The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  “I was thinking we could have it fingerprinted,” I say, even though I had already rejected that idea.

  “How convenient then that there will be an explanation for your prints on it,” Dr. Lockhart replies as she hands the bag to Dean Buehl.

  “I guess the same goes for you,” I say. “Since you handled the slide as well.” I hadn’t really planned to insinuate that Dr. Lockhart could have been responsible for planting the slide, but as I see her already pale skin go a shade paler it occurs to me that it could have been her as well as anyone else. I wonder, though, how she could have come by it in the first place.

  IT’S AFTER ELEVEN BY THE TIME I LEAVE THE MANSION AND walk back to my cottage. I take the same path that the person I saw on the Point would have taken. I look at the packed snow underfoot for some clue, but dozens of people have traversed the path since the last snow. I pause on the Point and look back toward the mansion. I can see Dr. Lockhart’s window. Although the office is unlit I can see now how the light from the hall filters in and makes the interior room faintly visible. A person standing in there would only appear as a vague outline, though, like the shadowy shape her desk and filing cabinet make now. I turn from the Point and follow the path to my cottage, which is less trodden than the path from the Point to the mansion. Still I can tell that someone else has been walking there since the last snow.

  When I get to my house I see that the porch light has burned out again. It takes me a moment to fit the key in the lock, and when I do my hand is trembling so hard I can’t make the lock turn. And why shouldn’t I be afraid? I ask myself. Someone obviously bears me some grudge.

  “Then why not just come out and knock me over the head or something,” I say aloud to my own door. “Get it over with. Why so coy?” My voice, I notice, sounds more angry than afraid. Good, I think. I’m tired of this game of signs.

  As I enter the house I feel sure that someone has been there in my absence. I am not afraid, though, that the intruder is still there. Whoever it was would have gone back to the slide show. Why miss out on the fun? I go through the rooms, flicking on the lights, scanning the walls and tabletops for something missing, or something new. I’m expecting, I don’t know what. Some bloody scrawl on the walls? For the first time it occurs to me that whoever is sending these signs is as frightened of me as I am of her. Whoever she is, and I’m certain it is a she, was silent until I talked to Roy Corey in the cave. Then she sent the corniculum. Tonight, when she saw me in Dr. Lockhart’s office, she retaliated by dropping that slide in Maia Thornbury’s carousel. It’s as if we are playing tug-of-war with the past, you look into my past, she is telling me, then I’ll fling your past back at you.

  “Well, what have you got for me tonight,” I call into the empty rooms. When I get to my bedroom and see the lump under the bedclothes and what’s seeping from that lump my bravado fades.

  “Oh, fuck,” I cry as I fling the blankets off the bloody deer’s head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I say maybe a dozen times over until I realize it’s only a felt mask of a deer’s head, with red paint dripping from its felt neck.

  Chapter Thirty

  DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS?” I ASK, FLINGING THE MASK on Roy Corey’s desk. It nearly topples a Styrofoam cup half-filled with grayish coffee, but I am not sorry. I have been wanting, since eleven o’clock last night, to fling the mask at someone. After a sleepless night I called Dean Buehl to cancel my classes.

  “I was up all night with a toothache,” I lied, “I’ve got to go into town and have this thing out.”

  She seemed neither suspicious nor interested in my excuse. “I’ll have your girls help Maia Thornbury with the ice harvest,” she told me.

  “It’s still on?” I asked.

  “I will not let some saboteur change my plans,” Dean Buehl replied. “That would be like giving in to the demands of terrorists.”

  Apparently I was not the only one tired of this game of cat and mouse.

  “Hey watch… ,” Roy Corey says looking up from the mask to me, but when he sees my expression he stops the complaint he’d been forming. He looks back down at the mask, picks it up, sniffs at the dried red paint and inspects the stitching along its seams.

  “Look familiar?” I ask.

  To my surprise, Roy Corey turns white.

  “It’s not real blood,” I say, my anger deflected by his reaction.

  “Why don’t you have a seat, Jane?”

  “You recognize it, don’t you?”

  Roy picks away some of the red paint, revealing a green embroidered heart. “Where did you find it?”

  “In my bed, a là The Godfather,” I tell him. “Did you hear about the little surprise at our slide show?”

  Roy nods. “Your dean called me last night. I went out there and took the carousel and slide. We’re having both dusted for prints, but both were handled by so many people we don’t expect much. This happened afterward?”

  “When I went home. Which was around eleven.”

  “Must’ve given you quite a start.”

  I shrug. “I’m getting used to it.” I tell him about the corniculum in the tree the night of the ice storm. “It was right after our conversation in the cave. Someone overheard us and then the signs started again.”

  He nods. “I thought they might.”

  “You bastard! You knew someone would eavesdrop on us in the cave.”

  “I couldn’t be sure, but what with the whole school there on the ice, I thought it was possible someone might take advantage of the situation.”

  “You took advantage of me,” I say rising to my feet. I wish I still had something to throw at him, but then I see the effect my words have had on him. It’s as if I have thrown something at him. He’s looking down at the mask, still fingering that green heart, as if he can’t bear to look me in the eyes.

  “It was only a matter of time before this person surfaced again. We’re talking about a murderer—someone who drowned one teenaged girl and drugged another and slit her wrists with a steak knife.”

  “Unless it was Athena who slit her own wrists.”

  “You mean a real suicide attempt?”

  “I mean she faked her own ‘suicide’ and then killed Melissa.” I tell Roy about the conversation I had with Athena in the basement. I don’t tell him about Dr. Lockhart’s file because I’d rather not admit to breaking and entering, but I manage to filter some of the information I gleaned there into my observations. “I hate to think Athena’s the one,” I conclude, “I’ve always liked her and I thought she liked me, but now she feels I’ve let her down and she’s gotten it into her head that I’ve started the whole Crevecoeur curse again since it was my roommates who died.”

  “How does she know about that?”

  “I don’t know. She’d know from the journal…” I pause, remembering something Athena said to me in the basement. “She said she knew I felt responsible for my friends’ deaths. That’s what I said to you in the cave, that I knew Deirdre’s death wasn’t an accident. So it might have been her listening to us in the cave.” I sink back into my chair, exhausted and disheartened. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted not to believe it was Athena who was trying to hurt me. I look at Roy, hoping he’ll contradict my theory. He’s still peeling the red paint away from the mask and smoothing the brown felt.

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She said it felt pretty shitty to know you had let someone down, but worse to be the one who’s let down.”

  Roy looks up from the mask. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “I think it’s a draw. I think the guilt of hurting someone you care about can last a long time, maybe even longer than the love itself.”

  He whisks the red paint flakes off his desk with the side of his hand and crumples the mask in a ball.

  “You mean Matt, don’t you? You think he’d still be alive if you hadn’t let him come back to Heart Lake that night?”

  He nods. I try to think of something I could say to relieve his burden, one I
understand only too well, but anything I say would only mean taking more of the burden on myself, and I don’t feel up to that. Instead I throw him a crumb, a relic of the person we both miss. “You know,” I say, “that’s the mask Matt wore that morning. His was the one embroidered with the green heart. He must have dropped it in the woods and someone found it.”

  Roy looks at me through narrow, tired eyes and sighs. He gets up and passes behind me to close the office door. When he comes back he doesn’t sit down behind his desk, but instead sits on its edge, so close to me the stiff cloth of his uniform brushes my leg and I can see the fine red hairs on his arms where he’s rolled up his sleeves. He’s still holding the mask. His thumb brushes the last of the red paint off the green embroidered heart. By this sign you’ll know your heart’s true love, Deirdre had said, embroidering a different color heart, green, blue and yellow, on each mask.

  “You’re right that it was dropped in the woods, Jane. And I suppose someone must have found it there. But this isn’t the mask Matt wore, Jane.”

  “But I saw that green heart…” I stop and look up at him, into familiar green eyes.

  “This is the mask I wore.”

  I AM STILL LIGHT-HEADED DRIVING BACK TO HEART LAKE. Exhaustion, I tell myself, fear and aggravation and frustration. All natural emotions considering what I’ve been through. But I know it’s something else. Since that moment in Roy Corey’s office when I realized who it was I was with that May Day morning all those years ago I have felt something vibrating through my core, like a hot wire snaking up from the base of my spine. When I touch the cold metal handle of my car door I’m surprised I don’t set off sparks in the dry air. I feel electric.

  “So what,” I had said over and over again to the hard glitter coming off the Hudson, “So what. So what.” I had parked my car across from the old Toller house, facing the river, and waited for the hot, wobbly feeling to go away. “So it was Roy Corey I had sex with on May Day morning and not Matt Toller. What earthly difference does it make?”

  By this sign you’ll know your heart’s true love.

  Crap. It was just a stupid superstition Deirdre’d made up. Only I had believed it and believed, for all these years, that my heart’s true love had drowned in the lake under the ice.

  “Crap,” I told myself, pulling into the faculty parking lot at Heart Lake. “Stupider than believing in the three sisters story and the curse of the Crevecoeurs. And it doesn’t solve anything. Doesn’t tell you who’s sending these signs from the past or who killed Melissa Randall.”

  In the end Roy was unconvinced that it was Athena. But maybe that was because I didn’t really want to convince him because I don’t want to believe it’s Athena either.

  He thought it had to be someone connected with what happened to Matt and Lucy and Deirdre twenty years ago. Who else would know so much about what happened then? Who else could have found that mask, which Roy said he abandoned somewhere in the woods that morning. Helen Chambers was dead. Dean Buehl had been there, but why would she deliberately wreak havoc on her own school now? Didn’t she have more to lose? I told Roy my suspicions about Dr. Lockhart—“She certainly wants to stop the ice harvest”—but neither of us could come up with a motive for the other events. What could she possibly have to do with what happened twenty years ago?

  “Whoever it is obviously has some grudge against you, Jane. I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay in that isolated cottage all by yourself.”

  “Where do you suggest I stay?” I asked, half-shocking myself with the provocative tone of my own voice. I hadn’t meant it to sound like that, had I? But I was disappointed when he only shrugged and suggested I stay in the mansion.

  I shuddered, thinking about what Dr. Lockhart said about living in a fishbowl.

  “The dorm then?”

  I thought of the hothouse atmosphere of the dorm, the hissing steam radiators, all those girls in flannel nightgowns damp from just-washed hair. The rancid smell of burnt popcorn and face creams.

  “No,” I told Roy. “Like Dean Buehl says, that’s like giving into the demands of terrorists. I’ll be OK.”

  He’d looked at me in silence for a few moments and then leaned down to search for something in his drawer. A lock of hair fell over his forehead and, catching the light from the grimy window, briefly flamed red. When he lifted his head, his hair fell back, extinguishing the bright color so that I could see the ashy gray at his temples. “Here,” he said, holding out something in a clear plastic bag. “I’ve been meaning to give this back to you. We don’t need it for evidence anymore.”

  I look through the thick plastic and recognize my old journal. “Thanks,” I say, trying not to sound too disappointed. I’d thought he was going to give me his phone number.

  I GET OUT OF MY CAR AND WALK TOWARD MY HOUSE, BUT halfway there I hear shouts coming from the lake, so I cut through the woods and head out onto the Point. At first, when I see the black gash in the ice and the figures with poles I think the worst: Someone has fallen through a crack in the ice and they’re trying to save her with long, lifesaving poles. I look for someone thrashing in the icy water, but instead I see a neat rectangle of ice floating down the dark channel toward the icehouse and I realize it’s only the Ice Harvest.

  They’ve made remarkable progress in such little time. Or else I’ve been gone longer than I realized. I look at my watch and see it’s already four o’clock. I hadn’t realized I’d spent so long in Roy’s office—or sitting in my car looking at the river. While I’ve been gone, Maia Thornbury and the girls have cut out a long narrow channel, perhaps four feet across, from the icehouse at the southern tip of the lake to halfway to the Point. Some of the girls are wearing skates and others, under Gwen Marsh’s direction, are wielding the long ice poles, pushing cakes of ice up onto a ramp into the icehouse. The scene is as cheerful and bucolic as the Currier and Ives print I’d seen on the flyer last night. In fact, it seems more populous than I would have thought possible. Everyone must be out.

  Then I look again and see that some of the figures on the ice aren’t people.

  What I’d taken for stationary children dressed in white are actually statues carved out of ice. As I watch I see two girls carry a cake of ice from the icehouse and stack it on top of three or four more. Other girls are chipping away at stacks of ice to form rudimentary bodies. Tacy Beade is using a pick and hammer to shave the ice away. Even from here I can hear the steady thwack of metal hitting metal with a force that’s alarming considering Beady’s half blind. Chips of ice fly under her hands like sparks from a forge. The shape emerging, though crude, already has the feel and motion of the human form, something trying to break free of the encasing ice.

  There are about a dozen of these figures standing on the lake. I can see now that they are half-formed and incomplete, but as the last rays of the sun catch each one they seem to gain a spark of life. I look directly below the Point and for an instant the whole lake seems to spin before my eyes. The sky on the eastern shore is black with storm cloud, so that the ice, lit by the low-lying sun, burns with a fierce, white light. Beside each of the sister stones stands an ice statue. Or rather the first one, the one closest to shore, stands. The second kneels, and the last one lies, supine on the white ice, only half of its body visible above the surface, so it’s as if the girl is half in, half out of the lake, one arm lifted and crooked as if suspended in midstroke. But what really unnerves me is the impression made by the dark backdrop of storm cloud. It’s as if the black water is rising from the ice and the pale figures are shapes seen underwater.

  What I feel is a kind of seasickness. A vertigo of reversal. I tilt my chin up and focus on the horizon, a trick to avert motion sickness Miss Pike taught us when we went canoeing. At the horizon line of deep green pines I see a figure standing still as the trees. At first I think it’s another ice statue, she’s standing so still, but then I realize it’s Dr. Lockhart. She’s wearing her skates, but she isn’t moving. When she sees me looking at her,
though, she lifts out her arms and flexes her wrists, like a ballerina getting ready for a pirouette, and begins to spin, effortlessly, on her skates. She spins in a small tight circle, her skates sending up sprays of ice into the darkening air, like a whirlpool spiraling through dark water.

  I GO BACK TO MY HOUSE AND EAT ALONE. I TELL MYSELF I don’t want to get caught out in the approaching storm, but it’s a weak excuse. Although the clouds in the east appear menacing and a wind has come up since the sun set, there’s no snow in the forecast. Just wind and cold. On the television I tune into an Albany station just long enough to hear that electrical storms, rare for this time of year, have been reported in the southern Adirondacks, and then the broadcaster’s face dissolves in a blizzard of static. I turn on the radio, but I can’t even get the country-western station in Corinth.

  The truth is that I don’t want to talk to anyone. I can’t imagine what Dean Buehl was thinking by going ahead with the Ice Harvest. And old Beady really must be senile as well as blind to have the girls make those macabre statues. I know it’s all anyone will be talking about in the dining hall and I can’t bear right now to field innocent questions about the three sisters legend. Even my cold, rattling cottage—shack, I think to myself tonight, it’s really a shack—is more appealing than that.

  So I turn up the heat as high as it goes and fry eggs over a gas burner that spits blue flames at the frying pan. Outside the wind seems to be moving in circles around the house, like an animal trying to get in. I put on wool socks and pad around on the worn rag rugs, pulling curtains shut and double-checking window locks. Twice I check the phone to make sure I’ve got a dial tone. The third time I pick up the phone I get such an electric shock I drop the heavy old-fashioned receiver on my toe. All that padding around in wool socks, I tell myself. Still, it keeps me away from the phone for the rest of the night, even though I’d been planning to call Olivia to remind her I’m coming this weekend. “I’ll see her tomorrow,” I tell myself, but I have to admit that part of the reason I don’t call is that I’ve begun to detect a distance in her voice, a guardedness that I might cancel on her again.