The Ghost Orchid (17 page)

She lifts her eyes up off the ground, and something, a flicker of light between the cypresses, draws her attention to the far side of the circle.

“Ashes, ashes . . .”

“Alice?” she calls, walking between two tall cypresses. “Is that you?” The song stops and she notices, half hidden in the shade, a low white building. A mausoleum, perhaps? There couldn’t possibly be more dead children, could there?

The building is little more than two columns and a porch covering a flight of stairs leading down into the ground. The iron gate above the stairs stands open. Pausing at the threshold, Corinth listens for any movement from below, but all she hears is the faint gurgle of water, which becomes louder as she walks down the stairs. The sound is coming from a round marble cistern, which is open to the light that pours through an oculus in the ceiling. A statue of a hooded woman leans against the basin, one hand on the cistern’s edge, the other resting over her belly.
The Grieving Mother.
That’s what it would be called, Corinth thinks, approaching the statue to get a better look at its face, which is cloaked by deep folds of marble drapery. Her expression is unexpected. If there’s grief, there’s no drama. In fact, the face looks curiously washed clean of emotion, as worn as the stone from which it’s carved, its eyes sunken and pitted where the sculptor has drilled the pupils. Corinth takes another step closer and then stops, frozen. Within the carved rim of one eye a drop of water gathers, wells, and, as Corinth watches, spills down the smooth marble face. The statue is weeping.

“Very lifelike, eh?”

For a second Corinth thinks the voice is coming from inside the marble basin, but then Signore Lantini rises from behind the well where he had been kneeling.

“Yes,” Corinth says, taking a breath to calm herself, “very lifelike, indeed.
Bravissimo!
Your work, I assume?”

The little man places one hand on the lapel of his shiny, threadbare waistcoat and sweeps the other out behind him as he takes a low, dramatic bow. For a moment he is every inch the impresario receiving applause for the show he has produced. For the show that is Bosco.

“
Naturalemente.
Signora Latham asks that Egeria weep, and
ecco!
She weeps.”

“Egeria again. But why? She wept for her dead husband, not her children.”

Lantini shrugs. “I am a
fontaniere,
signora. I make the water flow, I don’t ask why. I come down here today to check the spring because she’s not flowing so good today, and look what I find.”

Signore Lantini leans over the edge of the well so far that Corinth has to suppress an urge to catch him by the seat of his pants and haul him back in. She looks over the marble wall and for a moment she is back on the edge of the cliff looking down at the fast-flowing Sacandaga. The bottom of the well is covered with the same white stones.

“Somebody has been throwing stones into the well,” he says, “and they have blocked the pipe that feeds the fountains.”

“Who would do that?” Corinth asks.

Lantini doesn’t answer at first. Instead, he springs back down behind the well and rises with a coil of rope, which he hands to Corinth.

“Can you tie a good knot?” he asks.

Corinth knows all about tying knots—and how to get out of them—but she doesn’t want to touch the rope, so she shakes her head. Lantini shrugs and then kneels at the feet of the statue and ties one end of the rope around the pedestal on which the statue stands—the pedestal being affixed solidly to the floor—and the other end around his own waist.

“Last year it was the children,” he says as he swings his legs over the edge of the well and, holding on to the rope and bracing his feet—which, Corinth notices for the first time, are bare—against the curved marble wall, begins to lower himself down. “They liked to throw rocks into the well to hear the sound they made. Plonk, plonk, plonk.” Lantini’s voice echoes off the walls of the well, making him sound like a larger man than he is. Corinth leans over and watches his progress anxiously. When he gets to the bottom he splashes knee-deep into the water and then, unfolding a burlap sack from the waistband of his pants, bends to pick up the stones and load them into the sack. “So I had made a cover for the well to protect the spring, but still the little devils would take it off and throw more stones in.”

Corinth notices that there’s a white circle of marble resting against the wall of the crypt that must be the cover Lantini is talking about. She walks over to it and gives it an experimental push. It doesn’t budge. Perhaps three children together could move it, but it seems unlikely.

“Mrs. Latham told them that if they kept it up, someday one of them would fall inside and get trapped. . . . Signora, if you would do me a great favor . . . please to pull up the rope very slowly. I’ve tied the bag of stones to it.”

Corinth goes back to the well and begins hauling up the bag of rocks, wincing each time the rope touches her bare right hand. When she’s gotten the bag over the edge and untied it from the rope, she stands at the rim of the well and holds the rope up. The Italian’s mobile face, seen at this angle, with his mustache and high cheekbones, looks like the mask of a devil in a comic opera. His hands on the small of his back, he leans back and laughs. “It is very good we are friends, eh, Signora Blackwell? Or else you’d have me at quite the disadvantage.”

Corinth tries to return the laugh, but finds she can’t. As she lowers the rope back to Lantini, she can’t help but wonder, if the children were the ones who threw the stones into the well
last
year, who is doing it
this
year?

Chapter Fifteen

We take Zalman to the emergency room in David’s Oldsmobile, which has a backseat large enough for Zalman to put his leg up and still leave enough room for Bethesda to sit next to him.

“Man, this thing’s a boat,” Nat says with grudging admiration. “What’s it got under the hood?”

“A 307-inch V-8 engine,” David says, swinging the car out the front gates onto the main road. “It was my dad’s. He was a clothing salesman—east Texas and Oklahoma territory—and liked a big trunk for samples.”

“And liked a good cigar, as well, I might venture,” Zalman says from the back, his eyes closed.

“That’s right. Havana Montecristos, when he could get ’em. How’s that leg feeling, Zalman?”

“Delightful, just delightful.”

Before we left, Nat had run upstairs to his room and emptied his supply of Percocets (left over from a back injury last year, he told us) into his pockets and fed two to Zalman with a bottle of Saratoga Spring Water he’d grabbed from the kitchen. The pills seemed to have an almost instantaneous effect on the poet. “Would anyone like to hear the poem I composed today?” he asks, waving the cobalt-blue water bottle in the air.

I’m scrunched in between David and Nat on the long bench seat up front, but I turn and try to catch Bethesda’s eye. She hasn’t said a word since I left her with Zalman in the crypt and her silence is beginning to get on my nerves. “I think we overheard part of it,” I say to her. “Do you remember, Bethesda?” She tilts her head and assumes the same upward-glancing pose that she assumed in the children’s cemetery when quoting from Aurora Latham’s journal. She even moves her lips as if mouthing something she’s listening to, and then finally she breaks her silence to recite: “ ‘When water’s heart is silver, it will beat / so silently it can’t be found through sound.’ ”

Zalman presses the blue bottle to his heart and then extends it toward Bethesda as if offering her a toast. “I am honored to be remembered,” he says, and then begins to nod off. I exchange a worried glance with Nat (Bethesda’s eyes are still trained on the roof of the Oldsmobile), and he raises his voice loud enough to pierce Zalman’s Percocet fog.

“I, for one, would like to hear the rest of that poem, Zalman.” I murmur my assent and nudge David to do the same. Zalman opens his eyes and, fixing them on the blue bottle in his hand as if it were the source of his inspiration, recites from the beginning.

“When water’s heart is silver it will beat

so silently it can’t be found through sound,

nor echo nor, since hidden underground,

by sight of stone-veined pulse; it can defeat

all those who seek its dripping, chill retreat.

Yet water must still rise and seek the ground

in tiny tributaries, circling round,

until their throbbing pattern’s made complete.

Such mysteries the earth secretes away

below the streams that merge and run to seas,

in honor of Egeria’s sad day

and destiny of tears that never cease.

If only one could glimpse a silver heart!—

that pulsing pool where tearstained rivers start.”

The poem seems to jar Bethesda out of her fog. She looks around the car as if wondering where she is. “Egeria was the wife of Numa, wasn’t she?” she asks in a hoarse voice. “She grieved so deeply she melted into a pool of her own tears.”

Nat and I both turn around and stare at Bethesda to see that her own face is wet with tears. Nat seems as shocked as I am to see her crying. “Did
she
hit her head?” Nat asks me in a whisper.

“I’m not sure,” I whisper back.

Only David thinks to answer Bethesda’s question. “I believe you’re right there, Miss Graham,” he says. “There’s a spring dedicated to Egeria just outside of Rome. I bet you that broken statue we saw down by the well was supposed to represent her, because that’s the source of Bosco’s springs.” He pulls into the entrance to the hospital and steers the wide-bodied car to the door of the emergency room. When he’s put the car in park, he turns around toward the backseat. “But what I’m wondering is how Zalman found the source of the spring. I’ve been looking for it for months.”

Zalman half opens his eyes, his face dreamy. “I found it by following my heart,” he says.

The examining room is too small for the five of us. Since David, as the physically strongest, has helped Zalman into the emergency room, he’s one obvious choice to stay. I’d like to volunteer to stay with him, but instead I suggest that Bethesda should. Then, before leaving, I whisper to one of the attendings that someone should have a look at Bethesda to see if she’s okay. “She had a fall as well,” I tell the young intern, “and she’s been acting funny ever since.”

Nat and I find ourselves unlikely companions in the hospital cafeteria. I buy a tuna fish sandwich, while Nat opts for the turkey tetrazzini after a long consultation with the hairnetted server that—to my surprise—leaves the woman blushing and giggling. This flirtatious, bantering side of Nat is not one I’ve seen at Bosco. In fact, I can’t help but notice that despite the cafeteria’s fluorescent lighting Nat looks not only happier but even healthier outside of Bosco. As if a weight has been lifted off him. Even the feverish green glow his eyes have acquired in the last few weeks seems tempered in this light, and I can see hints of a calmer-looking blue, as if a storm were clearing somewhere behind them and a blue sky was beginning to peak out.

“Poor Zalman,” I say when we sit down. “I guess he won’t be able to go on any more sonnet walks. I wonder if he’ll stay for the rest of the winter.”

Nat looks up from his plate of steaming noodles and frowns. “Oh, I don’t think he’d leave. The board really hates it if you cut short your stay. There was an Israeli composer who left early one summer because the pine pollen gave him asthma attacks, and he was never invited back.”

“But if Zalman left because of his leg—”

“It’s not his arm,” Nat interrupts. “He can still write.”

“Still, he might want to go. And once Diana Tate learns about the bones in the well, there will probably be a police investigation, which is bound to change the atmosphere at Bosco.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think Diana will call the police. For one thing, they’re bound to want to park under the porte cochere.”

I laugh so hard I nearly choke on my tuna fish. Plastered all over the sitting room of Bosco are ancient mimeographed rules, the first of which is “Guests must NEVER, under ANY circumstance, park under the porte cochere.” It was practically the first thing Diana said to guests upon their arrival: “You haven’t parked under the porte cochere, have you?” And the last thing when they were leaving: “Make sure you tell the taxi not to pull up under the porte cochere.”

“You know what I think?” I say when I’ve successfully swallowed my tuna fish.

“No, what?”

“That Diana only made the rule so she can go around saying
porte ko-SHARE.
” I draw out the last syllable, exaggerating the French pronunciation. “Because it makes her feel important that she works someplace with a fancy French name for the carport.”

Nat rewards me with a smile that rivals the one he gave the hairnetted cafeteria worker, and I feel light-headed to be caught in the high beams of his attention—and glad that I’ve perhaps found an ally at Bosco.

On the drive back, though, I begin to suspect that David and Bethesda have also used their time together to form a bond. Neither thinks that Diana should be told about the bones in the well.

“I’ll never be allowed to work on the garden,” David says. “Even if the bones are a hundred years old, which I’m sure they are, they’ll call in forensic anthropologists and cordon off the site.”

“Imagine all the people tromping through the garden, disturbing the quiet,” Bethesda says. She’s sitting up front between David and Nat, so I can’t see her face. I’m wedged into the backseat with Zalman, who is snoring loudly, his cast-encased leg propped up on the seat between us. It began to snow while we were inside the hospital, and there’s already a good two inches on the road. The Olds, without snow tires or front-wheel drive, fishtails on the curves and struggles up the slick hills, but when I lean forward to watch the road in front of us, I seem to be the only one worried about making it safely back to Bosco.

“Don’t you want to know whose bones they are, Bethesda?” Nat asks. “Isn’t that important to your research?”

“I’m more interested in Aurora’s accomplishments than in the lurid details of the Blackwell affair,” Bethesda answers, her voice imperious. When I asked the intern if he’d had a look at her, he said she’d adamantly refused to be examined. Certainly she sounds like her old self now, although I can’t help feeling that there’s still something
distant
in her manner. But then, she’s always been a little cold. “I can imagine well enough whose bones they are,” she continues. “Corinth Blackwell and Tom Quinn obviously conspired to kidnap Alice Latham, but one of them—Quinn, I would imagine—decided to work alone, so he killed Corinth and left her in the well. And I certainly don’t care about
her
bones.”

“But why is the well filled with rocks?” I ask. “That was done before the body was put in there.”

“Maybe she filled the well with stones out of spite,” David answers, “to destroy the fountains of Bosco.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” Bethesda says. “People have always been jealous of Bosco.”

“But when the fountains ran dry,” I ask, “why didn’t Aurora look at the source of the spring to see what was the matter?”

“Because,” Bethesda answers, her voice growing impatient, “she thought the fountains running dry was a judgment against her for trying to contact her lost children, as was Alice’s abduction. The poor woman spent her life trying to atone for her mistakes by making Bosco a haven for artists. The least we can do is make good use of it. Don’t you agree, Nathaniel?”

Nat hesitates, glancing guiltily back at me, and I sense I’m losing his allegiance. “What worries me,” he says, “is that if we don’t tell Diana and then she finds out, we might be asked to leave,” he says.

“If we stick together in this, no one will get in trouble,” Bethesda says. “No one is going to ask
me
to leave!”

“And in the meantime, we can be working out what happened on our own,” David adds.

From the backseat I can see David’s and Bethesda’s profiles as they turn toward each other. The look they exchange suggests that they discussed this point while they were together in the examining room with Zalman. I feel a pang of jealousy, remembering how I’d pulled away from David earlier today. Has he decided to give up on me and pursue Bethesda instead? David turns back toward the road, but Bethesda’s face, tilted up toward the car roof, reminds me uncomfortably of the smooth white face of the statue in my dream. But it’s only the moonlight. The snow has stopped and the moon has come out from behind the clouds. As we turn to pass through the gates of Bosco, I see that the grounds have been swathed in white, the overgrown hedges lumpy under their mantles of snow, the statues draped in voluminous drapery. The garden looks like a stage set that’s been covered between acts and is waiting for the stagehands to come back and whisk away the dustcovers to reveal the next scene.