The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  “ ‘His grateful Iroquois followers lead Sir William Johnson to High Rock Spring,’ ” Nat quotes—not, apparently, from any plaque or inscription, but from memory. “This painting really pissed my grandfather off.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, everything pissed him off. He was a mean old bastard. My mother said it was because his own father disowned him when he refused to follow in his footsteps and go to medical school. He was always in court trying to reclaim his legacy: a house here in Saratoga and a bunch of properties in the Adirondacks. The cabin he managed to get back or, as he put it, ‘wrest back from the hands of some dirty half-breed Indians.’ ” Nat laughs bitterly. “I guess it really galled him to have his case heard under the watchful eyes of the Iroquois Nation.” He turns away from the mural and looks at me as if surprised that I’m there. “Sorry,” he says. “White Protestant guilt is so lame. I’d better get back and see what Katy’s dug up. Want to wait here?”

  Guessing that Nat might want to conduct the rest of his flirtation in private, I nod and sit down in a chair in front of the mural. What has struck me, listening to Nat talk about his grandfather, is that even though our families couldn’t be more different, we’re both suffering from a similar malaise. An inherited dysfunction. In my own case a family history of bad luck with men that, according to Mira, goes back to my great-grandmother, and in Nat’s case it’s a sort of inherited meanness that he reverts to almost reflexively and yet that I sense is not his true nature. There’s this more-generous person trying to get out.

  After waiting for another thirty minutes in the cold courtroom with only the solemn glare of the Iroquois for company, my view of Nat’s generous nature begins to fray around the edges. It seems as if he’s completely forgotten me. When he comes back, though, he looks so stunned that I don’t have the heart to complain. He’s holding several slips of paper in his hand as he drops heavily into the chair next to mine.

  “Did you find the death certificate for the first Alice?”

  He shakes his head. “There’s no record of an Alice Latham who was born and died on April ninth, 1883,” he says, “but there is a record of a birth for an Alice Latham on April fifteenth of that year.” He passes the photocopied birth certificate to me.

  “So the certificate that Bethesda found at Bosco was never registered,” I say. “Do you think there was a child born on April ninth at all?”

  Nat nods. “I think so, but it died like Aurora’s babies before that. Can you imagine losing so many children?”

  “No,” I say, “I can’t. Aurora must have been half-mad with grief. So Milo . . . he found a child for them to adopt and they registered that child’s birth in Town Hall, but where—?”

  “Bethesda is sure that Milo Latham’s affair with Corinth Blackwell started years before he brought her to Bosco. They would have known each other at his lumber mill in Corinth—”

  “And in Gloversville,” I add, “where Corinth appeared at the Lyceum and Milo Latham owned a glove factory. Do you think the child could have been Corinth’s?”

  “Yes. Milo would have wanted his own bloodline,” Nat says.

  “But why would Aurora go along with another woman’s child being substituted for her own? And why would Corinth give up her own baby?”

  “Aurora might have been so delirious she didn’t know what was going on, and Corinth wouldn’t have had much choice if she was dependent on Latham for financial support. Who knows, maybe the child was taken from her without her knowing—her own baby switched with the dead Latham baby.”

  “But that’s awful.”

  “Who knows what these men were capable of,” Nat says in a curiously dead voice.

  “These men?”

  Nat nods and points to a line on Alice Latham’s birth certificate. “The doctor who signed the birth certificate was Dr. Nathaniel Murdoch of Saratoga Springs.”

  “So?”

  “Murdoch was my mother’s maiden name. Nathaniel Murdoch is my great-grandfather. I looked up my mother’s and my grandfather’s birth certificates just to make sure. That’s probably how the Sacandaga camp came into the family. Payment for favors rendered. God, I knew I was descended from a long line of bastards, but I didn’t think we actually had baby-stealers to boast of in the family tree.” Nat starts to laugh—a slow, mirthless chuckle that raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask.

  “I never knew my great-grandmother’s maiden name,” he says. “She died soon after she married my great-grandfather, and there was something in her background my grandfather was ashamed to talk about. Now I know what. I saw it on my grandfather’s birth certificate.” He passes the photocopied birth certificate over to me. Under MOTHER’S MAIDEN NAME I read “Violet Ramsdale.”

  “So,” Nat says, turning to me, his lips contorted in a death mask’s grin, “I guess we know now where I get my writing talent.”

  Nat continues to look downcast as we make our way through the deep snow to the Range Rover, which is parked on a side street beside City Hall.

  “You’re not seriously upset that your great-grandmother was a novelist?” I ask.

  “Violet Ramsdale wrote sensation novels. It’s not exactly a prestigious literary heritage. If it ever got out—” He rounds on me so abruptly that I nearly slip in the snow. “Listen, you can’t tell anyone about this.”

  “Nathaniel Loomis,” I say, invoking his full name to get his attention, “listen to yourself. We just found out that your great-grandfather might have aided in the kidnapping of a woman’s child and what you’re worried about is being related to a popular writer?”

  Nat looks away, seemingly to a road sign for County Route 9N. “I’m upset about that, too—and it’s probably all true. My grandfather said something about it once—that his father wasn’t above helping unmarried girls out of a jam by securing ‘their bastards’ good homes. And that if he hadn’t, a lot of those babies would have ended up drowned in the bogs . . .” Nat’s voice trails off and he stares into the distance—down Route 9N, where storm clouds are massing over the foothills of the Adirondacks.

  “What?” I ask.

  “He showed me a grave once—well, not actually a grave, just a sort of marker carved into the trunk of a tamarack tree out in the bog. He said it was some Indian girl’s ‘dead brat.’ But what I remember thinking was that it wasn’t an Indian name.”

  “Was it Alice?”

  Nat closes his eyes. “It could have been. I can’t remember.”

  “That cabin belonged to Milo Latham in 1883. Corinth could have had the baby there—”

  “And Latham could have switched it with his own dead child.” Nat points down the road. “It’s only an hour’s drive from here—more by horseback then, of course, but you could have made it in a day, for sure.”

  Nat opens the Range Rover, and before I can get my seat belt on, he’s pulled out and is headed north on 9N, heading in the opposite direction from Bosco.

  “Nat, we can’t go there now. There’s a storm coming. They won’t know what happened to us back at Bosco.” I remember, too, that last image I had of the circle of guests in the breakfast room replaced by lifeless dolls, and I realize I’m afraid of what might be happening there while we’re gone.

  Nat stops at the next stop sign, puts the car in park, and turns to face me. “Don’t you want to know?” he asks, his eyes gleaming feverishly in the white light of the approaching storm. “Don’t you want to know the story?”

  I look away from Nat to the northern sky, where storm clouds are pleating the sky like tracks in the snow. Yes, I do want to know the story, and something—some instinct that I have spent my life denying—tells me that the answer is at the camp on the Sacandaga. When I look at the gathering storm clouds, though, I’m seized with a sense of dread, the same dread that came over me last night when I was with David, that sickening sense that the ground beneath my feet was giving way and that something was pulling me under. And then this morning I
realized why the feeling was familiar. I remembered that it’s what I had felt during the spirit circle my mother conducted when I was twelve and what I’ve felt every time I’ve dared to get close to anyone since then. It suddenly angers me—the way Nat’s squeamishness at being related to Mrs. Ramsdale angered me a moment ago. What kind of way was that to live? Mired in the past. David said I’d have to trust someone someday, but what he should have said was that sooner or later I’d have to learn to trust myself.

  “Okay,” I say, turning to Nat, “let’s go.”

  We drive north on Route 9N and then turn west toward the Great Sacandaga Lake, the reservoir created by the damming of the Sacandaga River in the thirties. As we follow the reservoir road around the lake, the terrain becomes increasingly dreary. We pass white farmhouses that look in disrepair, their paint peeling, black shutters hanging crooked, and their barns collapsing into themselves in fields where unmowed stubble sticks out of the deep snow. We pass aluminum-sided trailers listing windward in sunken hollows beside the road. We pass through deep patches of fog, so thick that I can’t make out the lake just beyond the road. The fog is so deep that I can barely see the sign for the “Indian Point Overlook” that Nat points out.

  “I always begged my grandfather to stop there,” Nat says as we drive by the sign, “but he never would. I told him that I’d heard it was a battle site from the French and Indian Wars, because I knew he loved stuff like that, but he said it was just some local legend about an Indian girl throwing herself over the cliff because her boyfriend left her. He called me ‘squaw boy’ for the rest of the summer and I stopped asking to go there.”

  I feel chilled by the story. The dead girl. The shamed little boy. I also remember Zalman’s poem linking the statue of Ne’Moss-i-Ne at Bosco to a girl who threw herself off a cliff and wonder if the sign might name the Indian girl. “Let’s go back and look at it,” I say.

  Nat looks at me with a flash of gratitude that heats the air between us, and then swerves the Range Rover into a U-turn, its back end fishtailing on the fog-slick road. He drives us back to the overlook and pulls into a semicircular drive underneath a pine tree and next to a garbage can. A sign pointing to a gap between the pines reads, “Scenic Overlook .5 mile.”

  “We’re not going to get much of a view today,” Nat says.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “We’re not here for the view.”

  Nat nods and gets out of the car and starts up the path. By the time I zip up my parka and follow him, I can barely make out his back five feet in front of me through the vaporous fog that rises from the deep snow. It’s easier to follow in his deep footsteps in the snow than to keep an eye on him. Easier, too, to stay in his tracks than to make my own. I’m concentrating so hard on fitting my feet into his tracks that I run into him at the end of the trail, nearly knocking him off his feet. He clenches my arm hard with one hand and grabs a metal sign pole with the other to keep us both from toppling into the abyss. Inches from our feet stretches a white void.

  “ ‘On this spot,’ ” Nat reads in a deep, sonorous voice, “ ‘an Iroquois maiden running from invading French and Algonquin forces to warn the British army fell to her death. She died a heroine of the French and Indian Wars.’ I knew it had something to do with the French and Indian Wars. My grandfather said it was bullshit. That it was just another pregnant Indian girl doing away with herself.”

  There’s a note of vindication in Nat’s voice, but when I look at him I see that there’s no triumph in his expression. Instead there’s a look of immeasurable sadness—as if he’d been personally acquainted with the “Indian maiden.” I look away from him and over the cliff, into the swirling fog, into a space where the thick white cloud thins and then tears like a run in a stocking. I’m staring over the edge of the cliff at the lake. I can feel myself getting dizzy, but I’m unable to pull away.

  “Hey,” Nat says, pulling me back from the edge. “You don’t want to end up like one of those Indian girls dashed on the rocks below. I mean, things aren’t that bad with the gardener, are they?”

  I look up, startled by the nastiness in his voice. Five minutes ago he’d seemed like a wounded boy, and now . . . Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a wounded boy might strike out at the nearest target. What does surprise me is the undercurrent of jealousy in his voice. “He’s a landscape architect, not a gardener.” I’m trying to keep my voice neutral, but it comes out icy instead. “And there’s really nothing going on between us at all.”

  “Oh,” Nat says. He turns away quickly, but not before I’ve seen him smile.

  As I follow, both of us sticking to the tracks Nat made on the way in, I wonder what in the world all that was about. I know that Nat’s been irritated by David since we all arrived at Bosco, but I always thought it was an almost reflexive rivalry between the two men. Now I wonder if it’s developed into something more—and if it has something to do with me. I also wonder why I was so quick to deny that anything was going on between me and David.

  I’m so engrossed in these thoughts that when I look up, I realize I’ve lost sight of Nat in the fog. He must be back at the car, because I can see a light in front of me that I assume is one of the Range Rover’s headlights, though it’s not exactly where I thought the parking lot should be. I head toward it, struggling through the snow, each step sinking deeper as if something were pulling my feet down into the earth. When I’ve gone another ten feet or so, I realize I’ve strayed out of Nat’s footsteps. I stop and listen for the sound of the Range Rover’s engine, but instead I hear a roaring sound—like a river in spring swollen with snowmelt. The light in front of me thins and wavers like a candle flame, and then I see her: a slim girl in a white buckskin dress, made out of fog, her eyes two holes torn out of the fog, black as raven wings. As she looks at me, I can feel the weight of betrayal in those eyes—the betrayal she suffered, the betrayal she caused. She holds out her hand to me and I step forward. The roaring sound becomes louder, and I see that I’ve come full circle to the cliff again. When I look down over the cliff now, though, instead of the placid lake I see a rushing river. Above the sound of the water I can hear the girl’s voice at my ear, murmuring seductively . . .

  “Ellis, what are you doing back here?” It’s Nat, his voice breaking into the fog-girl’s seductive whisper. I turn to him and look right through her, her shape shredding into ribbons of fog.

  “I—I remembered something,” I say, kneeling in the snow. I sweep an armful of snow off the edge of the cliff, which falls soundlessly into the void. Words have been carved into the rock below the snow.

  “ ‘Ne’Moss-i-Ne’s Rock,’ ” Nat reads. “Damn, how did you know—”

  I shake my head and get up, brushing the snow from my jeans. “I don’t know,” I say as we turn back to the car. I stay close to Nat this time, but still I can hear with every step I take the fog-girl’s whisper. “Remember me,” she’d said, “remember me.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Deep below the earth Corinth listens to her blood seeping through the rocks to join the water of the spring, which is still muttering its sad refrain, Remember me, remember me. She purses her lips and expels a current of precious breath into the airless well. “Shhhh . . .” The sound a mother makes to soothe a fretful child.

  She shifts herself on the rocks to take the weight off the shoulder the bullet pierced. At least she got to hold her child once. Alice would be all right now. Wanda must plan to take her away—else why would she have shot Corinth and left her down in here? Maybe it was Wanda’s plan all along—to make it look as if Corinth took the child once Aurora was through with her. Aurora wouldn’t follow and expose Wanda because Wanda would then reveal that Aurora killed Milo. Perhaps Aurora even promised Wanda the child in exchange for helping her wreak her vengeance on Milo and Corinth. What, Corinth wonders now, was Tom’s price for betraying her?

  Tom. Perhaps he’d been working for Aurora as well as for Milo. Where was he now? Had he taken his fee and fled
Bosco, or had Wanda’s son killed him for the part he played in aiding Milo Latham? Was he lying someplace in the garden, his own lifeblood draining into the ground? She tries to find him in the darkness. She lets her spirit flow out of her body as freely as her blood is flowing out onto the rocks. She pictures the blue bird on one of Aurora’s teacups, the blue of its wings bleeding into the surrounding white, and imagines her spirit as that bird, a blue whiff of smoke with wings, rising into a white sky. But just when she feels her spirit rising to the top of the well, she’s held back by the cold marble and she can feel it trembling there like the wings of a trapped bird beating the stagnant air. She can feel the panic rising in her as her spirit slams back into her torn flesh. Quickly she pushes the spirit out of her again, but this time she sends it downward, through the cracks between the rocks and into the pipes, where it snakes below the rose garden and the grotto and into the hillside through a hundred copper pipes, pushing the water aside to surface for one last gasp.

  Standing in the center of the rose garden in a sea of fallen crimson petals, Tom pauses and listens. All he hears, though, is silence. Damn it, Cory, he says to himself, I’ve done what you told me to. She was right, of course. Not ten minutes after she and Wanda left, he saw the driver get ready to make his move, but Tom was too quick for him. He hit him hard enough to kill him, but Tom was pretty sure he was still alive. He bound him with a rope that he found coiled in the man’s overcoat pocket—no doubt meant for Tom—and left him in the hedges. They could decide what to do with him later—but where is Corinth? Did she let herself be overpowered by Mrs. Norris?

  He turns in a slow circle, even his footsteps queerly silent on the soft red carpet, but the rose garden is empty except for the marble Indian girl, who holds her bound hands out to him as if imploring him to release her.