The Lake of Dead Languages (10 page)

“Maybe I should take her for a while,” Mitchell says.

I can tell from the combative tone in his voice that he’s bluffing. He’s expecting me to tell him no, call my lawyer, tell him I’ve done nothing to justify his taking her. But instead I say the last thing he expects me to.

“Yes, maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe you should keep her for a little while.” Because even though it breaks my heart to see her go, I am beginning to think that Heart Lake isn’t a very safe place for little girls.

T
HE COTTAGE, WITHOUT
O
LIVIA, IS TOO QUIET
. A
FTER
dinner (I scramble eggs and throw out the eggshells) I decide to go over to the dorm to talk to Vesta and Aphrodite. Their dorm is next to the lot where my car is parked. I can see if there’s anything they think Athena would like before I drive to the hospital for visiting hours. It seems like a good plan. The dorm and then the hospital. It seems like a good way to fill the evening.

I walk along the edge of the lake because, I tell myself, it’s a beautiful night. Today’s snow shower has left only a faint white gloss on the ground and a clear moonlit sky. It is cold, near freezing, I think. The moonlight lies on the water like a premonition of ice. It will be many weeks before the lake freezes, but tonight I sense something stirring in the lake. Matt Toller once explained to me how a lake freezes. He said that when the surface water grows colder it also becomes denser, so it sinks to the bottom. When the warmer water rises to the top, it’s chilled by the colder air temperature and sinks. The water circulates like this for weeks—a process called overturn—until the moment when the lake is all one temperature and then the surface begins to freeze. Matt said that if you could be at the lake on that night, the night of first ice, you could see ice crystals forming. I imagine the lake
now like a giant mixing machine, stirring old things to the surface.

I pause on the Point. There are ledges on either side of the Point, carved out of the same soft limestone that lines the lake bottom, but the rock here on top is made of something harder—granite I think Miss Buehl told us. Its curved surface is bare except for the cracks and scorings—chattermarks, they’re called—left by the last glacier ten thousand years ago. I think of how even this rock, so impermeable that it bears the scars of a ten-thousand-year-old event, was once under the surface of the earth.

Looking straight across the water I can see where the lake narrows and flows into the Schwanenkill and from there into the Hudson and the sea. Below me to the right the three sisters march into the water off the swimming beach. To my left I see the lights of the mansion and the dorm.

The journal pages, the corniculum, the three sisters story that have come to light are just floating debris, flotsam from a wreck that happened twenty years ago. But now the wreckage itself seems to be surfacing. Events that happened twenty years ago are happening again.

During our senior year Lucy Toller was sent to the infirmary with two slit wrists. A few weeks later our roommate Deirdre Hall was found in the lake, her neck broken. It was determined at the inquest that she jumped from the Point, landed on the ice, and then slipped into the water. A month after that I watched as Lucy, followed by her brother, Matt, walked out onto the thawing lake and vanished beneath the ice.

Could it be that there is something about this place that makes these events recur? Are all the deaths, from Iris Crevecoeur’s to Deirdre’s and Lucy’s and Matt’s, written on the landscape of Heart Lake like the glacier scores left on the rocks? Or is somebody re-creating the events, following a script written twenty years ago?

*    *    *

I
T
’
S ONLY WHEN
I
AM IN THE DORM STANDING IN FRONT OF
the security desk that I realize I don’t know what room Vesta and Aphrodite are in. I dig in my pocket and find the piece of paper Vesta gave me. I show it to the matron at the desk without looking at it and she tells me the room is up the stairs, second door on the left. And so I find myself standing in front of my old dorm room, the one I shared for three years with Deirdre Hall and Lucy Toller.

I knock and a voice from inside calls, “It’s open.” My students, Vesta and Aphrodite (or Sandy and Melissa as I try to think of them now), are sitting cross-legged on the same bed facing each other. I smell cigarette smoke and feel a cold draft. The bed is under the window. If I checked the sill beneath the window blind I am sure I would find an ashtray, but I don’t.

“Magistra
Hudson,” Vesta says.
“Salve.
What a surprise.” There isn’t a trace of surprise in her voice. I realize that I am probably one of a long line of adult visitors the girls have entertained tonight. I imagine the grilling they must have received this afternoon in the Music Room and the wellmeaning sympathy calls from teachers.

I notice a book of poems by Emily Dickinson on the bed and detect a faint whiff of mold in the air. Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd must have preceded me.

“May I sit down?”

Aphrodite shrugs, but Vesta at least has the good grace to gesture to one of the two desk chairs. I sit in the maple Windsor chair and wonder if it’s the same one I sat in twenty years ago. The desks look the same: soft, dark wood scored by generations of Heart Lake girls’ initials. If I looked hard enough I might find mine. Instead I look down and notice the dark stain on the floor.

“I think we should put something over it, but Sandy says that’ll only make it worse.” It’s the first time Aphrodite has spoken since I came in and I can hear from the hoarseness in her voice that she has been crying. I look at her and take in
the dark smudges under her eyes, darker than the ones she used to draw with kohl.

“I’m sure if you asked the dean would let you switch rooms. No one would expect you to stay in here with … that.”

“Yeah, Dean Buehl said we could move and Miss Marsh says we ought to move to another room. She said it would be like living with a ghost staying here and we shouldn’t have to …” Aphrodite’s voice trails off and she looks, I think, as white as a ghost herself. I’m sure Gwen meant well, but the ghost image certainly wasn’t well thought out.

“But Dr. Lockhart says we should stay and face our fears. She says that it’s not good to bury the past,” Vesta says. “I think she’s right. What do we have to be afraid of? That we’re going to suddenly decide to off ourselves just because Ellen went round the bend? I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” Aphrodite nods eagerly. “It’s not like we believe in that three sisters story.”

“Who told you that story?” I ask.

The girls look at each other. Vesta is scowling at Aphrodite, as if she is mad at her for bringing it up.

“Everyone knows that story. It’s one of our great Heart Lake traditions like tea in the Lake Lounge and ringing the bell on top of the mansion so you don’t die a virgin.”

I laugh before I can stop myself. “You all still do that?”

Vesta and Aphrodite smile, relieved, I think, that they’ve gotten me to laugh. “Yeah, although it’s not such a big issue with some girls,” Vesta says. Aphrodite slaps her playfully on the arm and steals a look at me to see how I’m taking it. I smile at her. I remember what she asked the Lake Goddess—to keep her boyfriend at Exeter faithful.

“Did Athena have a boyfriend?” I ask. “She told me that she was upset last year when her boyfriend broke up with her. Did something like that happen this time?”

The girls go quiet. I can feel them shrinking awayfrom me.

“How could she have a boyfriend here?” Vesta asks. “There are no boys here.”

“Sometimes girls meet boys from town. When I was here …”

I see the sudden interest in their faces and stop.

“What? What did you do when you were here? Did you meet boys out in the woods when you were here?” Aphrodite asks. “Maybe on the swimming beach? You know, you can’t see the swimming beach from the mansion.”

I feel suddenly hot and I notice that the high-intensity desk lamp is beating down on my shoulders. I remember what I came for—to find out if Athena had my journal and, if she had it, do Vesta and Aphrodite have it now. I look around the room. If I had left it hidden in this room twenty years ago they could have found it. I would like to look in my old hiding place—under a loose floorboard behind this desk, but then I had looked there twenty years ago. It had occurred to me at the time that Lucy might have hidden my journal, on that last night before she followed me to the lake, and Lucy was awfully good at hiding things.

Ignoring Aphrodite’s question with the smile I give my students when they ask something too personal, I stretch my leg and touch my toe to the edge of the bloodstain. I notice a gouge in the wood that has been worn smooth by time.

“I wonder if they’ll tear up these floorboards,” I say. “They’re old and loose as it is. I’ll tell you something we used to do when I was here. We used to hide things under the floorboards.”

I look up to see their reaction, but I can’t read their expressions. They look like they’re hiding something, but they’ve looked like that since I came in. It is a not uncommon look for a seventeen-year-old. At any rate, they’ve got nothing to say to my question.

“I bet you could find stuff that girls hid over the years,” I say, deciding to take a more direct route. “Have you ever? Found anything?”

The girls do not look at each other, but I have the feeling they are not looking at each other
on purpose.

“No,” Vesta says evenly. “Did you lose something?”

I swivel the chair toward the desk, away from Vesta’s gaze. Does she know this was my old room? Suddenly I feel like I’m the one who’s being interrogated and I start to sweat under the heat of the desk lamp. I push it away from me, knocking over an empty teacup.

“We should get rid of that,” Aphrodite says. “You’re the second one who’s knocked it over tonight. At least now it’s empty.”

I right the teacup and set it next to a history textbook. I idly flip open to the first page and read “Property of Heart Lake School for Girls” printed on the inside cover. Under the school’s seal are places for students to put their names and the year. The names go back to the mid-seventies and I look to see if there’s anyone I knew, but I don’t recognize any of the names. I was never much good at remembering my classmates’ names, mostly because I hadn’t bothered to get to know anyone that well except for Lucy and Deirdre. On the bottom line is Ellen Craven’s name.

“Is this Athena’s desk?” I ask.

“Yes,” one of the girls answers; I don’t notice which one.

I am looking for a black-and-white notebook; I don’t know which notebook I’m looking for, hers or mine.

“I’m going into town to see Athena now. I was wondering if she’d want any of her books.”

“Like her Latin books?” The note of sarcasm in Vesta’s voice sounds vicious, but when I turn around her face is bland and innocent.

“No. I don’t expect her to do her Latin work right now. I thought something more personal. Her journal, maybe. She did keep a journal, didn’t she? I remember seeing a black-and-white notebook.”

“Yeah, she had a bunch of those,” Aphrodite says.

“But you’re too late,” Vesta adds. “Dr. Lockhart came and took them all away.”

*    *    *

O
N MY WAY TO THE PARKING LOT
I
NEARLY SLIP ON THE ICY
path twice. I keep my eyes on the ground to avoid the icy patches, but the moonlight coming through the pine branches strews the path with black-and-white blotches that dazzle my eyes. The pattern of moonlight and shadows begins to look like the black-and-white cover of my old notebook—of Athena’s journals, too—so that I feel as if I were skating over the slippery cover of a book.

A bunch of those,
Aphrodite said. If Athena had my old journal then it’s possible Dr. Lockhart has it now. I have to find out from Athena if she had it, but will she even be conscious?

When I get to the hospital, I am relieved to find that Athena is awake, but disappointed to see that she is not alone. Dr. Lockhart is sitting in a chair by the window with an open book in her lap. The room is dark except for the small book light attached to her book. When she sees me come in, she closes the book and rises. The book light moves with her and throws lurching shadows across the room. Athena turns her head on the pillow and smiles when she sees me.

“Magistra
Hudson,” she says in a painfully raspy voice that makes me think of razor blades. “We were just talking about you.”

“You look like you’re going to sleep,” I say. “I can come back in the morning.”

“Oh no, I was just telling Dr. Lockhart that I wanted to talk to you.”

“Yes, Ellen says that Latin’s her favorite subject. I was just keeping her company until she fell asleep, but now that you’re here, I’ll go.”

Dr. Lockhart comes around the bed and motions me to come with her. “I just want to have a word with Miss Hudson, Ellen, then I’ll leave her to you.”

Athena turns over on her side to watch us move into the hallway. I can see her bandaged arms in the moonlight from the window. They remind me of a horse’s legs taped for a race.

Dr. Lockhart takes me by the elbow and steers me down
the hall. “I wanted you to know that she’s in a denial stage,” she whispers. “Don’t take anything she says about the suicide attempt too seriously. It would be better if you didn’t ask her too many questions about what happened.”

“I won’t,” I tell her. “There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you.”

Dr. Lockhart lifts one eyebrow and crosses her arms over her chest. The book light shines up onto her face ghoulishly the way the seniors used to shine a flashlight on their faces when they told us the three sisters story at the Halloween bonfire.

“Athena’s roommates told me you took some journals from her desk, I wondered if …”

“If any of them were yours?”

I nod.

“No, I checked carefully. If she is the one who has your notebook, she’s hidden it well. Maybe someone else has found it.” She pats my arm reassuringly, making the light wobble over the dimly lit hall. The effect is like water reflected on the walls of an underwater cavern. “Don’t worry, Jane,” she says, “surely there’s nothing so bad in your teenage diaries.” She turns and walks down the hall, the light attached to her book wobbling weakly beside her like Tinker Bell in
Peter Pan
.