The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  I have a sudden vision of Olivia, left with Mitch for safekeeping, that reawakens the pain in my stomach where Athena jabbed me with her elbow. I’m supposed to go see her this weekend.

  As if reading my intention, Roy stands up, reassuming an official air. He addresses Dean Buehl, but I understand the message is for me. “You understand now that this is an official murder investigation no one should leave the campus.” Dean Buehl nods and, when he looks in my direction, so do I.

  I CAN TELL ROY WANTS TO COME WITH ME WHEN I LEAVE Dean Buehl’s office, but there’s the phone call to be made to Vesta’s parents and Dean Buehl asks him to stay. I stand in front of the mansion for a moment wondering where Athena and Dr. Lockhart have gone, but there’s no sign of them. I’m stalled here trying to think of the words I’ll use to explain to Olivia that I have to cancel again. I canceled the last weekend I was supposed to visit because of the snow. How can I disappoint her again?

  I head back to my cottage to pick up my purse and the overnight bag I’d packed yesterday with clothes and papers to grade. I cut through the woods to avoid the police officers on the Point. I find, to my surprise, a narrow trail carved through the snow that leads me right back to my house. I find another one that gets me to the faculty parking lot. Someone’s grown tired of staying on the regular footpaths and made their own, just as Lucy used to.

  It’s only when I’m in the car, waiting for my windows to defrost (I still have the chemical de-icer in my glove compartment, but I’ve avoided using it since almost blinding myself with it) and the heat to thaw my hands so I can drive, that I realize the seriousness of what I’m doing. It will look as though I’m fleeing a crime scene. But Roy will know I couldn’t have anything to do with Vesta’s death. He was with me after all.

  But can I say the same about him? Do I really know what he was doing up on the Point? I think about what he said. Whoever was behind these events had something to do with what happened twenty years ago. Matt was Roy’s cousin. For twenty years he’s felt responsible for his death. What if he suddenly had someone else to blame for it? The thought is so monstrous that all I want to do is get away from Heart Lake. And even though I still can’t see through my rearview window, I back up blindly and drive as fast as I can to the Northway.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  SOUTH OF ALBANY I GET OFF THE THRUWAY TO TAKE THE Taconic the rest of the way south. Driving south on

  the Taconic I watch the Hudson Valley unscrolling toward the Catskill Mountains. It’s a familiar, gentle landscape and for a while it takes my mind off Athena and Roy Corey and Heart Lake. I think instead of how so much of my life has been played out along this corridor. I remember taking the train from Albany to Corinth after my mother died, of how I felt I was moving into my future even as I was traveling back to Heart Lake. Now, even as I’m fleeing Heart Lake as fast as I can, I feel as though I’m traveling into my past.

  I think about Matt and Lucy. I’ve shied away from thinking about them since I learned the baby was theirs, but now I force myself to imagine them together. It would have been May Day. The same morning I was with Roy Corey. I remember how Lucy and the masked boy faced each other on the beach and how Lucy calmly walked into the water, daring the boy to follow. When I’d thought it was Ward Castle, I thought he wouldn’t brave the cold water. I didn’t have time to wait and see; I thought it was Matt, below me on the steps, waiting for me to flee so he could follow.

  Now I imagine what happened after I turned my back on them. Lucy slipped into the mist rising from the water and started swimming for the icehouse and Matt followed her. He would have had to take off his mask. They were strong swimmers, used to swimming side by side in the lap lanes at the local pool. I picture them, cleaving the lake, their arms curving over the green water like two wings of the same bird. They would have been cold by the time they got to the icehouse. I picture Lucy, her lips blue and trembling, and Matt wrapping his arms around her to keep her warm. Maybe it wasn’t the first time. I remember the way they danced through the falling leaves on the first day I walked home with them, and how Matt spun Lucy on the ice when we skated on the lake. Maybe it was the first time.

  I imagine they told each other it wouldn’t ever happen again. But then Lucy found out from Helen Chambers that Matt wasn’t really her brother. She thought that changed everything. People still might have talked—after all, they grew up like brother and sister—but Lucy wouldn’t have cared and she could always talk Matt into doing what she wanted. It might have worked out for them, if I hadn’t let slip to Matt about the baby.

  I think about the night they died. Matt would have hitchhiked up this same road to get to Heart Lake after he got the letter from Lucy. He probably didn’t know what to make of it. Neither had I, when I read it.

  IT WAS AN AFTERNOON AT THE END OF FEBRUARY. SHE HAD just come back from dinner with Domina Chambers. She said she’d learned some things that were going to change her life and she had to write and tell Matt. I assumed that Domina Chambers had outlined some plan for where Lucy would go to college and what she would do afterward.

  “Also, I want to make sure he’s not worried about me with all this nonsense about my so-called suicide attempt,” she told me. “D’you want me to put in a message from you?” she asked. “Like… oh, I don’t know… Come, my Matthew, come, let’s go aMaying?”

  I stared at her but she kept on writing with her head resolutely bent over the pale blue stationery that Domina Chambers had given her. After May Day I had copied over Robert Herrick’s poem “Corinna’s Maying” into my journal. In the last line I had substituted Matthew’s name for Corinna’s. Had Lucy read my journal? Or had she just made up the line herself? After all, we had both read it in English last year. Either way, I was surprised at her for referring to what happened on May Day so casually.

  She must have finally noticed me staring at her, because she looked up at me. “Jane, you’re blushing. I’ll just write the line at the end of the letter without mentioning your name. He’ll know what it means, right?” She winked at me and bent back over the page. “How do the lines go again? ‘And sin no more, as we have done, by staying, but, my Matthew, come, let’s go aMaying?’”

  “Those come earlier in the poem,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said, happily folding the letter and stuffing it in an envelope. “One more thing, have you got any more hairpins?”

  I had a broken teacup on my desk in which I kept paper clips and hairpins. I handed it to her. She took out two Ushaped hairpins and one bobby pin. I watched as she fashioned a corniculum and put it in the envelope, carefully slipping it between the folds of her letter.

  “Why are you sending him that?” I asked.

  “So he’ll meet me at the icehouse.”

  “But he’s away at school,” I said. “How can he meet you anywhere?”

  Lucy smiled. “I have a feeling that once he gets this letter he’ll find a way to come.”

  I PASS A SIGN FOR BEACON AND REALIZE I’M NOT FAR FROM the military school Matt had gone to. It’s been more than two hours since I left Heart Lake. I wonder how long it took Matt to make the trip. He must have come as soon as he got the letter. It was only a few days after she’d written that I came back to the room after dinner and found, thumbtacked to our door, a corniculum.

  LUCY WAS AT DINNER WITH DOMINA CHAMBERS AND THE ONLY other person who knew about the corniculum was Deirdre. I shivered for a moment, imagining it was somehow a sign from her, but then chided myself for being so melodramatic. Obviously it was from Matt. He must have sneaked up to the room and left it as a message for Lucy to meet him at the icehouse. She’d be so happy when she saw it.

  I left it on the door and went into the room. I tried to start my Latin translation for the next day, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was lonely doing the work by myself. I had always studied in a group, first with Matt and Lucy, and then with Deirdre and Lucy. I remembered that first day, in ninth grade, walking home with Matt and Lucy chantin
g declensions and how Matt had taught me what they meant, and how he had presented me with a red maple leaf. I still had the leaf, pressed in my Tales from the Ballet. I took the book down from the shelf above my desk and turned to where the red leaf lay, pressed in between the pages of Giselle.

  And then something occurred to me. What if the corniculum wasn’t a sign for Lucy, but was, instead, meant for me? After all, Lucy had put that line about going aMaying at the end of her letter. Wouldn’t Matt know it had come from me?

  I got up and opened the window. A gust of wet air blew into the room, but it wasn’t cold. It wasn’t exactly warm either, but there was something in it—the smell of snowmelt maybe—that made me think of spring. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths. A fine white mist rose from the melting snow as if all the snow that had fallen that winter was rising back to the sky. I could hear water dripping from my window ledge and from the pine trees and, farther away, the sound of water moving in the lake where the ice had broken.

  I felt, suddenly, as if something were breaking up inside of me. When I closed the window I felt restless. I took out my journal and wrote, “Tonight I will go down to the lake to meet him and I’ll tell him everything,” before I knew that was what I meant to do. I paused with the peacock blue pen hovering over the page, waiting to see what I’d write next. I wrote, “I know I shouldn’t go, but I can’t seem to stop myself.” Was that true? Could I stop myself? Would I even try? I wrote, “It’s like the lake is calling me,” and I thought, yes, that’s what it is, that restless sound of water moving through the night, not just in the lake, but rising from the snow and dripping from the trees, a whole watery world out there calling to me. I wrote, “Sometimes I wonder if what they say about the three sisters is true. It’s like they’re making me go down to the lake when I know I shouldn’t.” I’d come to the end of a page. I turned it and saw I’d come to the last page of the notebook. I wrote one more line and then closed the book and went out.

  THAT’S HOW DESPERATE I’D BEEN TO SEE MATT; I BLAMED my going on the three sisters legend. It’s almost funny. I notice, though, that I’m not laughing. I’m crying so hard it’s difficult to see the road. It doesn’t help that the sky has darkened and a sharp wind is buffeting the car. I take a curve too fast and feel my tires skitter on the gravel on the shoulder. Shaken, I pull into a scenic overview and stare at rain clouds massing over the Catskills while waiting for my crying jag to stop.

  What had Matt thought of the May Day reference in Lucy’s letter? Did he suspect that Lucy had gotten pregnant on May Day? Is that why he rushed up to Heart Lake? I shake my head. How will I ever know? Matt’s dead. Lucy’s dead. Everyone who could tell me is gone.

  I stare at the soft folds of the Hudson Valley as if the landscape could answer my questions, but even this familiar vista fails me as the clouds from the west move across the valley, darkening the land and obscuring my view. But not everybody from back then is dead. Roy’s alive. He was with Matt when Matt got Lucy’s letter, with him at his parents’ house in Cold Spring when he decided to leave for Heart Lake. Hadn’t Roy said, when he met me at the Aquadome, that he’d just been visiting his mother in Cold Spring? (Our aunt Doris in Cold Spring, I hear Lucy’s voice, as if she were there beside me in the car, whispering in my ear.)

  I wipe my eyes and look at the car clock. It’s only one o’clock in the afternoon. Olivia will still be at school. I have time, I think, to make one quick stop.

  As I pull back on the road I know I’m being foolish. What can I possibly expect to find in Roy’s mother’s house? If Matt hadn’t told Roy why he was he leaving for Heart Lake, he certainly wouldn’t have told his aunt. But even as I tell myself all the reasons I shouldn’t be going I’m getting off the exit for Cold Spring and looking for a gas station so I can look up the address. If it’s not listed, I tell myself, I’ll take it as a sign that I’m on a fool’s errand and drive straight to Mitchell’s house.

  Not only is Doris Corey listed, she lives right on the main street of town. The road into town slopes steeply down toward the river. I can see, on a bluff overlooking the river, a low dark building with crenellated towers. The Manlius Military Academy for Boys. Matt’s old school. I look away from it and concentrate on looking for the Coreys’ house. It’s almost the last house on the street, a small yellow Victorian just before the train tracks and a stone’s throw from the river.

  The woman who answers the door looks so much like Hannah Toller that for a moment I think the report that I’d heard all those years ago of her death in a car accident must have been a mistake. When she smiles at me, though, me a stranger standing at her doorstep in the pouring rain, I see she’s softer than Hannah Toller ever was. I realize how guarded and strained Lucy and Matt’s mother had always been—bowed down, no doubt, by all the secrets she had borne.

  This woman, Doris Corey, has me into her house before I can even explain that I live in Corinth and know her son. “Is it Roy?” she asks, her hands arrested in reaching to help me off with my down parka. “Are you with the police, dear? Have you come to tell me something’s happened to Roy?”

  For all the panic in her eyes she’s still polite. If I were to tell her that something had happened to Roy she wouldn’t scream and make a scene; she’d know I was only the blameless messenger of bad news. I think of all the sadness she’s lived through. Her niece and nephew drowning in a lake, her sister and brother-in-law dying in a car accident. She holds herself like someone braced for tragedy.

  “Oh no, Mrs. Corey. Roy’s fine. You see…” I try to think how to explain to her why I’m here and can think of nothing better than to tell her my name.

  “Jane Hudson,” the hand that was tugging at my wet coat comes to rest on my forearm and squeezes, “weren’t you Mattie’s girl?”

  The noise I make must sound as if I’m choking. Mattie’s girl. It’s all I ever wanted to be. But I can’t lie to this woman. “I was a friend of Lucy and Matt’s, Mrs. Corey, but that’s all.”

  She waves a dismissive hand at my disclaimer.

  “Oh, he talked about you all the time, dear. He told me about the time Lucy fell through the ice and you pulled her out. He said you were the bravest person he knew.”

  You’d pull me out, wouldn’t you, Jane?

  My tears are falling again, mixing with the rainwater dripping from my hair, before I can do anything to stop them. Mrs. Corey makes a soft sound at the back of her throat, something between a tisk and an ahh, and pulls me down next to her on the couch. She pulls a brightly colored afghan from the back of the couch and tucks it around my shoulders, but the scratchy wool only sets me to shivering.

  “I know, I know,” she says, over and over. “It still comes to me some days, the thought of those two drowning. I confess it’s Mattie I think of most often. I guess because we’d come to feel he was like our own all those weekends he stayed here. Lucy… well, she was always a quiet one—not one to let you get too close. Even when she was a baby she’d struggle in your arms…”

  “Did you know she wasn’t Hannah’s?”

  Mrs. Corey sighs and smoothes the afghan over my shoulders. “Hannah was my little sister,” she says. “When she came home with that baby everyone else believed her when she said it was hers, but I could tell. She didn’t nurse her—when Mattie was born she nursed him. It’s not that she didn’t treat Lucy good—she took extra pains with her. She seemed… I don’t know… almost in awe of her. And then she didn’t look a bit like her or any of us…”

  “Did you confront her?”

  “Only once. When she let Matt and Lucy start school together. I asked her if she thought it a good idea, encouraging the two of them to be so close. She asked me what I meant, weren’t they brother and sister? When I didn’t say anything to that she looked away and told me to mind my own business. We never spoke of it again, but when she asked me to keep Mattie here… well… she said she was sorry she hadn’t listened to me before.”

  She sits back and folds h
er hands in her lap. She looks away from me to the mantel. I follow her gaze and see there the picture of Matt. It’s a posed portrait with a flag in the background. His school picture for his senior year at Manlius. His hair looks darker than I remember it and longer, the seventies haircut looks dated. I look away from the picture to Mrs. Corey. I want to ask her what else Matt said about me. What else did he say to give the impression that I was his girlfriend. But I realize suddenly how little it matters anymore.

  “Did you know who Lucy’s real mother was?” I ask instead.

  “I guessed it was that friend of hers, Helen Chambers. That’s who the girl looked like, after all. And then after Hannah died I found out that Helen Chambers had owned the house on River Street. She’d left it to Cliff and Hannah when she… when she passed on.” She unfolds her hands and plucks on the tufts on the upholstery. She doesn’t want to say “killed herself.” I look down at the worn chintz pattern on the couch and realize I’ve seen it before.

  “And then you inherited the house from Hannah.”

  “I was the only one left,” she says, “but I couldn’t hardly bear to be in that house for five minutes. Roy helped me move some of the furniture—Hannah’d always had better than what we could afford—but neither of us could bear to clear out the attic rooms. We figured whoever bought the house would clear it away, but then the house never would sell. People must’ve thought it was unlucky.”

  I remember that it’s what I suggested to Dr. Lockhart, but then, how had she come to live there?

  “But you sold it eventually?” I ask.

  “Only last year. I’d been renting it out summers, and then I got this letter from someone at Heart Lake…”

  “From someone at Heart Lake?”

  Doris Corey frowns. “I don’t remember. Let me see, I think I still have the letter. It had something nice in it about Lucy, so I saved it.” Doris Corey gets up and pushes open the top of a rolltop desk—a desk I suddenly remember as standing in the Tollers’ front hall. I look around me and recognize other pieces of furniture from the Toller household—a highboy carved of some dark wood, a wingback chair, a grandfather clock. They crowd around the couch, these relics from the past, like the dead heroes clamored around Aeneas in the underworld.