The Lake of Dead Languages (12 page)

And I will spend the vacation with Olivia. I’ve rented a room at the Westchester Aquadome for two whole weeks. It’s all the salary I’ve saved so far, but it will be worth it. We’ll swim in the hotel pool and I’ll take her into the city to see the Rockettes and
The Nutcracker.
We’ll go skating at Rockefeller Center. Far better than skating on the lake, I tell her, which at any rate remains stubbornly unfrozen.

Gwendoline Marsh tells me at the faculty Christmas party that the first ice club has been disbanded. Gwen looks almost pretty tonight. She’s got on her usual high-necked white blouse, but tonight she’s wearing it with a long brown velvet skirt that makes her waist look tiny. Instead of Ace bandages, her wrists are encircled by broad Victorian cuff bracelets. She’s even teased out a few tendrils from her usually severe bun and curled them into ringlets that tremble as she shakes her head over the lake’s unwillingness to cooperate and freeze. Myra Todd overhears our conversation and comes over to commiserate.

“I blame global warming,” she says. “The lake was always frozen by mid-December.”

Simon Ross, the math teacher, volunteers that the lake was only good for skating four days the previous year.

“It might not freeze at all.”

I turn around to see who has uttered this pessimistic prediction and see that it is Dr. Lockhart. She is wearing a silver dress that shimmers in the Christmas lights strung around the Music Room.

“It’ll freeze when we’re all away on holiday,” I tell her. “When we come back, everything will look different. The school always does, after break.” It may be the two glasses of champagne I’ve drunk, but I find myself oddly cheerful.

“Well, it’ll do us all good to get away,” Gwen Marsh says. “Imagine staying here through the whole break. I hear they used to let the scholarship girls do that to earn extra money.”

“How inhuman,” Dr. Lockhart says, taking a sip of her drink. “Imagine how depressing that must have been for those girls. Did you ever do that, Jane? Stay here during break?”

I notice that everyone is looking at me. I’m an old girl and so an authority on old Heart Lake customs, but no one has ever publicly mentioned before that I was a scholarship student. I wonder how Dr. Lockhart knows, but then I remember those files.

“In tenth and eleventh grade,” I answer. “It wasn’t so bad. My roommates were scholarships, too, so we all stayed. Our Latin teacher, Helen Chambers, stayed on campus and so did Miss Buehl.” I say the last bit loudly enough for Dean Buehl to hear and she comes over, one eyebrow raised inquiringly. “I was just saying that you were always here over Christmas break. We helped you collect ice samples.”

Dean Buehl nods. “Some of the younger girls even stayed with me at my cottage.”

“How kind of you, Dean Buehl,” Gwen Marsh says. “I wonder if any girls would want to stay here with me over break?”

It occurs to me that I haven’t asked Gwen what her plans are for the break. What if she’s stuck here all by herself? I know she has an apartment in town, but I certainly hope she isn’t spending her Christmas alone.

“Oh, I never minded,” Dean Buehl is saying to Gwen. “It was company and I took the girls skating with me. I always wanted to have an old-fashioned ice harvest,” she says, “like the Crevecoeurs had.”

Everyone is immediately fascinated with the idea of an ice harvest. Meryl North describes the icehouse on the other side of the lake at the mouth of the Schwanenkill and explains how even in summer there would still be blocks of ice packed in sawdust. Tacy Beade remembers that when she was a student here they used the ice to make ice sculptures. I notice that as soon as the older teachers come over Dr. Lockhart slips away from the group. I’ve seen her avoid them before and I can’t say I blame her as they both have a habit of droning on endlessly. When Myra Todd starts corralling people into an ice harvest committee (Gwen, I notice, immediately volunteers to do most of the work), I follow Candace Lockhart over to the drinks table that has been laid out under the Crevecoeur family portrait. She is standing with her back to the room, seemingly absorbed in the photograph of India Crevecoeur and her daughters, posing in ice skating costumes on the frozen lake.

“You’d think after the failure of their first ice club they wouldn’t be so gung-ho about an ice harvest,” she says as I help myself to some lukewarm Chardonnay.

“Well, it’s tricky catching the first ice. We always tried …”

“Did you ever see it?”

“I was actually at the lake the night the ice formed my junior year,” I tell her, “but, if you can believe this, I fell asleep.”

“So you missed it,” she says smiling into her drink, something clear and fizzy with ice. “Like you missed that last Christmas break.”

“Excuse me?”

She shakes the ice in her empty glass. “You said you spent the break here tenth and eleventh grade, but not in twelfth. And that’s when your roommate, Lucy Toller, first tried to kill herself. That’s what started it all, wasn’t it? You must have wondered at times if things would have been different if you’d been here.” She turns away from me to refill her glass with club soda. I hear something crack and think it must be the glass in my hand, but it’s only the ice in Dr. Lockhart’s drink, settling in the warm liquid.

“I was in Albany,” I tell her, “with my mother, who was dying of stomach cancer. In fact, she died the day before New Year’s.”

“Oh, Jane,” she says, “I didn’t mean to imply it was your fault what happened. Only that you might feel that way. What is it that the poet says about remorse …?”

I look at Dr. Lockhart blankly, unable to think of any appropriate line, but of course it’s Gwen, who’s overheard our conversation, who thinks of one. “‘Remorse,’ as Emily Dickinson says, ‘—is Memory—awake.’”

O
N THE
M
ONDAY BEFORE BREAK
A
PHRODITE DOESN’T
come to class. I ask Athena and Vesta where she is and they tell me that she went out early that morning to take a walk around the lake and they haven’t seen her since.

After class I go straight to Dean Buehl and report Aphrodite’s absence.

“We’ll go to her room right now,” Dean Buehl tells me.

I am not wild about being in my old dorm room with Dean Buehl, but what choice do I have? Walking from the mansion to the dorm I find myself looking at the Point, which blocks our view of the northeast cove and the swimming beach. I pull my collar up around my neck and start to shake.

“This morning’s weather forecast says the temperature will be in the single digits by nightfall. If we can’t find her by dusk we’ll have to call the State Police and organize a search
party. She’ll never make it through the night in that kind of cold.” Dean Buehl and I look at each other and I think we are remembering the same thing—a cold night twenty years ago when I showed up at the door of her cottage. Dean Buehl blushes and looks away first as if she were the one who was embarrassed at the memory.

At the dorm we find Athena and Vesta sitting at their desks with their books open. There is something wrong about the picture, I think. Something stagy about the way their books are laid out and how intently they lean over them. I sniff the air for cigarette smoke and smell, instead, gingerbread. The smell, with its connotations of holiday baking, confuses me. There are no ovens in the dorm. Then I realize what it is: air freshener. The girls were expecting us.

Dean Buehl sits on one of the beds and I stand because the other bed is covered with dirty laundry and it feels strange to sit on the same bed with the dean.

Dean Buehl asks the girls if Melissa seemed upset when she left this morning. The girls exchange guilty glances.

“Um, well, actually we’re not even sure she was here this morning. When we woke up she wasn’t in the single. There’s something on her bed, but it’s not a note or anything—it’s just some dumb poem.”

Dean Buehl and I both look at the door of the single, which is still closed. She nods to me and I open the door and look inside. The bed is neatly made. On its pillow lies a sheet of paper with blue printing. Perhaps it is the blue writing that makes me realize what it is. Who uses mimeographs anymore? Dean Buehl passes me in the doorway and without removing the page from the bed, reads the first two lines: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sound by the shore …” and I finish the poem aloud: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

H
OW
’
D YOU KNOW THAT?
” A
THENA ASKS.
“M
ELISSA’S
been repeating that poem for days. Are you the one who gave it to her?”

Dean Buehl, still standing above the single bed, looks my way.

“No,” I say. “It’s just something I remember. We read it when I was in school.”

Athena and Vesta shake their heads as if to say
Teachers! Who knows what junk they carry around in their heads!

“Girls,” Dean Buehl says, “run down to the matron and ask for a plastic bag, then come right back up. Don’t talk to anyone.”

The girls scurry out of the room, glad, I think, to be away from us. Dean Buehl moves as if to sit on the edge of Melissa’s bed and then thinks better of it and sits on the window ledge. When she looks up at me I think she’ll ask the same question Athena asked.
How did you know that poem?
But she doesn’t. Maybe she assumes her old girls ought to know their Yeats.

“I’m going to my office to call the police,” she says. “You’re to follow with Athena and Vesta, but give me half an hour to make the call—no, make it an hour. I don’t want them to overhear what I have to say to the police.”

“What do you think has happened to her?”

Dean Buehl shakes her head. “I just don’t know … it’s all so odd … that poem—it’s the same one that girl left in her journal twenty years ago … that Hall girl.”

“Deirdre.”

“Yes, Deirdre Hall. Right before she jumped off the Point. My God. This was her room, wasn’t it?” She looks around her and then she looks at me standing in the doorway, noticing for the first time, I think, my reluctance to step over the threshold into the small room. She shakes her head. “What the hell is going on here?”

I
T IS ONLY
3:30
WHEN
A
THENA
, V
ESTA, AND
I
REACH
D
EAN
Buehl’s office, but already the sun is low behind the mansion, its last rays skating across the lake and filling the room with their deep golden light. The State Police officer, in a chair facing Dean Buehl’s desk, has to shield his eyes from the glare. All I can make out of him is the copper glow of his hair in the sunlight. I usher the two girls in ahead of me and Gwen Marsh, who is sitting on a couch to the side of the desk, gestures for them to sit on either side of her. She slips an arm around each girl even though both of Gwen’s arms are wrapped in Ace bandages. Dr. Lockhart, who is standing with her back to the room, looks at the girls, then at me, and then turns back to the window.

“This is the teacher I was telling you about. Jane Hudson,” Dean Buehl says to the police officer.

The officer rises slowly to his feet and turns toward me. “Yes,” he says, “Miss Hudson and I have met before.”

For a moment the air around me seems to shimmer, as if the light the lake throws into the room was lapping up against me. It’s that feeling I’ve had that the lake, as it moves toward freezing, is churning up the past, casting its secrets into the light of day. And now look whom it’s cast up—Matt.

But then he takes a step toward me, out of the glare, and the copper hair fades to dark brown streaked with gray, the
golden skin ages and sallows. Not Matt. Maybe what Matt would have looked like if he’d lived many years past his eighteenth birthday.

“It’s Roy Corey, isn’t it?” I ask, reaching out my hand. He takes my hand and holds it for a moment, really holds it instead of shaking it, and I’m surprised and gladdened by the warmth. “Of course I remember you. You’re Matt and Lucy’s cousin. We met once.”

He drops my hand rather suddenly and that warmth is replaced by a sudden chill in the air. The sun has gone down behind Main Hall and the gold glow goes out of the lake like a light that’s been switched off. I feel inexplicably that I’ve disappointed this man, yet, I think I’m doing pretty well to have remembered as much as I have. After all it’s been twenty years and we only met that once.

He turns his back to me and sits down. Dean Buehl gestures for me to sit in the other chair in front of her desk. “Detective Corey was just saying we ought to check the Schwanenkill icehouse,” Dean Buehl tells me.

“I believe your Heart Lake girls have made a habit over the years of meeting town boys down there.”

I find myself blushing. I’m sure he’s said this to embarrass me—he knows as well as I do what used to go on in that icehouse.

“This Melissa Randall, did she have a boyfriend?” he asks.

Dean Buehl tells him that she did, but that he’s at Exeter.

“Anybody call to see if he’s still there?”

Dean Buehl places the call and speaks to the headmaster. Twenty minutes later he rings back and puts Brian Worthington on the line. At a signal from Corey, Dean Buehl hits the speakerphone so we all can hear Brian Worthington swear he hasn’t been out of New Hampshire since Thanksgiving break.

“When was the last time you heard from Melissa?” the dean asks him.

“Night before last,” he answers. “I knew something was
up when she didn’t call last night. She calls every night.” I can hear the weariness in his voice and I’m not sure whom to feel sorrier for, him or Melissa. “She hasn’t done anything stupid, has she?”

Dean Buehl explains that Melissa is missing. She asks Brian to please let the authorities know if Melissa should show up at Exeter and promises to call as soon as she knows anything. When she gets off the phone, Athena raises her hand as if she were in class.

“Yes, Ellen?”

“Melissa said she was going to the hall phone to call Brian at around ten last night. We heard her talking to someone on the phone.”