The Lake of Dead Languages (43 page)

“But I saw that green heart …” I stop and look up at him, into familiar green eyes.

“This is the mask I wore.”

I
AM STILL LIGHT-HEADED DRIVING BACK TO
H
EART
L
AKE.
Exhaustion, I tell myself, fear and aggravation and frustration. All natural emotions considering what I’ve been through. But I know it’s something else. Since that moment in Roy Corey’s office when I realized who it was I was with that May Day morning all those years ago I have felt something vibrating through my core, like a hot wire snaking up from the base of my spine. When I touch the cold metal handle of my car door I’m surprised I don’t set off sparks in the dry air. I feel electric.

“So what,” I had said over and over again to the hard glitter coming off the Hudson, “So what. So what.” I had parked my car across from the old Toller house, facing the river, and waited for the hot, wobbly feeling to go away. “So it was Roy
Corey I had sex with on May Day morning and not Matt Toller. What earthly difference does it make?”

By this sign you’ll know your heart’s true love.

Crap. It was just a stupid superstition Deirdre’d made up. Only I had believed it and believed, for all these years, that my heart’s true love had drowned in the lake under the ice.

“Crap,” I told myself, pulling into the faculty parking lot at Heart Lake. “Stupider than believing in the three sisters story and the curse of the Crevecoeurs. And it doesn’t solve anything. Doesn’t tell you who’s sending these signs from the past or who killed Melissa Randall.”

In the end Roy was unconvinced that it was Athena. But maybe that was because I didn’t really want to convince him because I don’t want to believe it’s Athena either.

He thought it had to be someone connected with what happened to Matt and Lucy and Deirdre twenty years ago. Who else would know so much about what happened then? Who else could have found that mask, which Roy said he abandoned somewhere in the woods that morning. Helen Chambers was dead. Dean Buehl had been there, but why would she deliberately wreak havoc on her own school now? Didn’t she have more to lose? I told Roy my suspicions about Dr. Lockhart—“She certainly wants to stop the ice harvest”—but neither of us could come up with a motive for the other events. What could she possibly have to do with what happened twenty years ago?

“Whoever it is obviously has some grudge against you, Jane. I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay in that isolated cottage all by yourself.”

“Where do you suggest I stay?” I asked, half-shocking myself with the provocative tone of my own voice. I hadn’t meant it to sound like that, had I? But I was disappointed when he only shrugged and suggested I stay in the mansion.

I shuddered, thinking about what Dr. Lockhart said about living in a fishbowl.

“The dorm then?”

I thought of the hothouse atmosphere of the dorm, the hissing steam radiators, all those girls in flannel nightgowns damp from just-washed hair. The rancid smell of burnt popcorn and face creams.

“No,” I told Roy. “Like Dean Buehl says, that’s like giving into the demands of terrorists. I’ll be OK.”

He’d looked at me in silence for a few moments and then leaned down to search for something in his drawer. A lock of hair fell over his forehead and, catching the light from the grimy window, briefly flamed red. When he lifted his head, his hair fell back, extinguishing the bright color so that I could see the ashy gray at his temples. “Here,” he said, holding out something in a clear plastic bag. “I’ve been meaning to give this back to you. We don’t need it for evidence anymore.”

I look through the thick plastic and recognize my old journal. “Thanks,” I say, trying not to sound too disappointed. I’d thought he was going to give me his phone number.

I
GET OUT OF MY CAR AND WALK TOWARD MY HOUSE, BUT
halfway there I hear shouts coming from the lake, so I cut through the woods and head out onto the Point. At first, when I see the black gash in the ice and the figures with poles I think the worst: Someone has fallen through a crack in the ice and they’re trying to save her with long, lifesaving poles. I look for someone thrashing in the icy water, but instead I see a neat rectangle of ice floating down the dark channel toward the icehouse and I realize it’s only the Ice Harvest.

They’ve made remarkable progress in such little time. Or else I’ve been gone longer than I realized. I look at my watch and see it’s already four o’clock. I hadn’t realized I’d spent so long in Roy’s office—or sitting in my car looking at the river. While I’ve been gone, Maia Thornbury and the girls have cut out a long narrow channel, perhaps four feet across, from the icehouse at the southern tip of the lake to halfway to the Point. Some of the girls are wearing skates and others,
under Gwen Marsh’s direction, are wielding the long ice poles, pushing cakes of ice up onto a ramp into the icehouse. The scene is as cheerful and bucolic as the Currier and Ives print I’d seen on the flyer last night. In fact, it seems more populous than I would have thought possible. Everyone must be out.

Then I look again and see that some of the figures on the ice aren’t people.

What I’d taken for stationary children dressed in white are actually statues carved out of ice. As I watch I see two girls carry a cake of ice from the icehouse and stack it on top of three or four more. Other girls are chipping away at stacks of ice to form rudimentary bodies. Tacy Beade is using a pick and hammer to shave the ice away. Even from here I can hear the steady thwack of metal hitting metal with a force that’s alarming considering Beady’s half blind. Chips of ice fly under her hands like sparks from a forge. The shape emerging, though crude, already has the feel and motion of the human form, something trying to break free of the encasing ice.

There are about a dozen of these figures standing on the lake. I can see now that they are half-formed and incomplete, but as the last rays of the sun catch each one they seem to gain a spark of life. I look directly below the Point and for an instant the whole lake seems to spin before my eyes. The sky on the eastern shore is black with storm cloud, so that the ice, lit by the low-lying sun, burns with a fierce, white light. Beside each of the sister stones stands an ice statue. Or rather the first one, the one closest to shore, stands. The second kneels, and the last one lies, supine on the white ice, only half of its body visible above the surface, so it’s as if the girl is half in, half out of the lake, one arm lifted and crooked as if suspended in midstroke. But what really unnerves me is the impression made by the dark backdrop of storm cloud. It’s as if the black water is rising from the ice and the pale figures are shapes seen underwater.

What I feel is a kind of seasickness. A vertigo of reversal.
I tilt my chin up and focus on the horizon, a trick to avert motion sickness Miss Pike taught us when we went canoeing. At the horizon line of deep green pines I see a figure standing still as the trees. At first I think it’s another ice statue, she’s standing so still, but then I realize it’s Dr. Lockhart. She’s wearing her skates, but she isn’t moving. When she sees me looking at her, though, she lifts out her arms and flexes her wrists, like a ballerina getting ready for a pirouette, and begins to spin, effortlessly, on her skates. She spins in a small tight circle, her skates sending up sprays of ice into the darkening air, like a whirlpool spiraling through dark water.

I
GO BACK TO MY HOUSE AND EAT ALONE.
I
TELL MYSELF
I don’t want to get caught out in the approaching storm, but it’s a weak excuse. Although the clouds in the east appear menacing and a wind has come up since the sun set, there’s no snow in the forecast. Just wind and cold. On the television I tune into an Albany station just long enough to hear that electrical storms, rare for this time of year, have been reported in the southern Adirondacks, and then the broadcaster’s face dissolves in a blizzard of static. I turn on the radio, but I can’t even get the country-western station in Corinth.

The truth is that I don’t want to talk to anyone. I can’t imagine what Dean Buehl was thinking by going ahead with the Ice Harvest. And old Beady really must be senile as well as blind to have the girls make those macabre statues. I know it’s all anyone will be talking about in the dining hall and I can’t bear right now to field innocent questions about the three sisters legend. Even my cold, rattling cottage—shack, I think to myself tonight, it’s really a shack—is more appealing than that.

So I turn up the heat as high as it goes and fry eggs over a gas burner that spits blue flames at the frying pan. Outside the wind seems to be moving in circles around the house, like an animal trying to get in. I put on wool socks and pad
around on the worn rag rugs, pulling curtains shut and double-checking window locks. Twice I check the phone to make sure I’ve got a dial tone. The third time I pick up the phone I get such an electric shock I drop the heavy old-fashioned receiver on my toe. All that padding around in wool socks, I tell myself. Still, it keeps me away from the phone for the rest of the night, even though I’d been planning to call Olivia to remind her I’m coming this weekend. “I’ll see her tomorrow,” I tell myself, but I have to admit that part of the reason I don’t call is that I’ve begun to detect a distance in her voice, a guardedness that I might cancel on her again.

I get in bed early. My old journal, that Roy gave me today, sits on my nightstand. I flip through it, not really reading, and notice that the pages flop loosely between their covers, like a person who’s lost weight wearing old baggy pants. I remember that pages have been ripped out. I flip to the end and see that the very last page is missing. Yet that’s not one of the pages that was sent to me.

I put the journal back on my nightstand and decide to read
The Aeneid.
Nothing like a little classical literature to calm the nerves, I think. Unfortunately, I’m at the part in Book Seven where Juno sends a fury to goad the Trojans and Latins into war. The description of the fury is so gruesome—
a shape-shifting monster writhing with snakes
—that I’m unable to read on. I remember that Helen Chambers told us that the Furies were sent out to avenge unavenged deaths. Curses personified, she said, the flip side of the three graces so beloved of Renaissance painters. I turn out the lights and burrow deep under the heavy wool blankets, covering my ears so that I won’t hear the wind and imagine some grotesque avenging monster hovering above Heart Lake, sowing dissent and suspicion among us.

But I can’t drown out the sound of the wind. And under the high-pitched keening of the wind I hear a lower sound, a deep basso profundo moan that makes my hair stand on end.
I slowly lift the blankets away from me and a shower of sparks cascades through the charged air. As I get out of bed, my hair lifts off my back like a fan. I walk to the front door and open it. Outside the trees are thrashing and fine ice particles spiral up from the ground like miniature tornadoes. I listen to all the tumult of the wind, but deep and steady, under the fitful tossing of the wind I can hear the moan, like a background theme that’s always there beneath the flightier variations.

I know it’s got to be the lake, the ice contracting and expanding, a natural process that I’ve heard described a dozen times by Dean Buehl and Myra Todd. But I’ve got to see for myself. I walk into the woods in my thick socks and flannel nightgown and I hardly feel the cold at all. It’s as if all the electricity I’ve stored during the day is burning inside me now, keeping me warm. The lake is shrieking like a creature that’s been ripped in half and of course it has, hacked down the middle with saws and poked at with steel-tipped spears. I feel now it’s calling me and who can resist the call of something so wounded?

It’s only when I reach the Point that I see the danger. The wind is all around me, pushing like a hand at my back, tugging at my nightgown with tiny icy fingers. It lifts my hair and nightgown up and I feel myself being borne light and charged as ionized electrons toward the brink. Then I feel another grip, hard and warm, and something pulls me back into the sheltering woods.

“Jane, are you crazy? What are you doing out in this?”

It’s Roy Corey who’s pulling me out of the wind and holding me by both arms, my back brushing against the rough bark of a white pine. My flannel nightgown rubs against his flannel shirt and the little shocks of electricity bring me back to my senses.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I say, surprised at the calmness of my voice.

“There was something I wanted to see.” He points to the
ledge on the west side of the Point. “I wanted to see if someone could hide there. You didn’t see me when you came out onto the Point, did you?” I shake my head. His hand is still on my arm and it feels warm. The wind is kicking the hem of my nightgown up, baring my legs.

“But I saw you. I saw you moving toward the Point just as you did that night Deirdre died. If someone was hiding on the west ledge that night she would have seen you come out of the woods and approach the Point. She would have seen Deirdre back away and fall. What she wouldn’t have seen is Lucy on the east ledge reaching up to grab Deirdre’s ankle.”

“So it would have looked like it was my fault?”

He nods. Suddenly I feel the cold and I start to shiver. Roy takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders. He has to pull me away from the tree to get it around me and as he does my flannel nightgown catches a charge from his shirt and clings to him.

“So you decided to conduct this experiment in the middle of an electrical storm?” I ask through chattering teeth. He releases his grip on my arms, but I don’t move away. I can’t move back, anyway, because of the tree.

“I also wanted to keep an eye on your house,” he tells me. “I didn’t feel you were safe.”

I lay my palm flat on his chest, expecting another shock, but instead his shirt feels damp and warm and I can feel his heart beating wildly. “Maybe you ought to come inside then.”

He nods, but neither of us move. I hear the moan again, only now I realize it’s not coming from the lake. It’s in my throat and his. I lightly touch the back of my hand to his face and he slides his fingers under the collar of my nightgown and strokes my collarbone. I feel the cold air brush against my breasts and I start to shake. He moves up against me so that I’m wedged between his body and the tree and I can feel he’s shaking, too. When he ducks his head to my throat my head arches back and I can see the pine boughs above us,
moving like bodies in a dance, moving the way we start to move. I lead him back to my house. We get under the blankets and, wordlessly, he makes love to me, slowly, never taking his eyes away from my eyes. I understand. This is not a fluke, he’s telling me, we know each other this time.