For a moment he is back in the Lyceum Theater in Gloversville, watching helplessly as Corinth is bound tighter and tighter until something breaks his spell of inertia: a voice, as if speaking inside his own head, calling his own name.
He stares at the statue of the Indian girl and realizes why it’s so quiet. The water from the fountain has stopped flowing. Instead, where jets of water leapt around the statue, a faint breeze stirs the water, swirling the rose petals on its surface into loops and eddies that form, as he watches, three letters.
TOM.
He blinks and his name is gone. A sudden gust of wind whips the petals on the ground into a red ribbon that leads from the fountain to the back of the garden, where the statue of the warrior with his upright sword seems to rebuke Tom for his tardiness. Get moving, he hears the voice inside him say—only he knows that this is his own voice.
He follows the red path beneath the statue and pauses between two cypresses to look into a round clearing where the rose-strewn path continues like a stream of blood between the white stones and bitter-smelling white flowers. At the other side of the circle he sees the housekeeper emerging from the underground crypt to look around the circle. Tom stands still in the shadow of the cypress trees, willing himself as still as the statue standing above him. He watches as Wanda Norris kneels and picks up a handful of rose petals, which she crushes in her hand and then sifts between her fingers. Then she turns and goes back down into the crypt, muttering something under her breath that sounds like a curse.
She’s waiting for her son, Tom figures. Does that mean she’s already killed Corinth?
The rose petals stir at his feet and a scent rises—Corinth’s scent—or maybe only the smell of her still on his skin, but it’s enough to convince him she’s alive. He walks out of the cypress shadows and crosses the clearing, the rose petals muffling the sound of his footsteps. They spray themselves across the marble steps so that as he creeps down into the crypt even Wanda’s keen hearing misses his approach. She’s kneeling by the side of the little Latham girl, waving some herb under her nose and chanting. Tom kneels and picks up a piece of broken rubble from the floor and raises it over Wanda’s head. He steps forward onto bare floor and at last she hears him, but it’s too late. When she turns the last thing she sees is a marble arm, one of her mistress’s statues come to life at last, descending from the sky to strike her.
In the well, Corinth breathes slowly, constricting her throat to make each breath last longer. Each breath sounds as if it’s moving through a rusty pipe. This is what she pictures herself becoming as the years pass: another pipe in the great fountain, her bones channeling the water, her flesh resurgent in the sprays and jets that flash in the sunshine. It’s not an entirely bad way to spend eternity. Even the voices of the children have ceased to bother her. They don’t blame her, even though it was her child they were sacrificed for. She can feel them gathered around her, as if waiting for a bedtime story, which she would be happy to oblige them with if only she could find the breath. She draws in one more breath, which feels as if it will be the last breath in all the world. As she lets it out she purses her lips to make a shushing sound. If she’s going to be trapped here for all eternity with these children, she had better at least calm them. The shushing noise, though, turns into a long, low moan—a grating cry that sounds as if the whole garden were keening for its lost children.
When Tom lowers himself down into the well, he’s relieved at first to see that Corinth’s eyes are open, but when he speaks to her she doesn’t seem to hear him. He runs his hands over her, feeling for broken bones, and feels the stickiness covering the left side of her chest and arm. He finds where the bullet went through her shoulder and where it came out.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he tells her, taking his own shirt off and tearing it into strips to bind her wound, “but I don’t think the bullet hit your heart. We’ve got to get you out of here, though. Can you put your arms around my neck?”
Corinth watches her own arms circle Tom’s neck as if watching an automaton performing tricks in one of his magic acts. She wills her body to do what he tells her to, wrapping her legs around his waist as he pulls them both up out of the well. He leans her against the wall while he drags Wanda’s body across the floor.
“She’s still breathing,” Corinth comments, surprised more at her own survival than Wanda’s.
“Well, she won’t bother us in there,” Tom says, hauling the heavy woman up to the rim of the well.
“You can’t leave her in there to die,” Corinth says, her voice still hoarse as old pipes.
“It’s what she planned for you,” Tom says, looking down at Corinth.
Corinth looks across the room to where the girl lies on the marble floor, her frail chest rising and falling under her white nightgown in the moonlight. Alice. Her child and Tom’s. But it’s Wanda who’s cared for her—killed for her—all these years. Wanda who will follow them to ends of the earth to find Alice if they leave her alive.
“All right,” she says, closing her eyes. But when Tom pushes the marble lid over the top of the well, she opens them again because for a moment she was back in the well, down in the dark with Wanda and the children.
Tom carries Alice back to the coach and Corinth walks by his side. She has to stop every few feet to rest. Through her bandages, she can still feel her blood seeping out of her, leaving a trail from the center of the maze to the hedge wall, like the ball of thread Ariadne gave to Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth, only Corinth can feel this scarlet thread attaching her to the center of the maze, pulling her back.
Tom shows her where he’s left the driver—bound and unconscious, but still breathing. “It would be better to kill him,” he says, but Corinth shakes her head. “Leave him be,” she says. “He won’t come after us.”
Tom lays Alice on the cushioned bench inside the brougham and then helps Corinth in beside her. The carpetbag she brought with her from the hotel in Saratoga is still there and, tucked beneath the seat, a small trunk with the initials A.L. stamped into the leather. So Wanda had planned to take the girl away. As Tom whips the horses into motion, Corinth sees that Alice is staring up at her. She braces herself for a reproach—or at least for the girl to ask what’s become of her caretaker—but instead Alice pushes herself forward on the seat until her head rests in Corinth’s lap, and with a deep sigh that Corinth feels reverberate through her entire body, she falls back asleep.
The movement of the carriage soon lulls Corinth to sleep, as well. She is instantly drawn by the scarlet thread back through the maze and down into the well, where Wanda is breathing her last breaths. The children who had gathered around Corinth have come closer now, but instead of waiting for a story, they are telling one—one only Wanda can hear. All Corinth can hear is the rattling of their bones, which sounds like china teacups shivering in their saucers.
Corinth startles awake to find that the carriage has stopped. Pale light filters through fogged-over windows. Alice is crouched on the floor below her, sorting through the clothes and toys packed in her trunk. Corinth wipes at the window with her handkerchief, but the fog is too thick to see through. She slides open the little window to the driver’s box and asks Tom why they’ve stopped.
“I’m just waiting for the fog to clear,” he says. “There’s a steep drop off the road up ahead that I don’t want to risk going over. Are you all right in there?”
“Yes,” Corinth tells him, looking down at Alice, who has pulled out of the trunk a doll with yellow hair and blue eyes. With a pang of remorse for Wanda, Corinth sees that it’s the same one that she had taken from Alice in the attic yesterday. The one Wanda had told her wasn’t for her. But it’s not the doll that Alice is interested in. She’s unwrapping something from a nest of white tissue paper. Corinth hears what it is before she sees it.
The dry rattle of bone against bone.
“Look, Wanda packed my teacup,” Alice says, holding up the cup and saucer. “See, yo
u can tell it’s mine.” She tips the cup over so Corinth can see inside. Corinth leans forward. She feels as if she’s looking down into the white marble well again. At the bottom of the cup, in flowing blue script that bleeds into the white background, is written the name Alice.
“See, that’s how I always knew which one was mine,” Alice says.
Corinth doesn’t say anything, picturing the row of flow-blue teacups in Aurora Latham’s china cabinet that she ordered specially from England for the children. Each with one of the children’s names on the inside.
“And Wanda told you to be careful always to drink only from your own cup.”
“Of course,” Alice says, laying the teacup down in its nest of tissue paper. “It would be dirty to share with the others. How long are we going to stay here?” she asks, climbing back up onto the seat. She kneels under the window and rubs it with the sleeve of her dress to see outside. The fog is burning off in the morning sun, dissolving into shreds. “I know where we are—the overlook on the way to the camp. Are we going to the camp, then?”
Corinth hesitates. Yes, this is the road to the camp, but how would Tom know the location of Latham’s hunting cabin? Had Latham taken him there? And why would Tom take them someplace that belonged to the Latham family? Is it possible he’s still acting for Milo—or for Aurora?
Alice is still staring at her, waiting for an answer. “Yes,” Corinth says, thinking it simpler to reassure the girl that they’re going someplace familiar.
Alice turns away from the window and smiles. “Oh, good, you’ll like it there,” she says. “I’ll show you the secret Indian grave in the bog.”
Corinth smiles back at the girl even though her flesh has gone cold. Alice can’t mean the desolate spot beneath the tamarack tree where she consigned that poor dead infant (Aurora’s child, not hers, she reminds herself) to the tea-colored water. She must have overheard one of Wanda’s stories about the Indian girls, abandoned by their lovers or repudiated by their tribes, who drowned themselves in the bog. The carriage jolts into motion and the wisps of fog stream away from the window. For a moment the two spots that Alice rubbed clean on the window darken into two black eyes and Corinth feels, rather than sees, someone watching from the side of the road.
Chapter Twenty-five
By the time we arrive at the turnoff to the camp, it has started to snow again. We drive through a stand of black spruce so dense it’s as if we are driving through a tunnel. Nat makes another right at an unmarked turnoff and then a left onto a drive whose only marking is the weathered blade of a canoe paddle nailed to the peeling bark of a birch tree.
“I’m guessing your family didn’t invite a lot of overnight guests to the camp,” I say, bracing myself as the car lurches on the unplowed road.
“Yeah, they saw remoteness as a virtue in location as well as emotional tone. It would have been even more remote before the valley was flooded in the thirties. Nothing but marshland and bog for a hundred miles in any direction. My grandfather said that back at the turn of the century an escaped convict hid out here all winter long. In the spring they found footsteps leading into the bog, but they never found his body. It was my grandfather’s belief that he’d been swallowed up by the bog and preserved in the peat.”
I wonder if this was another boogeyman Nat’s grandfather invented to scare him, but I don’t suggest it. Since Nat’s outburst on the cliff, we’ve both tried to stick to emotionally neutral content.
The narrow drive climbs up a small rise and then descends abruptly to the edge of a small pond. If you didn’t know the pond was there, you’d be in danger of driving straight into the water. Nat puts the car in park and turns off the engine. Instantly we are enveloped in a silence that feels as deep as the woods that surround us. Across the pond is the house—a low chalet built of rough-hewn logs, its roof and eaves sheathed in bark. It blends in so well with the surrounding woods I have the feeling that if I blinked, it would waver and be gone.
Nat sits looking at the house for a few minutes, as if more than a stretch of black water divided him from it—as if he were looking at the back of the last ferry as it pulls out of the dock. Then with one sharp expulsion of breath he gets out of the car and I follow him. Outside, the only sound is the soft whisper of snow falling through acres of black spruce.
“There’s a path that goes into the bog behind the house,” Nat says. “The grave site—or whatever it is—is about half a mile in. Stay close behind me, because there are sinkholes on either side of the path and we won’t be able to see them under the snow.”
I nod, feeling curiously unwilling to disturb the silence of these woods. As I follow Nat I can feel even through the layers of snow that the ground is buoyant and unstable. A floating world, my mother called it when she took me to visit a bog near our house in Lily Dale.
We had gone because my mother was looking for a love charm for one of her clients. Mira had described the orchid to me (“small white flowers growing on a tall spike with a scent like vanilla and cloves”) so that I could help find it. Usually I was reluctant to go on one of my mother’s foraging trips, but when I heard what she was looking for, I volunteered. I was just twelve, but I had begun to think about boys and to wonder what I might do to get them to think about me. The other girls in my school seemed equipped with an arsenal of attractions—lip glosses that made their lips shiny (unlike the waxy bee’s balm Mira gave me for chapped lips), and close-fitting jeans and T-shirts that disclosed their bodies instead of hiding them the way the shapeless linen shifts Mira made for me did. I suspected, as well, that these girls were getting advice from their mothers about boys that I would never get from Mira. Mira wouldn’t even talk about my father except to say that he was a boy she’d met at the agricultural college in Cobbleskill, where Mira had gone for one year, and who, when Mira got pregnant, hadn’t been interested in coming back to Lily Dale and starting a family. She’d moved back in with my grandmother, from whom she inherited the yellow Victorian house on the edge of town, her clientele of tourists who flocked each summer to Lily Dale to contact their dead relatives, and her bees, who were duly informed of Grandma Elly’s death so that they wouldn’t swarm. Sometimes I think it’s funny that Mira, whose calling is to recover lost loved ones or procure through charms and potions new loves, is so little interested in finding love herself. I picture a hollow place inside my mother where other people keep a place for a lover or husband that allows her to bring other women’s loved ones back from the dead. Like an empty seat at a table. Or the hollowness beneath a bog.
“In ancient times,” Mira told me while we looked for the white orchid, “bogs were recognized as sacred places consecrated to Mother Earth. Sacrifices were made to ensure fertility for the coming year. The bodies of sacrificial victims, along with fertility statues, are found today perfectly preserved.”
“That’s because of the tannic acid in the water,” I replied, repeating something I had recently learned in science class to still the quaking feeling in my stomach. I’d gotten my period for the first time the day before, but I hadn’t told Mira because I knew she’d make a huge fuss and probably burn some nauseating incense over my head and dance naked around me, or perform some equally embarrassing spectacle, when all I wanted was a box of Kotex and some Midol to stop the cramps. They weren’t so bad by the time we were walking in the bog, but I could feel a churning that made me queasily aware of my insides, and my stomach had the same spongy texture as the peat mat we walked over. Picturing preserved dead people beneath the sphagnum moss wasn’t helping.
Now, walking behind Nat on top of the snow-covered bog, I catch myself scanning the snowdrifts for the elusive white orchid my mother and I had gone looking for that day. What an odd juxtaposition, I realize now, that I went into the bog with my mother to gain some insight into love and instead heard about sacrificial victims preserved for all time in the peat. What I wanted to hear from my mother was that there was a possibility of finding a love that lasted, but instead I came
away that day with an image of everlasting death seared into my brain.
“What’s so funny?” Nat asks, suddenly turning to face me. I didn’t even realize that I had laughed out loud.
“Oh, I was just remembering something I learned about bogs when I was young. My mother was interested in the bog people—”
“You mean The Bog People by Peter Glob? I love that book! My favorite bog person was the Tollund Man, the one with the little skullcap and the peaceful expression on his face, like an old guy sipping soup at Ratner’s Deli. But my favorite bog reference has to be Emily’s.”
“Emily’s?”
“Yes,” he says, placing his hand over his heart and striking the pose of an orator. “How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public—like a Frog— / To tell one’s name—the livelong June— / To an admiring Bog!”
The heavy, leaden sky sends back an echo of the last word of the poem, a mocking reminder of the futility of shouting out one’s name in this place where the shadows of the black spruce trees seem to eat what little light remains of the day and the spongy ground swallows whatever falls into its maw. Nat runs his hand through his hair, dislodging a flurry of snowflakes, and laughs.
“You know,” he says, “when I first read that poem in college, I thought it was pretty disingenuous—the whole recluse-in-a-white-dress-shunning-publication thing. Who wouldn’t want to be published, after all? But the older I get, the more futile seems the idea that you can leave anything worthwhile of yourself behind, that it makes any difference. Sometimes I feel like Emily’s frog and that every word I write is just croaking in the graveyard.”
“The graveyard?” I repeat, suddenly feeling the same queasiness I had on that day I’d come to the bog with my mother.
“I’m sorry,” Nat says, noticing the stricken look on my face. “I guess that’s not the kind of thing an aspiring writer wants to hear. Remind me not to sign up for the Bosco mentoring program.” Nat stamps his feet against the ground. “And remind me not to give long lectures in the freezing cold. Come on, let’s find that tree.”