The Ghost Orchid (20 page)

“Put the rope back down,” Jimmy shouted at his men, “so he can see where the hole is.”

Violet looked down at her watch. He’d been under the water for four minutes. He’d never held his breath this long. She scanned the river, looking for other breaks in the ice where he might have surfaced, but the ice was as smooth and unbroken as the lid of a marble tomb. She pictured the white marble limbs of that Italian spring nymph, waiting beneath the ice to pull Tom to his death . . .

Then she heard a shout and the men were hauling up the rope and pulling something out of the water. Later Tom would tell her that when he lost sight of the hole, he’d found that between the ice and the water there was a gap of several inches where he was able to draw breath, that he’d kept alive that way, but when they dragged him out of the water his limbs, free of the ropes, were as white and lifeless as a statue’s. It was long months before he was well again, but she took care of him. Only for those few weeks when he went away that March was he away from her, and then he returned looking more frozen than he had when they fished him out of the river.

She looks at her watch—the same watch she held in her hand while Tom was under the river—and sees that it’s after ten. Twenty minutes now since Dr. Murdoch left, saying as he did, “I’ll leave you now to accustom yourself to the gravity of your condition.”
The gravity of her condition!
As if the years she’d spent in all the best clinics and water-cures of Europe hadn’t accustomed her to the shocks and indignities the human body had to offer. She didn’t even have recourse to her green bottle after he left. The only thing she wonders is whether she should tell Tom about Dr. Murdoch’s diagnosis now or later.

She opens the panel behind the bookcase and takes the secret passage up to the third floor. Aurora showed her the passage several summers ago. She always put Tom in the room on the third floor facing north, the one decorated in the rustic style that William West Durant was making so popular: bear rugs and furniture made from unpeeled birch logs, a massive headboard carved in the image of a great eagle. A room for a young Jupiter, Aurora said when she first showed it to Violet, but Violet thought instead of Ganymede, whom the god, in an eagle’s guise, had snatched away, and it has always made her nervous that Tom sleeps there.

She knocks on the panel and Tom opens the door for her.

“I saw you in the garden,” she says, holding up her skirt to fit between a chair and a dresser, both carved out of rough-hewn logs that, she well knows, will tear the good silk of her dress, “and wondered if you had heard anything more about Campbell’s death. They’ve removed his body from the grotto, have they not?”

“Yes. They’re saying he died of a heart attack.” He sits down at the desk, where several blueprints are laid out beneath stone paperweights. The only place to sit, besides the unmade bed, is the rustic chair, which will surely tear her dress to bits, and so she sits on the edge of the bed.

“A heart attack?” She tilts her head and tries to coax Tom with a smile, but he looks away. “And the doctor is going along with that?”

“Apparently. No doubt the doctor is in Mr. Latham’s copious pocket.”

“All the same, perhaps we should cut our stay here at Bosco short. I can’t afford to be mixed up in a scandal. My readers—”

“Your readers would like nothing better. But perhaps you’re right. Should I make arrangements for us to leave tomorrow?”

“Why not leave today?”

“Today?” His full lips part as if to smile, but the corners of his mouth appear frozen.

“Yes, why not? There’s nothing holding us here at Bosco.”

“I thought you were collecting atmosphere for your next novel.”

“I think I’ve collected all the atmosphere I need.”

“But won’t Mrs. Latham be disappointed? I believe she plans to go ahead with another séance tonight.”

“Really? Who told you that? The medium?”

Tom looks down. She can see the shadow of his long dark eyelashes on the pale skin beneath his eyes, and the shadow of a blue vein at his temple. Its pulse, under his fair skin, reminds her of the river that day, rushing darkly under the smooth ice.
What are you up to, Tom?
she asks herself.
What trick are you working now?

“I overheard Mrs. Latham talking to the medium in the garden. She wants her to try again to reach the children. She wants her to try again tonight.”

“Poor Aurora. It is her
idée fixe.
Very well, then, we’ll stay one more night, but then let us be ready to leave tomorrow.” She stands up to emphasize her determination, but the effect is ruined by one of the pins in her skirt catching on the bedspread. She pulls at it impatiently, tearing the silk after all her precautions. “Unless, of course, you’ve made any other engagement?”

“Other engagement?” He looks up, the blood coursing through his face.

“I mean with Signore Lantini,” she says, waving at the blueprints laid out on his desk. “I see you’ve been helping him with the fountains.”

“Oh,” Tom says. “I think we fixed the problem with the fountains.”

“Good, you’re free, then.”

“Free?” he asks, smiling. This time the corners of his mouth curve, but his lips don’t part. “I am always at your command.”

Violet bows her head at the compliment, thinking,
Good.
She decides to leave her news until tomorrow and turns to leave, but at the entrance to the secret passage she turns back and takes the rolled paper out of the pocket of her skirt. “By the way,” she says, “I found this piece of old memorabilia I thought you might like to have.” She hands him the bill from the Lyceum Theater. “For remembrance’s sake.”

Not five minutes after Violet has left his room, Tom hears a knock at his door and, answering it, finds Corinth, damp and bedraggled, leaning against his door frame. He pulls her into the room before one of the servants can see her. Her skin, under her wet dress, is cold as ice.

“What’s happened,” he asks, dragging a fur throw from the bed and draping it over her shoulders.

“The children . . .” she begins, and then, taken by a fit of shivering, collapses onto his bed. He takes her hands and begins to chafe them to bring the blood back, but when he touches the scars on her wrists, she looks up at him, her black eyes so full of pain that it’s like looking into cold water. Like looking into that hole in the ice the day he was thrown into the river.

“I have to leave here tonight,” she says in a voice that seems to come from faraway, like her voice last night at the séance. Was it her real voice, or something she put on to convince her audience that she had entered a trance?

“Tonight? I don’t see how we can get away without anyone seeing us before dark. Doesn’t Mrs. Latham want you to conduct another séance?”

She nods, bowing her head, not asking him how he knows about tonight’s séance. She has the same resigned look she had when he asked her ten years ago to wait for him in Gloversville when he went back to New York City. How could he blame her for not waiting when he had taken so much longer to get back? Still, he has always felt that with all her medium’s skill she should have known what kept him from returning to her. When he had been under the river, sinking into the cold water, he had felt her hand on his, leading him up to the narrow margin between ice and water where he was able to breathe. Then he had seen a long white shape swaying in the water and, when he swam toward it, had found the rope hanging through the hole in the ice. If he goes with her, he must know, once and for all, if she knew why he was delayed and still left him for Milo Latham. He has to know whether she’s a real medium or if it’s all an act.

“I say we leave after the séance,” he tells her now. “I’ll send you a note later to tell you where we should meet.”

Chapter Seventeen

I stop at the office long enough to tell Daria to watch Zalman, and then I rush down the hill toward the children’s cemetery, following the shortcut I learned yesterday. When I enter the crypt, I think at first that it’s empty. I notice a pile of white rocks on the floor beside the broken statue beneath the well, and when I kneel to inspect them, I see that the floor is wet and covered with a whitish slurry. I pick up a handful of the stuff and let it sift between my fingers. Three blue beads fall to the floor and dance there for a moment, vibrating; then I hear the sound of someone humming and look up to find Bethesda sitting on the steps.

“Where’s David?” I ask.

She shrugs and keeps on humming. It’s a children’s nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Roses,” a rhyming game that my mother once forbade me to play because she said it was about death. An odd restriction, I thought at the time, for someone whose business was contacting the dead. “Bethesda,” I say, louder this time, “do you know where David is?”

“He was in there clearing out the stones the children threw in the well, but I suppose he got tired of it. It’s very hard to find someone to do proper work . . .” Her voice drifts off and she starts humming again. I notice that she’s fingering one of the pearl-tipped pins, sliding it in and out of her sweater sleeve. And then I see it’s not the sleeve she’s piercing. It’s the skin of her wrist.

“Bethesda!” I cry, standing up so quickly that the room spins. The white marble floor seems to ripple under my feet as I rush toward her. I grab the hand that holds the pin and wrench it away from her other wrist. She stares up at me and I’m startled once again by the color of her eyes. That pale blue I noticed this morning is actually a film that has crept over her irises.
Flow blue.
I hear the words inside my head, but I don’t understand them. What I do understand is the look of hate that emanates from those eyes.

“Haven’t you stolen enough from me!” she spits out. I feel her wrist twist in my grip and break free. She brings up her hand, the pin held out, and strikes for my eyes.

I lunge away from her, my feet slipping on the wet marble floor, and fall against the well. As she comes toward me, still holding out that long pin, I grab one of the white stones and, as she swoops down on me, bring up my arm and smash the rock into the side of her face. For a second the blow seems to make the whole room shake, and then I see something happen to Bethesda’s eyes. The blue film slips away, like water gliding off a stone. Bethesda sits down hard on the floor, blinks, and raises her hand to her face to touch the rising welt on her cheekbone.

“Damn, Brooks, why’d ya—” Then she looks down and notices the pin in her hand and the scratches on her wrist.

Before I can answer—not that I have any good explanation for what happened to her—we both feel the floor beneath us shudder. This time, with my back against the well, I can feel it’s coming from deep beneath the ground. I pull myself up and look over the edge of the cistern. Water is rushing into the well, churning over the white rocks, which have been pushed into a sloping pile blocking the pipe on the north side. Which is why, I suddenly realize, the water level is rising. It has no place else to go.

“We’d better get out of here,” Bethesda says, leaning over the well next to me. “If the water floods the crypt, we could drown.”

I nod, pulling myself away from the frothing water, which seems to have a mesmerizing effect on me. Just as I’m taking my hand away from the rim of the well, though, I feel something rough graze my hand. I look down and see that it’s a rope on the edge of the cistern jerking back and forth. I grab it and tug, but it’s held taut by something under the water. A bucket, I notice, is bobbing free on the surface. Bethesda is also staring at the rope as if trying to decipher a mysterious rune.

“Did David tie the rope to something in the well?” I ask.

She nods. “It was tied to the bucket,” she says slowly, as if trying to remember something that happened days ago, “but then he said he was afraid the water might start rising quickly once he uncleared the pipe on the south side of the well. So he tied it to his waist.” She looks up at me and then we both look down into the dark water.

“I’m going in,” I say. “You stay up here. I may need you to help me get him up if he’s unconscious.”

I hoist myself onto the rim of the cistern and, grabbing the rope, swing my legs around. Bracing my feet against the wall, I lower myself down into the water, gasping at the cold. Above me I see Bethesda’s face leaning over the well, framed by the oculus above her. Snow is swirling across the opening, spiraling in tight circles like the water that wraps itself around my legs. It feels as if the water is trying to suck me, and all of Bosco, down into its maw. I draw in a long breath and go under.

At first, looking down into the water, all I see is blackness, but then, lit by the light from the oculus, I can make out the faint glimmer of white stones on the bottom and, crouched above them, a dark shape. I use the rope to draw myself down through the water. As I reach out my hand to grab him, David turns and his face, stained white from the chalk dust, floats out of the dark, his eyes opened but unfocused. I nearly scream in the water, but then David’s eyes fix on me and they widen with recognition. More than recognition. I can see a look of longing in them, as if he’s been waiting for me all along, there at the bottom of the well. He reaches out his arms and I take his hand, pulling him up toward the surface. For a moment I feel myself being pulled down, but then, with my other hand on the rope, I manage to break us both free of the water’s pull.

We surface, gasping in the cold air, and Bethesda reaches down to help first me and then David over the edge of the well.

“What the hell were you doing there?” Bethesda screams at David. “You could have drowned!”

“I was trying to read the inscription on the pipe,” David says, surprised as I am, I think, at the hysteria in Bethesda’s voice.

“You were willing to risk your life to read an inscription?” I ask.

“I know, I know. I don’t know what came over me. When the water started pouring in, all I could think about was that it might be my last chance to read it. I know it sounds crazy.”

I’m about to tell him that it
was
crazy, but Bethesda’s nodding as if his explanation made perfect sense. “No, no, of course you had to read it. Were you able to?”

David gives her a smile full of gratitude for her understanding and begins to tell her, but I stop him before he can. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but we just don’t have time for this. Something’s wrong with Zalman.”

Diana and Daria Tate are with Zalman when we get to his room. Daria is scrubbing at the pink stripes on Zalman’s cheeks with a washcloth; Diana is taking his pulse.

“I see you’ve cleared the rocks out,” he says as Diana plucks the thermometer from his mouth, “and unblocked the spring.”

“Zalman’s told me all about the stones in the well, and the bones,” Diana says, shaking down the thermometer. “As the rest of you should have yesterday.”

“We were afraid that a police investigation might put an end to our residencies here,” Bethesda says, stepping forward. I’m impressed that Bethesda is so quick to take the blame. I have a sudden vision of her as a girl at boarding school, facing the headmistress when something got broken or her hall was put on suspension.

“But clearly the police should be called,” I say.

“Well, I don’t know about
that,
” Diana says. “Those bones have probably been there for a hundred years. I don’t see what good the police will do now.”

“But can’t you see that something’s really wrong here?” I say, pointing to David and Bethesda. I only mean to bring attention to David’s wet clothes and Bethesda’s scarred hand and bruised face, but I realize I was about to say something else—to accuse them of some more personal betrayal. When I look at the bruise on Bethesda’s face, I can almost feel the weight of the rock in my hand when I struck her. The memory appalls me, but I notice that my fingers are clenching and unclenching—as if they missed the feel of the hard rock. “I mean,” I say, pronouncing each word carefully, as if I can’t quite trust what will come out of my own mouth, “David nearly got killed in the well and someone decorated Zalman with war paint—”

“It was Aurora and the children,” Zalman says patiently. “They don’t really mean any harm, but they very much want to have their story told.”

“Like those people who keep calling the office,” Daria says, “looking for a writer to tell their stories. It’s kind of sad, really.”

Bethesda nods. “As if that’s all it took: a story to tell.”

“I’ve always felt,” Diana says, “that there was some kind of force here at Bosco that speaks through the artists that come here. I’ve felt it more than ever this year.”

“It’s because of you,” Zalman says, taking my hand. “You’re a medium. They’ve been waiting for another one since Corinth Blackwell. They want to speak through you.”

“I am not a medium,” I say, the blood rushing to my cheeks, horrified at the thought of
anyone
speaking through me, forcing foreign words up through my throat and out of my mouth. I turn to David, the only one present who knows how I feel about my mother’s profession, but instead of helping me he gives me away.

“But your mother is,” he says.

“And you grew up in a town full of mediums,” Diana adds.

“How . . . ?” But then I remember that of course Diana has read my application and knows I was born and raised in Lily Dale—a known center for spiritualists. I just hadn’t thought that that part of my background would be of the slightest interest to anyone at Bosco. I’ve spent most of my life trying to evade the taint of mysticism that clings to me like the scent of Mira’s patchouli incense. This is the last place where I thought it would catch up with me. Now everyone in the room is looking to me as if I were the answer to all their troubles. The one person whom I could count on to express a healthy dose of skepticism is absent.

“Where’s Nat?” I ask, as much to deflect everyone’s interest in me as to find out.

“He was in the kitchen with Mrs. Hervey when I came in from the office,” Daria says, “but then he asked me if he could get some stationery out of my desk, and I told him to go ahead—”

“He’s alone in the office?” Diana says, rising from Zalman’s bed. “That’s very irregular.”

Daria rolls her eyes at her aunt. “I can’t control what these people do,” she says.

“I think we should all be here if we’re going to decide what we’re going to do about . . . about these incidents,” I say. “I’ll go get Nat—”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m here,” Nat says, coming into the room. He’s carrying a stack of files, which he lays down on Zalman’s night table. “How are you doing, Zal?”

“Oh, I’m fabulous, Nathaniel. I’ve always wanted to catch a glimpse of the visionary realm since my days studying Yeats.”

“Yes, you mention that in one of the poems you included in your application to Bosco.” Nat sorts through the folders, selects one, and pulls out a page of typescript. “ ‘Mysticism in the 1890s.’ A good poem. I like it.”

“Why, thank you—”

Diana glares at Nat, her face as pink as Zalman’s had been when covered in war paint. “When the Board finds out that you’ve been going through the other guests’ files—”

“The Board might be interested to know that you’ve been weighting the selection process in favor of artists who are pursuing projects of special interest to you,” Nat counters. “Bethesda’s biography of Aurora Latham; Zalman’s series of sonnets inspired by the gardens of Bosco, coupled with his interest in nineteenth-century spiritualism, Ellis’s novel on Corinth Blackwell and her family history of spiritualism; and David’s research into Lantini’s plans for the garden. Everyone here is doing work on something related to the events that transpired during the summer of 1893.”

“You’re not,” Diana says coolly, the color in her cheeks subsiding. “As far as I can tell, you’re not working on anything.”

“No, you’re right. But I think I’m here for another reason, and it has to do with my family.” Nat takes out a folder from the bottom of the pile. “I was talking to Mrs. Hervey this morning about my family’s old camp on the Great Sacandaga Lake and it turned out she knew it! Why, she even had a picture of it. It seems that it was originally owned by Milo Latham.”

“That’s quite a coincidence—” Diana begins.

“Not half as much a coincidence as the fact that you own it now.”

Diana shrugs, but I can see that she’s even more unnerved by Nat’s unearthing this information than she was by his violating the privacy of the office’s filing system. “Milo Latham promised that land to my great-grandmother and then reneged on his promise. When you mentioned your first year here that your father was selling it, I thought it was a good opportunity to get it back into the family. And yes, I’ve sometimes expressed my opinion to the Board that artists working on projects related to Bosco history should get preference. Why not? Bosco has a rich history; why shouldn’t its story be told? It wasn’t just the family and their guests who were affected by what happened here that summer.”