The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  “Where will we take her?”

  For a moment Tom thinks the question comes from his own head, but then he looks up and sees that the girl is looking at Corinth’s lifeless body.

  “We’ll have to bury her,” he tells the girl, wondering if she understands about death. But then he remembers who she is—how many sisters and brothers she’s lost—and figures she, of all people, should understand about death.

  Alice nods, her eyes shining with tears, but she bites her lip and juts out her chin, and in the end she doesn’t cry. “Of course,” she says, “we’ll bury her with the dead baby.”

  Tom would have picked someplace other than where “the dead baby” is buried. It’s the last place he wants to go, not just because it’s where Corinth died, but because it’s occurred to him by now that the baby might have been his. Of course she would have made Latham think it was his own child. He can’t really blame her. When he didn’t come back at Christmas, she must have felt she didn’t have any other option. Still, it means she must have given Latham good reason to think it could be his—and way before Christmastime.

  Tom carries Corinth in his arms. He wrapped her in a blanket and tied the blanket with rope, but at the last minute he couldn’t bear to think of her spending all eternity bound like that.

  Alice said it wasn’t necessary. “She’ll be like Ophelia floating in the water,” she said. She picked flowers to braid in Corinth’s hair. Bog rosemary and laurel and the little white orchid that smelled like vanilla. She made a bouquet of all the flowers and wrapped them in a green pitcher plant, and carries it as solemnly as a flower girl in a wedding procession behind Tom as he carries Corinth into the bog.

  When they reach the tree where the name is carved, Tom lays Corinth down at the edge of the water and stands while Alice takes out the broken teacup from her pocket. She kneels at the foot of the tree and digs a little hole with her bare hands. He knows he should help her, but he feels frozen, his feet leaden. He’s afraid that if he kneels down in the peaty soil, he might never get up again. He keeps his eyes on the trees, looking away from Corinth and the water, afraid of what he might see in its tea-stained depths. Even his own reflection would be a horror to him right now.

  “There,” Alice says, getting to her feet and brushing the dirt from her hands onto her dress. The girl doesn’t even have good manners. Why on earth didn’t the Lathams take better care of her? “I’ll need your help for the next part, Mr. Quinn.”

  “We really should be going,” he says.

  “It won’t take long.” Alice says, biting her lip. He hopes the girl isn’t going to cry. She holds out the bottom piece of the teacup with her name on it. “I want you to put this over the other name on the tree,” she says. “If you carve a little hole for it, you can wedge it in. You do have a pocketknife, don’t you?”

  Yes, he has a pocketknife. He takes the teacup bottom and measures it against the tree. “I could put it beside the name,” he says, “then they’ll both be here.”

  “No,” Alice says, stamping her foot on the ground. “It has to go over it.”

  Tom shakes his head and begins scooping out a circle from the soft bark of the tamarack tree. Who knows what the girl has in mind, but it feels curiously right to erase the name of this baby—perhaps his baby—and rechristen it with Alice’s teacup. It feels as if he were erasing his past as the name shreds under his knife. When this is all over, when he’s gotten rid of the girl, he’ll change his own name. To satisfy Corinth’s last wish he’ll take the girl to the sister in Buffalo, but that will be it. From Buffalo he’ll take a train west—maybe as far as California—and start over. He’ll forget Corinth’s name and his own name. He’ll certainly forget this baby’s name.

  As he wedges the china disk into the tree, he feels he’s already forgotten it. He kneels down beside Alice and together they ease Corinth’s body into the bog. He doesn’t watch as the water closes over her face, and yet he can almost hear, beneath the sighing of the sedges and the reeds, her voice. One last time, he hears her calling his name.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  When I call Tom’s name, Nat hesitates for just a moment, but he still brings down the marble arm into David’s skull with a crash that reverberates through the crypt. David staggers and begins to fall, but Bethesda catches him and keeps his head from hitting the marble floor.

  “You didn’t have to hit him so hard,” Bethesda scolds.

  “You’re welcome,” Nat says sarcastically. “Next time I’ll let him slice you open with this thing.” Nat picks up the scythe, but I take it from him and drop it down the well, where it clatters against the stones at the bottom. Then I kneel down next to Bethesda, who has her ear pressed to David’s chest. “Is he—?”

  Bethesda shakes her head. “He’s breathing,” she says, “but shallowly. We have to get him back up to the house.”

  “Well, I’m not carrying him,” Nat says petulantly.

  Bethesda and I both look up at him and someone sighs as if exasperated, but then I realize the sound is coming from David. I look down and see his eyes flicker open. They settle on Bethesda, and I’m afraid for a moment that he’ll attack her again, but the white film is gone.

  “I’ll go get that scythe now,” he says. “I left it in a storage shed up the hill—” Then he sees me and Nat and, I imagine, notices that it’s dark. “What—?”

  “We’ll explain later,” I say. “We’ve got to get back to the house. Can you walk?”

  David nods and struggles to his feet, leaning on Bethesda’s and my arms. Nat stands a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest. “How’s your head feel?” Nat asks.

  “Like I was rammed by a truck.”

  “Sorry about that,” Nat says with a smile that looks anything but apologetic. Before David can register what’s happened, Bethesda and I steer him up the steps. In the cemetery the white flowers have withered and shriveled up. They crackle under our feet as we walk across them. When we enter the narrow path back to the house, we have to walk two by two. I motion for Bethesda to go with David to keep an eye on him, and I fall back to have a word with Nat.

  “It’s not his fault,” I tell Nat. “It’s not David who was trying to hurt Bethesda—or me—it’s this place.”

  “Yeah, I get it, Ellis. He was possessed. So, maybe I was possessed, too.”

  “The only one you’re possessed by right now is your grandfather. All the ugly things he ever said to you are all right in here”—I tap my finger on Nat’s forehead—“and you’re going to keep spewing out the bad stuff until you turn around and face it.”

  “Oh, please,” Nat says, dodging away from my finger, “spare me the psychobabble. I thought you were a psychic, not a psychiatrist.”

  I stop in my tracks, and Nat goes on a few more feet, his head ducked and his shoulders hunched. When he sees that I’m not following him, he stops and turns back toward me. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be so sensitive. I’m sorry. It’s just that right now I think we probably need your skills as a psychic more than as a psychoanalyst. Okay?”

  It’s the closest I’m likely to get to an apology, so I continue walking. He’s right, I realize: whatever is happening here at Bosco requires the skills of a medium and, unfortunately, I’m the closest thing we have to one.

  When we emerge onto the terrace, the snow is a deep wave that sweeps up over the hill and crests the marble balustrade. Although the snow has stopped falling, a steady wind blows a cloud of fine icy particles across the frozen expanse. A tsunami of snow that might at any moment break over the house and carry it away.

  Or has it already carried everyone away?

  Turning to the house, I see a wall of darkened windows that have been sealed by a milky coat of ice. Like blind eyes, I think, shivering as a gust of icy wind hits my back with so much force it almost knocks me off my feet. It’s like standing in the ocean and getting hit by an unexpected wave. I can feel the pent-up pressure of Bosco’s dead springs gathering to unleash
their rage on the house.

  David and Bethesda come back from the east side of the house to report that the door on that side, the one under the porte cochere, is locked.

  “That’s funny,” Nat says. “In all the years I’ve been coming to Bosco the porte cochere door has never been locked.”

  “Well, the porte co-SHARE door is locked now,” David says, drawling out the French word. “So much for tradition.”

  Nat takes a step toward David, but Bethesda gets in between them. “Let’s check the library doors,” she suggests. “It’s got the best working fireplace. I bet Diana and Daria would take Zalman there if there wasn’t any heat.”

  “The library doors would be the first ones they’d lock in a storm,” Nat says as we trudge through the deep snow to the double French doors.

  A drift has risen halfway up the doors. Even if they aren’t locked, we won’t be able to open them without digging them out. As I stare at them, though, I see a flicker of light coming from beneath the waxy layer of ice that covers the glass. “Look,” I tell the others, “I think someone is in there. If you start clearing some of this snow away, I’ll try to get their attention inside.”

  I press my face to the frosted glass to look in, but all I can see are amorphous globes of light hovering in the room like huge fireflies. I breathe on the window until a crack appears in the ice and I’m able to get my fingernails underneath to pry it away. I’ve cleared a small circle when one of the lights suddenly flares right in my eyes, blinding me. I take a step back and fall into the pile of snow that Nat and David have pushed away from the door.

  “Who’s there?” a tremulous voice calls as the door opens a crack.

  “Diana?” Nat calls. “It’s Nat Loomis.” David and Bethesda add their names, but the door still doesn’t open. I struggle to get up, but the wind pushes me down, as if I’m being dragged under by a riptide. My ears are filled with a sound like rushing water and I’m blinded by a gust of snow. Then I can feel someone pulling me up and through the narrowly opened doors. I’m still blinded by the powdery ice in my eyes and my tangled hair and the flaring candlelight in the dark room. Then my vision clears and I see it’s Nat who’s helped me through the door. He pushes away my hair, which is hanging in icy strands as if he’d fished me out of a frozen sea.

  “Shut those doors,” Diana yells at us.

  I’m surprised at the note of hysteria in Diana’s voice, but then I look back at the glass doors to the terrace and understand. Even now snow is lapping across the lintel, drawing wave patterns in a drift that reaches to the wainscoting, like surf marks of an encroaching tide. David and Bethesda have to struggle against the wind and drifted snow to close them.

  “Maybe we should make for higher ground,” I say, only half joking.

  “We can’t leave Zalman,” Diana says, waving toward the alcove. We all follow her into the alcove, where Zalman is seated in his wheelchair beside the library table. At the center of the table is a large branching candelabra—a hideous kitschy thing made out of the antlers of a moose. Daria’s sitting to Zalman’s right, scribbling away on a steno pad as Zalman dictates. It takes me a moment to realize, though, that Zalman’s words are barely audible and that his eyes look as blind and unfocused as Bosco’s frozen windows.

  “I’ve gotten a few more words filled in,” Daria says, holding up the spiral-bound notebook. “You were right, Aunt Diana, if you break it into lines of ten syllables each, there are fourteen lines that he’s repeating over and over again.”

  “Fourteen lines?” Nat asks.

  “You mean he’s reciting a sonnet?” Bethesda asks, sitting down next to Daria and looking over her shoulder at the lines.

  “Yes,” Diana says, walking over to the sideboard. “He lost consciousness earlier this evening and then when he came to, he started reciting. He’s been repeating the same sonnet for three hours now, but so softly we couldn’t tell at first that’s what it was. I asked Daria to write it down. I told you that steno class would come in handy.” Diana turns from the sideboard with a glass of scotch in her hand and David takes it from her without asking and sits down next to Bethesda. Glaring at him, Diana pours herself another glass and sits down next to David. I notice as she passes me that she reeks of the peaty scotch.

  “Well, I have gotten pretty good, what with all the phone messages I’ve been taking. Here, do you want to hear it?”

  “Absolutely,” Nat says, sitting down next to Diana. There’s only one chair left, the one between Zalman and Nat, which I take.

  “Okay, but let me wait until he comes around to the beginning again. It would seem kind of rude to read out of step with him.”

  No one questions Daria’s sense of decorum. Instead, we all do what she does, follow Zalman’s lips until he pauses, and then with a sharp intake of breath that sounds painfully hoarse (three hours repeating the same sonnet!), Daria’s voice chimes in with Zalman’s barely audible one.

  “Elusive, evanescent as twilight,

  this velvet snow obscures the murky bog.

  A spirit, barely in your mortal sight,

  moves shadowy and sudden through a fog

  that slithers across a pond’s slick mossy skin

  and merges with the weave of silent snow.

  The spirit is an infant lost at birth,

  forever roaming here; the blackbirds know

  her loss, mark it in red, just as the earth

  is mourning her with clouds, with snow, with rain.

  Her tiny silhouette chills to your bone,

  especially the shadow of her eyes,

  so innocent and lost, so all alone,

  for no one ever hears her ghostly cries.”

  When they finish, we can all hear the moan of the wind outside, and then the hiss of Zalman drawing another painful breath as he begins again. I reach out and touch Zalman’s hand. “It’s all right,” I say, “we found her.” Then I take out of my pocket the broken china and spill the blue-and-white shards onto the table along with the crumpled white orchid. Instantly the room is filled with the scent of vanilla.

  Bethesda reaches across the table and touches the china pieces. “Where did you find these?” she asks.

  “What do you mean that you ‘found her’?” Diana asks at the same time. “Who did you find?”

  “Alice,” Nat answers. “The first Alice, the one who was born and died on April ninth, 1883. Bethesda was right—that death certificate was never filed, but there was a birth certificate filed for an Alice Latham on April fifteenth—”

  “So it was just a mistake—” Diana Tate begins.

  “That a child was born on April ninth, died, and was suddenly reborn on the fifteenth?” Nat asks. “I don’t think so.”

  “They must have replaced the dead baby with another,” Bethesda says. “But where . . . ?”

  “With Corinth’s child,” I answer. “Nat remembered a grave site in the bog behind his family’s camp, and we went to look there. We found the name Alice written on a piece of china that had been wedged into the tree, and then we found these pieces beneath the tree—”

  “But that can’t be right,” Bethesda says, “Aurora bought these teacups for the children in 1892, so that name couldn’t have been put on the tree when that baby died in 1883.”

  “No, I think it was put over another name,” I say, “when Alice Latham came to the cabin in 1893 with Corinth Blackwell and Tom Quinn.”

  “Well, at least that proves that they did kidnap Alice Latham,” Diana Tate says, taking a sip from her drink and putting the glass down so hard on the table that some scotch sloshes over the side. I turn to her, surprised at the emotion in her voice.

  “Alice was her own child,” I say. “If the babies were switched without Corinth knowing, she wouldn’t have known that until she came to Bosco in 1893. By then all the other Latham children had died. Corinth would have been afraid for Alice’s life. I think that’s what they want us to know—what happened to them. What happened to Alice.”


  “That’s why all the teacups have been breaking,” Daria says, taking out of her pocket a handful of broken china pieces and spilling them across the table so that they join the shards that I brought back from the bog. “This was Cynthia’s cup,” she says, picking out a C, Y, N, and A on the pieces of white china. “I was giving Zalman his tea around four o’clock today, and suddenly the cup just shuddered itself off the table.”

  Nat and I exchange a look. Four o’clock was around the time the tamarack tree fell in the bog and I found the pieces of Alice’s cup buried beneath it.

  “That’s when Zalman started babbling,” Daria says. “I went to find Aunt Diana and I heard a noise from one of the rooms upstairs, so I went up there and found Miss Graham’s door open.”

  “My room?” Bethesda asks, turning an outraged glance at Daria. “I’m quite sure I left my door closed and locked.”

  “Well, it was open and the noise had come from there,” Daria says, blinking back tears. The stress of having been here alone all day with a drunken aunt and a semicomatose poet has obviously gotten to her.

  “And what did you find?” I ask more gently.

  “There were pins all over the floor and pieces of broken china,” she says. “I picked them up.” She takes a few pieces of broken china from a different pocket and places them on the table. I spy a T and an A.

  “Tam’s cup,” I say.

  “And where were you when your niece was invading my room?” Bethesda asks Diana.

  “I was having a cup of tea in the kitchen,” she says, “when the cup I was drinking from exploded in my hand. It cut my finger. See?” Diana holds up her bandaged hand.