The Ghost Orchid (23 page)

“Let’s begin,” she says, taking Tom’s hand first. When they’ve all joined hands, Corinth closes her eyes and tilts her head back far enough so that she can see through the narrow slits between her eyelashes. She counts in her head to a hundred and then, lowering her voice, she calls the names of the three children. “James. Cynthia. Tam.” She pronounces each name separately as if reciting a recipe, while to herself she pronounces, over the name of each of the children, a word for something inanimate.
Stone. Water. Wood.
It takes a tremendous amount of concentration to say one word while thinking another; it takes up all the space inside her head, which is exactly what she wants. She doesn’t intend to leave any space for the children to find their way in.

Checking through the slits of her eyes that no one is looking, she frees her right hand from Tom’s and slides a wire beneath the table, gently guiding Tom’s forefinger over the wire so that he can feel it, so he’ll believe she’s taking him into her confidence. She feels his hand startle for a moment, but then he grips her wrist to steady her hand as she rocks the table up and she feels a shiver of pleasure at the pressure of his skin against hers. “James,” she says, thinking
stone
while picturing in her head a round white stone, “is that you?” The table rocks two times. “Are Cynthia and Tam with you?”
Water. Wood.

Two knocks come from beneath the table. Through her slitted eyes she sees Aurora’s face tighten, her brow furrowed and her jaw drawn back as if in pain. “My babies,” Aurora says, “I want to see my babies.”

“You mean the children,” Milo Latham says, his head tilting toward his wife’s voice. Even with his eyes closed Corinth can imagine the impatience that always flickers through his eyes when someone gets something wrong—a waiter brings a wine that’s turned, or a bellhop the wrong valise. She’s seen him at recitals striking phantom keys when the pianist makes a mistake. He is a man used to having his world ordered to his liking and will correct anything amiss. “James, Cynthia, and Tam,” he says, and then, in a low hiss:
“You don’t want the others.”

“No!”
Aurora spits in a deep, guttural croak that raises the hairs on the back of Corinth’s neck. “You can’t replace one for the other. They’re not dining room chairs that have been broken or figures in a ledger to be moved from one column to another. I want my babies back, my sweet babies, the way they were when I nursed them.”

The table lurches beneath Corinth’s hand and she’s not sure if she moved it or if Tom did. “It’s James,” Aurora cries, her eyes flying open and looking straight at Corinth. “You must tell him to be quiet. He would never be quiet even when the others were sick, even when he became sick himself.”

“James,” Corinth says, thinking
stone,
only this time instead of a round white stone she pictures the marble of a statue. “Your mother will say good-bye now and then you can be free. The others can be free, too.” She looks across the table at Aurora. “Tell him good-bye,” she says.

“Go!” Aurora screams. “You must let the others rest.”

Milo opens his eyes and, letting go of Corinth’s hand, turns toward his wife. “That’s quite enough. I’ve had enough of this foolishness. I had her brought here to give you some peace, but it isn’t peace that you want.”

By now Mrs. Ramsdale has opened her eyes and is watching the scene with evident interest. Only Signore Lantini keeps his eyes closed.

“You brought her here so you could bed her in our own house, in the house where our children died, because I wouldn’t let you foist your dirty children on me anymore. She’s my replacement, just as James and Cynthia and Tam were replacements for the ones who died. Look what you’ve brought into your home to replace your own—a stinking savage!”

At the word
savage
the grotto shakes and something cracks. Signore Lantini’s eyes fly open. “
Dio mio,
it’s an earthquake.” He gets to his feet and runs out of the grotto.

Milo Latham throws back his head and laughs. “There, you see what you’ve done? You’ve scared your little gardener away. I, for one, have had enough spectacles for one night.” He takes a cigar out of his pocket and lights it using the candle in the center of the candelabra. Then he gets up, bending stiffly at the waist for a moment as if he had a cramp. “I’m going to bed. Mrs. Ramsdale, perhaps you will attend to my wife?” He precedes the rest of the party out of the grotto, Tom directly behind him, then Mrs. Ramsdale, who’s left Corinth to help Aurora to her feet. At the mouth of the grotto Milo bends over, draping his arm around the shoulder of the river god, as if he were doubled over in laughter and sharing the joke with the marble statue. Then he slides to the ground.

By the time Corinth is able to free herself of Aurora Latham’s grip and squeeze herself out of the grotto’s narrow entrance, Tom and Mrs. Norris are kneeling on either side of Milo’s body. Wanda is keening a chant, while Tom leans over, pressing his head against Milo Latham’s chest. He looks up at Corinth and shakes his head, and Aurora begins to scream. Corinth turns away from the sound and her eyes fall on the statue of the river god, the one that represents the Sacandaga. The marble has been cleaved in two, from the top of the shaven skull to the bottom of one moccasin-clad foot, and a quail-feathered arrow is sticking out of the crack in just the spot where the river god’s heart would be.

Chapter Nineteen

So much snow falls in the last weeks of November that I am forced to give up my plan of driving across the state to Lily Dale for Thanksgiving. I console myself by remembering that it’s not a very important holiday for Mira, who, once Halloween is over, focuses all her attention on the approaching winter solstice or, as she calls it,
beating back the rising dark.
I would have liked a break from Bosco, though, and I considered asking David to make the drive with me, but then I couldn’t quite make up my mind to do it. Since the incident in the well, I’ve felt uneasy in his presence. I’ve seen Bethesda watching me, noticing how tongue-tied I am around him, and I’m sure she thinks it’s because I have a crush on him. She would be half right. I am drawn to him, but I’m also afraid of him—or maybe afraid of how he makes me feel. Truth be told, I have felt this same sense of unease before at the onset of a relationship. I felt it when I began seeing Richard Scully, and as the aftermath of that affair abundantly proved, I would have been wise to heed my instincts.

I’d meant it when I told Nat that having an affair with my writing teacher was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t know how stupid until a month before graduation, when I realized my period was five days late. I made the mistake of telling Richard that I thought I might be pregnant. “Of course it’s up to you,” he’d said, “but I’d hate to see your promise as a writer swallowed up in the drudgery of child-rearing.” I’d known in that instant how little our “affair” had meant to him. I could have the baby, but I’d be on my own. I’d go back to Lily Dale, the way my mother had gone back pregnant with me. I knew she’d take care of us both. I’d have a midwife-assisted childbirth in a birthing tank surrounded by a chanting spirit circle. And I’d grow old there—alone—just as my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before me. A line of women who seemed cursed to live without male companionship. By the time I realized I wasn’t pregnant, I was finished with Richard. I wasn’t even angry at him. I was only angry at myself for having chosen so poorly.

He was right about one thing: I would have hated giving up the opportunity to write this book at Bosco, especially now that it’s going so well. I’d thought that after discovering the bones, and Zalman breaking his leg, and David almost drowning, and all the talk of ghosts, I wouldn’t be able to work at all, but on the contrary, I awake each morning with the voice of Corinth Blackwell in my head practically dictating the next scene. I go straight to my desk and write through breakfast, scurrying downstairs after noon to collect my lunch box, which, I notice, seems to be the pattern that everyone else is now following. The lunch boxes, once collected soon after breakfast, sit in a row outside the dining room waiting for the guests to take a break from their work to claim them. Quiet hours, which used to end at five, have been extended by tacit agreement to six, when we all drift down to dinner in the dining room. There the silence lingers through the meal, as if we were each reluctant to leave the world of our own work. Or maybe we’re afraid of acknowledging out loud what’s going on. I would have thought that after everything that came out in Zalman’s room, someone would have left, but I suspect that if my fellow guests have found the atmosphere as conducive to their writing as I have, then it will take more than a few “water tricks” to make them leave.

After dinner we all drift into the library, where we sit around the fire and drink Bosco’s seemingly endless store of single malt. Diana has given up portioning out the scotch, since all the guests seem to have developed a taste for the eighteen-year-old Laphroaig (only Zalman, because of the painkillers he’s taking, abstains). “It’s a little bit like drinking potting soil,” David says one night when he fills everyone’s glasses (somehow he has become the default bartender).

When I take my first sip of the evening, I picture David’s hands plunging into black soil and shiver as the warm liquid rolls down my throat. Nat talks about the bogs around his grandfather’s cabin and how in the fall his grandfather would make a bonfire out in the bog and the smell of burning leaves would be mixed with the smell of peat. “He’d always make some joke about there being Indian bodies in that peat,” he says. “He’d tell all these stories about pregnant Indian girls who’d thrown themselves off cliffs and drowned themselves in the bog . . .”

“Hm,” Zalman says, “I’ve been thinking of writing a poem about one of those legends.”

“Well, I’m sure you’d give the subject better treatment than my grandfather. He’d always end those stories by sniffing the peat smoke and saying, “ ‘Can’t you smell ’um, son? Roasted Injun.’ ”

“What a lovely man, your grandfather,” Bethesda says.

“Yeah, he was a real bastard,” Nat replies.

Often we all conjecture on whether Corinth Blackwell ever went to the cabin and, if so, with whom? Did she meet Milo Latham there? Or did she and Tom Quinn flee there after the second séance? By my second glass, I’m not sure if we are talking about fiction or fact anymore. It seems as if we are each telling a part of a story that happened a very long time ago to all of us, only we all remember it a little differently. I fall asleep at night with all of their voices in my head, but when I awake, with the taste of peat still on my tongue, I hear only one voice: Corinth’s.

Until one morning in early December, a morning of heavy snow and galelike winds, when I get to the scene of the second séance. I still hear Corinth’s voice, but all she will say are three words:
stone, water, wood.
Repeated over and over again like one of Mira’s mantras. It feels, maddeningly, as if my muse has had a stroke, and I wonder if my scotch consumption has finally eroded my own brain cells. I stare out the window at the steadily falling snow and feel as if my brain is muffled in the same thick white fleece that covers the garden. Finding the right words is suddenly as hard as making out shapes under the snow. What looks like a hedge might be a statue, and what looks like the shape of a body lying in the
giardino segreto
might only be a snowdrift sculpted by the wind. A moment later the body seems to take flight, and I see that what I had thought was a snowdrift was actually a flock of the pale gray mourning doves that winter in Bosco’s hedges.

I will myself to see, in the shifting snow, Corinth Blackwell in the center of the séance circle with Tom Quinn on her right and Milo Latham on her left. Her old lover and her married lover: the two men fate had placed her between. But when Corinth opens her mouth, instead of “James, Cynthia, and Tam,” the words “Stone, water, wood,” come out.

I squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate until the image in my head says the words she’s supposed to and then, just as the rest of the scene is coming clear, a noise outside my door makes me jump.

“Ridiculous,” I say aloud, crossing the room. “I’ve scared myself with my own story.”

When I open the door, I’m relieved by the homely sight of the old-fashioned tin lunch box. I look at my watch and see that it’s almost three o’clock. Mrs. Hervey must have decided to bring it up when I didn’t come down for it at noon. I look down the hall and see that Nat’s and Bethesda’s lunch boxes have been left outside their doors as well. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s absorbed in his or her work today—although I may be the only one who’s spent an entire day writing only three words.

I go back to my desk to work, but after some time—fifteen minutes? an hour? I have no idea—something slams into my window so hard that the blow reverberates in my chest as if I had been struck. When I look up, I see the spread of wings against the glass and realize that some large bird, lost in the storm, has flown into my window. As I watch the bird slide off the glass and drop to the terrace below, I feel a sickening lurch in my stomach, as if I were in a plane that had suddenly lost altitude. I run downstairs and out onto the terrace in my slippers and kneel down in the snow over an indentation in a drift marked by a single white feather. I lean over to scoop up the bird, my arms sinking into the snow up to my shoulders, but then the snow beneath my hands begins to stir. It feels as if the snow itself had come to life, and once again I hear the words Corinth spoke at the séance:
stone, water, wood.
This is water—frozen—come to life.

It must be my screams that rouse David from the library. He comes out brandishing a fire poker, but when he sees, as I see now between slits in my fingers that I have raised to protect my face, that the snow demon is only a large, angry snow goose, he drops the poker and grabs the bird with his bare hands. The wings beat against his face, strike his chest, and then it’s gone in an upward spin of white down that merges with the falling snow.

He kneels down in front of me and tries to pull my hands away from my face, but his fingers on my wrists feel like burning brands searing into my flesh.

“Ellis,” he says. “Ellis, it’s okay, it’s gone. Let me see your face.”

I shake my head no, but he manages to peel away my hands from my face with the same gentle but firm motion I imagine he might use to peel a husk away from a seed. He cups handfuls of snow to wash my face and I see that the snow comes away red.

“Come on,” he says, holding my hands in his. His are trembling, but then, I notice, so are mine. “Let’s get you inside. I’ve got some bandages and antiseptic in my room.” I must look suspicious, because he shows me his own hands, which are scratched and scarred. “Occupational hazard,” he says, laughing. “I’m always getting scratched or nicked working outdoors. But I have to say, I’ve never gotten myself attacked by any of the waterfowl.”

Instead of laughing with him, I lay my hand on David’s chest. “You have now,” I say. He looks down and sees that the left side of his shirt has been ripped open to the skin, revealing a two-inch scratch just above his heart.

When we get to David’s room, I can still hear the beating of wings. I can hear them while he bandages my hands, and when I lay my hand over the scratch on his chest, I feel his heart beating to the same rhythm. The beating is loud enough to drown out the sound of my own heartbeat but not the sound of my fear.

“I can’t . . .” I begin, but then he lays his hand over mine and, lifting it to his mouth, kisses the underside of my wrist. I shiver and the beating in my head becomes a drumbeat. When he pulls me down onto the bed, the papers beneath us crackle like fire. David sweeps the blueprints and maps off the bed in one stroke of his arm, and the papers spin in slow, lazy spirals to the floor.

My bandaged hands are too clumsy to unbutton my own shirt, so he does it for me, deliberately and gently, his own hands shaking. Not being able to use my hands makes me feel clumsy, but he anticipates every movement I want to make until I feel that someone else is inhabiting my body, moving my limbs, producing the moans that issue from my throat.

I stretch out beneath him, reaching to wrap my hands around the bedposts, but he catches my hands and, cradling them in one of his, holds them above my head. For an instant I feel trapped, but then I’m soaring, as if I’ve broken free of my body at last. I can feel myself rising above the bed, watching myself making love to this man I hardly know. Outside the snow howls and something cracks, and I hear someone cry out. Me.

“It’s just the wind,” David murmurs, soothing me, “a branch breaking in the wind.”

But it wasn’t the sound that made me cry out—it was something sharp stabbing into my wrist. I wrench my hand out of David’s grasp and hold it up. Stuck half an inch into my flesh is a pearl-tipped pin. David pulls it out instantly.

“I have no idea how this got here . . .” he begins, but I’m already getting up, clutching my unbuttoned shirt over my breasts. I’m not listening. I’m looking over my shoulder at the headboard, where one of the eagle’s wings has cracked in half.

David follows me out into the hall, pleading with me. “Ellis, what’s wrong? Please tell me.”

I keep going, my eyes blinded with tears, and so I don’t see what trips me before I land on the floor. It’s one of the white stones, lying in the middle of the hallway. I pick it up and notice that there’s another one a few feet away . . . and another at the foot of the attic stairs. David reaches me there, and we both look up the stairs to see a stone on every step. He follows me up to the attic, where we find an entire circle of the stones in the middle of the room. Two glass-eyed dolls, a carved bear, and a stuffed goose are sitting inside the circle.

“It’s some kind of joke,” David says. “Nat and Bethesda probably set this up.”

I don’t say anything because I’ve noticed that there’s another path of stones leading from the circle to a closet at the west end of the attic.

“Yeah,” he says, following me to the closet, “they’re probably hiding in there waiting to jump out and shout ‘Boo!’ Nat,” he calls, “Bethesda, we know you’re in there.”

A thunk comes from inside the closet that sounds exactly like a stone dropping on wood. He rattles the door and calls their names, but there’s no other sound. “I’m going to get something to pry this loose,” he says, shaking the padlock that secures the door as if he were angry with the thing itself. “The metal is so corroded it won’t be hard to break.”