The Ghost Orchid (15 page)

“I’d like a word with you, Miss Blackwell,” she says. “Will you walk with me in the garden so our voices don’t disturb the other guests? I’m afraid that the tragedy has taken a particularly heavy toll on Mrs. Ramsdale.”

Corinth bows her head at her hostess’s suggestion, taking a cue from her hostess’s humble bearing before the doctor, and they walk together down the steps to the second terrace and from there along the shaded arbor bordered by a marble trough into which water trickles from the wide-open mouths of satyrs.

“I usually find the sound of water soothing,” Aurora says when they have walked for several minutes in silence, “but this morning even Bosco’s fountains fail to calm me. I feel . . . I feel . . .”

“It was a horrible thing,” Corinth interrupts. “Of course you’ll want to discontinue the séances—”

“Discontinue the séances!” Aurora wheels around to face Corinth, her glossy red braids whipping around like snakes. Her face—white and openmouthed—looks exactly like that of a statue of Medusa that Corinth remembers from a gallery in Florence. “When we made such progress last night? I heard my dear, sweet children’s voices. I felt their little hands on my face—” Aurora lifts her own hands and places them on either side of Corinth’s face. Her fingers are ice-cold, but when she pats Corinth’s face it feels, for just a moment, the way a child’s hand—
no, an infant’s
—strokes its mother’s face. Corinth has to bite her lip to keep from striking the woman’s hands away from her.

“—I can feel them now, all around us.” The two women have come to the end of the arbor, to the semicircular bench in the ilex grove, where Corinth remembers seeing on her first day—was it really only the day before yesterday?—a seated statue. There’s no statue now. Aurora sits on the bench and draws Corinth down beside her. “I believe you have awoken them. I must speak to them—there’s something I must explain. You see, I’m afraid I wasn’t always the best mother. I was sometimes impatient with them when they would play their games and hide from me in the garden or refuse to take their medicine when they were sick. James, especially, was very, very willful. Like his father. When my husband sets his mind on a thing . . . At times I had to be quite strict with him—James, of course, not Milo—for his own good. But then he would convince Tam and Cynthia to join him in his little rebellions.” She lowers her voice and leans closer to Corinth, her lips only inches from Corinth’s face. “He’s doing it even now,” she says in a whisper that Corinth feels on her skin, “using the other two to do his little tricks. I believe he’s keeping them from their salvation. So you see how vital it is we contact Cynthia and Tam
alone,
without him. Can you do that?”

Corinth stares at her hostess, unable at first to grasp what she means. Then she does.

“You’re asking me to separate the children?”

“I knew you would understand,” Aurora says, rising from the bench with the satisfied air of a mistress whose orders have been comprehended by a not particularly bright servant. “I told my husband I must have the best medium because I knew that he always gets what he goes after. There’s no time to waste. We’ll have to have another séance tonight.” She stands for a moment, waiting, no doubt, for Corinth to rise, too, but when she doesn’t, Aurora smiles. “Of course, you want to commune with their spirits here to prepare yourself for tonight. I can feel them, too.” Her eyes dart around the encircling trees with a hectic glance, and then, before Corinth can stop her, she flees down the arbor like a deer that’s heard the huntsman’s horn.

After she goes, Corinth sits in the grove, as rooted to the bench as that statue she imagined seeing here. She’s had peculiar requests in her day: a countess in Marienbad who wanted to contact her dead spaniel; a doctor’s wife who came to her circles at the hotel in New York for three weeks in a row to contact her daughter, who, Corinth learned when the doctor finally paid her a call, was alive and well and living in Paterson, New Jersey; and of course there was Mr. Oswald, who wanted forgiveness from his dead son for torturing the boy’s mother. Most of the people who come to her to contact a lost loved one do so because they have unfinished business with the dead. But this . . . reaching into the darkness to sever the children’s ties to one another . . . Even if she didn’t find the idea sickening, she can’t imagine how she could perform such a delicate operation. She doubts that anyone—even the
best medium
—could.

She smiles in spite of herself.
The best medium.
Yes, Milo Latham certainly gets whatever he goes after. He got her—but then, she wasn’t all that difficult a quarry. The first time she resisted, that time he found her alone in the mill, sweeping sawdust off the floors. He came up behind her and touched her hair. “Indian hair,” he said, moving his hand from her hair to her breast and pulling her by the hips toward him, “but with sparks of fire.” She’d wheeled around so quickly that the broom handle hit him in the stomach, and while he bent over in pain, she ran out of the mill and all the way home, where she found Wanda White Cloud helping her mother bake bread in the kitchen. When she told what happened, Wanda White Cloud said it was only a matter of time. He’d
spoilt
near a dozen girls in the town. What could anyone do? He owned the town.

“You should let Mike take her to that revival show like he’s been wanting to,” Wanda said. “At least she’d be out of harm’s way.”

Six years they’d been on the road before Gloversville. Who would think a man like Latham would even remember who she was. But he had.

It was three weeks after Tom Quinn had left Gloversville to go to New York and two weeks after she’d realized she was pregnant. She’d woken up every morning for the last week in Mrs. McGreevey’s boardinghouse sick to her stomach and scared, until finally, on this morning, she’d gotten up before dawn and written Tom a letter. He’d have to come back for her sooner than Christmas, she explained in her letter. She couldn’t expect Mrs. McGreevey to keep her. For all her kindness, all she ever talked about was the respectability of her establishment and the marriageability of her four daughters. She couldn’t do that to them. She had to know if Tom would marry her or . . . or she’d have to make some other arrangements.

She wondered, while walking the three miles into town, what those “other arrangements” could possibly be. She walked across the fields where she and Tom had lain that summer, the long purple grasses brushing against her skirts with a dry papery sound like women whispering. She thought of the McGreevey sisters sitting in their white dresses beneath the viburnum tree and it was like a childhood memory she’d left behind a long time ago. She thought of her mother in a grave in a strange place and her baby sister growing up with strangers. What had it mattered, she wondered, that she’d gotten away from Milo Latham six years ago if she’d ended up coming to the same thing? She was still wondering as she walked up the steps to the post office and heard the voice behind her. “Indian hair,” it said—a voice that made her scalp prickle, “but with sparks of fire.”

She turned around slowly this time, and when she saw Milo Latham standing below her on the steps of the Gloversville Post Office, she wondered if she were dreaming. The edges of his black coat were blurring in the morning sunlight, the rustle of dried grasses was deafening. She remembered that her mother always said that a ringing in the ears was bad luck. Then she was watching herself from above, a stupid girl fainting on the post office steps.

She came to on a green velvet couch in a room with purple drapes. Milo Latham was sitting in a chair across from her, smoking a pipe.

“You really must take better care of yourself, Miss Blackwell. A life on the stage has not been kind to you.”

“I’ve left the stage,” Corinth said. “I make gloves now.”

“Even worse,” he said, “for a woman of your talents. You should allow me to take care of you.” He got up and joined her on the couch. Ran his hand through her hair, which someone had loosened from its pins. She knew she had to get up off the couch—and part of her did. She watched the man touching the girl, unbuttoning her dress, pushing her skirts up, and thought, if the other one doesn’t come back, she can tell this one the baby’s his.

In the ilex grove Corinth pushes the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and wills the memory away. She would like to think that she succumbed to Milo Latham in a moment of weakness, not a moment of cold-blooded calculation, but why then hadn’t she mailed the letter to Tom, after all? Hadn’t she decided even then that being a rich man’s mistress might be easier than being a poor man’s wife? Who is she, after
that,
to judge Aurora Latham? To judge anyone? She made her plans and, as it turned out, she’d been wise. When Tom didn’t come back at Christmas, she went to Latham’s factory, and because he was away for the holiday, she’d taken a job there and waited for him. Even after Latham returned she waited to see if Tom might still show up, but when she couldn’t wait any longer she went to Latham and told him she was pregnant with his child, and he was true to his word. He took care of her.

She opens her eyes and spots of color swim across her vision: blooms of orange and red that waver like flames in the glossy green foliage and then, dying out, spark the thicket like fireflies. When her vision clears, she is staring into the face of a little girl standing on the edge of the grove. She’s wearing a white dress with a pink ribbon in her hair and she’s holding a smooth white stone in one hand. The girl turns and melts into the bushes, looking once over her shoulder to see if Corinth is following her.

Chapter Thirteen

I take the poster back to my room and tack it to the window frame above my desk. At first it’s hard to get back to work. I’m unsettled by the fact that both Diana Tate and David—and Bethesda, if David’s right—think something’s going on between me and Nat. I’d sworn to myself that I’d never let this happen to me again when rumors started circulating last year that I was having an affair with Richard Scully. I’d promised myself that I’d be more careful in my choices, but apparently I have a knack for being drawn to exactly the wrong kind of man. Damn—Nat Loomis wasn’t even
nice
to me (then, neither, in the end, was Richard Scully). The worst thing is that if Nat heard the rumor, he might think I’d actually encouraged it!

I stare at the theatrical poster and try to think about Tom Quinn instead of Nat Loomis. I picture a dashing dark-haired man performing amazing feats of magic on the stage. Then I start to write. I rewrite the séance scene, hinting that it’s Tom—
Master of Disappearances—
who shoots the arrow through Frank Campbell’s heart.

I’m so engrossed in my writing that when I look up from my laptop and out the window, I see that the last light is fading in the western sky. The clock on my screen reads 4:00—only another hour of quiet hours. Up until now the phrase has sounded like an admonishment from the ghost of some mad librarian, but today those hours have stolen past me so stealthily that I imagine them personified as Greek goddesses—like the Muses or the Graces: The Quiet Hours, barefoot girls in white dresses dancing around me in a sacred circle. I can almost hear them padding softly by my door . . .

I close my laptop and listen, then move to the door. Someone
is
walking by. I swing open the door and surprise Bethesda Graham walking barefoot down the hall in pajamas, cradling a blue-and-white teacup, which slips from her hands at the sound of my door opening.

“Shit,” Bethesda says, moving back from the splash of hot water and stepping on a piece of broken china with a sickening crunch.

“Your foot! God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You could have fooled me. You swung that door open like the cuckolded husband in a bad French farce.”

“Can I get you a Band-Aid?”

“I’ve got some in my room.” Bethesda hops forward and nearly falls, but I grab hold of her arm and steady her.

“Let me at least help you to your room.”

Although she’s light, I have a hard time getting Bethesda down the hall because of the disparity in our heights and because she’s such an unwilling cripple. Instead of leaning on my arm, she alternately pulls on it and lurches away from it. By the time I lower her onto her unmade bed, my back aches and I feel as if I’ve pulled a muscle in my shoulder.

“The Band-Aids are in the desk drawer—do you mind?” Bethesda says, propping her foot on the opposite knee and leaning over to examine her wound.

Going to look for the Band-Aid, I can’t help but notice the change in Bethesda’s desk since I was last here. If my muses are a circle of barefoot girls, Bethesda’s muse must be the goddess Kali dancing her dance of destruction. The stacks of books and papers have careened into one another like a stack of cards that’s been shuffled, forming a mound several feet high and covering the entire surface of the desk. The chaos, like an overfertilized houseplant, has sent runners up the muslin curtains, where the number of notes and documents has doubled in the last three days. Turning to Bethesda, I see that she’s taken one of the pearl-tipped pins off the sleeve of her shirt (not a pajama top, as I first thought, but an oversized man’s dress shirt worn over thermal gray leggings) and is using it to pry a splinter of china out of her heel.

“Can I help?” I ask, bringing the package of Band-Aids to Bethesda.

She shakes her head and continues digging into her flesh, impassive as a surgeon. I can’t help thinking of the cutting reviews that Bethesda is famous for and the dissection of lives that she practices in her biographies. I look from the slight figure with pale skin and shadowed eyes back to the monument to research she’s erected on her desk. It’s bigger than she is.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Bethesda looks up. “Okay, but if you’re going to interrogate me, you might as well be holding the implement of torture.” She hands me the pin. “My eyesight is shot.”

I pull the desk chair over to the edge of the bed and bend over Bethesda’s foot. A half-inch-long blue splinter is wedged into the heel, the skin of which is surprisingly soft and uncalloused. I press my fingernail into the skin just below the point of the splinter and slip the pin under the skin. This is something I’m actually quite good at—something Mira taught me.

“Did you tell Diana Tate that you saw me in the garden with a woman in white?” I ask as I scoop the pin under the splinter.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. A woman in white? Are we in a Wilkie Collins novel now— Hey, you got it!”

I hold up the sliver and hand it to Bethesda along with the pin. “My mother is sort of like a character from Wilkie Collins,” I say. “That’s who it was. She paid me a surprise visit. Diana Tate said a guest—a female guest—saw us from her window.”

Bethesda laughs. “That’s one of Diana’s tricks. When she has a complaint, she always pretends that it originated with another guest.”

I’m tempted not to believe her, but then I take another glance at her desk and realize that it couldn’t have been Bethesda who saw me—at least not from her room. “I’m sorry,” I say, looking toward her desk. “Of course it wasn’t you. You can’t have opened those drapes for weeks.”

Bethesda follows my gaze to the pinned drapes and turns pink. “I suppose that looks like the work of a madwoman.”

“Then I guess we’re all mad. I’ve been sticking notes up all over, too. I just tacked an old theater poster to my window frame—”

“A theater poster?”

“I found one that lists Tom Quinn on it as a magician. It made me think he might have been the one behind the effects in the first séance.”

“You think he was Corinth’s accomplice?”

“Well, maybe,” I say, oddly uncomfortable with the notion of Tom as accomplice—it somehow doesn’t feel right—but then something else occurs to me. “Maybe he was working for Milo Latham.”

“Hm,” Bethesda says, with a look of grudging admiration, “you might have something there. After all, Milo
was
having an affair with Corinth—” Bethesda stops when she sees the surprise in my face and smiles—glad, I think—that I haven’t figured out everything, after all. “You didn’t know?”

I shake my head. “Did Aurora know?”

“Oh, yes, she mentions it in her journal. Let me see, I’ve got the reference here somewhere . . .” Bethesda goes to her desk and rummages through a stack of papers, some slipping loose from the piles and drifting to the floor. “Here it is. She wrote, ‘Today the medium arrived at Bosco. She is pretty in a common way, but I don’t quite see what Milo sees in her.’ ”

“But I thought Aurora herself invited Corinth Blackwell to Bosco.”

“Yes, she did. That’s what makes it so poignant. Aurora was so desperate—foolishly desperate—to contact her lost children that she was willing to undergo the humiliation of entertaining her husband’s mistress under her own roof.” Bethesda sighs and shakes her head. “Here, I want to show you something.” She gets up and goes to her closet. I’m expecting her to produce some document proving her point, but instead she comes back with socks and a pair of green rubber boots, which she proceeds to put on over her leggings.

“Come on, you can wear one of my sweaters,” she says, pulling on a white fisherman’s knit sweater and handing an almost identical one to me. “It’s cold outside.”

“But where are we going?” I ask.

“To the children’s cemetery.”

We go out the side door on the western end of the house and down a narrow path that leads directly to the ilex grove on the second terrace. No wonder she always beat me to it after breakfast; she had a shortcut.

Bethesda pauses in the center of the clearing as if listening for something. At first all I hear is the wind sifting through the underbrush, rattling bare branches and sweeping dried pine needles along the marble terraces, but then I hear a voice so faint I’m not sure whether it’s real until I recognize it as Zalman Bronsky’s.

“When water’s heart is silver, it will beat,” he recites, “so silently it can’t be found through sound.” The two lines, repeated, grow fainter until the words can’t be made out but the cadence remains, like the garden’s pulse.

“Where is he?” I ask.

Bethesda shrugs. “He’s probably on one of the hidden paths that Aurora had carved out of the hedges. The whole hillside is really a maze. I was sitting here a few weeks ago reading one of Aurora’s journals, and I came across a reference to ‘the white-blazed path to the children’s cemetery’ and I happened to look down and notice this—” Bethesda kneels at the edge of the circle directly across from the marble bench and pushes away a vine to reveal a round white stone nestled in a bed of dried pine needles like an egg in a bird’s nest.

“These are all over the house,” I say, kneeling beside Bethesda, “in the library and on Diana Tate’s desk—I even found a few in my room.” I don’t mention that David Fox has a dozen of them in his room, because I don’t want Bethesda to know I’ve been there.

“The children collected them on hiking trips up at the Lathams’ summer camp. They’re from a river gorge in the mountains where they were rounded and smoothed by the water.” Bethesda picks up the stone and holds it, one hand over the other like a child trapping a firefly, and then passes it to me. It fits perfectly in the palm of my hand and feels cool. Holding it is like cupping water. I pass the stone back to Bethesda, who replaces it on its nest of pine needles as carefully as if it really were an egg. “She used them because the children were so fond of them.” She gets up, brushing gold pine needles from her legs, and sweeps aside a curtain of vines that hangs over an opening between two ilex trees. “Come on.”

I follow her onto the narrow path, but when I try to straighten up as Bethesda has done, my head hits the branches of the ilex trees, which have twisted into a low canopy above the path. Even when I crouch, the prickly ilex leaves catch at my hair. It’s all I can do to keep Bethesda in sight as we wind our way down the steep hill passing from the ilex grove into the maze of overgrown box hedges. Fortunately, Bethesda’s white sweater stands out against the dark green hedges even as the light fades in the sky above us and the path grows dark. I can also see the white stones that mark the path whenever another path crosses over it—at least most of the time. Some of the crossroads are unmarked, their stone markers either sunken into the brush or picked up as souvenirs by previous houseguests. Bethesda, though, appears to know exactly where she’s going, and she also seems to be in a rush to get there, not sparing a look back to see if I’m keeping up. In fact, I can’t help wondering if this isn’t some nasty trick Bethesda has cooked up to get back at me for that afternoon in Nat’s room. Maybe she plans to lead me into the dense underbrush of Bosco and abandon me.

The idea makes my skin prickle with shame. It’s like high school all over again, when my classmates would draw pentagrams on my locker. It was after I’d transferred from the local Lily Dale school (where half the children had parents who were psychics) to a magnet school with a gifted program. No matter how hard I had tried to blend in—ditching Mira’s organic lunches and saving my babysitting money to buy clothes at the mall to replace Mira’s hand-sewn tunics and peasant dresses—I had been a pariah. It wasn’t until college and writing classes, where an eccentric background was deemed an asset, that I began to make friends. Now I feel I’m back where I started: the butt of a practical joke.

The path levels off and I guess that we’ve passed the
giardino segreto
and are behind the rose garden. Thick thorny rose branches reach up through the hedges, the dead roses and rose hips rustling in the wind with a dry papery whisper that sounds like the whisper of
witch
I’d hear as I walked to my table in the school cafeteria. I swipe angrily at my face, and my hands come away sticky. I’ve walked through a spiderweb and a strand of the sticky silk has gotten in my mouth. I stop and spit and rub at my face with the rough sleeve of my sweater. When I lift my head up, the hedges ahead have closed around me; there’s no sign of Bethesda or the path.

“Okay,” I say out loud, “I’ll just go back, then.” But when I turn, I see that the path behind me is barely discernible in the gloom and that it divides in two not far from where I stand. There is, though, something white snagged on a rose thorn in the hedges on one of the paths—a scrap of wool maybe from either my sweater or Bethesda’s—which would tell me which path we came on. As I reach my hand into the hedge, I’m suddenly visited by an image from my dream—the white-blazed trail of flesh—and as I touch the scrap of white, I know immediately that it’s not wool or cloth but some kind of skin. As much as I want to draw back my hand in horror, I don’t. I extract the scrap from its nest of thorns and watch as it uncrumples into the shape of a hand.