The Lake of Dead Languages (29 page)

“We ought to wrap something around it to make sure it doesn’t open. Do you have any string?”

I shook my head. String? What the hell was she thinking? She opened her coat and felt the top of her jeans. “I’m not wearing a belt,” she said. “Are you?”

I opened my coat and unthreaded my belt through the belt loops of my jeans. It was made of thick, webbed cotton—I’d bought it at the army/navy store in town—with an adjustable brass buckle.

“Perfect,” Lucy said, tightening the belt around the tin and fastening the buckle. “That should hold. Let’s go.”

I had to help Lucy into the boat while she held the tin. This time I did offer to take it from her but she shook her head and held on to it more tightly.

I pushed the boat into the water and then hopped in and grabbed the oars. I turned the boat around so the prow faced the lake and I faced the shore rowing. Lucy sat behind me. When the boat grazed thicker ice she directed me.

“There’s a path of thinner ice that goes all the way through the lake,” she told me, “it must follow the underground spring.” I remembered the day we had skated here and she had gone through the ice. The place she had gone in must have been over the spring.

Twice we had to stop and I had to pass her one of the oars to chop the ice. I was afraid, each time, that she’d drop the oar into the lake and we’d be stranded out here.

“It must be deep enough here,” I said after we were stopped by the ice for the third time, but she shook her head and battered the ice with the oar. The chopping sounds reverberated
against the layer of heavy clouds and the rock wall of the Point. The jutting prow of the Point seemed close now and I could see, a little to the east, one of the three sister stones emerging from the ice, standing like a silent witness to our deed.

“We’re more than halfway across the lake,” I said. “We’re getting too close to the other shore.”

Lucy stopped hammering with the oar and looked behind her. Her hair was so damp with sweat that it had frozen together in clumps and when she swung her head back to face me I could hear the sound her frozen hair made brushing against her nylon parka.

“OK,” she said, “here.”

We both looked down at the tea tin sitting in the bottom of the boat. The blue sky over golden mountains looked to me like a dream of summer during winter. I looked up at the lowering black-green sky above us and tried to remember what such a sky looked like. Lucy knelt down in the bottom of the boat and picked up the tin. She tried to hold it in one hand while using one hand to brace herself against the rim of the boat to get up. The boat careened toward the east shore and then swung back to the west, sluicing us with icy water.

“Jesus,” I said taking the tin from her, “let me have that.” I heard the stones knock together inside the tin. The whole thing felt lighter than I expected and I wondered if it would really sink to the bottom. “Let’s get this over with,” I said. I balanced the tin on the edge of the boat and looked at her. She nodded.

I leaned over, holding the tin parallel to the water’s surface in a patch Lucy had cleared of ice. I didn’t like to think of it flipping over and sinking to the bottom upside down. When it was a few inches from the surface I let it go. I watched it sink below the water and saw the blue sky and gold mountains turn pale green and then vanish into the green-black depths of the lake. I stared for a moment at the shards of white ice floating on the black water until I noticed that white crystals
were beginning to fill in the black spaces. I thought the water was freezing again in front of my eyes and I was afraid that when I looked back at how we had come the path across the lake would be sealed with ice. But when I looked up I saw that the path back to the icehouse hadn’t closed. It was the green sky above that had opened up to disgorge its burden of snow, a stream of snow so thick it felt as if the sky were falling down upon us.

E
VEN THE AIR HERE IS TAINTED, DYED A CITRINOUS
green that shimmers under the frosted dome like green Jell-O. We spend the day splashing in murky water the same color and temperature as the air. Or Olivia swims and I lie in a plastic lawn chair staring up at the pale green bubble of sky. We play putt-putt on spiky green plastic grass. We eat our meals at a restaurant next to the pool and so even our food tastes like chlorine. Our room’s only window looks onto the interior dome. By the third day I’ve lost all sense of night and day; it seems like we’ve been here for years, not days. When I turn out the light for bedtime, the green light from the dome seeps through the cracks in the curtains. Even Olivia is restless and spends the night clinging to me in the oversized bed. I awake, tangled in her damp hair, breathing in its comforting smell of bleach and salt.

I thought it made sense to stay in a hotel with an indoor pool, so I spent the last of my savings on two weeks at the Westchester Aquadome. When I gave Dean Buehl the phone number she asked how long I planned to stay and I realized that I might not have a job anymore. When I told her I didn’t know she said to call her in two weeks and we’d talk it over.

“Take some time to think about what you really want to do, Jane.” The words sounded familiar and I realized it was the
same thing she had said to me the day I graduated from Heart Lake. She’d come down to the train station to see some of the younger girls off. She did this every year and usually she was a cheerful sight, calling a hearty “see you next year” and waving her handkerchief at the departing trains. But that year a lot of girls wouldn’t be coming back. Two students and a town boy had drowned in the lake and a teacher had been let go because she had somehow been involved. Parents reacted by pulling out their children and their money. I saw Miss Buehl first on the opposite side of the tracks, the northbound side, fussing nervously over Albie, trying, unsuccessfully, to slick back her pale wisps of hair into a large bow pinned to the back of her head. When she saw me she hurried over the bridge leaving Albie looking small and lost beside a tower of matching monogrammed suitcases.

“I wanted to wish you luck at Vassar, Jane,” Miss Buehl said when she had crossed to the southbound side. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be getting out now.”

“Have that many girls been pulled out?” I asked.

“About half,” she said, lowering her voice. “Of course, we’ll get more girls, but not of the same sort.”

“Albie’s been pulled out?” I asked in a low voice even though the girl couldn’t possibly hear us from across the track.

“I’m afraid Albie’s been kicked out,” Miss Buehl said in a quaking whisper, leaning her head close to mine. I thought I smelled liquor on her breath and I noticed for the first time how haggard she looked. “We discovered it was she who broke the fanlight over the doors to the mansion. She threw half a dozen rocks through it.”

“Really? Albie did that?” It was hard for me to imagine frail little Albie having the strength to throw even one rock that high.

“Yes, I tried to argue on her behalf, but then there were other infractions, curfew breaking, erratic behavior …”

“Where is she going?” I asked, trying to keep from stealing
a look across the tracks. I felt sure she was watching us and that she guessed she was the topic of our whispered conversation.

“St. Eustace,” Miss Buehl answered.

“Oh.”
St. Useless.
The school Deirdre’d been so afraid she’d end up at. I did look at Albie then, but she had turned away from us and set her small, pinched face into an expression of bland indifference, as if she were on her way to a tedious but necessary luncheon, and not to the Siberia of girls’ boarding schools. Then the northbound train pulled in and blocked my view of her.

“So you see how lucky you are, Jane,” Miss Buehl had said to me. “You can put this whole thing behind you and take some time to think about what you really want to do. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” She said it like she almost envied me. That she wished she were getting out, too. But then I might have imagined that. After all, Heart Lake was her whole life.

T
HIS TIME SHE DIDN’T TELL ME
I
HAD MY WHOLE LIFE
ahead of me. We both knew my options were limited, they had narrowed to … what? Did I even have more than one option? “Maybe it’s not too late to work things out with your husband,” she had added instead.

I suppose she would feel better firing me if she knew I had somewhere to go.

The idea of working things out with Mitch was the furthest thing from my mind when I came here, but he has been unexpectedly kind.

He joins us for dinner almost every night and has even offered to pay part of my hotel bill. When I told him, on the first day while we both watched Olivia swimming in the pool, about what the police had found in the lake along with Aphrodite’s body, he thought I meant, at first, that the baby in the tea tin had been Aphrodite’s. I had to explain, for what seemed like the hundredth time since the diver had emerged
from the lake with that tin, that the baby belonged to my old roommate Deirdre Hall. I told him, as I told the police and Dean Buehl, that Lucy and I had helped her by sinking the tin in the lake.

“Are they charging you with anything?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Good,” he said. “You were a minor and you were only an accomplice in disposing of the body. The baby was dead at birth, right?”

I nodded. “That’s what Lucy told me.”

He paused for a moment, perhaps seeing my uncertainty. Even as I assured him, I realized I was no longer so sure. Maybe it’s being in this place—the warm humid air and the way voices echo under the dome. Since I’ve been here I’ve remembered standing in that damp, overheated dorm corridor listening to a thin wail of crying. “Well, if it was a lie, it was Lucy’s lie. You should be OK. I’ll call Herb Stanley in the morning.” Herb Stanley was Mitch’s lawyer. He’d drawn up our separation agreement. “Don’t talk to anyone without consulting him first. You say you knew this police officer back in school?”

“He was Matt and Lucy’s cousin. I met him once or twice.”

Mitchell smiled at me. “An old boyfriend?”

I was surprised to detect a note of jealousy in his tone.

I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered holding hands with Roy Corey on the swimming beach, stroking my hand along his face. “Not exactly,” I said.

“Not exactly no either. Maybe he still likes you.” I thought of the way Roy Corey flinched when I touched his arm. No, I didn’t think he liked me, but I wasn’t obliged to tell Mitchell that.

“You’re looking good by the way. That north country air must agree with you.”

I saw his eyes moving up and down my body and I felt, suddenly, self-conscious in my bathing suit. It was true I had
lost weight over the fall semester, finally shedding the pounds I’d gained having Olivia. I knew Mitch had minded how I’d changed after Olivia was born. And I had minded how he minded.

“I’m sure Roy Corey is busy with his job right now. Aphrodite’s … I mean Melissa’s death will probably be declared a suicide, but now he’s got this other body…”

I stopped myself, appalled at how the word “body” echoed in the watery air. I lowered my voice and went on. “They’re going to exhume Deirdre Hall’s body—she was buried in Philadelphia—and Matt Toller’s body.”

I stopped again, remembering the day they found Matt and Lucy. Although it had felt like spring the night I went to meet Matt at the icehouse, it had been a false spring. One of those premature February thaws we get in the Adirondacks. Overnight the temperature had plunged and the lake froze over again. They tried sawing holes in the ice the way they used to for the ice harvest. It turned out that the extension agent had all the equipment and had been thinking of doing an ice harvest for a history demonstration. When they couldn’t find the bodies, though, they brought in a small ice cutter from the Hudson and tore the whole lake apart.

I was in the woods behind the icehouse on the day they found them. The divers carried the bodies into the icehouse while they sent for the family to identify them. It must have been hard on the divers, pulling that tangle of limbs up from the lake bottom. They stood on the shore afterward, smoking cigarettes, their backs to the icehouse. One skipped a stone over the water, but stopped because there was too much broken ice. They didn’t notice me when I came down from the woods and stood in the doorway.

They had laid the bodies on one of the ledges where they used to store the slabs of ice. At first I thought they’d only found Matt, but then I saw, tangled in his hair, the small hand and, nestled below his ribs on the side farthest from me, in the shadow of the ledge, her face, pressed against his chest.

They had been bleached clean by the lake, their flesh the same marble white. It was hard to tell where his body stopped and hers began.

“I
THOUGHT YOU SAID IT COULDN’T BE
M
ATT’S BABY
.” Mitchell’s voice broke into the memory of those twisted limbs.

I took a deep breath of the warm chlorinated air.

“I may have gotten it wrong,” I told Mitchell. “Roy Corey seems to have some other idea.”

When I told Roy Corey what had happened—from the day I came back to the school early to the last argument between Matt and Lucy—he didn’t seem completely surprised. “I thought something was wrong that night Matt left to hitch back to Corinth. He said he’d gotten a letter from Lucy and he was afraid he’d ‘really messed something up.’ He wouldn’t tell me what. I was afraid … well, never mind what I was afraid of. We’ll have our answers in two weeks.”

That’s how long it would take to get the results of the DNA tests. They’d found an aunt of Deirdre’s who agreed to the exhumation. As for Matt, Cliff and Hannah Toller had both died in a car accident four years after their children’s deaths. Ironically, Matt’s next of kin was now Roy Corey. I asked if he’d call me when he got the results.

“Oh, you’ll be hearing from me, Jane,” he said.

“A
T LEAST HE DIDN’T TELL YOU TO STAY IN
C
ORINTH,”
Mitchell said. “That’s a good sign.”