The Ghost Orchid (29 page)

“Okay,” I say, turning to Nat, “let’s go.”

We drive north on Route 9N and then turn west toward the Great Sacandaga Lake, the reservoir created by the damming of the Sacandaga River in the thirties. As we follow the reservoir road around the lake, the terrain becomes increasingly dreary. We pass white farmhouses that look in disrepair, their paint peeling, black shutters hanging crooked, and their barns collapsing into themselves in fields where unmowed stubble sticks out of the deep snow. We pass aluminum-sided trailers listing windward in sunken hollows beside the road. We pass through deep patches of fog, so thick that I can’t make out the lake just beyond the road. The fog is so deep that I can barely see the sign for the “Indian Point Overlook” that Nat points out.

“I always begged my grandfather to stop there,” Nat says as we drive by the sign, “but he never would. I told him that I’d heard it was a battle site from the French and Indian Wars, because I knew he loved stuff like that, but he said it was just some local legend about an Indian girl throwing herself over the cliff because her boyfriend left her. He called me ‘squaw boy’ for the rest of the summer and I stopped asking to go there.”

I feel chilled by the story. The dead girl. The shamed little boy. I also remember Zalman’s poem linking the statue of Ne’Moss-i-Ne at Bosco to a girl who threw herself off a cliff and wonder if the sign might name the Indian girl. “Let’s go back and look at it,” I say.

Nat looks at me with a flash of gratitude that heats the air between us, and then swerves the Range Rover into a U-turn, its back end fishtailing on the fog-slick road. He drives us back to the overlook and pulls into a semicircular drive underneath a pine tree and next to a garbage can. A sign pointing to a gap between the pines reads, “Scenic Overlook .5 mile.”

“We’re not going to get much of a view today,” Nat says.

“That’s okay,” I say. “We’re not here for the view.”

Nat nods and gets out of the car and starts up the path. By the time I zip up my parka and follow him, I can barely make out his back five feet in front of me through the vaporous fog that rises from the deep snow. It’s easier to follow in his deep footsteps in the snow than to keep an eye on him. Easier, too, to stay in his tracks than to make my own. I’m concentrating so hard on fitting my feet into his tracks that I run into him at the end of the trail, nearly knocking him off his feet. He clenches my arm hard with one hand and grabs a metal sign pole with the other to keep us both from toppling into the abyss. Inches from our feet stretches a white void.

“ ‘On this spot,’ ” Nat reads in a deep, sonorous voice, “ ‘an Iroquois maiden running from invading French and Algonquin forces to warn the British army fell to her death. She died a heroine of the French and Indian Wars.’ I knew it had something to do with the French and Indian Wars. My grandfather said it was
bullshit.
That it was just another pregnant Indian girl doing away with herself.”

There’s a note of vindication in Nat’s voice, but when I look at him I see that there’s no triumph in his expression. Instead there’s a look of immeasurable sadness—as if he’d been personally acquainted with the “Indian maiden.” I look away from him and over the cliff, into the swirling fog, into a space where the thick white cloud thins and then tears like a run in a stocking. I’m staring over the edge of the cliff at the lake. I can feel myself getting dizzy, but I’m unable to pull away.

“Hey,” Nat says, pulling me back from the edge. “You don’t want to end up like one of those Indian girls dashed on the rocks below. I mean, things aren’t that bad with
the gardener,
are they?”

I look up, startled by the nastiness in his voice. Five minutes ago he’d seemed like a wounded boy, and now . . . Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a wounded boy might strike out at the nearest target. What does surprise me is the undercurrent of jealousy in his voice. “He’s a landscape architect, not a gardener.” I’m trying to keep my voice neutral, but it comes out icy instead. “And there’s really nothing going on between us at all.”

“Oh,” Nat says. He turns away quickly, but not before I’ve seen him smile.

As I follow, both of us sticking to the tracks Nat made on the way in, I wonder what in the world all that was about. I know that Nat’s been irritated by David since we all arrived at Bosco, but I always thought it was an almost reflexive rivalry between the two men. Now I wonder if it’s developed into something more—and if it has something to do with me. I also wonder why I was so quick to deny that anything was going on between me and David.

I’m so engrossed in these thoughts that when I look up, I realize I’ve lost sight of Nat in the fog. He must be back at the car, because I can see a light in front of me that I assume is one of the Range Rover’s headlights, though it’s not exactly where I thought the parking lot should be. I head toward it, struggling through the snow, each step sinking deeper as if something were pulling my feet down into the earth. When I’ve gone another ten feet or so, I realize I’ve strayed out of Nat’s footsteps. I stop and listen for the sound of the Range Rover’s engine, but instead I hear a roaring sound—like a river in spring swollen with snowmelt. The light in front of me thins and wavers like a candle flame, and then I see her: a slim girl in a white buckskin dress, made out of fog, her eyes two holes torn out of the fog, black as raven wings. As she looks at me, I can feel the weight of betrayal in those eyes—the betrayal she suffered, the betrayal she caused. She holds out her hand to me and I step forward. The roaring sound becomes louder, and I see that I’ve come full circle to the cliff again. When I look down over the cliff now, though, instead of the placid lake I see a rushing river. Above the sound of the water I can hear the girl’s voice at my ear, murmuring seductively . . .

“Ellis, what are you doing back here?” It’s Nat, his voice breaking into the fog-girl’s seductive whisper. I turn to him and look right through her, her shape shredding into ribbons of fog.

“I—I remembered something,” I say, kneeling in the snow. I sweep an armful of snow off the edge of the cliff, which falls soundlessly into the void. Words have been carved into the rock below the snow.

“ ‘Ne’Moss-i-Ne’s Rock,’ ” Nat reads. “Damn, how did you know—”

I shake my head and get up, brushing the snow from my jeans. “I don’t know,” I say as we turn back to the car. I stay close to Nat this time, but still I can hear with every step I take the fog-girl’s whisper. “Remember me,” she’d said, “remember me.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Deep below the earth Corinth listens to her blood seeping through the rocks to join the water of the spring, which is still muttering its sad refrain,
Remember me, remember me.
She purses her lips and expels a current of precious breath into the airless well. “Shhhh . . .” The sound a mother makes to soothe a fretful child.

She shifts herself on the rocks to take the weight off the shoulder the bullet pierced. At least she got to hold her child once. Alice would be all right now. Wanda must plan to take her away—else why would she have shot Corinth and left her down in here? Maybe it was Wanda’s plan all along—to make it look as if Corinth took the child once Aurora was through with her. Aurora wouldn’t follow and expose Wanda because Wanda would then reveal that Aurora killed Milo. Perhaps Aurora even promised Wanda the child in exchange for helping her wreak her vengeance on Milo and Corinth. What, Corinth wonders now, was Tom’s price for betraying her?

Tom.
Perhaps he’d been working for Aurora as well as for Milo. Where was he now? Had he taken his fee and fled Bosco, or had Wanda’s son killed him for the part he played in aiding Milo Latham? Was he lying someplace in the garden, his own lifeblood draining into the ground? She tries to find him in the darkness. She lets her spirit flow out of her body as freely as her blood is flowing out onto the rocks. She pictures the blue bird on one of Aurora’s teacups, the blue of its wings bleeding into the surrounding white, and imagines her spirit as that bird, a blue whiff of smoke with wings, rising into a white sky. But just when she feels her spirit rising to the top of the well, she’s held back by the cold marble and she can feel it trembling there like the wings of a trapped bird beating the stagnant air. She can feel the panic rising in her as her spirit slams back into her torn flesh. Quickly she pushes the spirit out of her again, but this time she sends it downward, through the cracks between the rocks and into the pipes, where it snakes below the rose garden and the grotto and into the hillside through a hundred copper pipes, pushing the water aside to surface for one last gasp.

Standing in the center of the rose garden in a sea of fallen crimson petals, Tom pauses and listens. All he hears, though, is silence.
Damn it, Cory,
he says to himself,
I’ve done what you told me to.
She was right, of course. Not ten minutes after she and Wanda left, he saw the driver get ready to make his move, but Tom was too quick for him. He hit him hard enough to kill him, but Tom was pretty sure he was still alive. He bound him with a rope that he found coiled in the man’s overcoat pocket—no doubt meant for Tom—and left him in the hedges. They could decide what to do with him later—but where is Corinth? Did she let herself be overpowered by Mrs. Norris?

He turns in a slow circle, even his footsteps queerly silent on the soft red carpet, but the rose garden is empty except for the marble Indian girl, who holds her bound hands out to him as if imploring him to release her.

For a moment he is back in the Lyceum Theater in Gloversville, watching helplessly as Corinth is bound tighter and tighter until something breaks his spell of inertia: a voice, as if speaking inside his own head, calling his own name.

He stares at the statue of the Indian girl and realizes why it’s so quiet. The water from the fountain has stopped flowing. Instead, where jets of water leapt around the statue, a faint breeze stirs the water, swirling the rose petals on its surface into loops and eddies that form, as he watches, three letters.

TOM.

He blinks and his name is gone. A sudden gust of wind whips the petals on the ground into a red ribbon that leads from the fountain to the back of the garden, where the statue of the warrior with his upright sword seems to rebuke Tom for his tardiness.
Get moving,
he hears the voice inside him say—only he knows that this is his own voice.

He follows the red path beneath the statue and pauses between two cypresses to look into a round clearing where the rose-strewn path continues like a stream of blood between the white stones and bitter-smelling white flowers. At the other side of the circle he sees the housekeeper emerging from the underground crypt to look around the circle. Tom stands still in the shadow of the cypress trees, willing himself as still as the statue standing above him. He watches as Wanda Norris kneels and picks up a handful of rose petals, which she crushes in her hand and then sifts between her fingers. Then she turns and goes back down into the crypt, muttering something under her breath that sounds like a curse.

She’s waiting for her son, Tom figures. Does that mean she’s already killed Corinth?

The rose petals stir at his feet and a scent rises—Corinth’s scent—or maybe only the smell of her still on his skin, but it’s enough to convince him she’s alive. He walks out of the cypress shadows and crosses the clearing, the rose petals muffling the sound of his footsteps. They spray themselves across the marble steps so that as he creeps down into the crypt even Wanda’s keen hearing misses his approach. She’s kneeling by the side of the little Latham girl, waving some herb under her nose and chanting. Tom kneels and picks up a piece of broken rubble from the floor and raises it over Wanda’s head. He steps forward onto bare floor and at last she hears him, but it’s too late. When she turns the last thing she sees is a marble arm, one of her mistress’s statues come to life at last, descending from the sky to strike her.

In the well, Corinth breathes slowly, constricting her throat to make each breath last longer. Each breath sounds as if it’s moving through a rusty pipe. This is what she pictures herself becoming as the years pass: another pipe in the great fountain, her bones channeling the water, her flesh resurgent in the sprays and jets that flash in the sunshine. It’s not an entirely bad way to spend eternity. Even the voices of the children have ceased to bother her. They don’t blame
her,
even though it was her child they were sacrificed for. She can feel them gathered around her, as if waiting for a bedtime story, which she would be happy to oblige them with if only she could find the breath. She draws in one more breath, which feels as if it will be the last breath in all the world. As she lets it out she purses her lips to make a shushing sound. If she’s going to be trapped here for all eternity with these children, she had better at least calm them. The shushing noise, though, turns into a long, low moan—a grating cry that sounds as if the whole garden were keening for its lost children.

When Tom lowers himself down into the well, he’s relieved at first to see that Corinth’s eyes are open, but when he speaks to her she doesn’t seem to hear him. He runs his hands over her, feeling for broken bones, and feels the stickiness covering the left side of her chest and arm. He finds where the bullet went through her shoulder and where it came out.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he tells her, taking his own shirt off and tearing it into strips to bind her wound, “but I don’t think the bullet hit your heart. We’ve got to get you out of here, though. Can you put your arms around my neck?”

Corinth watches her own arms circle Tom’s neck as if watching an automaton performing tricks in one of his magic acts. She wills her body to do what he tells her to, wrapping her legs around his waist as he pulls them both up out of the well. He leans her against the wall while he drags Wanda’s body across the floor.

“She’s still breathing,” Corinth comments, surprised more at her own survival than Wanda’s.

“Well, she won’t bother us in there,” Tom says, hauling the heavy woman up to the rim of the well.

“You can’t leave her in there to die,” Corinth says, her voice still hoarse as old pipes.

“It’s what she planned for you,” Tom says, looking down at Corinth.

Corinth looks across the room to where the girl lies on the marble floor, her frail chest rising and falling under her white nightgown in the moonlight. Alice. Her child and Tom’s. But it’s Wanda who’s cared for her—killed for her—all these years. Wanda who will follow them to ends of the earth to find Alice if they leave her alive.

“All right,” she says, closing her eyes. But when Tom pushes the marble lid over the top of the well, she opens them again because for a moment she was back in the well, down in the dark with Wanda and the children.

Tom carries Alice back to the coach and Corinth walks by his side. She has to stop every few feet to rest. Through her bandages, she can still feel her blood seeping out of her, leaving a trail from the center of the maze to the hedge wall, like the ball of thread Ariadne gave to Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth, only Corinth can feel this scarlet thread attaching her to the center of the maze, pulling her back.

Tom shows her where he’s left the driver—bound and unconscious, but still breathing. “It would be better to kill him,” he says, but Corinth shakes her head. “Leave him be,” she says. “He won’t come after us.”

Tom lays Alice on the cushioned bench inside the brougham and then helps Corinth in beside her. The carpetbag she brought with her from the hotel in Saratoga is still there and, tucked beneath the seat, a small trunk with the initials
A.L.
stamped into the leather.
So Wanda had planned to take the girl away.
As Tom whips the horses into motion, Corinth sees that Alice is staring up at her. She braces herself for a reproach—or at least for the girl to ask what’s become of her caretaker—but instead Alice pushes herself forward on the seat until her head rests in Corinth’s lap, and with a deep sigh that Corinth feels reverberate through her entire body, she falls back asleep.