The Ghost Orchid (18 page)

David parks the Olds under the porte cochere. Bethesda and I get the rented wheelchair out of the trunk and unfold it by the door, while Nat and David maneuver the heavily medicated poet out of the backseat and into the chair. When we’ve gotten him into the front hall, David pauses on the threshold.

“If you guys can manage from here, I’d better move the car. Diana’s going to be riled enough when she hears about Zalman’s leg without me breaking the port coach-her rule.”

As soon as David says the words
porte cochere,
Nat smiles at me. “No, we wouldn’t want to break the porte ko-SHARE rule,” he says, using the same exaggerated pronunciation that I had used when we were in the cafeteria.

He’s trying to make up for going back on our agreement, I think, returning his smile.

“Well, however you pronounce it,” David says from the doorway, scraping a chunk of ice from the bottoms of his work boots. I have just enough time to make out the scowl on his face before he turns around and leaves.

“Damn,” I say, realizing that he must have thought Nat and I were making fun of him. I follow him outside, but he’s already in the car. The passenger door handle is locked and the window is fogged over, so I knock on the glass, but the roar of the eight-cylinder engine drowns out the sound. The car pulls out, leaving me in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

I watch the car accelerate past the office and down the hill, going way too fast for the road conditions. Instead of turning into the guest parking lot, though, it skids to a stop at the bottom of the hill.

He’s seen me through the rearview mirror, I think. He’s waiting for me. I set out down the hill, trying to hurry to make up for the unintended insult, but the light coat of snow has made the road slippery and the cloud of exhaust fumes from the Olds, condensing in the cold air, obscures my footing. I concentrate on the Olds’s red taillights as I frame words of apology in my head.
We weren’t making fun of your Texas accent?
No, that just sounded condescending.
Nat and I had been laughing about the whole porte cochere thing . . .
but that made it sound as if we’ve gotten really chummy. And so what? What did I have to apologize for when obviously David and Bethesda had been plotting how to handle the “bones” question on their own?

I stop dead in the middle of the road. What if David’s not waiting for me at all? What if he just stopped the car to . . . what? It’s an odd place to stop, unless . . .

Something draws my attention away from the car at the bottom of the hill and into the woods just beyond where the car has stopped. I’ve been staring so long at the red taillights that they’ve burned an afterimage into my retinas—a hazy reddish blob that hovers under the old ilex trees. I see there’s a gap in the trees here—a path like the one Bethesda led me on earlier today. Of course, Bethesda knows all the secret paths around the garden, and so does David. What if they’d agreed to meet here?

The reddish blob swells as my eyes fill with tears. What an idiot I’ve been! Here I thought David was interested in me when all the time it was Bethesda.

I blink and the reddish blob wavers and thins, turning into a girlish shape that darts between the tangled branches of the ilexes. For a moment I think of the spectral girl who’d led me up the hill today, and it’s a testimony to my jealousy that I find myself hoping that the girl in the trees is a ghost. But no, although my vision is still blurred from the tears that fill my eyes, and staring at the taillights, I can see it’s Bethesda moving stealthily through the woods. Of course it’s Bethesda he’s waiting for, not me. I turn away and creep back up the hill, staying in the shadows so that no one will see my humiliation.

The snow does not stop David from his plans to excavate the well the next morning. At breakfast, once Diana Tate leaves to order a hospital bed for Zalman and Daria is sent back to the office to answer the phones, David announces his plans to remove the bones first and asks for a volunteer to help him. I see him look in my direction, but I keep my eyes down, studying the way the brown sugar I’ve just spooned into my oatmeal is melting into the milk. After a moment of silence, Bethesda offers to help.

“Thanks,” David says. “I’ll need a burlap sack to put the bones in. There should be one in the pantry.”

We all look toward the kitchen, where we can hear the sounds of the cook making our lunches. “I’ll distract Mrs. Hervey,” Nat says.

“I guess that leaves me to get the sack,” I say. “Shall I bring it down to the crypt?”

“Oh, we won’t need it until after lunch,” Bethesda says. “Why don’t you watch Zalman this morning?”

I look toward David. If he really wants me there, he could say he needs the sack sooner, but he says nothing. Which must mean he wants the morning alone with Bethesda. When I look away from David, I see that Bethesda has been watching me. I never noticed how pale her eyes are, the same color as the milky blue in the teacup she lowers from her lips now in order to smile at me.

While I’m unloading potatoes from a sack in the pantry, I can hear Nat talking to the cook. I notice that Nat remembers not only the names of Mrs. Hervey’s three children but the ages and names of
their
children—one of whom, Danielle Nicole, is working as a housemaid this winter at Bosco.

“That’ll make six generations of Herveys that’s worked here at Bosco,” the cook tells Nat, “which’ll have us beating out the Tates.”

“Really? I didn’t know that Diana’s family worked here. Was she related to Evelyn White, the first director?”

Mrs. Hervey sniffs. “No, Diana was Miss White’s assistant, but Diana’s grandfather was a gardener and his mother was housekeeper for Mrs. Latham . . .”

Sneaking out of the pantry behind Mrs. Hervey’s back, I give Nat a wave so he can make his escape, but I hear him accepting Mrs. Hervey’s offer of tea and fresh-baked brownies and what Mrs. Hervey refers to as “a nice long chat.”

From Zalman’s room on the first floor, I watch David and Bethesda leave from the side door and enter the path that leads down to the children’s cemetery. “I think it’s wrong to move those bones without contacting the police first,” I say, plumping up Zalman’s pillows so he can sit up and drink the tea I’ve brought for him. I give the last pillow a hard punch, remembering how Bethesda had pretended to be reluctant to help David and then volunteered anyway.

Zalman nods sympathetically, but after he’s taken a sip of tea, he asks me a question on an entirely different subject. “Do you find that you have particularly vivid dreams here at Bosco?”

I can feel the color leave my face. It had taken me a long time to get to sleep after climbing back up the hill, but when I did, I’d had the dream about the statues again, only this time when the girl in the maze turned, her stone face was so worn down that I could see that there were bones beneath the marble.

“Yes, yes, I have.”

“Last night I could have sworn there was a white dog on my bed, lying over my broken leg.” Zalman points to the lumpy mass beneath his bedspread.

“Did you have a white dog when you were growing up?” I ask, thinking that Zalman’s dream seems comfortingly benign compared to my nightmares.

“No, we lived in an apartment building in Riverdale that didn’t allow dogs.” And then, leaning forward in bed, he confides in a whisper, “I think it was Madame Blavatsky’s dog who came to visit me last night.”

“Madame Blavatsky’s dog?”

“She was a famous medium—”

“Yes, I know who she was. My mother is a big fan of hers. She even belongs to the Theosophical Society, which Madame Blavatsky founded. You see, my mother thinks she’s a medium—”

“Of course she is,” Zalman says to my bewilderment. I check the vial of painkillers that Zalman brought home from the hospital to see how many are still there. “I’m sure she’s heard of the white dog. I learned about it when I was an undergraduate at Penn. I was writing my thesis on Yeats’s forays into spiritualism, and I wandered into a little cafe on Sansom Street one day, and imagine my surprise when I read on the menu that the cafe—the White Dog Cafe—was the former home of Madame Blavatsky! A serendipitous coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

I look up from counting Percocets (Zalman appears to have taken only one since last night) and nod in agreement. Zalman’s eyes are glittering and his hair is standing up in wispy fluffs from his pink scalp. I lay a hand on his forehead to see if he’s got a fever, but his brow is cool.

“The story on the menu explained that Madame Blavatsky had injured her leg and that her doctors wanted to amputate. ‘Imagine my leg going to the spirit world without me,’ she retorted. And then within days her leg was miraculously healed. She said a white ‘pup’ from the spirit world came to her each night and lay on her leg to heal it. Now it’s come to heal my leg. What do you think of that?”

“I think I’ll bring my laptop down here today,” I say, patting Zalman’s quilt, “in case you need anything.”
And in case you lapse into delirium.
“If that’s okay with you.”

“Of course,
shayna maidela,
but you can’t fool me.” Zalman wags a reproving finger at me. “I know the real reason is so you can see the white dog for yourself.”

When I go back to my room to retrieve my laptop, I notice that the theatrical poster listing Tom Quinn and Corinth Blackwell has fallen from the window frame and slipped under my desk. I pick it up and see that on the back of it there’s a message written in pale, faded ink.
“Cory,”
it reads,
“I’m leaving Bosco tonight. If you want to go with me, meet me in the Rose Garden at midnight.—Q”
Below the florid
Q
is another line:
“We’ll follow the rivers north.”
So the poster must have been in Corinth’s possession at some time, but why would she leave it behind? David said he found it in the attic in an old trunk. Is it Corinth’s trunk? And if her trunk is still here, might that prove she never left Bosco at all? That the bones in the well are hers?

Although I’m nervous about leaving Zalman unattended, I decide to take a quick trip up to the attic. Hurrying up the stairs, I admit to myself that I’m hoping that I won’t find Corinth’s trunk. Since we found the bones yesterday, I’ve been fighting the idea that they could be Corinth’s. I can picture the stone lid closing over her, picture it as though from inside the well. I can feel the last breath of air slip out between the cracks and hear the muttering of the spring boiling up to claim her bones. The image is so real to me that when I reach the attic, I’m gasping for breath as if I myself were trapped in the well. The four narrow beds that line the north wall like shrouded mummies cast a funereal gloom over the room. I quickly cross to the south side, threading my way between discarded furniture and books and toys that lie in disordered heaps, nearly tripping over an ancient rocking horse whose baleful eye looks up at me through a tangle of decaying pink ribbons, and wrench open a window. I rest my arms on the windowsill and draw in breath after chill breath, trying to dispel the awful claustrophobia of my vision.