The Ghost Orchid (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

“We don’t have her,” Corinth tells Wanda, stepping aside so that the narrow hotel room is open to her inspection.

Wanda rakes the room with her eyes, indicating to her son to look under the bed while she throws open the doors to the armoire.

“I found that poor girl in a dark attic closet, tied to a chair,” Corinth says to Wanda. “She told me you put her there.”

“So that her mother wouldn’t do worse to her,” Wanda says, rounding on Corinth. She holds up the bloody handkerchief. “You don’t deny letting her out?”

“No, why should I? How could I do otherwise? Who could bear to leave a child alone like that? But I left her in her own bed. You mean to say she’s disappeared?”

“Mrs. Latham found this handkerchief with your initials on it in her daughter’s bed. Along with this pouch. And
this
was in the pouch.” Wanda takes out the long thin hellebore root, and Corinth realizes that she must have put it down in the storage closet when she was untying Alice’s hands. She opens her mouth to say that Aurora must have put the root in the pouch, but she realizes it won’t make any difference.

“She asked me if I thought it belonged to you and I couldn’t deny that it did, but I managed to take both things while she had the police sent for—”

“The police?” Tom asks, speaking for the first time since their room’s been invaded. He’s kept a wary eye on the coachman while buttoning his shirt and listening to the interchange between Corinth and Wanda. “She’s accusing us of kidnapping her child?”

“Yes,” Wanda says. “So you see, it’s in your own interest to help me find her.”

“But how would I know—” Corinth begins, but then she remembers her dream. She closes her eyes to picture it better. White stones, a shadow moving across them like an eclipsed moon . . . only now she can see that the shadow is red—a creeping tide of blood eclipsing one small life.

“I know where she is,” Corinth says, opening her eyes. “But we have to hurry. She hasn’t much time left.”

Wanda rides on the box beside her son, urging him faster over the road to Bosco. Inside the coach Tom begs Corinth to reconsider, to turn back.

“I can’t,” she says, “I can’t leave that child to die.”

“But you said yourself that it might be too late, that the child might be dead already. They’ll blame us. Aurora’s already told the police that we’ve taken her.”

“Yes, when she found that I’d let Alice free, she must have decided she could blame us for her disappearance—” Corinth frowns. “Perhaps in her mind she thinks that Alice’s death would be my fault. She hadn’t meant to go that far until she saw I’d let her go, just as she didn’t really mean to kill the others.”

“What do you mean,
‘kill the others’
?”

“James and Cynthia and Tam.” Corinth trembles as she says their names out loud, hearing, like an echo in a well, the words she’d superimposed on their names during the séance:
water, wood, and stone.
“She’d lost so many children already, I think she lost a little of her sanity with each one. She grew used to them sickening and dying, but if James and Cynthia and Tam could live, then it would be as if she’d saved the others.”

“You mean she made her own children sick?” He whispers it, his voice thick with revulsion, and Corinth feels bile rising in her own throat, a nausea that reminds her of the first weeks of her own pregnancy.

“Yes,” she says, her eyes shining in the darkness of the coach. “The hellebore given in small doses would just make them weak, but she meant to nurse them back to health, only . . .”

“What?”

Norris gave my tea to the others.

“Norris gave Alice’s tea to the other children. She must have suspected that there was something bad in it.” Corinth lowers her voice, gazing uneasily toward the roof of the coach, through which she can hear Wanda’s voice urging her son to drive faster and faster. “But the extra dose of hellebore was enough to kill them—” Corinth clutches Tom’s hand. “Wanda didn’t mind letting the other children die for Alice’s sake and she won’t mind killing us. We’ll be in danger from the moment we find Alice. Wanda will tell you to stay with the coach—”

“I won’t let you go alone with her.”

“I’ll have to. Just watch yourself with the son, and if you can . . .” She stops because the coach has stopped. Beneath the hard breathing of the horses she can hear, as on the first day—was it really only three days ago?—the voice of the water from within the hedge maze. Only now she is beginning to make out its words—a triplet of murmured
m
’s that might be
remember me
or possibly
memento mori,
a little piece of Latin she’s seen often enough on garden statuary to know that it means
Remember you must die.

“When I’ve taken care of him,” Tom whispers hurriedly with his hand on the coach door to keep it from being opened from the outside, “I’ll come for you. I promise. This time I’ll come back for you.”

She nods and touches his face, unable to speak. She believes him but suspects that it will probably be too late.

When she gets out of the carriage, she finds Wanda standing at the entrance to the maze and she knows from the frightened look in her eyes that she can hear the voice of the water, too, and that, although she may not hear the same words that Corinth hears, she’s terrified. There isn’t much that would scare Wanda White Cloud, but these are the spirits of the children she let die. Apparently, though, she is willing to brave them for Alice’s sake. Corinth can’t help wondering what claim the girl has on Wanda’s affections.

“Let the men stay with the horses,” Wanda says.

Corinth nods, catching Tom’s eye and noticing the look that also passes between Wanda and her son. Then Wanda steps through the gap in the hedge into the maze and Corinth follows her. She hears a rustle of leaves behind her but doesn’t turn to look, afraid that what she’ll see is the gap closing in the hedge, cutting her off from the outside world—and Tom—forever. As they walk the rustling sound stays close behind them, and Corinth imagines the box hedge creeping across the path, growing higher and wider in their wake. The moon in the western sky pierces the thick foliage, creating patterns in the hedges that shift in the breeze, looking like overgrown rosebushes one moment and then, the next, like the figure of a woman fleeing.

“Do you remember,” Corinth says as they come into the center of the maze, “that story about the Iroquois girl who loved the missionary captive and led him to a spring?”

“She betrayed her people,” Wanda says.

“And then she was betrayed,” Corinth answers. In the rose garden the moonlight falls full on the white marble girl and the bloodred pool in which she kneels. Corinth catches her breath when she sees the color of the water, but when she gets closer she sees that the pool is covered with red rose petals. Looking around, she sees that all the rosebushes, which were at the height of their bloom only three days ago, are bare now. The ground, carpeted with their crimson petals, looks as if it were soaked in blood.

“It happened here,” Corinth says. She bends to pick up one of the petals, but what she finds in her hand instead is a black feather tipped with red.

“Yes, it’s a bad place, but we don’t have time for this. You said you knew where the girl was.”

Corinth walks behind the pool, feeling a prickling on her scalp as she passes under Jacynta’s raised sword and between the cypresses into the children’s cemetery. Here instead of a carpet of red she finds a draping of white like fresh-fallen snow. White flowers that weren’t there yesterday are growing up around the gravestones in thick profusion. She recognizes them: black hellebore, which blooms only in winter.

She walks between the gravestones, being careful not to step on any, but when she reaches the top of the steps leading down into the crypt, she finds a white gravestone that she could swear wasn’t there yesterday. Kneeling, she sees that it’s not a stone at all. The hellebore has grown into a lacy
parterre de broderie
spelling a name and a date.

ALICE
APRIL 9, 1883

Corinth turns and rises so suddenly to her feet that Wanda, usually so surefooted, stumbles. “Aurora was pregnant that year,” Corinth says. “The baby was delivered”—she sees Wanda’s eyes widen at the sight of the name spelled out in the deadly white flowers—“and died.”

Wanda looks up and, looking straight into Corinth’s eyes, nods. “Yes. Mrs. Latham nearly lost her mind—Mr. Latham thought she really would this time. And so, when he heard that your child was born healthy, he sent the dead child to the cabin and told me to give over your child. I’ve watched over her ever since, but now she will die, too, if we don’t hurry.”

Corinth turns away from her and hurries down the steps to the well, which has been covered by the heavy marble cover. She pushes at the lid, but it’s too heavy. Even when Wanda joins her they can’t move it.

“We’ll need to get the men,” Wanda says.

“There isn’t time,” Corinth says. When she closes her eyes, she’s inside the well, looking up into a blackness that presses down on her chest.

She looks frantically around the crypt and spots a coil of rope left behind by Lantini. She grabs it and wraps it tightly around the circumference of the lid, pulling so hard on it that the rope burns her hands, and then wraps it around the waist of the statue of Egeria. “If we push the statue over, the weight of its fall will drag the lid off,” Corinth tells Wanda, leaning her shoulder against the statue. “You get on the other side.”

On the count of three, both women throw their weight against the cold, unyielding marble. Corinth hears a groan, which for a moment she imagines is the voice of the grieving nymph complaining of this rude treatment, but then realizes it is the statue’s base grating against the marble pedestal. The statue trembles, then tilts, and then slowly falls, dragging the lid of the well with it until it smashes onto the floor in an explosion of dust and flying marble splinters—one of which strikes Corinth just below her right eye. She barely notices, though, as she scrambles to the side of the well that has been uncovered.

“Alice!” she calls into the darkness. She hears the name repeated, echoing up through the oculus, but there is no answering word from the well. Then, as the moon moves above the oculus, the white rocks at the bottom of the well come into view and, nestled among them, a curled fist, which loosens as they watch, like the petals of a dying flower falling from the stem.

“I’m going down.” Corinth pulls the rope from around the lid and wraps it around her waist. “Tie the other end to the pedestal. It should hold.”

Corinth doesn’t wait for an answer before swinging her legs over the edge of the well and, tugging against the now taut rope, lowering herself down through the column of moonlight, which feels, to Corinth, like a cold spill of water carrying her into a deep pool. The girl doesn’t stir when she touches her, but her skin is still warm. Corinth presses her cheek against her thin, bony chest, but all she can hear is the water below the stones.

Remember me, remember me.

Corinth lets herself see, for the first time in ten years, the face of the child drifting down into the tea-colored water of the bog. The child she thought was hers. And all this time her own child had been here, waiting for her at the bottom of this moonlit well . . . only she’s found her too late. She lays her head back down on Alice’s chest and lets herself weep for the first time in ten years for her lost child. She weeps so hard she feels herself breaking—like the statue of Egeria smashed on the floor above—and then, just when she thinks she really will crack apart, she feels a stir of breath in the girl’s chest.

She pulls the rope off her own waist and ties it around Alice, deftly shaping a sling out of the rope. When she looks up, she sees Wanda’s face at the edge of the well.

“She’s still breathing,” Corinth calls up, “but she’s unconscious. You’ll have to pull her up.”

Corinth holds on to the girl until she’s carried above the reach of her fingertips, and then she holds her breath until Wanda has her over the edge. For a moment the circle is empty except for the moon, which she can see shining through the oculus, and then she sees Wanda’s head appear back at the edge of the well, silhouetted against the full moon. Wanda tilts her head, and something about the gesture strikes Corinth as wrong—as if Wanda had become a lifeless automaton controlled by an outside force. But when Wanda speaks, Corinth understands what’s wrong. It’s not Wanda standing at the edge of the well.