The Lake of Dead Languages (39 page)

Roy pulls my hands away from my eyes and when I open them I am looking directly into his eyes and I read there the hope that I have remembered something.

“What does it matter?” I say, too angry at being forced to relive that night to give him the satisfaction that he’s right, that maybe I did see something more. “It happened twenty years ago. Both Lucy and Deirdre are dead. So is Melissa Randall. Whatever she read in my journal, whatever it made her do, it’s all over now.”

“Is it?” Roy asks. “First there’s a fake suicide attempt—that’s like what Lucy did at Christmas—and then a girl drowns in the same spot Deirdre drowned. Two of the events from your senior year have recurred, but what about the last act? What about what happened to Matt and Lucy? We’ve been assuming that Melissa Randall did it all, but why? Because we found your journal with her things. But isn’t that also like what happened twenty years ago? You and Lucy tampered with Deirdre’s journal so everyone thought it was a suicide. What if someone planted your journal in Melissa’s things?”

I stare at him now not so much with anger as with horror. What he is suggesting is my worst fear, that the events set in motion twenty years ago would never really be over until they have swept over me, counting me a victim: the third girl. And really, why should I have been spared?

I close my eyes and see once again, sharper now, Lucy reaching up to grab Deirdre’s leg and know the memory’s always been there. I open my eyes again and nod. “Deirdre’s
death wasn’t an accident,” I say. “You were right. It doesn’t matter that we were young; I’m responsible for what happened back then. For Deirdre’s death, too …”

Roy puts his hand over mine. I notice the fine red hairs that catch the light reflected from the ice at the opening to the cave. “Jane,” he says, “that’s not what I meant …” I look up at him, into the green eyes that look so familiar, and then I notice the light is gone.

I turn toward the narrow entrance to the cave just in time to see the long shadow cast by the sister stone split in two and half of the broken shadow move away. It’s as if the stone’s shadow had come to life and skated away across the ice, but Roy disabuses me of this notion. Getting to his feet, he skates out of the cave and I stumble along clumsily behind him. I catch up to him on the other side of the Point where he stands watching the skaters in the west cove. There’s Dean Buehl, Tacy Beade, Meryl North, Gwendoline Marsh, Simon Ross, Myra Todd, Dr. Lockhart, Athena, Vesta, and a dozen more teachers and students. It’s impossible to say, though, which one had been listening to our conversation inside the cave.

I
HAVE THE SKATING DREAM AGAIN THAT NIGHT, ONLY IN
this dream I can hear the ice cracking beneath me, fissures erupting in the wake of my blades. I keep skating, though, around and around, in an ever-tightening circle, as if following a magnetic track laid below the ice. Whereas in the dreams I had before there was a feeling of lightness, now there is weight, a heaviness that pulls my blades deep into the ice. When I look behind me I see the fissure open into a crevasse: a pale green tunnel descending for miles beneath my feet. It occurs to me that I am no longer skating on the lake, but on Miss Buehl’s glacier. I stare into the pale green crevasse. Its walls are bubbled, like old glass, only the bubbles are moving. I look closer and see, miles beneath me yet impossibly clear, figures suspended in the ice. Matt and Lucy and Deirdre and Aphrodite, even Iris Crevecoeur, small and brown like a sepia photograph come to life, are all there, streams of bubbles spewing from their mouths.

There’s another figure in the ice, but when I move closer to see I slip into the crevasse and as I slide down, deep into the pale green ice, I can hear the ice cracking closed above me.

I awake to the sound of something cracking above my head. My room is filled with an eerie green light. The light, I realize after a moment, comes from the luminescent dial on
my alarm clock, which reads 3:33. As I stare at it something crashes on the roof above my head and skitters down the walls of my house. It sounds as if the house were bursting at its seams. I swing my legs out of the bed, half expecting to feel the floor trembling beneath my feet. I am thinking earthquake, tornado, another ice age, glaciers already on the march. But the floor, though icy cold, is reassuringly solid.

I get up and shove my bare feet into felt-lined boots and pull my down parka on over my nightgown. In the living room the crashing is louder. It sounds as if an army of raccoons were bivouacking on my roof. Raccoons? Hell, it could be bears. Wishing I had a rifle, I fling open the front door and switch on the porch lamp, hoping that any nocturnal intruder will be startled by the light just long enough for me to slam the door and call Animal Control.

Instead I see, in the nimbus of light from my porch lamp, a world made out of glass, a crystal world, like the inside of a candy Easter egg. Every branch and pine needle in the woods is glazed in ice. As I step out into the clearing in front of the house I can feel a light, needle-sharp sleet falling. Tree branches, weighed down by the ice, crack and crash to the forest floor. I should go back inside but I’m enchanted. I haven’t seen an ice storm like this since I was little. I know how dangerous they can be, dragging down power lines and taking down trees, but for the moment I’m enthralled by the precision of it. The way the ice turns each blade of grass and dead leaf into an artifact.

Between my house and the Point there’s a giant white pine. Each feathery needle is encased in ice. I can hear, above me, the rustle of them, rubbing against each other in the wind, a sound like muted chimes or bells tolling underwater. In the light from my porch they glitter like the eyes of some woodland animal, and then I think I can actually see a face of some sort of animal in the pine needles, watching. I move closer and see that the needles have twisted themselves into an animal face—a horned animal with its
bloody prey dripping from its mouth. I reach out and pull the face from the tree and feel, under the thin ice casing, metal. I am holding three interlinked hairpins: a corniculum.

I
N THE MORNING
I
GO OUT TO THE
P
OINT.
I
SCRAPE THE ICE
on the ground with my boots and shake the branches, but find not one hairpin. There’s just the three in my pocket. I walk onto the Point and look out at the lake. The storm has passed, leaving clear skies. The rising sun sets the lake on fire. I look down at the three sister stones and see that they, too, have gained a mantle of ice during the night. The third stone looks like an opal set in gold, the middle stone casts a long shadow like a crooked finger pointing toward the cave where Roy Corey and I sat yesterday. I remember how we saw that shadow, pointing in the opposite direction in the setting sun, split in two.

I look down at the three hairpins in my hand. Miss Macintosh once said that the question the reader should ask the narrator of any book is, “Why are you telling me this
now?”

I’ve been back at Heart Lake for four weeks and it has been, above all else, quiet. No messages from the past, no torn journal pages or totem hairpins or dead girls. I’d assumed it was over, that the messages had stopped because Aphrodite was dead. But apparently I had assumed wrong. Someone had been keeping quiet. So why send me this message now? A sign that would appear innocent to anyone else—what could I say: that someone was threatening me with hairpins?—but which is full of menace to me.

It
is
menace I feel, and that I have felt since yesterday when I saw the shadow split away from the stone. Someone listened to the conversation between me and Roy. Something in that conversation has awakened an avenging spirit. But what? I go over in my mind what we talked about and instantly I remember the image of Lucy toppling Deirdre into the lake. I’m standing now at just the place where I stood the
night Deirdre fell. To my left is the ledge where Lucy stood. I step down to that level—it’s only about three feet below the top part, and work my way to the edge of the Point. The rock is flatter here and it almost reaches to the edge, but then there’s an outcropping of stone and a stunted pine tree that blocks the edge of the cliff. Was that why Lucy stepped down here? Because the footing was better than the curved surface at the edge of the Point? She’d have known this from the nights we climbed down from here to the swimming beach. From where I’m standing I could reach up and touch someone standing at the edge of the Point. Or reach up and trip someone standing there. Once again I see the scene as I saw it yesterday in the cave. I climb back up to the curved stone of the Point and, staying on my hands and knees, inch myself as close to the edge of the cliff as I can before vertigo forces me to creep back.

I look down at the rock and see that I’ve dug my nails into the narrow crevices as if I were a rock climber ascending a vertical wall. The glacial chattermarks remind me of my dream—the pale green crevasse opening in the glacier.

Whoever listened to our conversation yesterday heard what I said about Lucy and me covering up Deirdre’s death. They also heard Roy say that he didn’t believe Melissa Randall killed herself, that whoever “faked” Athena’s suicide attempt and killed Melissa Randall might still be alive. If he’s right, if that person were still alive and listening, it would have sounded like a challenge. And the corniculum is an answer to that challenge.

T
HROUGHOUT MY CLASSES
I
AM SO DISTRACTED BY THIS
question that I can hardly follow the easy faked Latin in the
Ecce Romani
textbook (today we follow our Roman family to an inn on the Via Appia) let alone the advanced girls’ translations of Virgil. We have followed Aeneas into the underworld where he encounters his spurned lover Dido and tries to apologize for abandoning her in Carthage. Dido,
however, will have none of it. She turns away from Aeneas and refuses to talk to him.

I remember the dream I had of Deirdre turning away from me.

“I’m glad Dido doesn’t talk to Aeneas,” Vesta, never a fan of the Roman founder, says.

“She should have done more than just give him the cold shoulder,” Athena says, tugging her unraveling cuffs over her wrists. “People … people who hurt other people …”

Vesta starts to hum the Barbra Streisand song, “People, people who need people …”

“Can it, Vesta,” Athena screams, clutching her
Aeneid
as if she were going to hurl it at her classmate.

“Puellae!”
I say rising to my feet and clapping my hands.
“Tacete!”

Both my students glare at me.

“What’s up with you girls?”

“We’re just tired and we’ve got a big chemistry exam with Moldy Todd next period.”

I can’t help but laugh at the sobriquet, even though I know it’s the height of unprofessionalism. At least it gains me a smile from Vesta, but Athena glares all the harder at our shared mirth.

“Vesta,” I say, “why don’t you go out in the hall? I’ll give you both some extra time to study; I just want to have a word with Athena.”

Athena rolls her eyes—overdoing, I think, the role of student asked to stay after class.

“Hey,” I say when Vesta is gone, “I thought we were friends. What’s bothering you?”

“People …” remembering Vesta’s jibe she amends, “some of the girls are making fun of me because of this.” She holds up her arm and shakes her wrist so that the loose sweater cuff falls down to her elbow. “And it’s not fair. I haven’t cut myself since last year. Someone else did this.”

“You mean Melissa?”

Athena shrugs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, giving me an even better view of the savaged skin. “Well, Dr. Lockhart keeps telling me it was Melissa, but I still find it hard to believe. I mean, we were friends …”

“Keeps telling?”
I ask. “How often do you see Dr. Lockhart?”

“Twice a week, which, like, really sucks. She keeps asking me how it made me feel to have my roommate kill herself. Like what am I going to say? It makes me feel good? It makes me feel like shit—sorry—but it doesn’t make me want to off myself. She acts like killing yourself is a kind of germ and maybe I’ve got it. The other girls act that way, too, like I’ve got cooties or something.”

I almost laugh at the childish term, something Olivia would say, but stop myself.

“I know what you mean. When one of my roommates killed herself my other roommate and I had to go to counseling.”

“Did it bother you?”

“Well, I didn’t love it, but it really drove my other roommate crazy.”

“Yeah, it would.” Athena gives me a small, tentative smile. “People thinking you’re crazy could make you go crazy.”

The smile encourages me to reach out and rub her arm. “Well, you’ll just have to prove them wrong.” The advice comes out a little forced, a little too cheerleaderish, but Athena nods and dries her eyes and tries another smile.

“Thanks,
Magistra,”
she says gathering her books to go, “that’s the best argument I’ve heard for not plunging through the ice and drowning myself.”

D
URING LUNCH
I
KEEP REPLAYING
A
THENA
’
S LAST WORDS,
trying to convince myself that it’s a coincidence that the method of suicide she chose to cite was the way Matt and Lucy died. What I can’t help thinking, though, is that if someone were playing out the events from twenty years ago,
that would be the next method of death. I’m roused from these morose musings by a harsh, jangling sound in my ears. I look up and see Dr. Lockhart standing by the empty seat next to me, dangling a silver key chain in her right hand and absentmindedly shaking it while she answers a question from Gwen Marsh.

“No, Gwen, I don’t think we should cancel midterms because the girls are having a tough semester,” she says. When she sits down she lays the keys next to her plate. Not only doesn’t this woman carry a tote bag bursting with books or papers like the rest of us, she doesn’t even feel the need of a purse or pockets. No doubt the clutter would disrupt the line of her tailored suits.