I slid open the heavy wooden door with trepidation because, I told myself, animals might be hiding—foxes, possums, mice, bats. I hadn’t been inside the barn since summer, when I’d stored my bicycle there. Something might fly out at me or something might be dead on the floor. But there was only the flutter of wings, the coo of nesting mourning doves, and slanted beams of light inside. The barn was empty even of the plans Evan had made for it. In a couple of years it would collapse into itself like the old barns on the Blackwell estate and begin the slow decay back into the earth.
For now, though, it held my bicycle, a few boxes of old books, and the cross-country skis Evan had given me for Christmas our first year here. We’d used them Christmas Day, skiing onto the estate, pulling Emmy on a sled. A magical day right out of a children’s book. We’d gone out a few more times during the break but then once the semester had started I hadn’t had time. I’d never used the skis again. Now they were peeling and warped, the boots that went with them full of spiders. I cleaned them out with an old rag, slid my feet into them, and carried the skis and poles to the edge of the woods. I snapped the boots into the skis and pushed off down the hill, heading toward the road.
The pines here were spaced far apart, making it easy to ski between them. The powdery snow gave way smoothly under me. I was out of practice, out of shape, and my head was still foggy from the Glenlivet I’d drunk last night, but it was easy going down the gentle slope. My leg muscles quickly warmed up and the day, which had started gray and overcast, brightened. The sun felt good on my face; the air smelled like pine and woodsmoke. There was a clarity and stillness in the day that felt like Christmas. Maybe it was being so close to the solstice. It felt as if the earth had paused in its spinning at that moment when it tilted farthest from the sun and had taken a breath before turning back. The day felt poised. Balanced in between. A hawk sailing overhead, its high-pitched keen riding the cold air, seemed to move in slow motion, suspended in ether. I wouldn’t have minded staying in this in-between place, coasting over the surface of things, forever.
Then I reached the wall with Leia’s shrine. Someone had come early and laid pine boughs and holly amid the candles and stuffed animals. Merry Christmas, Leia, love you forever! someone had written on a Christmas card. Again I looked for anything unusual left among the offerings, but nothing stood out. Of course not, I told myself, Hannah had been the one to leave them and Hannah was lying unconscious in the hospital. Then I looked out toward the road. I pictured myself coming around the curve, seeing the deer, and swerving to avoid it, my car coming to rest inches from the wall. I looked down into the ditch between the wall and the road, forcing myself to think about Leia lying there. Could she have been there when I got out of the car?
But no, I’d searched the road, looking for the deer. I’d have seen her.
I turned from the wall and skied into the woods, following the path I’d taken that night to the clearing. I recognized the log I’d sat on, the tree I’d leaned against. I took off my skis and sat there now. I leaned back and closed my eyes, the sun on my face feeling better than it should have. I was here to remember, not sunbathe. I focused on what I’d heard that night—
A squeal of tires. A scream. Come back!
A man’s voice calling Come back!
I heard it now. Startled, I opened my eyes and saw a figure in jeans and hooded jacket striding through the snow. He was only a few yards away from me but he was moving so fast he hadn’t seen me. I tucked myself in closer to the tree, not wanting to be seen. There was something in the man’s angry stride that instantly made me wary.
“Goddamnit, man, come back! Where the fuck do you think you’re going? I can’t keep up in this fucking snow.”
The voice came from behind me, back toward the road. The hooded man came to a halt and turned around. I was sure he’d see me but he was looking to my right and I was in the shadow of the tree. He shouted at the man behind him.
“Who told you to wear those faggot shoes? I told you we’d have to hike.”
I saw now that the first man was wearing a hooded sweatshirt underneath an open leather jacket. The sweatshirt was dark purple with gold lettering—Acheron colors. I’d already guessed from their prolific cursing they were students. Now I saw that I was right. The man in the Acheron sweatshirt was Troy Van Donk.
“I didn’t know we were hiking through the fucking snow.”
The second man came into view. He was indeed poorly outfitted for hiking in the woods. He was picking his way through the snow like a long-legged crow in skinny black jeans and thin, pointy oxfords, flapping the arms of a loose vintage trench coat as he tried to keep his balance. But it was the porkpie hat that made me recognize him as the aging hipster from the Loop bus.
“Jesus, man, did you think the college was gonna snow-blow us a path?”
“Shit, man, I wish you’d keep it down. The police are bound to be on the lookout.”
Troy sniggered. “Right, they’re out here with sniffer dogs and infrared night vision goggles while Leia Dawson’s killer goes scot-free.”
“I thought they had the hot professor for that.”
“Nah, Prof Lewis wouldn’t do Leia like that, even if she was lit from the party. That’s just what the cops want people to think so the real killer lets down his guard.” Troy rubbed his hand over his eyes as if trying to erase some painful memory, then punched the other man in the arm. “So do you want to stand out here bird-watching or do you want to see if the stash is still there?”
So they were looking for hidden drugs. It was the only logical reason for them to be out here in the snow but I felt a sinking sense of disappointment in Troy.
“Fuck, man, it better be or my friends in P’town’ll have our balls.”
“Then let’s go.” Troy turned around and started up the hill. “Try to keep up.”
The second man took off after Troy, flailing his arms more like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz now. I waited a few minutes, then followed them. Troy’s faith that I hadn’t killed Leia had been momentarily heartening, but it might have another explanation. Ross might have been right: he knew I hadn’t killed Leia because he had.
* * *
It was harder going uphill in skis. My leg muscles burned and I fell twice. Each time I was afraid that Troy and his companion would turn around and see me flailing around on my skis. But they were too busy arguing with each other, their voices carrying on the still, cold air, to notice me.
“Couldn’t you have found someplace easier to get to?” I heard the other man complain.
“What part about secret hideout do you not get? It wouldn’t be secret if it was on Main Street.”
“Yeah, but these woods give me the creeps. Who owns all this?”
“There’s an old farmhouse up there”—he pointed toward my house—“that’s where Professor Lewis lives.”
“Sweet. Maybe we should pay her a visit later— Fuck! That hurt.”
“Just shut up about her.”
“Oh, I get it. You want her all to yourself.” He said something too low for me to hear but I guessed it was filthy from his high-pitched, nervous laugh. “Hey, she must be loaded to own all this.”
“She doesn’t own this land, asshole; it belongs to the school. It was all part of an old estate that some crazy old guy gave away back in the day.”
“He just gave it away?”
“Hey, you’d understand what rich people do better than me. He was some lonely old fart who went apeshit when he lost his kid so he gave his place away to become a teaching college. So kids could get a better education—or some bullshit like that.”
Troy’s voice faded as he and his companion crested the hill. I didn’t need to eavesdrop on the history of Amos Blackwell and his lost child—I knew it all too well. Evan had researched all that history when we moved to the edge of the estate, reading in books on the area—Ghosts Along the Hudson, Haunted Mansions of the Highlands—and even talking to the local historian at the library
. He found out that Amos Blackwell had brought his young bride, Charlotte, from New York City to live at the family estate, River House. They had been happy there for their first year and had a child, a little girl named Flora. But then Flora had died in a boating accident on the river. The wife had drowned herself a year later. Evan had been fascinated with the story and said he might want to write a ghost story about it one day. Later, after Emmy, he said we should have known the place was cursed.
When I reached the top of the hill I paused to catch my breath and take in the view. Even after seven years it took my breath away, especially on a morning like this. The broad sweep of the Hudson glittered in the sun. The Catskills rose blue and purple across the river. The mountains always looked different to me depending on the time of day and year, the distant ridges receding on foggy days and standing startlingly close on clear days like today. As if they were moving when we weren’t looking, stealthily shifting the contours of the landscape.
Against this backdrop of frozen river and distant mountain, Troy and his companion looked like two tiny figures from a Brueghel painting—peasants returning home to their village or hunters tracking their prey. They had reached the bottom of the hill and were walking north along the train tracks, heading toward the trestle bridge. I skied across the top of the hill and started down through the woods north of the bridge so they wouldn’t see me. These woods were denser, though, full of underbrush and blackberry thickets. I had to inch down the snowy slope, grasping branches and tree trunks to keep from sliding. I fell backward twice, soaking my behind and snagging my clothes in the thorns. Branches snapped at my face. What was I doing trailing my student and his accomplice in crime into the woods? I should have called the police.
But I hadn’t thought to bring my phone and if I went back to my house now and called Sergeant McAffrey what would I tell him? That I’d seen Troy Van Donk walking through the woods with a suspicious-looking man too old to be a student? That they’d been talking about a “stash”? That my department head was offering me tenure in exchange for my recovered memory of Troy running over Leia? That I thought Troy had run over Leia because he didn’t think I had done it?
In for a penny, in for a pound, my mother might have said, although I was pretty sure my mother would have discouraged me from following two possible drug dealers to their hideout.
When I reached the train tracks I looked south toward the trestle bridge but I didn’t see Troy and the other man. Had they gone over it? But why? What was on the other side of the tracks besides soggy marsh and frozen river and—
The boathouse. I saw it about a hundred feet away, through the trees, on a spit of land that jutted out into the river. The old Blackwell boathouse. Most Hudson River estates had one, to house millionaires’ yachts and pleasure skiffs for jaunts on the river. The Blackwell boathouse had once been a grand affair, built in the Adirondack Great Camp style with three pitched eaves trimmed in rustic birch branches over three wide boat berths open to the river. Dottie had told me that there’d been a rowing club in the twenties—there was still a loft with rowing shells and boating gear—but the college didn’t have the money to keep the building in repair. Plus it was dangerous to reach it. The trestle bridge was rusted and decrepit and crossing the train tracks on the ground was “strongly discouraged” by the administration.
Of course that made it all the more appealing to college students. I’d heard my students talking about daring each other to cross the tracks, laying pennies on the rails for flattened souvenirs, and the inevitable drama of someone who’d gotten their foot stuck in the track while a train approached. The tracks had featured in so many of my students’ stories that I felt dread just looking at them as I stood listening for a train now. Or maybe it was the memory of the keening cry of the train whistle that made me think of the college ghost story.
Every college had them—the dorm room haunted by the freshman girl who got pregnant and hung herself, the twenty-four-hour study room inhabited by the premed who OD’d on speed and lay on the couch for three days before anyone noticed he was dead. Of course an old, abandoned boathouse where a little girl had drowned would have its stories. I’d heard it was a fraternity hazing ritual to make new pledges spend the night there, and it was the most popular spot on campus, according to “Overheard at Acheron,” to lose one’s virginity. It wasn’t surprising that it would also attract drug users. It must be where Troy and the other man had gone.
I took off my skis and hid them behind a bush. Then I listened again for the train, heard only the crunch of ice moving on the river, and stepped cautiously over the tracks. It felt like stepping over a sleeping snake. When I got on the other side I realized I’d been holding my breath. I crossed over the rotting planks that lay over the causeway and crept around the side of the building until I came to a low, open window. I crouched below it, squirming behind a prickly bush that I hoped would conceal me from the two men if they came out, and then listened. At first I heard only the beating of my own heart, then the crack and groan of ice on the river, but then I heard Troy’s voice, amplified by the high, peaked ceiling of the boathouse.
“What can I tell you, I thought it was here. The third plank from the third berth.”
“Let me guess, you were stoned when you hid it.”
“Hell no, I keep a straight head when I’m doing business. These college students will rip you off if you don’t.”
“You talk like you’re not one yourself.”
“Not like them I’m not. I can’t afford to slack off. I’ll lose my financial aid if my average drops below eighty-five.”
Then you should have handed in your revision.
“I’m pretty sure you’ll lose your financial aid if they catch you dealing.”
“It was supposed to be a onetime thing as a favor to a friend. I’m done after this—”
Whatever else Troy was going to say was drowned out by the shriek of a train whistle, so close I nearly jumped out of my skin. Although I was a good ten feet from the tracks, I pressed myself against the wall as it passed and closed my eyes. It felt as if the train was moving just inches from my skin. When I opened my eyes I saw Troy and the other man walking back along the train tracks toward the college. From the dejected slump of their shoulders I figured they hadn’t found what they were looking for.
But had I? Was there anything in what I’d seen or heard that made Troy a more likely suspect for running over Leia?
Maybe. But not really.
I’d come so far, though; I might as well see the place. I untangled myself from the shrubbery and picked my way gingerly over the half-sunken planks that led into the boathouse, feeling the cold from the soles of my boots up to the crown of my head. It was the cold of the frozen river, I told myself, it had nothing to do with the ghost stories.
But when I came into the boathouse and saw, dappled by the reflections of river water, a girl’s face staring at me I nearly screamed. This wasn’t the ghost I was expecting. This was Leia Dawson.
I stepped closer and saw that the face had been painted on the peeling wood of the back wall. There were other marks on the wood—initials, hearts, obscenities, graffiti tags—but this painted face seemed to float over all of them, Leia’s wide blue eyes staring through the rippled light like a drowned woman come back to life. I stared at it for several minutes before I noticed the words beneath it—Winter Solstice Self-Portrait.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It took me a long time to figure out what was wrong about her face. It was in the shading. Leia had somehow created the effect of a shadow over her features, a dark veil that didn’t fall from overhead but rose from below. That’s why she looked like she was drowning. The light-ripple from the water enhanced the effect, but she’d planned it, working with the painting’s setting so that it looked as though a tide of dark water was rising from the river to engulf her. I stepped closer to the painting and saw that underneath her name she’d written The Dark Is Rising.
A chill rose
up in me. The Dark Is Rising was a book we’d read in the Children’s Lit class Leia had taken with me two years ago, a British fantasy novel about an eleven-year-old boy who discovers over the course of a Christmas holiday that he is the guardian of the Light charged with fighting the forces of the Dark. Leia had written her term paper on it, exploring the Celtic, Arthurian, and Norse mythology the author had used. I found myself both strangely touched that she had remembered the book and disturbed that she’d painted herself as being engulfed by the dark—especially since if she’d painted it on the solstice she had painted it on the day of her death. As if she’d seen her own death coming for her. What had been going on with her? And what was she doing down here at the boathouse hanging out with the likes of Troy and that sleazy scarecrow?
I looked around and saw signs of recent partying—empty bottles and beer cans, cigarette butts, condoms, even a broken syringe. Stepping back, I looked up at the loft built into the rafters. Old life preservers and boat cushions formed a sort of makeshift bed. I could guess what use the students were making of that. I was having a hard time picturing Leia here—unless she was looking for material for her writing or Troy was right and the Leia I knew was only a carefully constructed façade.
I stayed for a little longer, willing Leia’s image to answer my questions, but the shadows over her face only deepened as the day grew overcast and colder. I could feel the cold rising off the river as it froze. Finally, I turned from her and left, my feet so numb from standing so long that I tripped on the plank causeway and into the water, soaking one leg up to my knee.
My mind was as clumsy as my limbs, going round and round the question of Leia. Why had she painted herself like that? What dark thing was rising to engulf her? Was it Troy’s infatuation for her as Ross had said? Was that what she had come to talk to me about that day? It all came back to that. If I had taken the time to listen to her would I have made a difference? Could I have stopped that tide of dark rising up to engulf her on the river road?