The Ghost Orchid (28 page)

“I knew you would be able to find her,” Aurora Latham says. “It proves you’re her real mother, doesn’t it?”

“You didn’t know?” Corinth asks, rising to her feet. The top of the well is still ten feet above her head. The walls are smooth marble, with no cracks to use as handholds.

“Do you think I would have willingly harbored your bastard all these years if I had known?”

“Then we were both deceived,” Corinth says, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. She thinks of how badly Aurora treated her own children and thanks God that Alice survived.

“Do you really expect me to believe that? That you didn’t conspire with my husband to set up your own spawn here and then, when my own children had been murdered, to take my place? Why else did he bring you here?”

“You don’t really believe that Milo would murder his own children—” She stops as a shadow moving across the well tells her that Wanda is still in the crypt. If she tells Aurora that it was Wanda who was responsible for the children dying, Aurora will turn on her—and then Alice will have no one to protect her if Corinth doesn’t get out of this well alive.

“I thought you asked for me,” she says instead, “for the séances—”

“He pretended it was my idea, but I knew he was only trying to establish you here as my replacement. I went along with it because I thought a séance would be an opportune place to die—especially for a man with a weak heart.”

“So you planned to give him the hellebore all along? How did you disguise the taste?”

“In that damned scotch he’s so proud of,” Aurora says with a touch of pride in her voice.

“But what about Frank Campbell? Was he part of your plan as well?”

“Not originally, but then he figured out what was happening and threatened to unmask me. I had to stop him. Fortunately, Norris here is a good shot with a bow—or with a gun.” Corinth sees Wanda’s head appear beside Aurora’s. The moonlight catches on something metal in her hands. Corinth crouches down in the darkest part of the well, away from the swatch of moonlight. “I was in favor of having you die slowly in the well,” Aurora says, “but Norris has some heathenish notion that you might curse Bosco that way. So I’ll leave you to her.”

Before Corinth can think of anything else to say, Aurora is gone. Not that there’s anything she could have said, she realizes. How could anyone reason with a woman who’d sickened her own children and then, when they actually died, blamed her husband for their deaths and planned his murder. She hears an echo of laughter in her head and feels the scars around her wrists tighten, as if the ropes that had made them were still there. Yes, that was what had fueled Mr. Oswald’s murderous rage, she realizes now, many years later, his need to blame someone for what he had done to his wife. She waits for the sound of Aurora’s footsteps to recede and then tries to reason with Wanda.

“She’ll never let you have Alice,” she says. “Even if she’s not hers, she bears the Latham name. She’ll destroy her.”

“I’ll take care of Alice, better than you could, at least.”

“I can take her out of here,” Corinth says, “with Tom—”

“Tom Quinn?” Wanda laughs, the sound echoing off the marble walls and reverberating in Corinth’s chest, which feels as tight as it did that night Oswald had bound the ropes around her. “Don’t you know he was working for Latham all along? He was hired to make sure your séances were impressive enough to satisfy Mrs. Latham. He betrayed you, just as you betrayed him. Why should I trust Alice to either of you?”

Corinth sees moonlight catch the gun in Wanda’s hand, and then there’s a flash and a shower of sparks, as if the moon had exploded. It feels as though a chip of the moon has broken off and flown into her heart, an icy splinter that turns to fire in her flesh as she falls back onto the rocks.

Above her she can see the moon, brilliant and white, so large it seems to fill up the entire oculus, so large that she can feel its pull on the water of the spring, feel the water yearning upward to it. She wills her own spirit up toward the moon, anything to keep from being trapped down here, but then she hears the sound of stone moving against stone and the moon is eclipsed, leaving her alone in the darkness with nothing but the muttering of the spring for company.

Chapter Twenty-three

Just before we are set to leave for town, Daria decides that she ought to stay behind with Zalman. “Aunt Diana gets busy in the office sometimes and loses track of time,” she tells us.

I’m surprised that the girl would give up a trip to town to sit with a middle-aged poet, but when I say so, Daria shakes her head very seriously. “Zalman’s such a sweetie, and besides, I feel kind of responsible for his accident. If I’d given him the right message from his grandmother in the first place, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen down the stairs.”

“Do you think Daria’s right?” I ask Nat as he steers the Range Rover down the curving icy road to the front gate. Nat, his eyes glued to the road, laughs. “About what? That Zalman’s a sweetie?”

“No, we all know
that,
” I say, stealing a glance at Nat’s profile to see that he’s smiling. In all the publicity photos I’ve ever seen of him his face is turned to the right, casting the right side of his face in shadow. I notice now that there’s a small scar on his right cheekbone—a quarter-inch indentation that looks as if it might have come from either a bad case of adolescent acne or childhood chicken pox. It makes me realize how hard he works to keep some parts of himself hidden. “Do you think she’s right about the message she got on the phone—that it really was Zalman’s grandmother trying to warn him?”

“Considering everything else that’s happened here, I don’t see why it matters,” Nat says.

“Yeah, but everything else has to do with Bosco and with what happened here in 1893. Last night I felt like the house and the gardens had come alive, that the place itself is taking all of us over. What I wonder is if it matters who this is happening to.”

Nat takes his eyes off the road for a moment to look at me. I’m afraid that I’ve said it all wrong, that he’ll think I’m trying to make myself sound important, that I agree with Zalman that my being the first medium to return to Bosco is the reason the spirits of the children have awoken, but when Nat speaks, his voice is kind and hoarse with feeling. “It always matters who it’s happening to,” he says. “In the end that’s all that really does matter.”

At City Hall I see why Bethesda sent Nat. Although the young female clerk starts out by explaining that genealogy searches always take at least a week to process, as soon as Nat explains that he’s engaged in very important research for his next novel, she concedes that since it’s not too busy today, she could go have a look at the records for 1883 herself.

“That would be great, Katy,” Nat says, plucking her name from the gold ID necklace at her neck. “I promise I’ll mention you in the acknowledgments. Should we check back in half an hour?”

Leaving the blushing clerk, we wander down the echoing hallway. “People love that ‘researching a novel’ line,” Nat tells me. “They all want to be part of the process.”

“Yeah, well, it helps if you’re a famous novelist,” I say.
And good-looking,
I almost add.

“Why?” Nat asks. “Do you think she recognized me?” He looks hopeful for a moment, but then he shakes his head. “Unless you’ve been on
Oprah,
no one in the real world—I mean the world outside of MFA programs and writers’ retreats—is going to recognize who you are.” He looks downcast for a moment, but then, passing a glass door etched with the words
Conference Room,
his face brightens. “Hey, I think I attended a hearing here once—one of my grandfather’s many frivolous lawsuits
trying to reclaim the family’s inheritance.
If it’s the same room, there’s a cool mural.”

Nat opens the door an inch and when he’s sure the room is empty, he motions for me to follow him in. The light from the frost-covered windows is so faint that I can hardly make out the painting on the wall, but then, as if emerging from an early morning fog, the figures take shape as a tribe of Native Americans gathered around something that looks like a miniature volcano.

“ ‘His grateful Iroquois followers lead Sir William Johnson to High Rock Spring,’ ” Nat quotes—not, apparently, from any plaque or inscription, but from memory. “This painting really pissed my grandfather off.”

“Why?”

“Oh, everything pissed him off. He was a mean old bastard. My mother said it was because his own father disowned him when he refused to follow in his footsteps and go to medical school. He was always in court trying to reclaim his legacy: a house here in Saratoga and a bunch of properties in the Adirondacks. The cabin he managed to get back or, as he put it,
‘wrest back from the hands of some dirty half-breed Indians.’
” Nat laughs bitterly. “I guess it really galled him to have his case heard under the watchful eyes of the Iroquois Nation.” He turns away from the mural and looks at me as if surprised that I’m there. “Sorry,” he says. “White Protestant guilt is so lame. I’d better get back and see what Katy’s dug up. Want to wait here?”

Guessing that Nat might want to conduct the rest of his flirtation in private, I nod and sit down in a chair in front of the mural. What has struck me, listening to Nat talk about his grandfather, is that even though our families couldn’t be more different, we’re both suffering from a similar malaise. An inherited dysfunction. In my own case a family history of bad luck with men that, according to Mira, goes back to my great-grandmother, and in Nat’s case it’s a sort of inherited meanness that he reverts to almost reflexively and yet that I sense is not his true nature. There’s this more-generous person trying to get out.

After waiting for another thirty minutes in the cold courtroom with only the solemn glare of the Iroquois for company, my view of Nat’s generous nature begins to fray around the edges. It seems as if he’s completely forgotten me. When he comes back, though, he looks so stunned that I don’t have the heart to complain. He’s holding several slips of paper in his hand as he drops heavily into the chair next to mine.

“Did you find the death certificate for the first Alice?”

He shakes his head. “There’s no record of an Alice Latham who was born and died on April ninth, 1883,” he says, “but there is a record of a birth for an Alice Latham on April fifteenth of that year.” He passes the photocopied birth certificate to me.

“So the certificate that Bethesda found at Bosco was never registered,” I say. “Do you think there was a child born on April ninth at all?”

Nat nods. “I think so, but it died like Aurora’s babies before that. Can you imagine losing so many children?”

“No,” I say, “I can’t. Aurora must have been half-mad with grief. So Milo . . . he found a child for them to adopt and they registered that child’s birth in Town Hall, but where—?”

“Bethesda is sure that Milo Latham’s affair with Corinth Blackwell started years before he brought her to Bosco. They would have known each other at his lumber mill in Corinth—”

“And in Gloversville,” I add, “where Corinth appeared at the Lyceum and Milo Latham owned a glove factory. Do you think the child could have been Corinth’s?”

“Yes. Milo would have wanted his own bloodline,” Nat says.

“But why would Aurora go along with another woman’s child being substituted for her own? And why would Corinth give up her own baby?”

“Aurora might have been so delirious she didn’t know what was going on, and Corinth wouldn’t have had much choice if she was dependent on Latham for financial support. Who knows, maybe the child was taken from her without her knowing—her own baby switched with the dead Latham baby.”

“But that’s awful.”

“Who knows what these men were capable of,” Nat says in a curiously dead voice.

“
These
men?”

Nat nods and points to a line on Alice Latham’s birth certificate. “The doctor who signed the birth certificate was Dr. Nathaniel Murdoch of Saratoga Springs.”

“So?”

“
Murdoch
was my mother’s maiden name. Nathaniel Murdoch is my great-grandfather. I looked up my mother’s and my grandfather’s birth certificates just to make sure. That’s probably how the Sacandaga camp came into the family. Payment for favors rendered. God, I knew I was descended from a long line of bastards, but I didn’t think we actually had baby-stealers to boast of in the family tree.” Nat starts to laugh—a slow, mirthless chuckle that raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“I never knew my great-grandmother’s maiden name,” he says. “She died soon after she married my great-grandfather, and there was something in her background my grandfather was ashamed to talk about. Now I know what. I saw it on my grandfather’s birth certificate.” He passes the photocopied birth certificate over to me. Under
MOTHER’S MAIDEN NAME
I read “Violet Ramsdale.”

“So,” Nat says, turning to me, his lips contorted in a death mask’s grin, “I guess we know now where I get my writing talent.”

Nat continues to look downcast as we make our way through the deep snow to the Range Rover, which is parked on a side street beside City Hall.

“You’re not seriously upset that your great-grandmother was a novelist?” I ask.

“Violet Ramsdale wrote sensation novels. It’s not exactly a prestigious literary heritage. If it ever got out—” He rounds on me so abruptly that I nearly slip in the snow. “Listen, you can’t tell anyone about this.”

“Nathaniel Loomis,” I say, invoking his full name to get his attention, “listen to yourself. We just found out that your great-grandfather might have aided in the kidnapping of a woman’s child and what you’re worried about is being related to a popular writer?”

Nat looks away, seemingly to a road sign for County Route 9N. “I’m upset about that, too—and it’s probably all true. My grandfather said something about it once—that his father wasn’t above helping unmarried girls out of a jam by securing
‘their bastards’
good homes. And that if he hadn’t, a lot of those babies would have ended up drowned in the bogs . . .” Nat’s voice trails off and he stares into the distance—down Route 9N, where storm clouds are massing over the foothills of the Adirondacks.

“What?” I ask.

“He showed me a grave once—well, not actually a grave, just a sort of marker carved into the trunk of a tamarack tree out in the bog. He said it was some Indian girl’s
‘dead brat.’
But what I remember thinking was that it wasn’t an Indian name.”

“Was it Alice?”

Nat closes his eyes. “It could have been. I can’t remember.”

“That cabin belonged to Milo Latham in 1883. Corinth could have had the baby there—”

“And Latham could have switched it with his own dead child.” Nat points down the road. “It’s only an hour’s drive from here—more by horseback then, of course, but you could have made it in a day, for sure.”

Nat opens the Range Rover, and before I can get my seat belt on, he’s pulled out and is headed north on 9N, heading in the opposite direction from Bosco.

“Nat, we can’t go there
now.
There’s a storm coming. They won’t know what happened to us back at Bosco.” I remember, too, that last image I had of the circle of guests in the breakfast room replaced by lifeless dolls, and I realize I’m afraid of what might be happening there while we’re gone.

Nat stops at the next stop sign, puts the car in park, and turns to face me. “Don’t you want to know?” he asks, his eyes gleaming feverishly in the white light of the approaching storm. “Don’t you want to know the story?”

I look away from Nat to the northern sky, where storm clouds are pleating the sky like tracks in the snow. Yes, I do want to know the story, and something—some instinct that I have spent my life denying—tells me that the answer is at the camp on the Sacandaga. When I look at the gathering storm clouds, though, I’m seized with a sense of dread, the same dread that came over me last night when I was with David, that sickening sense that the ground beneath my feet was giving way and that
something
was pulling me under. And then this morning I realized why the feeling was familiar. I remembered that it’s what I had felt during the spirit circle my mother conducted when I was twelve and what I’ve felt every time I’ve dared to get close to anyone since then. It suddenly angers me—the way Nat’s squeamishness at being related to Mrs. Ramsdale angered me a moment ago. What kind of way was that to live? Mired in the past. David said I’d have to trust someone someday, but what he should have said was that sooner or later I’d have to learn to trust myself.