The Lake of Dead Languages (14 page)

I lean into Corey’s arm and immediately he moves it away as if he just noticed he had it around me. No, I think, the girls are wrong. This man can’t even stand to touch me.

I take another sip of the bitter coffee and look at Vesta and Athena.

“Your girls led me to you,” Corey tells me. “I met up with them here and they were surprised you weren’t right behind them.”

“I got stuck in the snow,” I say.

“You passed out,” he tells me. “I was afraid you had hypothermia, but I think it was just fear. How do you feel now?”

“Fine,” I tell him. I look around the icehouse. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to check out the icehouse first thing last night.”

“I did, but then all I was looking for was a lost girl. I wasn’t noticing what wasn’t here.”

I sit up and swing my legs over the edge of the wooden ledge. I am sitting, I see, on one of the wide shelves where they used to store the slabs of ice harvested from the lake.

“The boat,” I say. “There’s no boat.”

Corey nods his head and twists his mouth around like a man who’s made a big mistake and hates to admit it. I notice that he has the same full lips that Matt Toller had.

“I should have thought of it directly,” he says. “But I’d forgotten the county extension agent used the icehouse to store her dinghy.”

“You think Aphrodite … Melissa took it?”

Instead of answering, Corey looks at the girls.

“We found it at the beginning of the year and took it out once or twice. I guess Melissa could have taken it,” Athena says.

“Could she have gotten it down to the water by herself?” I ask.

In answer, Corey swings open the double doors at one end of the wooden hut. At first all I see is blackness, but then I realize that what I’m looking at isn’t the blackness of night, but a wide expanse of water—so still it might be air instead of water—spreading out from the edge of the icehouse.

W
HEN
I
HAVE ASSURED
C
OREY AND THE GIRLS THAT
I haven’t suffered any ill effects from my faint in the woods, we walk back along the east side of the lake toward the swimming beach.

We are walking two abreast on the path with the girls in front of us. Corey slows his pace a bit and signals for me to do the same. I realize he wants to leave some space between us and the girls. “We found a boat drifting off the swimming beach, caught between two of the rocks,” he says in a voice so low I have to move closer to hear him, “but I wanted to see where the boat came from since the school’s boathouse was still padlocked. That’s when I remembered about the boat in the icehouse.”

“But shouldn’t you be looking for Melissa in the water?” Roy pats the air with his hand, meaning for me to keep my voice down. I hadn’t realized how loud I’d spoken, or how frightened my voice would sound. It’s that image of the empty boat, drifting between the rocks.

“We’ve called the divers in, but they can’t start until sunrise. The girl’s parents are flying in from California. I’d like you to get those girls back to their rooms before then. I don’t think they need to see this.”

“I understand,” I tell him. “I’d like to come back. If you don’t mind.”

He looks at me. “You were there when they took Matt and Lucy out of the lake, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been.”

“Really? I’ve always wished I had been here. You know, Matt was staying with us the weekend he took off and hitched back here.” I nod, remembering that the military
school Matt had been sent to senior year was near his aunt and uncle’s house. “I knew he was doing it. He told me he had to see his sister. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.”

So someone else has been carrying the weight of Matt Toller’s death all these years. For a moment it makes me feel lighter, and then heavier. This is why Roy Corey is so standoffish with me. He blames me for what happened to Matt and Lucy.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” I say, but what I’m really saying is
please don’t blame me.
“You were just a kid.”

“That’s no excuse,” he tells me. “I’ve thought about this a lot since then. You can’t duck responsibility because you’re young. You have to take accountability.”

“Is that why you became a cop? To hold people accountable for their mistakes? To unmask the villains?”

He stops on the path and looks at me as if I’d slapped him. I hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but I’m tired of being blamed.

“Look,” I say, laying my hand on his arm. I want to explain to him how I feel, but he moves away from me and walks up the path so quickly I can hardly keep up with him.

A
FTER
I
DROP OFF
A
THENA AND
V
ESTA AT THE DORM
I walk back to the swimming beach. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but I can see a lightening in the sky across the lake and know that it soon will. I was upset at first after my talk with Corey, but once I got over the fact that he obviously holds me responsible for what happened to Matt and Lucy, I realized how lucky I am to have found him.

Roy Corey saw Matt Toller just before he came back here to Heart Lake that last time. Maybe Matt talked to him about me and, if he did, I might find out what Matt was thinking about me at the end. For the past twenty years I’ve felt like I was talking to someone on the phone when the lines went down. Right in the middle of the most important conversation
of my life. Roy Corey might be able to fill in some of the lost pieces.

When I round the Point and see the police cars and ambulance parked on the road above the swimming beach I feel ashamed of myself for worrying at a time like this about Matt’s opinion of me. Vesta is right, we girls make such fools of ourselves over men.

I can imagine what must have happened to Aphrodite. Frantic over Brian’s purported faithlessness and feeling powerless hundreds of miles away from him she resorted to a childish witchcraft. What was that Dr. Lockhart said?
It’s all an attempt to gain control over a world in which they have no power.
She wanted to go to the farthest three sisters rock and make an offering to the Lake Goddess. Only it was too cold to swim there, so she got the boat from the icehouse and rowed across the lake. It was probably when she was trying to get from the boat onto the rock that she slipped and fell into the water. The cold of the water must have shocked her … or maybe she hit her head …

From what Vesta and Athena have said, I know that Aphrodite could have gotten the idea to take the boat from their previous exploits. But something else bothers me. Lucy Toller and I once took the rowboat from the icehouse and I wrote about it in my senior-year journal. What if Aphrodite got the idea from my journal? Then I have an awful thought. I think: Maybe Aphrodite had my journal with her when she fell into the lake. If so, maybe my old dream of the lake washing clean those pages has finally come true. It’s an awful thought because for a moment it has made me glad.

I walk down the steps to the swimming beach and stop midway. Roy Corey is there, so is Dean Buehl and a middle-aged couple in matching Burberry trench coats. Melissa’s parents, no doubt. I find that I don’t want to join the group on the beach, so I sit down on the cold stone, about halfway down the steps, and wrap my arms around my knees, trying to make myself small and compact against the relentless cold.

Three men in oily black rubber suits are talking to Corey. They all look at the eastern shore where the sun has just appeared through the pine trees. I can imagine what they are saying. That it’s probably better to wait until the sun is higher, shining through the water. But then they look back at the parents. The first morning light hits the woman’s face and it’s like a blade cracking her open. I imagine this woman looked ten years younger just twelve hours ago.

The divers walk into the water. When they are chest deep they spread their arms over the surface of the water and then they dive. On the beach there is nothing to do but wait. No one talks.

The sun rises above the tips of the pines on the eastern shore and bathes the farthest of the three sisters rocks in light. I notice, for the first time, that the rocks are perfectly aligned with the angle of the rising sun. As the sun rises, the light touches each rock in turn, like a child jumping across stepping-stones. The sunlight glazes the beach and the step I am sitting on, but there’s no warmth in it. Instead, I feel as if I, and all the other figures on the beach, have been sealed in ice. The lake is so still that I find it hard to believe that divers are moving below the surface, but then I see a black head surface in the middle of the cove. I see a hand rise out of the water, and Roy Corey, who is watching the diver through binoculars, waves back.

I see Mrs. Randall turn to Corey as if to ask a question, but then she turns back to her husband and kind of leans in on him, like a tree tilting in the wind.

Out in the lake the head is gone. The surface of the water is still again.

We are all still looking toward the center of the cove so we don’t notice the diver surface to the left of the swimming beach. He is shoulder deep in the water and his arms, instead of spreading across the water, are below the surface and look as if they are being pulled down as he walks slowly through the water toward the beach.

He’s carrying Melissa Randall.

As soon as he lays her down on the beach the paramedics snap into life and try to resuscitate what even I, from this distance, can see is a corpse. The group on the beach contracts into a tight fist around the drowned girl. I am probably the only one who notices the second diver surfacing a little to the left of the three sisters. He is carrying something, too, but something smaller and lighter.

Roy Corey notices and breaks away from the group. He meets the diver at the edge of the water and reaches for the rusty tin box. I am up and moving across the beach, although I don’t know what I think I can do about it. Roy Corey is moving his hand over the domed surface of the box, which is a little larger than a shoe box. A webbed belt is fastened around the box. I see him unfasten the brass buckle and the belt falls away, rotting, to the ground. He wipes away the layer of green slime that covers the tin, revealing an improbable landscape of gold mountains that glints in the morning sun. He flicks back a little gold latch and opens the lid.

Inside is a heavy white cloth embroidered with a heart and words I can’t make out from where I am. But I don’t have to. I know them by heart.
Cor te reducit.
The heart leads you back. Roy Corey lifts the cloth, delicately, with a little flourish even, like a magician culminating his final trick. But there’s no flutter of white wings; instead, nestled in a circle of greenish-gray stones, are the perfectly preserved bones of a tiny human being.

I look away from the small skeleton toward the lake and notice that something is happening. I remember again how the nurse said that after birth the mother’s body temperature drops precipitously. It is as if now that the lake has given up these two bodies its own temperature has achieved an equilibrium of cold. It’s as if that flutter of white handkerchief has produced magic after all because shooting out in all directions at once, brilliant in the morning sun, ice crystals explode across the still surface of the lake. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for: first ice.

W
HEN
I
FIRST MET
M
ATTHEW AND
L
UCY
T
OLLER
I thought they were twins. Not that they looked all that much alike. He had the sandy red hair, blunt jaw, and stolid build of the Tollers, while she was fair and lithe and sharp-featured like one of the water nymphs in my copy of
Tales from the Ballet.
It was in their gestures and the way they moved their bodies—like one person in two sets of limbs—that they so deeply resembled each other.

I first noticed them the summer before ninth grade. My mother, having decided I ought to meet some West Corinth kids before being thrown in with them at Corinth High School, had gotten me a job as a counselor at the swim club. How she thought spending a summer wading calf-deep in the tepid, citrinous water of the kiddie pool would gain me entrée into the world of doctors’ and lawyers’ children, I do not know. What it did gain me was a view, through the bitter-smelling box hedge, of the deep end and the high dive where I could watch Matt and Lucy Toller practice their dives and race freestyle in the lap lane. No one ever seemed to win those races; they were more like synchronized swim events. They swam, shoulder to shoulder, their bodies tilting for breath at the same angle like two planets pulled by the same moon, their white elbows cresting the water like the two wings of one enormous swan.

*    *    *

W
HEN
I
GOT TO HIGH SCHOOL
I
FOUND OUT TWO THINGS
about the Tollers. One was that they were not twins; Matt was thirteen months younger than Lucy. He had been allowed to start kindergarten early because, Lucy told me, he had pitched such a fit when she started school without him. Hannah Toller had gone to the principal and told him she’d either have to keep Lucy back a year or let Matt start early. So Matthew started kindergarten six months shy of his fifth birthday.

The second thing I found out about the Tollers was that although Matt and Lucy lived on the west side of the river (in Corinth it’s the river and not the train tracks that divide the haves from the have-nots), they fit in with the West Corinth kids no more than I did. Their father, Cliff Toller, was a paper salesman at the lumber mill—a job only a few rungs above my father’s job as factory foreman. Still, the Tollers seemed to live a little better than other salesmen’s families. They had a small but picturesque house on River Street where the doctors and lawyers lived. They belonged to the swim club and Matt and Lucy took piano lessons with the music teacher at Heart Lake. My mother assumed that Cliff Toller must do well on commission and she chastised my father for not having the wherewithal to move into a sales job. When Lucy Toller befriended me on that first day of ninth grade my mother was pleased. Perhaps not as pleased as if one of the doctors’ or lawyers’ children had invited me home to their River Street mansion, but it was a start.