Arcadia Falls (43 page)

“I couldn’t tell. The lights were out in her office.”

He sighs. “Neither could I. Chloe said she saw a woman in white in the woods. But why would Ivy have changed into a white dress? She didn’t take part in the bonfire ceremony.”

“What does it matter?” I ask. “Ivy admitted that she was in the woods that night.”

“She admitted she was on top of the ridge, but she didn’t say anything about running into Chloe down by the apple orchard.”

“Maybe Chloe imagined the woman in white because she’d worked herself up into believing the legend.”

“Or maybe there was someone else in the woods that night, someone who pushed Isabel off the ridge.”

I realize now where the dark shadows under his eyes come from. Callum Reade was responsible for a young man’s death in New York City and he can’t bear the thought of leaving another young person’s death unsolved, even if it means chasing after a legend.

“Is that why you’re being so obliging to Dean Drake—so you can look for more evidence on the campus?”

He smiles. Unlike the smile of a minute ago, this one is sad and rueful. “You’ve found me out, Ms. Rosenthal. I’m searching the woods for signs and portents.” He holds his arms out, palms extended to the sky, and then looks up as if the signs and portents he spoke of might be hiding in the tops of the pine trees. Then he sniffs at the air and dismisses me. “Best get home,” he tells me. “It smells like it’s going to snow.”

I wake up that night because it’s too quiet. I’ve become accustomed to the sigh and creak of pine trees in the wind and the murmur of the Wittekill as it flows past my cottage, but when I wake up in the middle of the night there’s no sound at all. The cottage is wrapped in thick silence. I get up to look out the window, half expecting the whole forest to be gone, the trees come to life and walked off as in Lily’s fairy tale. Instead I find the trees shrouded in heavy white robes, their limbs muffled by the steadily falling snow. It reminds me of the night Lily first told the girls at St. Lucy’s the story of the changeling girl and Lily thought she had put the whole world to sleep with her story, only to find it was the snow that
had muffled the creek. She’d described the girls as caterpillars breaking out of their cocoons and flitting mothlike to the window. For a moment, standing in my own darkened bedroom looking out at the white-robed trees, I feel them around me: those girls who had come far from their homes to leave their babies with strangers, listening to a story about a girl who lost her way in the woods. I feel them waiting for me to finish the story.

But I think they wouldn’t like the ending I would have to tell them.

Climbing back into bed, I burrow under the blankets, muffling the silence of the waiting girls, but I feel it all around me: a sense that time has been suspended and that I’ll be here forever, alone and insulated in the quiet of the snowstorm. It takes a long time for me to fall back asleep.

In the morning it’s still snowing. When I wake Sally up, I tell her to look out her window, remembering how her face would light up at the first snow each year. But when she looks out at the beautifully transformed world, she only sighs. “I guess they don’t have snow days here,” she says and hides back under the covers.

Sally turns out to be wrong. At breakfast, in the Dining Hall, Shelley—or Dean Drake, as she likes to be called now—announces that since it is the last day of the term, classes are canceled. “I don’t want anyone falling into the clove,” she says. She doesn’t have to add
like Dean St. Clare, like Isabel
for those names to reverberate in the silence that follows her announcement. The only one who does speak is Dymphna, but it’s a muttered whisper that only I hear because I’m standing next to her by the tea urn.

“Dean St. Clare would never cancel classes for a smidgen of snow like this.”

Surprised by the edge in her voice, I glance at her. Her round dimpled face is pink with suppressed anger. She may be the only one at Arcadia who really misses Ivy St. Clare.

“It’s probably Dean Drake’s inexperience that makes her a bit overcautious. I’m sure she’s just doing what she thinks is best to keep the students safe.”

“Are you saying that Miss St. Clare didn’t have the children’s safety in
mind, then?” she asks, turning an even brighter shade of pink. “Don’t tell me you believe that nonsense about her hurting Isabel Cheney? She’d never do something like that.”

“But she confessed to killing Lily Eberhardt,” I say as gently and softly as I can. I notice that Shelley, while outlining the guidelines for how the dorm rooms should be left, is glaring in our direction.

“Well, yes, I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that. My mother always said that Miss St. Clare couldn’t abide Lily—that she was horrible jealous of her from the day she set foot here. But that was something altogether different. Arcadia was everything to the dean. She wouldn’t do anything to harm it—or one of the students.”

I could point out that she might have thought killing Isabel was her way of protecting the school or that it was an accident, but Clyde Bollinger has come up to the urn, holding his mug out for a cup of tea.

“Arcadia blend?” he asks.

“Sorry, love, it’s all gone and the new dean says we’ve got to serve decaffeinated beverages from now on,” Dymphna informs him. “So it’s chamomile or raspberry leaf, the latter being most beneficial in the toning of the uterus.”

Poor Clyde blanches. “Uh … no thanks. Could I have a word with you, Ms. Rosenthal?”

“Sure,” I say. “Why don’t we go up to the Reading Room? It should be empty while everyone’s here.”

Clyde nods gratefully and precedes me, giving a wary backward glance at Dymphna in case she might be planning to “tone” any other of his organs. I have to hurry to keep up with his long-legged lope out of the Dining Hall and up the stairs to the Reading Room. “If you’re after me to fix the tea and coffee situation, I’m afraid I can’t help,” I tell him when we get to the lounge, “but if you come by my cottage I will brew you a strong cup of Earl Grey.” It occurs to me that it might be a nice gesture to invite some of my students to the cottage since Shelley’s decision to cancel classes on the last day has robbed me of a chance to say goodbye to them.

“It’s not about the tea, Ms. Rosenthal. It’s about Chloe.”

“What is it?” I ask, motioning for him to sit down on the couch and pulling a chair in front of him.

He folds his long lanky body awkwardly down onto the low couch and crouches forward, elbows on knees. I can’t help but feel a pang of guilt. I was worried about Chloe when I learned that she was not going home after the dean’s death, but I’ve been too busy tending to Sally to keep more than a cursory eye on Chloe over the last few weeks. She’s seemed subdued, but not overly upset. She handed in her assignments on time, answered questions in class, and even looked like she’d put on a few pounds, although that might have been a trick of the heavy sweaters and baggy corduroys she started wearing when the weather grew cold.

“She doesn’t still blame herself for Isabel’s death, does she? I tried to tell her that it’s likely the dean pushed her and that she couldn’t have done anything to stop her.”

“I don’t think she buys that,” Clyde says. “She says that if she hadn’t played that trick on Isabel she wouldn’t have run up to the ridge. And now she says it’s her fault, too, that the dean died. She wants to perform some kind of purification ceremony on the winter solstice to stop the cycle of guilt and retribution.”

“I think we’ve had enough ceremonies,” I tell Clyde. “And besides, the solstice is tomorrow. Everyone will be leaving for winter break.”

“But she’s staying here for the break. She’s asked Ms. Drake—I mean Dean Drake—if she can stay on in the dorms and Dean Drake’s said yes.”

Getting up to my feet, I tell Clyde not to worry. “I’ll talk to Chloe. If I can’t convince her to go home, I’ll have her stay with me and Sally. We can observe the winter solstice together.”

It’s not hard to find Chloe. As soon as breakfast is over, the students abscond with the dining hall trays and run to the hill above the apple orchard for sledding. I pass Sally and Haruko heading back to our cottage.

“We still have Dad’s old sled, don’t we?” Sally asks. “You didn’t give it away, did you?”

Did I? I wonder with a stab of guilt. I’d gotten pretty ruthless by the
end of packing in Great Neck, and I dimly recall placing a price tag on Jude’s old Flexible Flyer in the garage. But then I also remember going out in the middle of the night and taking the price tag off. He’d had it from the time he was eight and he’d pulled ten-month-old Sally on it around the backyard the first year we lived in Great Neck. “I’ll take her sledding when she’s older,” he’d said. Long Island winters being mild and most of our vacations being spent in Florida, the sled didn’t get much use over the last sixteen years, but at the last minute I couldn’t bear to let it go. It felt freighted with all the things we hadn’t gotten to do with Jude.

“I think it’s in the garage,” I tell Sally.

“I told you,” she says to Haruko. “My mom saved all the important things.” Then she turns and gives me a small smile that nearly breaks my heart. I’m afraid to speak lest I say something to ruin the moment, but then I see her shiver in her thin jacket and, unbidden, the words “You’d better get your down parka while you’re at it” pop out of my mouth. Sally rolls her eyes at Haruko, but her smile widens and the two girls turn to go. I watch them for a minute, saying a small prayer of thanks for the resiliency of youth. When I turn and see Chloe standing at the top of the sledding hill, though, my faith in that resiliency is shaken. She’s standing just where she stood on Halloween night, only in a powder-blue North Face parka instead of a white robe. Her face looks as haunted as it did that night. How could I not have noticed the deep blue bruises under her eyes and her swollen pink eyelids?

“Aren’t you going sledding?” I ask when I reach her. “It looks like fun.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t like the feeling of falling. It reminds me …” She doesn’t have to finish. I wonder if she has the same falling dreams that I do. We stand for a minute watching her classmates speed down the hill on their makeshift sleds, whooping with a mixture of fear and delight, laughing when they wipe out at the bottom. I can’t imagine being young enough to enjoy the sense of weightlessness, the rush of gravity, but it makes me sad that Chloe has lost that ability at such a young age.

“Look,” I say, “I hear you’re planning to stay here over break. Why
don’t you stay at the cottage with Sally and me? It’ll be more comfortable than the dorm and I’m sure Sally will be glad of the company.”

“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course not,” I say, wondering if it will really be the best thing for Sally to share the house with such a morose roommate. “Bring your stuff over tomorrow.”

As I’m walking away from Chloe I run into Shelley. “I saw you talking to Chloe,” she says. “Is she all right?”

“I’m not sure,” I admit. “She still holds herself responsible for Isabel’s death.”

“For Isabel’s death? But she knows it was Ivy’s fault.”

“Yes, but if she hadn’t played that trick on Isabel—” The blank look on Shelley’s face reminds me that I never told Shelley about the dress trick. I tell her briefly, ending with the apparition of the white woman. “Of course she might have imagined that part.”

“No doubt. These girls can be quite hysterical.”

“Yes, they can,” I say, stifling the urge to laugh at Shelley Drake calling anyone else
hysterical
.

S
ally decides to stay in the dorm that night because the students are having an end-of-term party. I’m grateful she feels ready to leave the safety of our cottage, even if the cottage feels lonelier without her. I will not be one of those mothers who cling to their children, I repeat to myself a dozen times as I make my solitary dinner, grade my students’ final essays, and watch the snow fall outside.

I’d asked them to write their own changeling stories and then examine what the changeling myth meant to them. I’m impressed with the variety of responses—there’s a a sci-fi story from Clyde Bollinger and a heart-wrenching story
from a girl who’s barely spoken all term about her brother in drug rehab. (
Sometimes I think he’s not the same brother who used to play Candyland with me … that he was snatched in the night and replaced by an alien
.) The one I like the best, though, is Hannah Weiss’s.

She’d told me that when she asked her mother about the picture, her mother admitted that she hadn’t graduated from Vassar at all. She’d dropped out when she married Hannah’s father. She told Hannah that she had never told her because she didn’t want to be a bad example. And she’d hoped that Hannah going to private school in the East would give her a chance to do what her mother hadn’t. In her paper, Hannah writes: