I get in bed early. My old journal, that Roy gave me today, sits on my nightstand. I flip through it, not really reading, and notice that the pages flop loosely between their covers, like a person who’s lost weight wearing old baggy pants. I remember that pages have been ripped out. I flip to the end and see that the very last page is missing. Yet that’s not one of the pages that was sent to me.
I put the journal back on my nightstand and decide to read The Aeneid. Nothing like a little classical literature to calm the nerves, I think. Unfortunately, I’m at the part in Book Seven where Juno sends a fury to goad the Trojans and Latins into war. The description of the fury is so gruesome—a shape-shifting monster writhing with snakes—that I’m unable to read on. I remember that Helen Chambers told us that the Furies were sent out to avenge unavenged deaths. Curses personified, she said, the flip side of the three graces so beloved of Renaissance painters. I turn out the lights and burrow deep under the heavy wool blankets, covering my ears so that I won’t hear the wind and imagine some grotesque avenging monster hovering above Heart Lake, sowing dissent and suspicion among us.
But I can’t drown out the sound of the wind. And under the high-pitched keening of the wind I hear a lower sound, a deep basso profundo moan that makes my hair stand on end. I slowly lift the blankets away from me and a shower of sparks cascades through the charged air. As I get out of bed, my hair lifts off my back like a fan. I walk to the front door and open it. Outside the trees are thrashing and fine ice particles spiral up from the ground like miniature tornadoes. I listen to all the tumult of the wind, but deep and steady, under the fitful tossing of the wind I can hear the moan, like a background theme that’s always there beneath the flightier variations.
I know it’s got to be the lake, the ice contracting and expanding, a natural process that I’ve heard described a dozen times by Dean Buehl and Myra Todd. But I’ve got to see for myself. I walk into the woods in my thick socks and flannel nightgown and I hardly feel the cold at all. It’s as if all the electricity I’ve stored during the day is burning inside me now, keeping me warm. The lake is shrieking like a creature that’s been ripped in half and of course it has, hacked down the middle with saws and poked at with steel-tipped spears. I feel now it’s calling me and who can resist the call of something so wounded?
It’s only when I reach the Point that I see the danger. The wind is all around me, pushing like a hand at my back, tugging at my nightgown with tiny icy fingers. It lifts my hair and nightgown up and I feel myself being borne light and charged as ionized electrons toward the brink. Then I feel another grip, hard and warm, and something pulls me back into the sheltering woods.
“Jane, are you crazy? What are you doing out in this?”
It’s Roy Corey who’s pulling me out of the wind and holding me by both arms, my back brushing against the rough bark of a white pine. My flannel nightgown rubs against his flannel shirt and the little shocks of electricity bring me back to my senses.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I say, surprised at the calmness of my voice.
“There was something I wanted to see.” He points to the ledge on the west side of the Point. “I wanted to see if someone could hide there. You didn’t see me when you came out onto the Point, did you?” I shake my head. His hand is still on my arm and it feels warm. The wind is kicking the hem of my nightgown up, baring my legs.
“But I saw you. I saw you moving toward the Point just as you did that night Deirdre died. If someone was hiding on the west ledge that night she would have seen you come out of the woods and approach the Point. She would have seen Deirdre back away and fall. What she wouldn’t have seen is Lucy on the east ledge reaching up to grab Deirdre’s ankle.”
“So it would have looked like it was my fault?”
He nods. Suddenly I feel the cold and I start to shiver. Roy takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders. He has to pull me away from the tree to get it around me and as he does my flannel nightgown catches a charge from his shirt and clings to him.
“So you decided to conduct this experiment in the middle of an electrical storm?” I ask through chattering teeth. He releases his grip on my arms, but I don’t move away. I can’t move back, anyway, because of the tree.
“I also wanted to keep an eye on your house,” he tells me. “I didn’t feel you were safe.”
I lay my palm flat on his chest, expecting another shock, but instead his shirt feels damp and warm and I can feel his heart beating wildly. “Maybe you ought to come inside then.”
He nods, but neither of us move. I hear the moan again, only now I realize it’s not coming from the lake. It’s in my throat and his. I lightly touch the back of my hand to his face and he slides his fingers under the collar of my nightgown and strokes my collarbone. I feel the cold air brush against my breasts and I start to shake. He moves up against me so that I’m wedged between his body and the tree and I can feel he’s shaking, too. When he ducks his head to my throat my head arches back and I can see the pine boughs above us, moving like bodies in a dance, moving the way we start to move. I lead him back to my house. We get under the blankets and, wordlessly, he makes love to me, slowly, never taking his eyes away from my eyes. I understand. This is not a fluke, he’s telling me, we know each other this time.
When I have breath enough to speak I turn to him and say, “How you must have hated me.”
He touches my forehead, strokes the damp hair back. “I didn’t hate you, Jane. I hated myself for not telling you there and then who I was.”
“We had Miss Buehl and her Girl Scouts shrieking and pointing at us. Hardly the moment to unmask.”
He lifts himself on one elbow and runs the back of his hand down the length of my arm. I feel his breath cooling the sweat in the hollow of my collarbone. “But that’s not why I didn’t show you who I was. I didn’t want to see the look of disappointment when you saw I wasn’t Matt.”
I look at him hard so that I don’t, by looking away, admit the truth of what he’s saying. I want to tell him he’s wrong, but I can’t. I would have been disappointed—more than disappointed, crushed—to have seen any face but Matt’s beneath that mask. And for a moment, I do see Matt’s face, rising in Roy’s features, as if the seventeen-year-old boy is looking out of his cousin’s eyes. I see him so clearly I feel as if every minutest hair on my body were sheathed in ice. And then he’s gone. Matt’s face fades from Roy’s, just as in my dream it sinks into the black water, only I suspect that this is the last time I will see that face.
I can’t lie to Roy, so I tell him the next best thing. “I’m glad it’s you. Here. Now.”
Chapter Thirty-one
IT’S STILL DARK WHEN THE PHONE WAKES US. I SEE FROM the glowing green numbers on the digital alarm clock that it’s 5:33. The phone is on Roy’s side of the bed and he answers it by saying his name. I’m surprised by how unsurprised I am at this. As if I’d been with him for years and known how a cop always knows the call in the middle of the night is for him.
He listens without saying anything and then says, “I’ll be right there.” He swings his legs over his side of the bed and finds his jeans and shirt on the floor. When he stands up he sees me propped on one elbow, watching him, and he sinks back onto the bed and cups my face with his hand.
“I’m afraid this time it’s worse than getting interrupted by the Girl Scouts.”
ROY DOESN’T HAVE FAR TO GO. I FOLLOW HIM DOWN THE steps to the swimming beach where a little group is huddled in a circle of flashlights. I recognize three seniors, none of whom take Latin. The only one whose name I know is Mallory Martin, the girl whom my girls call Maleficent. She doesn’t look too maleficent right now, crying and shaking under a trooper’s heavy leather coat.
“We came out to watch the sun rise,” she’s telling someone. I get the feeling she no longer needs an audience to tell this story. She’ll be telling it for the rest of her life. “We thought it would look cool—with all the statues? A bunch of girls talke
d about doing it yesterday at the Ice Harvest. At first we thought it was a statue.” She points a wobbly finger in the direction of the stones. On the lake, police officers bundled in heavy coats are moving slow-footed over the ice, their arms held out to their sides for balance. Their posture reminds me of something—it’s how Miss Pike told us to move through water looking for drowning victims, toes feeling the bottom, arms held out to feel for dead limbs. It reminds me of the morning they found Melissa Randall’s body.
I walk past Mallory Martin and her circle. I’m going to follow Roy onto the ice, but at the edge of the lake a police officer holds up his hand to stop me.
“I’m sorry, miss, we don’t want any civilians on the ice.”
Roy turns and sees the look on my face.
“It’s OK, Lloyd, she’s with me.”
I don’t even think about the slipperiness of the ice, but stride out to where Roy is. We pass the first stone and the ice statue standing next to it. I look at its face and am startled to see the detail there. Someone went to a lot of trouble. The surface of the ice is smooth and glowing, as if the wind last night had polished it.
At the second stone the kneeling ice figure has been whittled down by the wind, so that it looks more like a lump on the ice than a statue. I look from it to where the third statue should lie, but although the first light has reached that part of the lake there is nothing there. It’s as if the supine figure had sunk beneath the ice.
I turn to Roy to ask if this is what all the fuss is about and see the fourth statue. It’s stretched out on the second stone, a girl’s smooth marble-white body arched up as if in some terrible throes of pain or pleasure to meet the eight-foot ice pole thrust through its middle. It’s only when the light creeps over her and touches her mermaid-red hair that I recognize Vesta.
“SHE SAID SHE COULDN’T SLEEP AND WAS GOING TO GO skating on the lake,” Athena is telling us for perhaps the third time. “She thought it would be cool to skate around the statues. Some other girls had talked about doing it at the Ice Harvest. I offered to go with her but she was still mad at me about keeping the light on. She said if I was going to go she’d just as soon stay and turn out the light.”
Athena looks up from the low chair in front of Dean Buehl’s desk and we can all see the deep shadows under her eyes. A lock of stringy, multicolored hair falls over her left eye and the hand she lifts to push it back is trembling so hard she quickly returns it to her lap and clasps both hands together. I can see from my seat on the couch along the side wall that her cuticles are ragged and bloody. She squints in the glare from the early morning light on the ice outside Dean Buehl’s window. I look away from her to the frozen lake. Mercifully, the view of the east cove is blocked by the Point. I wonder if they have removed Vesta by now or will they still be taking pictures of the body? I notice two police officers standing on the Point looking down into the east cove. One has set up a tripod and is taking aerial shots of the crime scene.
“And you heard nothing, Jane?”
I flinch at the sound of my name and look up at Dean Buehl, but it’s Dr. Lockhart, who is standing at the large plate-glass window behind Dean Buehl’s desk, who has asked the question. For a moment I don’t understand what she thinks I would have heard, then I remember the shrieks and moans coming from the ice last night. Could they have been Vesta’s cries for help and not the ice?
“There was a storm,” I say. “I heard wind and the ice buckling.”
“The ice buckling?” Dr. Lockhart repeats. I look up at her, but the glare from the lake ice surrounds her like a harsh aura and I have to shade my eyes to look in her direction. Even so, I can’t read her expression.
“Yes,” I say, “cracks and pops and…”
“Moans?” she asks. “Shrieks? That’s what the ice sounds like. Did you go out and look?”
“I did go out,” I say, “I went to the Point, but I never looked over.”
Even Athena swivels her head and stares at me.
“I ran into Officer Corey—he was… um… patrolling the area.”
There’s a moment of silence during which I vividly remember what happened on the Point after I ran into Roy Corey. I look down at my hands and see they are bright pink and for a moment I’m sure I must be blushing, but then I realize it’s only the morning light from the window.
“So did you both look over the Point to see where the sounds were coming from?” Dean Buehl finally asks. I think we’re both surprised that Dr. Lockhart isn’t the one to ask, but she has turned back to the window, her attention drawn to the two men taking pictures on the Point.
“I was going to, but Officer Corey led me back from the Point—I guess he was afraid it was too dangerous out there…” I’m mercifully interrupted by a soft knock on the door, which opens to admit Roy Corey. For a moment I’m so happy just to see his face that I don’t think about the fact he’s a police officer.
“What’s going on here? Why is this student here?” he directs the question to Dean Buehl, but it’s Dr. Lockhart who answers.
“It’s her roommate you’ve been peeling off the rocks out there. We thought she might know something about it.”
At the word “peeling” I see Athena’s face crumple. She turns to look at me. “What does she mean? I thought she was stabbed to death.”
“Why did you think that, Ellen?” Dr. Lockhart steps away from the window, walks around Dean Buehl’s desk and perches on its edge. She crosses one long, gray-stockinged leg over another and waits for Athena to answer. I notice there’s a small pull in her pantyhose, just where her skirt rides up, and for some reason it makes me absurdly happy to see some tiny flaw in Dr. Lockhart’s usually perfect ensemble. Otherwise, she is as calm and cool as ever. I wish I could say the same for Athena.
“Ss-someone told me,” Athena says. I remember that’s what she said to me when I asked her how she knew about my roommates’ deaths twenty years ago. I’ve never heard her lisp before. “Didn’t someone say she was stabbed? I mean, I thought with all those big ice poles lying all over the place…”
“Which you took such an interest in during the slide show…”
“Dr. Lockhart, if you have some theory to share with the police, perhaps you’d like to come down to the station…”
“Yes, I’d like that, Officer Corey. I’d like to know why a police officer was on the Point last night, preventing one of our teachers from looking over to see where all those awful sounds were coming from?”
Roy looks at me.
“I didn’t say he prevented me…” I start to explain, but then I think about what happened on the Point last night and it occurs to me that, effectively, that’s what he did. I falter and look up at Roy and he sees my hesitation.
“It was windy and the rocks were icy,” he offers the explanation to me instead of Dr. Lockhart, but it’s she who replies.
“So did you look over the Point to see where those noises were coming from?”
“I assumed it was the ice,” Roy answers.
“Then you’re either even stupider than the average cop or you’re trying to cover up something you did see,” she says calmly.
I can see a muscle in Roy’s jaw flinch, but it’s Athena who loses her composure. She springs out of her chair so abruptly it topples, hitting Roy in the kneecap and forcing him to step back.
“Why are you so mean?” she screams, lunging at Dr. Lockhart. The impact of Athena’s collision with Dr. Lockhart knocks the desk back a good six inches, sending Dean Buehl’s swivel chair careening backward into the window. I hear glass shatter, and for a sickening moment I imagine Dean Buehl propelled out into the air, but it’s Athena I’m moving toward. I throw my arm over her head in a shoulder hold that I learned from Miss Pike’s lifesaving class and pull her back, her arms flailing as though she really were a drowning victim. Apparently she’s a victim who doesn’t want to be saved, because as soon as she gets her balance she sinks, sidesteps, and drives her elbow into my solar plexus. While I crumple ov
er in pain, she runs from the room. When I can lift my head, I look for Dean Buehl, afraid of what I’ll see, but she’s all right, visibly shaken but untouched by the glass of the shattered window behind her, every inch of which is veined by an intricate maze, somehow magically suspended, as if held in place by the bright morning sun streaming in now through the cracks.
ROY HELPS ME TO A SEAT ON THE COUCH. DEAN BUEHL moves gingerly away from the shattered window and sits down next to me on my other side.
“Are you all right, Jane?” Dean Buehl asks. “I had no idea that girl was capable of such violence.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “It wasn’t Athena’s fault. She was…” I falter, unable to come up with a plausible explanation for my student’s behavior. The word “provoked” comes to mind. “Upset,” I say instead, which sounds weak in view of the destruction left in Athena’s wake. “I should go talk to her.”
“I think it’s better if I go,” Dr. Lockhart says. “I’ve been working with her. I think I understand her issues.”
“She seemed pretty angry with you,” Roy says.
“That’s all part of the therapeutic process,” Dr. Lockhart says, putting on her coat. I look to Dean Buehl and she nods to me.
“Candace is right, she should go.”
Dr. Lockhart smiles at me like a child who’s won at some squabble mediated by grown-ups. When she’s gone Dean Buehl adds, “Candace has a special empathy with these girls—she had the same sort of upbringing. Over the years I’ve seen so many girls like Ellen and Candace, girls whose parents have too little time for them and leave their care to us.”
“Abandon them to you,” Roy says.
“Don’t be too harsh, Detective Corey. It’s what they know; it’s how they were brought up. I’m sure they think they’re doing what’s best for their children. Maybe it’s the best they can do for them.”
The Lake of Dead Languages Page 34