“But we have to tell someone,” she said.
“Of course, you were right in the first place. We’ll go back to Miss Buehl’s cottage. . .”
“But what if she’s gone out? No. It’s safer to go back to the dorm and wake up the matron.”
Lucy led the way because she knew a shortcut following one of her narrow footpaths. We went single file, Lucy walking so fast I could barely keep up with her. I was glad she had shaken off the trancelike lethargy that had come over her at the lake, but I was surprised that when we got to the dorm Lucy climbed up the drainpipe to the second-story bathroom. When I caught up with her inside I asked her what she was doing. “Why are we sneaking in? We’ve got to wake the dorm matron anyway.”
“I need to check something first,” she said. “Deirdre was writing in her journal before she ran out. What if she wrote about what we did, Jane? Do you want people to know you drowned a baby in the lake?”
“Drowned?”
“Not so loud.” Lucy put a finger to my lips. Her hands were ice cold.
“The baby was dead,” I said.
“It’s our word against hers. What if she wrote it was born alive and you and I killed it? Do you want people thinking that about you? Do you think you’ll get that scholarship to Vassar if that gets around?”
I shook my head and Lucy opened the bathroom door, poked her head out and then gave the all-clear sign. It wasn’t until I was following her down the hall that I wondered how she knew about the scholarship. I hadn’t told anyone but Miss Buehl and Miss North, who had written my recommendation letters. It didn’t seem the right time to ask, though, so I followed Lucy in silence.
We crept down the hall and Lucy opened our door slowly so it wouldn’t creak. We’d done the same thing countless times, but always with Deirdre. I kept looking behind me expecting to see her and then I would think of her in the lake, below the ice. I remembered my dream and hoped, for Deirdre’s sake, that Lucy was right about the fall killing her.
Lucy went straight into Deirdre’s single and I heard a drawer opening. When she came out she was holding Deirdre’s journal. She sat down at her desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the notebook to the last written page. I stood behind her and read over her shoulder. Under the Horace quote, which had been the last thing in the journal when I’d seen it this afternoon, Deirdre had written another line: “Whatever happens now, it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas.” There was nothing about the baby being alive at birth.
“What does she mean?” I asked. “She makes it sound like it’s all your fault. That’s not fair.”
Lucy looked up at me. “She blamed me for hiding the truth. She said it would have been better if it had all come out into the open.”
“But you were only trying to help.” I was getting angry at Deirdre, forgetting that she wasn’t around to be angry at.
Lucy shrugged. “Apparently she didn’t see it the same way.”
“Well, we can’t let anyone see this,” I said. “We’ll hide it. We’ll dump it in the lake. I’ll never tell.”
Lucy smiled. “You’re a good friend, Jane, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Listen.” She read the line out loud. “ ‘Whatever happens now it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas.’ It’s perfect! All that shrink from Albany has been going on about is how one suicide attempt leads to another. Like it’s catching. They expected Deirdre to do this. Especially since I had the bad manners to cut my wrists in her bed. They’ll probably pat each other on the backs for seeing it coming.”
“But she didn’t kill herself,” I said. “It was an accident. We’ll just explain…”
“Don’t be silly, Jane. It looks like a suicide. It even fits the three sisters legend because she landed right in between the second and third sister. It’s what they’ll want to believe. They’ll lap it up like cream.”
“Maybe it was a suicide,” I said. “I mean, think how bad Deirdre must have felt about the baby…” I thought Lucy would be glad of my theory, but instead she seemed distracted. She looked around the room as if she had lost something.
“There’s just one more thing needed to make it perfect.” She popped up from her desk and crossed to the bed. I was a little startled at her energy. She snatched a piece of white paper from her bed and flourished it above her head.
“Voilà!” she said, sitting back down at the desk. “Ecce testimonium.” It was the mimeograph of Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” “I think just the last stanza will do.” Lucy cut out the last stanza of the poem, being careful to cut evenly. Then she taped it into Deirdre’s journal, again taking time to line it up perfectly.
“Even if it was her suicide note,” Lucy said, “Deirdre was so fucking precise.”
“SO YOU TWO MADE IT LOOK LIKE A SUICIDE. YOU CHANGED her journal and then took it to the dorm matron.”
“Yes. We said that I’d woken up and saw Deirdre’s door open, her bed empty, and her journal lying open on the bed. I know it sounds bad, but I thought she really might have killed herself, that she felt so bad about the baby…”
“But it wasn’t her baby.”
“No.”
“And what was it Deirdre said just before she fell?”
“ ‘Yes, Jane, let’s have a nice long talk. There’s a lot you might be interested to learn.’ ”
Roy watches me, waiting for me to take the next step.
“She would have told me it wasn’t her baby, that it was Lucy’s baby…”
“And you say Lucy flailed her arms just before Deirdre fell?”
“Yes, because she lost her balance…”
“But you say she was on the east ledge. You can’t fall from there because there’s a rock blocking the edge of the Point. But it is close enough to the edge of the Point to reach out and push someone…”
“I didn’t see that.” I’ve raised one hand to my mouth and I feel the wool of my mittens dampen with my breath. Roy reaches over and pulls my hand away from my face.
“Because you were trying to reach Lucy and fell. You wouldn’t have seen anything.”
I snatch my hand away from Roy and press both hands over my eyes as if to blot out the picture Roy is drawing. I grind the heels of my hands into my eyes until bright sunbursts bleed into the blackness, sunspots that turn into the glitter of rock and ice, a miniature landscape of glaciers from which I look up and see, against a moonlit sky, like actors performing in front of a silver scrim, Lucy’s small pale hand reaching up and pulling Deirdre’s foot. A swift hard yank the strength of which must have surprised Deirdre because I see her mouth form a little O before she falls back.
Roy pulls my hands away from my eyes and when I open them I am looking directly into his eyes and I read there the hope that I have remembered something.
“What does it matter?” I say, too angry at being forced to relive that night to give him the satisfaction that he’s right, that maybe I did see something more. “It happened twenty years ago. Both Lucy and Deirdre are dead. So is Melissa Randall. Whatever she read in my journal, whatever it made her do, it’s all over now.”
“Is it?” Roy asks. “First there’s a fake suicide attempt—that’s like what Lucy did at Christmas—and then a girl drowns in the same spot Deirdre drowned. Two of the events from your senior year have recurred, but what about the last act? What about what happened to Matt and Lucy? We’ve been assuming that Melissa Randall did it all, but why? Because we found your journal with her things. But isn’t that also like what happened twenty years ago? You and Lucy tampered with Deirdre’s journal so everyone thought it was a suicide. What if someone planted your journal in Melissa’s things?”
I stare at him now not so much with anger as with horror. What he is suggesting is my worst fear, that the events set in motion twenty years ago would never really be over until they have swept over me, counting me a victim: the third girl. And really, why should I have been spared?
I close my eyes and see once again, sharper no
w, Lucy reaching up to grab Deirdre’s leg and know the memory’s always been there. I open my eyes again and nod. “Deirdre’s death wasn’t an accident,” I say. “You were right. It doesn’t matter that we were young; I’m responsible for what happened back then. For Deirdre’s death, too…”
Roy puts his hand over mine. I notice the fine red hairs that catch the light reflected from the ice at the opening to the cave. “Jane,” he says, “that’s not what I meant…” I look up at him, into the green eyes that look so familiar, and then I notice the light is gone.
I turn toward the narrow entrance to the cave just in time to see the long shadow cast by the sister stone split in two and half of the broken shadow move away. It’s as if the stone’s shadow had come to life and skated away across the ice, but Roy disabuses me of this notion. Getting to his feet, he skates out of the cave and I stumble along clumsily behind him. I catch up to him on the other side of the Point where he stands watching the skaters in the west cove. There’s Dean Buehl, Tacy Beade, Meryl North, Gwendoline Marsh, Simon Ross, Myra Todd, Dr. Lockhart, Athena, Vesta, and a dozen more teachers and students. It’s impossible to say, though, which one had been listening to our conversation inside the cave.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I HAVE THE SKATING DREAM AGAIN THAT NIGHT, ONLY IN this dream I can hear the ice cracking beneath me, fissures erupting in the wake of my blades. I keep skating, though, around and around, in an ever-tightening circle, as if following a magnetic track laid below the ice. Whereas in the dreams I had before there was a feeling of lightness, now there is weight, a heaviness that pulls my blades deep into the ice. When I look behind me I see the fissure open into a crevasse: a pale green tunnel descending for miles beneath my feet. It occurs to me that I am no longer skating on the lake, but on Miss Buehl’s glacier. I stare into the pale green crevasse. Its walls are bubbled, like old glass, only the bubbles are moving. I look closer and see, miles beneath me yet impossibly clear, figures suspended in the ice. Matt and Lucy and Deirdre and Aphrodite, even Iris Crevecoeur, small and brown like a sepia photograph come to life, are all there, streams of bubbles spewing from their mouths.
There’s another figure in the ice, but when I move closer to see I slip into the crevasse and as I slide down, deep into the pale green ice, I can hear the ice cracking closed above me.
I awake to the sound of something cracking above my head. My room is filled with an eerie green light. The light, I realize after a moment, comes from the luminescent dial on my alarm clock, which reads 3:33. As I stare at it something crashes on the roof above my head and skitters down the walls of my house. It sounds as if the house were bursting at its seams. I swing my legs out of the bed, half expecting to feel the floor trembling beneath my feet. I am thinking earthquake, tornado, another ice age, glaciers already on the march. But the floor, though icy cold, is reassuringly solid.
I get up and shove my bare feet into felt-lined boots and pull my down parka on over my nightgown. In the living room the crashing is louder. It sounds as if an army of raccoons were bivouacking on my roof. Raccoons? Hell, it could be bears. Wishing I had a rifle, I fling open the front door and switch on the porch lamp, hoping that any nocturnal intruder will be startled by the light just long enough for me to slam the door and call Animal Control.
Instead I see, in the nimbus of light from my porch lamp, a world made out of glass, a crystal world, like the inside of a candy Easter egg. Every branch and pine needle in the woods is glazed in ice. As I step out into the clearing in front of the house I can feel a light, needle-sharp sleet falling. Tree branches, weighed down by the ice, crack and crash to the forest floor. I should go back inside but I’m enchanted. I haven’t seen an ice storm like this since I was little. I know how dangerous they can be, dragging down power lines and taking down trees, but for the moment I’m enthralled by the precision of it. The way the ice turns each blade of grass and dead leaf into an artifact.
Between my house and the Point there’s a giant white pine. Each feathery needle is encased in ice. I can hear, above me, the rustle of them, rubbing against each other in the wind, a sound like muted chimes or bells tolling underwater. In the light from my porch they glitter like the eyes of some woodland animal, and then I think I can actually see a face of some sort of animal in the pine needles, watching. I move closer and see that the needles have twisted themselves into an animal face—a horned animal with its bloody prey dripping from its mouth. I reach out and pull the face from the tree and feel, under the thin ice casing, metal. I am holding three interlinked hairpins: a corniculum.
IN THE MORNING I GO OUT TO THE POINT. I SCRAPE THE ICE on the ground with my boots and shake the branches, but find not one hairpin. There’s just the three in my pocket. I walk onto the Point and look out at the lake. The storm has passed, leaving clear skies. The rising sun sets the lake on fire. I look down at the three sister stones and see that they, too, have gained a mantle of ice during the night. The third stone looks like an opal set in gold, the middle stone casts a long shadow like a crooked finger pointing toward the cave where Roy Corey and I sat yesterday. I remember how we saw that shadow, pointing in the opposite direction in the setting sun, split in two.
I look down at the three hairpins in my hand. Miss Macintosh once said that the question the reader should ask the narrator of any book is, “Why are you telling me this now?”
I’ve been back at Heart Lake for four weeks and it has been, above all else, quiet. No messages from the past, no torn journal pages or totem hairpins or dead girls. I’d assumed it was over, that the messages had stopped because Aphrodite was dead. But apparently I had assumed wrong. Someone had been keeping quiet. So why send me this message now? A sign that would appear innocent to anyone else—what could I say: that someone was threatening me with hairpins?—but which is full of menace to me.
It is menace I feel, and that I have felt since yesterday when I saw the shadow split away from the stone. Someone listened to the conversation between me and Roy. Something in that conversation has awakened an avenging spirit. But what? I go over in my mind what we talked about and instantly I remember the image of Lucy toppling Deirdre into the lake. I’m standing now at just the place where I stood the night Deirdre fell. To my left is the ledge where Lucy stood. I step down to that level—it’s only about three feet below the top part, and work my way to the edge of the Point. The rock is flatter here and it almost reaches to the edge, but then there’s an outcropping of stone and a stunted pine tree that blocks the edge of the cliff. Was that why Lucy stepped down here? Because the footing was better than the curved surface at the edge of the Point? She’d have known this from the nights we climbed down from here to the swimming beach. From where I’m standing I could reach up and touch someone standing at the edge of the Point. Or reach up and trip someone standing there. Once again I see the scene as I saw it yesterday in the cave. I climb back up to the curved stone of the Point and, staying on my hands and knees, inch myself as close to the edge of the cliff as I can before vertigo forces me to creep back.
I look down at the rock and see that I’ve dug my nails into the narrow crevices as if I were a rock climber ascending a vertical wall. The glacial chattermarks remind me of my dream—the pale green crevasse opening in the glacier.
Whoever listened to our conversation yesterday heard what I said about Lucy and me covering up Deirdre’s death. They also heard Roy say that he didn’t believe Melissa Randall killed herself, that whoever “faked” Athena’s suicide attempt and killed Melissa Randall might still be alive. If he’s right, if that person were still alive and listening, it would have sounded like a challenge. And the corniculum is an answer to that challenge.
THROUGHOUT MY CLASSES I AM SO DISTRACTED BY THIS question that I can hardly follow the easy faked Latin in the Ecce Romani textbook (today we follow our Roman family to an inn on the Via Appia) let alone the advanced girls’ translations of Virgil. We have followed Aeneas into the underworld where he encounters h
is spurned lover Dido and tries to apologize for abandoning her in Carthage. Dido, however, will have none of it. She turns away from Aeneas and refuses to talk to him.
I remember the dream I had of Deirdre turning away from me.
“I’m glad Dido doesn’t talk to Aeneas,” Vesta, never a fan of the Roman founder, says.
“She should have done more than just give him the cold shoulder,” Athena says, tugging her unraveling cuffs over her wrists. “People… people who hurt other people…”
Vesta starts to hum the Barbra Streisand song, “People, people who need people…”
“Can it, Vesta,” Athena screams, clutching her Aeneid as if she were going to hurl it at her classmate.
“Puellae!” I say rising to my feet and clapping my hands. “Tacete!”
Both my students glare at me.
“What’s up with you girls?”
“We’re just tired and we’ve got a big chemistry exam with Moldy Todd next period.”
I can’t help but laugh at the sobriquet, even though I know it’s the height of unprofessionalism. At least it gains me a smile from Vesta, but Athena glares all the harder at our shared mirth.
“Vesta,” I say, “why don’t you go out in the hall? I’ll give you both some extra time to study; I just want to have a word with Athena.”
Athena rolls her eyes—overdoing, I think, the role of student asked to stay after class.
“Hey,” I say when Vesta is gone, “I thought we were friends. What’s bothering you?”
“People…” remembering Vesta’s jibe she amends, “some of the girls are making fun of me because of this.” She holds up her arm and shakes her wrist so that the loose sweater cuff falls down to her elbow. “And it’s not fair. I haven’t cut myself since last year. Someone else did this.”