The Lake of Dead Languages (34 page)

“Well, I’ll certainly be more careful in the future. Now I’d better get back to campus. I want to see if Athena and Vesta are back yet.”

“If you mean Ellen and Sandy, they’re both back. Perhaps you ought to consider dropping the goddess names. Didn’t your old Latin teacher use Roman names like Lucia and Clementia?”

Is it just coincidence she picked my old Latin name and Lucy’s? Is it something else she gleaned from my old journal?

“Yes, but I can’t see what harm there is in the girls keeping their names. Doesn’t it just make a bigger thing out of it?”

“Miss Hudson, one of our students is dead. How much bigger do you want it to be?”

“All right. I’ll suggest they take other names. Look, can I give you a lift back to campus?” I try to make my voice conciliatory. The last thing I want is this woman for an enemy.

“No thanks, I’m going skating.” She turns her right side to me so I can see a pair of worn ice skates with decorative stitching hanging over her shoulder. “There’s a shortcut through the woods behind my house. I can skate straight across the lake to the school.”

“Be careful,” I tell her. “There’s a weak spot in the ice near the mouth of the Schwanenkill.”

“Don’t worry, Jane,” she says, smiling, “I know where all the weak spots are.”

I
TAKE
L
AKE
D
RIVE AROUND THE EAST SIDE OF THE LAKE.
Through the pines lining the drive I catch glimpses of the frozen lake, shimmering under a full moon. Dr. Lockhart has picked a beautiful night to skate. I believe her when she says she is not superstitious. It’s hard to imagine, otherwise, how she could bear to be alone on that ice at night. I don’t think it’s something I could do.

I turn off Lake Drive and park in the faculty parking lot. I’ll have to haul my suitcases up the long path to my house without a light—of course I hadn’t thought to leave any light on in the house when I left. Two weeks ago I hadn’t even been sure I’d be coming back. It occurs to me it might be better to go up to the house first and turn on some lights before trying to navigate the path with a heavy suitcase.

I look in my glove compartment and find a flashlight, but the batteries are burned out. I resign myself to finding my way in the dark, the moon is full so it shouldn’t be too bad,
but when I get out of my car I notice the path on the opposite end of the parking lot, the one to the dorm, is ablaze with light. Dean Buehl must have had extra lighting installed after Melissa Randall’s death to reassure worried parents—although how extra lighting is supposed to prevent girls from taking their own lives, I do not know.

I decide I’ll go to the dorm first. It’ll give me a chance to visit with Athena and Vesta before it gets too late. Maybe the dorm matron will have an extra flashlight to lend me. As I walk up the well-shoveled (Dean Buehl must have had to call in a plow to clear the paths enough to install the lights) and well-lit path I realize that all my prevarication about going up the unlit path to the cottage amounts to one thing: I’m not ready to be alone in that house yet.

The dorm matron has a plentiful supply of flashlights and she is happy to give me one as long as I sign it out. She also has me “sign in” to the dorm and leave a photo ID. I notice, as I walk up to the second floor, hand-lettered signs posted exhorting students to travel in pairs and flyers for community counseling groups. I think I recognize Gwen Marsh’s handwriting. The thought that poor Gwen has spent her Christmas holiday making up flyers, with carpal tunnel syndrome no less, and planning how to help the girls cope with returning after the trauma of Melissa Randall’s death, suddenly makes me feel guilty and self-absorbed. It makes my two weeks at the Aquadome seem like a luxury vacation by comparison.

The second floor is quiet except for the hissing of the steam radiators. One of the flyers advertises a “Welcome Back Sing” for tonight and I’m afraid that Athena and Vesta will be there, but when I knock on their door I hear the familiar shuffle and window shutting that tells me they are in, and they haven’t given up smoking over the break.

Vesta unlocks and opens the door, but only a few inches. When she sees it’s me she scrunches her eyebrows together suspiciously and reluctantly opens the door the rest of the way.

“Sandy,” I say, determined to avoid the girls’ classical
names as per Dr. Lockhart’s suggestion, “nice to see you. How was your break?”

Vesta shrugs and sits down on the bed underneath the window. Athena turns around in her chair and smiles at me. I notice right away that her face looks less drawn and, somehow, more open. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but she looks healthier. The two weeks away from Heart Lake have done her good.

“Salve, Magistra,”
she says,
“quid agis?”

“Bene,”
I say, “et
tu,
Ellen?”

“Ellen? Why aren’t you calling me Athena?”

I shift uncomfortably from foot to foot. The room is hot and damp.

“Here,” Athena says, getting up from her chair and seating herself cross-legged on the floor, “take off your coat and sit down. They keep it like a sauna in here.”

I sit down at my old desk. Now that Athena is sitting beneath me I can see one thing that’s different about her. She’s let the dye grow out of her hair. I can see several inches of her natural color—a light mousy brown—showing at the roots. I scan her books and realize that I’m still looking for the black-and-white notebook. I see instead Wheelock’s Latin grammar and a paperback copy of
Franny and Zooey.
“I read this when I was your age,” I say.

“You didn’t answer the question,” Vesta says. “Why have you dropped our Latin class names?”

“Dr. Lockhart thinks the goddess names might not be appropriate …”

Vesta snorts. “The names are the best part,” she says. “I always hated
Sandy.
My real name is Alexandria, which is even worse. If you stop calling me Vesta, I’ll drop Latin.”

“Yeah,” Athena chimes in, “I’ve always hated ‘Ellen.’”

“OK,
Athena,”
I say, “and
Vesta,
I can’t have you all dropping out of Latin.”

Immediately I notice a change come over the girls. They seem more serious and somehow embarrassed.

“A bunch of girls have,” Athena says. “Some of the parents didn’t want their kids in the class after what happened to Melissa.”

“Yeah, there’s this rumor we were sacrificing babies and stuff.”

I look at Vesta when she says “babies” but she doesn’t seem to attach any significance to the example she’s chosen. Dean Buehl said that no one was told what was found in the tea tin. But then if Melissa had my journal, she might have shared its contents with her roommates.

“It’s our fault,” Athena says. “If we hadn’t started that stuff with the three sisters and making offerings to the Lake Goddess none of it would have happened.”

“Who thought of that?” I ask. “Going out to the rocks and offering prayers to the Lake Goddess?”

Athena and Vesta look at each other and shrug. “I don’t know. We all kind of did. I guess Melissa got into it the most because she was worried about Brian.” I remember the night I watched the three girls at the stones. Melissa had asked for loyalty from her boyfriend, Vesta for good grades, but I hadn’t been able to hear what Athena asked for. I find myself wondering now what it was she asked for and whether she has gotten what she wished for.

“Did you notice that Melissa had a black-and-white notebook?” I ask.

“Like this?” Athena opens a desk drawer by my feet and takes out a marbled notebook. I see that the name written on the white box on the cover is “Ellen (Athena) Craven.”

“Yes,” I say, “something like that.”

Athena shakes her head, but Vesta is looking at me strangely.

“Why do you want to know?”

I see that I have wound myself into a trap with my own questions. If the girls really don’t know that Melissa had my old journal (and Athena, at least, seems innocent) I certainly don’t want to tell them.

“I just thought that if she kept a journal,” I say with feigned casualness, “we’d understand more about what happened to Melissa.”

Vesta looks unconvinced. “You think she wrote down why she drugged Athena and slit her wrists?” Vesta points at Athena’s wrists and Athena tugs at the cuffs of her sweater even though they already reach down to her knuckles. I notice that the cuffs are frayed and unraveling, as if they’d been plucked at again and again. “Jesus,” Vesta says, “who would be stupid enough to write down all that stuff?”

I
MAKE AN EXCUSE TO LEAVE BEFORE
V
ESTA CAN ASK ME
any more questions about the journal. I realize as I leave their room that I’ve made a tactical error visiting the girls before talking to Dean Buehl and finding out what exactly they were told about Melissa’s death. I promise myself that I’ll call Dean Buehl as soon as I get into the cottage, but I see that I won’t have to. Dean Buehl is waiting for me at the matron’s desk.

“Ah, Jane, I saw your name in the sign-in book and thought I’d wait for you.”

The matron hands me back my driver’s license without looking up at me. I wonder if she called the dean to tell her I was here in the dorm. I wonder if she had been instructed to do so.

“Did you see the note I left on your door?” Dean Buehl asks. “Asking you to call as soon as you got in?”

“I haven’t been back to my house yet,” I tell her. “I came here first to get a flashlight.” I hold up the flashlight as corroborating evidence.

“Ah,” Dean Buehl says, nodding. “I remember the path up to that cottage could be tricky. Of course I’ve walked all these paths so many times I think I could find my way around the campus blindfolded. Let me walk you back to the parking lot and help you with your luggage. We can talk along the way.”

*    *    *

I
N ADDITION TO MY SUITCASES
I’
VE BROUGHT BACK SOME
boxes of books from the house in Westchester. Although I tell her they can wait until the morning, Dean Buehl cheerfully hoists up two and takes off down the darkened path so quickly I am hard put keeping up with her with my one box. I am reminded of the nature hikes she used to take us on when she was the science teacher—the way she strode through the woods, leaving her students scrambling over rocks and puddles, desperately trying to stay close enough to hear her lecture. We’d be tested on every rock and flower identification, we knew, and inability to keep up was no excuse. “The race goes to the swiftest,” was one of her favorite sayings and in her class it was literally true.

Twenty years haven’t slowed her down a bit. When I do finally catch up with her I have to stay behind her because this path hasn’t been plowed. Fresh snow covers the narrow track that had been shoveled before Christmas break and the sound of our boots crunching in it makes it doubly hard to hear what Dean Buehl is saying. She is talking over her shoulder to me as if I had been right behind her all along and I realize I’ve already missed half of her “getting me up to date on the Melissa Randall affair” as she calls it. She is tossing out autopsy and DNA findings the way she used to rattle off the names of trees and wildflowers. I gather, though, that there’s nothing I haven’t learned already from Roy Corey. Then I hear her refer to “that journal you kept senior year” and I interrupt to ask how many people know about it. “Well, Dr. Lockhart was there when we found it,” she tells me. We have reached the door of the cottage, so this I get to hear clearly, “but the only people who have read it are me and that nice young detective. Of course, I told Dr. Lockhart a little about the contents so she could assess their influence on Melissa. It should make an interesting chapter in the book she is writing on teenage suicide.”

I am somewhat unnerved by the idea of my journal figuring in Dr. Lockhart’s research, but I smile at Dean Buehl in a
way that I hope is ingratiating. “Thanks for helping with my stuff. I’ll make us some coffee, we can sit and talk …” I gesture toward the old Morris chair by the fireplace, the armrest of which still holds the teacup I drank from the night before I left. I see her follow the sweep of my hand and take in the little living room, the battered, old floral love seat under the window, the coffee table stacked with Latin books and Lands’ End catalogs and piles of ungraded blue books. The lines of her face, which had looked firm and rosy from the cold air and exertion of our walk, seem to settle downward and her skin pales. I think it is my untidiness, but then I remember that this was once her home. The furniture was here when I moved in and, now that I think of it, is arranged just as it was that night I stumbled out of the snowstorm and into this room. Only then there was a fire in the fireplace and classical music on the radio and the room shone with a kind of brightness that has now dulled with dust and the usage of uncaring tenants.

She walks out my door and heads in the opposite direction from the parking lot.

“Beautiful night …” I hear her say as she disappears down the path to the Point. “Better to talk out of doors.”

I follow her to the Point where she has taken a stance—legs spread apart and arms clasped behind her back, like a general surveying her troops—on the curving rock above the frozen lake.

“Always find this a good place to think,” she says as I come up beside her.

“Yes,” I say, “the view is beautiful.”

She shakes her head impatiently and scuffs at the snow with the heel of her heavy hiking boot like a horse pawing the ground. “Not the view,” she says with the weary patience of a teacher used to hearing the wrong answer, “the rock. Right where we’re standing was a mile-high glacier. This rock here is so hard it’s barely eroded in ten thousand years, but the marks the glacier left are still here. Puts things in perspective.”

“Yes,” I say, although I am not exactly sure what the perspective is. Is it that human suffering is insignificant in the face of the majesty of nature, or that the scars of the past are still with us and always will be?

“You’re embarrassed,” she says. Actually, I’m more perplexed at the moment but I nod.

“Because I’ve read your old journal.” Dean Buehl sighs and relaxes her stance a bit so I can see, suddenly, the slight curve in her shoulders and the droop in her once taut figure. “Don’t be, it was a great relief to me.”