The Lake of Dead Languages (42 page)

“India Crevecoeur and her daughters loved to skate on the lake, but their favorite activity was attending the annual ice harvest.”

If Dr. Lockhart’s spine could get any straighter it does so now. I’ve always wondered why she seems to dislike me and now I think I know. Twice a week she listens to Athena talk about me, about how I pretend to care but really don’t. No wonder she seems to see right through me.

The next slide shows the icehouse from the lake. A long narrow channel has been cut out of the ice leading to the open doors. On one side of the channel a muffled figure leans over the ice with what looks like a large saw. Another figure holds a long pole up toward the camera. He looks like an angry Eskimo shaking his spear at an intruder.

“After the snow was scraped off the ice, saws were used to cut out a ‘header’—a channel through which the ice could be moved through the water to the icehouse. Then a plow marked out cakes of ice. Pike poles were used to push the cakes of ice down the channel and onto a conveyer belt into the icehouse. Would someone turn on the lights for a moment?”

I close my eyes against the sudden light and when I open them I see Maia Thornbury wielding a spear-tipped pole nearly twice her height. She shakes the pole with both hands. Perhaps my original idea of her as Valkyrie wasn’t so far off.

“This is one of the original poles used on the Crevecoeur estate for ice harvesting. It’s eight feet long.”

“Oooh,” someone coos, “what a long pole you have there.”

The girls giggle while the teachers make shushing noises.

“Is that point sharp?” someone else asks.

“Oh yes,” Maia Thornbury says, hefting the pole up and angling it so we can all see the six-inch-long steel tip. “It had to be to grip the ice. Would you like to touch it?”

More hysterical giggling as the girl who spoke rises from her chair. I’m surprised to see it’s Athena. I wouldn’t have expected her to express such an interest in ice harvesting after our scene in the basement, but here she is, walking up to the front of the room where the extension agent holds the pole parallel to the floor. As Athena walks toward the spear I have the disturbing thought that this is how Roman senators killed themselves: by falling on their own swords. I am poised to rush toward Athena, but she only lifts her arm and touches the point of the spear with the tip of her index finger.

“Sharp, isn’t it?” Maia Thornbury asks like a magician testing the veracity of some trick with a volunteer from the audience.

Athena nods without taking her eyes off the spear point. Then she turns and walks back to her seat. Before the lights go out I see her look down at her finger, to a drop of blood poised there. Then she puts the finger in her mouth and sucks.

“To celebrate the ice harvest, the villagers carved decorative statues out of the ice,” Maia Thornbury says as the lights go out. I am still looking at Athena when the next slide appears, so when I hear the rest of the audience gasp I have the awful thought that there’s been some accident with the ice pole. But when I look up I see it’s the slide that has made everyone gasp. This picture is in color. It shows a girl, nearly naked except for some flimsy white drapery, stretched out on the second sister stone. The girl and stone are so pale they could be almost mistaken for some particularly skillful ice sculpture. Except for the gash of bright red blood across her throat. I immediately recognize the girl as Lucy, but it takes me a few moments to recollect where the picture is from. As the lights go on and Dean Buehl tries to calm the now hysterical girls I try in vain to explain to someone that what the picture
portrays isn’t real. It’s just Lucy Toller playing Agamemnon’s daughter in our senior year production of
Iphigenia on the Beach.

B
Y THE TIME
I
MAKE MY WAY TO THE FRONT OF THE ROOM
I can see that my explanation won’t help. Dr. Lockhart is arguing with Myra Todd about the wisdom of going on with the ice harvest given the inevitable connotations the girls will now have. Maia Thornbury is going over her numbered slides with Dean Buehl to prove to her that the picture of the slaughtered girl was not part of her original demonstration. The slide itself has been passed from Maia Thornbury to Meryl North to Gwen Marsh to Dr. Lockhart to Myra Todd, and, finally, to Dean Buehl, so any fingerprints that might have been found on it are probably now obscured. I surprise myself by thinking of fingerprints. Could I, perhaps, take this slide to Roy Corey and ask for it to be fingerprinted? Maybe, but now it’s too late. I promise myself, though, that if any other relic from my past shows up I’m taking it straight to him. I pick up the slide now and look at it. Lucy as Iphigenia. I remember watching the play from the eastern shore of the lake. This picture shows the reflection of the setting sun on the side of the rock nearest to the camera, so it must have been taken from the opposite side.

Someone plucks the slide from my fingers. “Like a scene from a Greek tragedy, don’t you think, Miss Hudson?” Dr. Lockhart smiles at me as she slips the slide into a plastic bag. I’m not sure if she means the slide itself, or the furor its appearance has caused.

“I was thinking we could have it fingerprinted,” I say, even though I had already rejected that idea.

“How convenient then that there will be an explanation for your prints on it,” Dr. Lockhart replies as she hands the bag to Dean Buehl.

“I guess the same goes for you,” I say. “Since you handled the slide as well.” I hadn’t really planned to insinuate that Dr.
Lockhart could have been responsible for planting the slide, but as I see her already pale skin go a shade paler it occurs to me that it could have been her as well as anyone else. I wonder, though, how she could have come by it in the first place.

I
T
’
S AFTER ELEVEN BY THE TIME
I
LEAVE THE MANSION AND
walk back to my cottage. I take the same path that the person I saw on the Point would have taken. I look at the packed snow underfoot for some clue, but dozens of people have traversed the path since the last snow. I pause on the Point and look back toward the mansion. I can see Dr. Lockhart’s window. Although the office is unlit I can see now how the light from the hall filters in and makes the interior room faintly visible. A person standing in there would only appear as a vague outline, though, like the shadowy shape her desk and filing cabinet make now. I turn from the Point and follow the path to my cottage, which is less trodden than the path from the Point to the mansion. Still I can tell that someone else has been walking there since the last snow.

When I get to my house I see that the porch light has burned out again. It takes me a moment to fit the key in the lock, and when I do my hand is trembling so hard I can’t make the lock turn. And why shouldn’t I be afraid? I ask myself. Someone obviously bears me some grudge.

“Then why not just come out and knock me over the head or something,” I say aloud to my own door. “Get it over with. Why so coy?” My voice, I notice, sounds more angry than afraid. Good, I think. I’m tired of this game of signs.

As I enter the house I feel sure that someone has been there in my absence. I am not afraid, though, that the intruder is still there. Whoever it was would have gone back to the slide show. Why miss out on the fun? I go through the rooms, flicking on the lights, scanning the walls and tabletops for something missing, or something new. I’m expecting, I don’t know what. Some bloody scrawl on the walls? For the first time it occurs to me that whoever is sending these signs is as
frightened of me as I am of her. Whoever she is, and I’m certain it is a she, was silent until I talked to Roy Corey in the cave. Then she sent the corniculum. Tonight, when she saw me in Dr. Lockhart’s office, she retaliated by dropping that slide in Maia Thornbury’s carousel. It’s as if we are playing tug-of-war with the past, you look into my past, she is telling me, then I’ll fling your past back at you.

“Well, what have you got for me tonight,” I call into the empty rooms. When I get to my bedroom and see the lump under the bedclothes and what’s seeping from that lump my bravado fades.

“Oh, fuck,” I cry as I fling the blankets off the bloody deer’s head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I say maybe a dozen times over until I realize it’s only a felt mask of a deer’s head, with red paint dripping from its felt neck.

D
O YOU RECOGNIZE THIS
?” I
ASK, FLINGING THE MASK
on Roy Corey’s desk. It nearly topples a Styrofoam cup half-filled with grayish coffee, but I am not sorry. I have been wanting, since eleven o’clock last night, to fling the mask at
someone.
After a sleepless night I called Dean Buehl to cancel my classes.

“I was up all night with a toothache,” I lied, “I’ve got to go into town and have this thing out.”

She seemed neither suspicious nor interested in my excuse. “I’ll have your girls help Maia Thornbury with the ice harvest,” she told me.

“It’s still on?” I asked.

“I will not let some saboteur change my plans,” Dean Buehl replied. “That would be like giving in to the demands of terrorists.”

Apparently I was not the only one tired of this game of cat and mouse.

“Hey watch …,” Roy Corey says looking up from the mask to me, but when he sees my expression he stops the complaint he’d been forming. He looks back down at the mask, picks it up, sniffs at the dried red paint and inspects the stitching along its seams.

“Look familiar?” I ask.

To my surprise, Roy Corey turns white.

“It’s not real blood,” I say, my anger deflected by his reaction.

“Why don’t you have a seat, Jane?”

“You recognize it, don’t you?”

Roy picks away some of the red paint, revealing a green embroidered heart. “Where did you find it?”

“In my bed, a là
The Godfather,”
I tell him. “Did you hear about the little surprise at our slide show?”

Roy nods. “Your dean called me last night. I went out there and took the carousel and slide. We’re having both dusted for prints, but both were handled by so many people we don’t expect much. This happened afterward?”

“When I went home. Which was around eleven.”

“Must’ve given you quite a start.”

I shrug. “I’m getting used to it.” I tell him about the corniculum in the tree the night of the ice storm. “It was right after our conversation in the cave. Someone overheard us and then the signs started again.”

He nods. “I thought they might.”

“You bastard! You knew someone would eavesdrop on us in the cave.”

“I couldn’t be sure, but what with the whole school there on the ice, I thought it was possible someone might take advantage of the situation.”

“You took advantage of me,” I say rising to my feet. I wish I still had something to throw at him, but then I see the effect my words have had on him. It’s as if I have thrown something at him. He’s looking down at the mask, still fingering that green heart, as if he can’t bear to look me in the eyes.

“It was only a matter of time before this person surfaced again. We’re talking about a murderer—someone who drowned one teenaged girl and drugged another and slit her wrists with a steak knife.”

“Unless it was Athena who slit her own wrists.”

“You mean a real suicide attempt?”

“I mean she faked her own ‘suicide’ and then killed Melissa.” I tell Roy about the conversation I had with Athena in the basement. I don’t tell him about Dr. Lockhart’s file because I’d rather not admit to breaking and entering, but I manage to filter some of the information I gleaned there into my observations. “I hate to think Athena’s the one,” I conclude, “I’ve always liked her and I thought she liked me, but now she feels I’ve let her down and she’s gotten it into her head that I’ve started the whole Crevecoeur curse again since it was my roommates who died.”

“How does she know about that?”

“I don’t know. She’d know from the journal …” I pause, remembering something Athena said to me in the basement. “She said she knew I felt responsible for my friends’ deaths. That’s what I said to you in the cave, that I knew Deirdre’s death wasn’t an accident. So it might have been her listening to us in the cave.” I sink back into my chair, exhausted and disheartened. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted not to believe it was Athena who was trying to hurt me. I look at Roy, hoping he’ll contradict my theory. He’s still peeling the red paint away from the mask and smoothing the brown felt.

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said it felt pretty shitty to know you had let someone down, but worse to be the one who’s let down.”

Roy looks up from the mask. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “I think it’s a draw. I think the guilt of hurting someone you care about can last a long time, maybe even longer than the love itself.”

He whisks the red paint flakes off his desk with the side of his hand and crumples the mask in a ball.

“You mean Matt, don’t you? You think he’d still be alive if you hadn’t let him come back to Heart Lake that night?”

He nods. I try to think of something I could say to relieve his burden, one I understand only too well, but anything I say would only mean taking more of the burden on myself, and I don’t feel up to that. Instead I throw him a crumb, a relic of
the person we both miss. “You know,” I say, “that’s the mask Matt wore that morning. His was the one embroidered with the green heart. He must have dropped it in the woods and someone found it.”

Roy looks at me through narrow, tired eyes and sighs. He gets up and passes behind me to close the office door. When he comes back he doesn’t sit down behind his desk, but instead sits on its edge, so close to me the stiff cloth of his uniform brushes my leg and I can see the fine red hairs on his arms where he’s rolled up his sleeves. He’s still holding the mask. His thumb brushes the last of the red paint off the green embroidered heart.
By this sign you’ll know your heart’s true love,
Deirdre had said, embroidering a different color heart, green, blue and yellow, on each mask.

“You’re right that it was dropped in the woods, Jane. And I suppose someone must have found it there. But this isn’t the mask Matt wore, Jane.”