The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  I lean over the side but there’s nothing but a series of concentric circles to mark where they went down. I aim for the center of the circles and dive, holding my eyes open even though the salt water stings them. For a moment all I see is blackness and then, as the morning light pierces the water, I see them, so wrapped around each other that they look like one body with two heads. A horrible monster sinking into the abyss.

  Part of that creature is Neil, though. I surface briefly to fill my lungs and then plunge down again, arrowing my body toward the bottom of the river. And just as I’m running out of air a hand reaches out of the gloom and grabs me by the hand.

  It’s Dr. Horace. I clasp his arm with my other hand and start pulling back to lift him and Neil up to the surface but he pulls me down. I’m looking straight into his eyes and I can see he’s completely out of his mind. Neil’s eyes, though, which look out at me from behind Dr. Horace, look completely sane. He knows exactly what he’s doing when he corkscrews his body with such force that the water rushes around me like a whirlpool and I see them both sinking down into the depths of the river as I’m pushed back to the surface.

  I gulp air and dive down again, but no matter how deep I go I see only blackness. I rise to the surface and dive again … and again, and again, but I can’t find them. Even when I mean to keep on going down into the dark something leads me back into the air and light. After a while I can’t tell the difference. The dark water is lit with stars and explosions like fireworks, and the sky above is fretted with dark bands that ripple and wave across the silver skin of the river like banners in a medieval pageant. They’re coming for me across the river on silver boats. Neil and Christine and Eugenie and Clare and Augustus—coming to tell me that there’s no difference at all. Above the water or below. The surface of the water is a silver mirror reflecting the silver window of the sky. It’s all silver light spreading as far as the eye can see, a mirror reflecting a window. What difference does it make which side I’m on?

  Still I wait. All but one of the boats has vanished and now I can see that it’s not a boat at all, but a pure white bird skimming the surface of the waves, its wings tilting first to one side and then to the other. I have only to wait for its touch to transform me into a bird as well and then we’ll ride the waves together forever on a sea becalmed by the transformation of our undying love.

  I STAYED IN BED FOR A WEEK AFTER THEY BROUGHT ME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL and I would have stayed longer if I hadn’t awoken one morning to the sound of hammering. I’d been dreaming that Ernesto and my father were building me a coffin out of glass—like Snow White’s—and when I opened my eyes I could look out through the clear lid and see Bea standing over me crying. That got me out of bed and down the spiral stairs into the studio.

  I found that the coffin they were making wasn’t for me, but for the lady. While I’d lain in bed, my father, Ernesto, and Robbie had finished the restoration without me and now they were crating the window to take it back to the college. The window would be reinstalled in time for the dedication ceremony the day after Labor Day.

  “Good riddance,” I say to the wooden pallet covering the Lady’s face. I’ve developed a real animosity toward the lady in the window. If I hadn’t gotten Christine the lecture appointment, she wouldn’t have gone up to Briarwood to research the lady’s antecedents and she and Neil would still be alive. I wish I’d never seen her face.

  Ernesto and my father exchange looks while Robbie busies himself drawing arrows on the crate to indicate which side is up.

  “I talked to Beatrice yesterday,” my father says with studied casualness. “She’s coming home on Tuesday.” I feel a pang of reproach that manages to pierce through the general malaise of guilt that hovers around me like a noxious gas. I’d let my father make the call to Bea explaining that Neil was dead. I hadn’t even remembered when she was coming home.

  “She has a lot of questions that I didn’t really know how to answer,” my father says.

  “And you think I do?” I glare at my father, daring him to tell me how to explain to Bea that her father was killed by the very man who’d been entrusted with his health and well-being all these years.

  “That nice Italian police officer came by yesterday,” he says, looking away. “He said that when you were ready he had some things to tell you. Maybe he can give you an idea what to tell Bea …”

  My father’s holding out one of Falco’s business cards, but I don’t take it. I don’t have to. I still remember the number.

  WHEN I CALL, FALCO SAYS HE’LL PICK ME UP. “WE CAN TALK IN MY CAR ON THE WAY.”

  “On the way where?”

  “I’ll explain that on the way, too.”

  He hangs up before I can object. I agreed to meet with him to get my father off my back, but I hadn’t bargained on a road trip, which means actually getting dressed and leaving the factory. I consider calling back and telling him not to come, but aside from the fact that he probably wouldn’t listen, I have to admit I owe him. If he and Kyle hadn’t come for me in the outrigger canoe, I would have drowned.

  When he came to see me in the hospital he told me that after he’d dropped Neil and me off at the factory he’d gone back across the river to retrieve Kyle’s outrigger canoe from the Penrose estate. On his way to the boathouse, though, he’d stopped to pick up a cup of coffee at Gal’s. Annemarie had told him that I’d been in to call Dr. Horace because Neil was sick, so he’d gone by the factory. When he couldn’t find us there he went to the boathouse, where he met Kyle—just coming in for an early morning tour he was giving to a singles group from the 92nd Street Y. He’d asked Kyle if he’d seen me or Neil or Dr. Horace.

  “When I mentioned Horace’s name, Kyle turned as white as a dead fish. He spilled his guts—that he’d been trading stock for Dr. Horace in a drug company and he was afraid it might have something to do with Christine’s death. When he saw that the rowboat was gone he had that canoe in the water so quick it was all I could do to hop aboard. My arms still ache from trying to keep up with his paddling.”

  Falco told me that Kyle had cut a deal with the SEC in exchange for providing information on the transactions and that his efforts to rescue me would be taken into consideration at his hearing. He’d even dived for Neil and Dr. Horace, but without any luck. Their bodies, still wrapped together, were found a week later in a cove just south of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Falco had come to see me when they found the bodies.

  I’m waiting outside the main door when he pulls up in front of the factory. I’d just as soon get right in the air-conditioned car to get out of the heat—the erratic stormy weather of July has settled into the kind of hot, humid August weather that makes one long for the crispness of autumn—but he parks and gets out. He’s dressed more casually than I’ve seen him before—in jeans and a yellow Polo shirt—so I guess he must consider this an off-duty call. Then I notice that he’s carrying a soft black leather messenger bag and I remind myself that this is a man who’s never completely off duty.

  “I thought we’d have coffee at Gal’s first,” he says. “I have some things I want to show you.”

  I turn without comment and start walking toward the cafe. I half suspect this whole outing is part of a scheme he’s cooked up with my father to get me back into the routines of daily life. I remember that after Neil was put in Briarwood, Christine would come up here from the city with little made-up errands: looking for old furniture at the Salvation Army or going to an old church to look at some window she was writing a paper on. My father kept losing workers and needing “a hand” on one job or another. And of course, there had been Bea, only a toddler at the time, needing so much. Eventually the demands of daily life had filled in the cracks Neil’s absence had left behind, just as my dad and Ernesto had poured epoxy into the fire-damaged windows up at St. Eustace’s to keep them from falling apart. But the cracks were still there and it was unlikely that those windows would survive another disaster. The question was, could I?

  As soon
as I walk into Gal’s, Portia comes out from behind the counter and throws her soft, damp arms around my neck. She smells like almonds and hot milk.

  “Zia, we’re all so sorry about Uncle Neil.” Uncle Neil? I can’t remember anyone in my family calling him that before. “Is it true he saved your life?”

  I look into Portia’s wide brown eyes and past her to her friend, Scott, who’s sitting at a little metal table, writing in a notebook between sips of espresso. In his black jeans and black T-shirt all he needs is a beret to complete the picture of Hemingway-writing-in-a-cafe. He steals a look up at me and blushes. They’ve talked about me, I realize, and about what happened on the river. Neil and I have become for them one of the romantic stories they read about, like Francesca and Paolo or Halcyone and Ceyx. The only difference is that those lovers always died together or at least transformed into some shape that bound them together for eternity. What am I still doing here?

  Fortunately, Annemarie comes out and rescues me from Portia’s well-meaning, but unnerving, adulation. She seats us at an out-of-the-way table and brings us cappuccinos (I ask for a plain one—I’ve lost my taste for amaretto) and biscotti. When she leaves us, she smiles at Falco and calls him Danieli.

  “Wow, I’m impressed,” I tell him. “Annemarie doesn’t warm up to just anyone like that.”

  Falco shrugs and takes a sip of his coffee, which leaves a mustache of foam on his upper lip. What nice lips, I find myself thinking, and then blush just like Portia’s teenaged boyfriend.

  Falco wipes his mouth with his napkin and lays the leather bag on the table between us. “Recognize this?”

  It’s a plain leather bag—good quality, a little fancier than what I’d expect a police detective to carry, and while it doesn’t look exactly feminine, it’s the kind of item that could be worn equally well by a stylish man or woman. When he unzips it, though, I recognize the silk jacquard lining embossed with the logo of an Italian luggage maker.

  “It’s Christine’s,” I say. “She had it with her when I put her on the train.”

  “Yes. We found it locked in one of Dr. Horace’s file cabinets. Apparently he hadn’t figured out yet how to dispose of it safely.”

  He takes out a manila file folder and slides a sheet of paper across the table. It appears to be a page taken from some kind of medical report—a badly Xeroxed form with spaces for dosage amounts and blood counts, a series of numbers and dates that mean nothing to me. I realize, though, that this must be the page of blood results that Horace failed to alter and that Christine stole from Neil’s file. On the bottom of the page is a larger blank left for “comments.” Scribbled here, in handwriting I recognize as Dr. Horace’s, is a progress report on Neil’s condition.

  Patient has shown tremendous improvement under drug therapy. He no longer represents a threat to himself or others. It’s recommended that he be placed in a less-supervised setting, with the expectation that he will someday resume a normal life.

  I lay the page down and push it back toward him carelessly into a puddle of spilled coffee. “Thanks, but I don’t see what good this is to me now.” It’s like getting an invitation after the party’s over.

  “I thought you’d want to know why Christine stole the file in the first place.”

  He unpeels a bright yellow Post-it note from the inside of the folder and hands it to me. Show Juno, it says. “She wanted you to know that Neil was better.”

  “She almost did show it to me,” I say, remembering that she’d reached into her bag at the station, “but then she changed her mind.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I think because I told her I never wanted to feel for anyone what I had felt for Neil.” I look away from him because my eyes have filled with tears. “She stole this page from Neil’s file so she could show me that Neil was better. Neil had told her that he still loved me. She was trying to give us a second chance … Damn …”

  I cover my face with my hands. I hear the scrape of Falco’s chair and when I uncover my face he’s got a glass of water for me and a clean white linen napkin that’s been soaked in cold water and wrung out like the cold compresses my mother would press to my forehead during childhood fevers.

  “And that’s why Horace killed her. Because she stole that page from Neil’s files and it has the original blood work on it before he tampered with the results.”

  Falco nods. “Amy Webb says that she misplaced her keys a few months ago when Christine was visiting and then they showed up a few hours later. Christine must have had copies made.”

  “She was always an overzealous researcher,” I say, trying to smile, but the effort of moving my lips makes me sob again.

  “Her interest in Clare Barovier wasn’t merely academic. I had a long talk with Gavin Penrose—”

  “About Christine thinking she was related to him? Gavin said something about that at Astolat, but I wasn’t sure if it was true or not. It sounded kind of crazy …”

  “Well, I think I understand how she came to the idea. Here—this is the page she took from Clare Barovier’s file.”

  He takes out another piece of paper and hands it to me. It’s another patient progress report, only this one is much older—a yellowed page of typescript dated December 18, 1923 and signed by a Dr. Peabody, who, I remember, was Dr. Horace’s predecessor at Briarwood. I read the comments written on the bottom of the page.

  Clare Barovier has made an excellent and unforeseen recovery since her surgery. I attribute this improvement to the removal of her uterus. Patient has seemed quite logical and calm since the operation, and has finally given over her long-held obsession with her lost baby

  “Lost baby?”

  “That’s what led Christine to believe that Clare had had a baby—Augustus’s baby—in the asylum and that it had been adopted by the Webbs. It makes sense when you remember the stories Christine’s father told about taking those boat trips as a boy. And then when Christine found out she was pregnant—”

  “Amy said that Christine was asking a lot of questions about the family history. She thought it was because Christine was pregnant.”

  “It was. When she found out she had Tay-Sachs she wanted to know how the Protestant, English Webbs came by an Eastern European hereditary disease. She thought that maybe Clare’s father was Jewish.”

  “The drawing teacher that Eugenie and Clare’s mother eloped with. And was he?”

  Falco shrugs. “I have no idea. Nor do the Webbs have any idea where the gene could have come from.”

  “So after all Christine’s efforts the whole thing is still a mystery.”

  “That part, yes, but there’s a piece I think I’ve figured out. Only I need your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Yes, it’s right up your alley—a little restoration job I’ve been working on with a friend of yours.”

  We drive across the river and head south on Route 9W. It doesn’t take me long to realize where we’re going and the knowledge breaks the fragile thread of interest revived in me by Falco’s revelations. When we turn into the main gate at The Beeches, the color of the copper-red trees is almost too painful to look at. I feel as if it’s my blood draining out from my body and seeping into the humid, hazy air. I slump down in my seat and close my eyes while Falco asks the groundskeeper to unlock the inner gate to the estate.

  “Gavin’s been most cooperative,” he says, as we drive through the gate. “He’s hoping the local police will put in a good word for him when his case comes up for trial. And he’ll need it. Aside from The Drowning

  Tree, he sold a Rubens and two Hudson River school landscapes. When Joan Shelley found out she called off the engagement. You know he’s resigned the presidency of the college.”

  “No,” I say, half opening my eyes to sneak a look at the woods we’re driving through. We’ve passed the copper beech grove and are driving on a wide, curving road lined with sycamores. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yep, I hear that Professor Umberto Da Silva is
going to act as interim president while the Board of Trustees conducts a search.”

  “The college could do a lot worse than to keep him; he’d be a fine president,” I say, thinking of Professor Da Silva’s regal Roman bearing and his kindness.

  “I hear he’s going to preside at the dedication of the window in September.”

  I turn toward Falco, whose profile against the dappled green of the sycamores is pretty regal itself. “You hear quite a bit, don’t you? Since when are you so involved in the affairs of the college?”

  He half turns his head toward me and smiles. “This case has given me a new interest in the town …” He seems like he’s going to say something else, but a sudden jolt draws his attention back to the road. The drive has come to an abrupt end at a bare, grassy rise above the river. Falco brakes and turns off the engine and we both stare ahead for a moment at the scattered stones and crumbling walls that mark the ruins of the old estate.

  “Astolat,” Falco says. “There’s not much left is there?”

  I shake my head.

  We get out and Falco leads me down the hill, through the crumbling terraces populated by broken urns and overgrown garden beds, toward the stream and the weeping beech tree. Approaching it from higher ground, the tree looks like a giant shaggy animal grazing at the water, a saber-toothed tiger, perhaps, come to drink at a primeval watering hole, the bank of which is littered with the bleached white bones of its prey. Not bones, I see as we get closer, but pieces of marble laid out on the bank. Two men are bending over them.