them back to health, only . . .”

  “What?”

  Norris gave my tea to the others.

  “Norris gave Alice’s tea to the other children. She must have suspected that there was something bad in it.” Corinth lowers her voice, gazing uneasily toward the roof of the coach, through which she can hear Wanda’s voice urging her son to drive faster and faster. “But the extra dose of hellebore was enough to kill them—” Corinth clutches Tom’s hand. “Wanda didn’t mind letting the other children die for Alice’s sake and she won’t mind killing us. We’ll be in danger from the moment we find Alice. Wanda will tell you to stay with the coach—”

  “I won’t let you go alone with her.”

  “I’ll have to. Just watch yourself with the son, and if you can . . .” She stops because the coach has stopped. Beneath the hard breathing of the horses she can hear, as on the first day—was it really only three days ago?—the voice of the water from within the hedge maze. Only now she is beginning to make out its words—a triplet of murmured m’s that might be remember me or possibly memento mori, a little piece of Latin she’s seen often enough on garden statuary to know that it means Remember you must die.

  “When I’ve taken care of him,” Tom whispers hurriedly with his hand on the coach door to keep it from being opened from the outside, “I’ll come for you. I promise. This time I’ll come back for you.”

  She nods and touches his face, unable to speak. She believes him but suspects that it will probably be too late.

  When she gets out of the carriage, she finds Wanda standing at the entrance to the maze and she knows from the frightened look in her eyes that she can hear the voice of the water, too, and that, although she may not hear the same words that Corinth hears, she’s terrified. There isn’t much that would scare Wanda White Cloud, but these are the spirits of the children she let die. Apparently, though, she is willing to brave them for Alice’s sake. Corinth can’t help wondering what claim the girl has on Wanda’s affections.

  “Let the men stay with the horses,” Wanda says.

  Corinth nods, catching Tom’s eye and noticing the look that also passes between Wanda and her son. Then Wanda steps through the gap in the hedge into the maze and Corinth follows her. She hears a rustle of leaves behind her but doesn’t turn to look, afraid that what she’ll see is the gap closing in the hedge, cutting her off from the outside world—and Tom—forever. As they walk the rustling sound stays close behind them, and Corinth imagines the box hedge creeping across the path, growing higher and wider in their wake. The moon in the western sky pierces the thick foliage, creating patterns in the hedges that shift in the breeze, looking like overgrown rosebushes one moment and then, the next, like the figure of a woman fleeing.

  “Do you remember,” Corinth says as they come into the center of the maze, “that story about the Iroquois girl who loved the missionary captive and led him to a spring?”

  “She betrayed her people,” Wanda says.

  “And then she was betrayed,” Corinth answers. In the rose garden the moonlight falls full on the white marble girl and the bloodred pool in which she kneels. Corinth catches her breath when she sees the color of the water, but when she gets closer she sees that the pool is covered with red rose petals. Looking around, she sees that all the rosebushes, which were at the height of their bloom only three days ago, are bare now. The ground, carpeted with their crimson petals, looks as if it were soaked in blood.

  “It happened here,” Corinth says. She bends to pick up one of the petals, but what she finds in her hand instead is a black feather tipped with red.

  “Yes, it’s a bad place, but we don’t have time for this. You said you knew where the girl was.”

  Corinth walks behind the pool, feeling a prickling on her scalp as she passes under Jacynta’s raised sword and between the cypresses into the children’s cemetery. Here instead of a carpet of red she finds a draping of white like fresh-fallen snow. White flowers that weren’t there yesterday are growing up around the gravestones in thick profusion. She recognizes them: black hellebore, which blooms only in winter.

  She walks between the gravestones, being careful not to step on any, but when she reaches the top of the steps leading down into the crypt, she finds a white gravestone that she could swear wasn’t there yesterday. Kneeling, she sees that it’s not a stone at all. The hellebore has grown into a lacy parterre de broderie spelling a name and a date.

  ALICE

  APRIL 9, 1883

  Corinth turns and rises so suddenly to her feet that Wanda, usually so surefooted, stumbles. “Aurora was pregnant that year,” Corinth says. “The baby was delivered”—she sees Wanda’s eyes widen at the sight of the name spelled out in the deadly white flowers—“and died.”

  Wanda looks up and, looking straight into Corinth’s eyes, nods. “Yes. Mrs. Latham nearly lost her mind—Mr. Latham thought she really would this time. And so, when he heard that your child was born healthy, he sent the dead child to the cabin and told me to give over your child. I’ve watched over her ever since, but now she will die, too, if we don’t hurry.”

  Corinth turns away from her and hurries down the steps to the well, which has been covered by the heavy marble cover. She pushes at the lid, but it’s too heavy. Even when Wanda joins her they can’t move it.

  “We’ll need to get the men,” Wanda says.

  “There isn’t time,” Corinth says. When she closes her eyes, she’s inside the well, looking up into a blackness that presses down on her chest.

  She looks frantically around the crypt and spots a coil of rope left behind by Lantini. She grabs it and wraps it tightly around the circumference of the lid, pulling so hard on it that the rope burns her hands, and then wraps it around the waist of the statue of Egeria. “If we push the statue over, the weight of its fall will drag the lid off,” Corinth tells Wanda, leaning her shoulder against the statue. “You get on the other side.”

  On the count of three, both women throw their weight against the cold, unyielding marble. Corinth hears a groan, which for a moment she imagines is the voice of the grieving nymph complaining of this rude treatment, but then realizes it is the statue’s base grating against the marble pedestal. The statue trembles, then tilts, and then slowly falls, dragging the lid of the well with it until it smashes onto the floor in an explosion of dust and flying marble splinters—one of which strikes Corinth just below her right eye. She barely notices, though, as she scrambles to the side of the well that has been uncovered.

  “Alice!” she calls into the darkness. She hears the name repeated, echoing up through the oculus, but there is no answering word from the well. Then, as the moon moves above the oculus, the white rocks at the bottom of the well come into view and, nestled among them, a curled fist, which loosens as they watch, like the petals of a dying flower falling from the stem.

  “I’m going down.” Corinth pulls the rope from around the lid and wraps it around her waist. “Tie the other end to the pedestal. It should hold.”

  Corinth doesn’t wait for an answer before swinging her legs over the edge of the well and, tugging against the now taut rope, lowering herself down through the colum
n of moonlight, which feels, to Corinth, like a cold spill of water carrying her into a deep pool. The girl doesn’t stir when she touches her, but her skin is still warm. Corinth presses her cheek against her thin, bony chest, but all she can hear is the water below the stones.

  Remember me, remember me.

  Corinth lets herself see, for the first time in ten years, the face of the child drifting down into the tea-colored water of the bog. The child she thought was hers. And all this time her own child had been here, waiting for her at the bottom of this moonlit well . . . only she’s found her too late. She lays her head back down on Alice’s chest and lets herself weep for the first time in ten years for her lost child. She weeps so hard she feels herself breaking—like the statue of Egeria smashed on the floor above—and then, just when she thinks she really will crack apart, she feels a stir of breath in the girl’s chest.

  She pulls the rope off her own waist and ties it around Alice, deftly shaping a sling out of the rope. When she looks up, she sees Wanda’s face at the edge of the well.

  “She’s still breathing,” Corinth calls up, “but she’s unconscious. You’ll have to pull her up.”

  Corinth holds on to the girl until she’s carried above the reach of her fingertips, and then she holds her breath until Wanda has her over the edge. For a moment the circle is empty except for the moon, which she can see shining through the oculus, and then she sees Wanda’s head appear back at the edge of the well, silhouetted against the full moon. Wanda tilts her head, and something about the gesture strikes Corinth as wrong—as if Wanda had become a lifeless automaton controlled by an outside force. But when Wanda speaks, Corinth understands what’s wrong. It’s not Wanda standing at the edge of the well.

  “I knew you would be able to find her,” Aurora Latham says. “It proves you’re her real mother, doesn’t it?”

  “You didn’t know?” Corinth asks, rising to her feet. The top of the well is still ten feet above her head. The walls are smooth marble, with no cracks to use as handholds.

  “Do you think I would have willingly harbored your bastard all these years if I had known?”

  “Then we were both deceived,” Corinth says, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. She thinks of how badly Aurora treated her own children and thanks God that Alice survived.

  “Do you really expect me to believe that? That you didn’t conspire with my husband to set up your own spawn here and then, when my own children had been murdered, to take my place? Why else did he bring you here?”

  “You don’t really believe that Milo would murder his own children—” She stops as a shadow moving across the well tells her that Wanda is still in the crypt. If she tells Aurora that it was Wanda who was responsible for the children dying, Aurora will turn on her—and then Alice will have no one to protect her if Corinth doesn’t get out of this well alive.

  “I thought you asked for me,” she says instead, “for the séances—”

  “He pretended it was my idea, but I knew he was only trying to establish you here as my replacement. I went along with it because I thought a séance would be an opportune place to die—especially for a man with a weak heart.”

  “So you planned to give him the hellebore all along? How did you disguise the taste?”

  “In that damned scotch he’s so proud of,” Aurora says with a touch of pride in her voice.

  “But what about Frank Campbell? Was he part of your plan as well?”

  “Not originally, but then he figured out what was happening and threatened to unmask me. I had to stop him. Fortunately, Norris here is a good shot with a bow—or with a gun.” Corinth sees Wanda’s head appear beside Aurora’s. The moonlight catches on something metal in her hands. Corinth crouches down in the darkest part of the well, away from the swatch of moonlight. “I was in favor of having you die slowly in the well,” Aurora says, “but Norris has some heathenish notion that you might curse Bosco that way. So I’ll leave you to her.”

  Before Corinth can think of anything else to say, Aurora is gone. Not that there’s anything she could have said, she realizes. How could anyone reason with a woman who’d sickened her own children and then, when they actually died, blamed her husband for their deaths and planned his murder. She hears an echo of laughter in her head and feels the scars around her wrists tighten, as if the ropes that had made them were still there. Yes, that was what had fueled Mr. Oswald’s murderous rage, she realizes now, many years later, his need to blame someone for what he had done to his wife. She waits for the sound of Aurora’s footsteps to recede and then tries to reason with Wanda.

  “She’ll never let you have Alice,” she says. “Even if she’s not hers, she bears the Latham name. She’ll destroy her.”

  “I’ll take care of Alice, better than you could, at least.”

  “I can take her out of here,” Corinth says, “with Tom—”

  “Tom Quinn?” Wanda laughs, the sound echoing off the marble walls and reverberating in Corinth’s chest, which feels as tight as it did that night Oswald had bound the ropes around her. “Don’t you know he was working for Latham all along? He was hired to make sure your séances were impressive enough to satisfy Mrs. Latham. He betrayed you, just as you betrayed him. Why should I trust Alice to either of you?”

  Corinth sees moonlight catch the gun in Wanda’s hand, and then there’s a flash and a shower of sparks, as if the moon had exploded. It feels as though a chip of the moon has broken off and flown into her heart, an icy splinter that turns to fire in her flesh as she falls back onto the rocks.

  Above her she can see the moon, brilliant and white, so large it seems to fill up the entire oculus, so large that she can feel its pull on the water of the spring, feel the water yearning upward to it. She wills her own spirit up toward the moon, anything to keep from being trapped down here, but then she hears the sound of stone moving against stone and the moon is eclipsed, leaving her alone in the darkness with nothing but the muttering of the spring for company.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Just before we are set to leave for town, Daria decides that she ought to stay behind with Zalman. “Aunt Diana gets busy in the office sometimes and loses track of time,” she tells us.

  I’m surprised that the girl would give up a trip to town to sit with a middle-aged poet, but when I say so, Daria shakes her head very seriously. “Zalman’s such a sweetie, and besides, I feel kind of responsible for his accident. If I’d given him the right message from his grandmother in the first place, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen down the stairs.”

  “Do you think Daria’s right?” I ask Nat as he steers the Range Rover down the curving icy road to the front gate. Nat, his eyes glued to the road, laughs. “About what? That Zalman’s a sweetie?”

  “No, we all know that,” I say, stealing a glance at Nat’s profile to see that he’s smiling. In all the publicity photos I’ve ever seen of him his face is turned to the right, casting the right side of his face in shadow. I notice now that there’s a small scar on his right cheekbone—a quarter-inch indentation that looks as if it might have come from either a bad case of adolescent acne or childhood chicken pox. It makes me realize how hard he works to keep some parts of himself hidden. “Do you think she’s right about the message she got on the phone—that it really was Zalman’s grandmother trying to warn him?”

  “Considering everything else that’s happened here, I don’t see why it matters,” Nat says.

  “Yeah, but everything else has to do with Bosco and with what happened here in 1893. Last night I felt like the house and the gardens had come alive, that the place itself is taking all of us over. What I wonder is if it matters who this is happening to.”

  Nat takes his eyes off the road for a moment to look at me. I’m afraid that I’ve said it all wrong, that he’ll think I’m trying to make myself sound important, that I agree with Zalman that my being the first medium to return to Bosco is the reason the spirits of the children have awoken, but when Nat speaks, his vo
ice is kind and hoarse with feeling. “It always matters who it’s happening to,” he says. “In the end that’s all that really does matter.”

  At City Hall I see why Bethesda sent Nat. Although the young female clerk starts out by explaining that genealogy searches always take at least a week to process, as soon as Nat explains that he’s engaged in very important research for his next novel, she concedes that since it’s not too busy today, she could go have a look at the records for 1883 herself.

  “That would be great, Katy,” Nat says, plucking her name from the gold ID necklace at her neck. “I promise I’ll mention you in the acknowledgments. Should we check back in half an hour?”

  Leaving the blushing clerk, we wander down the echoing hallway. “People love that ‘researching a novel’ line,” Nat tells me. “They all want to be part of the process.”

  “Yeah, well, it helps if you’re a famous novelist,” I say. And good-looking, I almost add.

  “Why?” Nat asks. “Do you think she recognized me?” He looks hopeful for a moment, but then he shakes his head. “Unless you’ve been on Oprah, no one in the real world—I mean the world outside of MFA programs and writers’ retreats—is going to recognize who you are.” He looks downcast for a moment, but then, passing a glass door etched with the words Conference Room, his face brightens. “Hey, I think I attended a hearing here once—one of my grandfather’s many frivolous lawsuits trying to reclaim the family’s inheritance. If it’s the same room, there’s a cool mural.”

  Nat opens the door an inch and when he’s sure the room is empty, he motions for me to follow him in. The light from the frost-covered windows is so faint that I can hardly make out the painting on the wall, but then, as if emerging from an early morning fog, the figures take shape as a tribe of Native Americans gathered around something that looks like a miniature volcano.