The Lake of Dead Languages (38 page)

“But why? What’s the point? Are you investigating Deirdre Hall’s death now?”

He shrugs. “Humor me, Jane.” He grins at me then with the kind of boyish grin that Matt might have given me to coax me into another fifteen minutes of Latin study. So I do what he wants. I tell him everything I remember about that night.

I
HAD BEEN ASLEEP, DREAMING THAT AWFUL DREAM ABOUT
sinking under the ice, the tea tin drifting down through the water beside me, when their voices woke me. They were in the single, arguing.

“I’m going to tell.”

“You can’t.”

“There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I’ve had enough.”

Someone rushed through the room I was in. The door to the hall opened, letting in a slice of light, and then slammed shut. Someone else followed from the single and opened the door. I could see in the light that it was Lucy and I called to her.

Lucy spun around and then closed the door. She came over and sat on the bed next to me. “I didn’t know you were awake,” she said. There was a little light coming from the single, but I couldn’t make out Lucy’s face in the shadows. “Did you hear?”

“I heard you arguing with Deirdre. Where’s she gone?”

“She’s going to Miss Buehl. To tell.”

“Tell what?”

Lucy paused before she answered. “About the baby,” she said.

“Why would she tell Miss Buehl she had a baby?”

Lucy sighed. “I guess she wants to get it off her chest,” she said. “Confession’s good for the soul, and all that junk.” I thought about my journal writing guiltily, but at least that wouldn’t get anyone in trouble.

“But then everybody will know we helped get rid of it.”

Lucy nodded. “She doesn’t care,” Lucy said. “She doesn’t care about anyone but herself.”

I sat up in bed. “Can we stop her?” I asked.

Lucy took my hand and squeezed it. “Good old Jane,” she said, “that’s an excellent idea. Come on. Maybe we can catch up with her.”

We didn’t bother going down the drainpipe. The dorm matron was asleep at her desk, so we just tiptoed by. Once outside I started running down the path, but Lucy stopped me. “I’ve got a shortcut through the woods,” she said. “We might be able to catch up with her before she gets to Miss Buehl.”

We followed the narrow trail that Lucy had carved out of the snow. I noticed that it was freshly trodden and was surprised that she had obviously used her trails after the last snow. The trail led directly to the Point. When I saw where we were I stopped at the edge of the woods, thinking of my dream. I didn’t want to go out onto the rock.

“I think I see her,” Lucy hissed, “get back.”

Lucy motioned me back until we were hidden by the shadows. Only when Deirdre was directly in front of us on the path did Lucy step out from the shadows, blocking her way. Deirdre was startled when she saw Lucy and moved toward the trees, but then she must have seen me, because she moved off the path in the other direction, toward the Point. When she was on the rock Lucy started walking toward her, but not on the curved surface on top of the Point. She took a step down to the ledge on the east side of the Point and approached Deirdre slowly but steadily.

“I think we should talk this over, Deir,” I heard Lucy say. Her voice sounded calm and reasonable.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Lucy, just get away from me.” I heard the fear in Deirdre’s voice and it surprised me; Lucy was so much smaller than Deirdre. What did Deirdre have to be afraid of? It made me, suddenly, angry. I stepped out of the woods and walked carefully onto the icy rock. My anger quickly turned to fear, though, when I saw how close Deirdre and Lucy had gotten to the edge.

“Hey,” I called. My voice sounded feeble. “Let’s go back to the dorm and talk this over.”

Deirdre snorted. “Yes, Jane, let’s have a nice long talk. There’s a lot you might be interested to learn.’”

Lucy turned toward me and in turning lost her balance. Her arms flailed wide and beat the air like the wings of some large, awkward bird. I tried to grab her, but she was too far away, below me on the ledge, and I stumbled before I could reach her. Just before I landed on the rock I saw Deirdre reach for Lucy’s arm and then I heard someone scream and the sound of something cracking. I looked up and saw one figure crouched on the rock. I crept toward her and found it was Lucy. She was looking over the edge of the cliff at the frozen lake below where a long black gash had opened in the ice.

“Y
OU SAY
L
UCY WAS BELOW YOU ON THE LEDGE AND THAT
when you stepped forward Deirdre stepped back?”

I nod. He seems lost in thought for a moment. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says, “at least, I have to take a look at the Point again to tell if it’s anything. Go on, tell me what you did after Deirdre went through the ice. Did you go down and try to help her?”

“There was nothing we could do.”

He looks at me without saying anything. I remember that he’s read my journal. “Whose decision was it to leave without trying to help her?”

“Mine,” I say, and when he still stares at me, I add, “Well, first it was Lucy’s and then it was mine.”

I
TRIED TO PULL
L
UCY AWAY FROM THE EDGE BUT IT WAS AS
if she were stuck there, transfixed by that long dark opening in the ice.

“We have to go down and see if we can help her,” I said.

Lucy looked at me, her eyes wide. “I saw her when she hit the ice,” she said. “Trust me, she was dead before she went into the water.” I saw the horror in Lucy’s eyes and it frightened me.

“We can’t just leave her. We have to be sure.”

Lucy nodded. She let me lead the way down to the beach. When we got to the edge of the ice I stopped but Lucy walked right out onto the ice, to the edge of the hole where Deirdre had fallen through. I caught up to her and grabbed her arm and she wheeled around on me so suddenly that I almost lost my balance and fell in.

“You said you wanted to be sure,” Lucy said. “One of us has to go in. Obviously it should be me. It was my fault she fell.” She spoke softly but her words chilled me. She had that look she got when she was determined to have her way. I didn’t doubt that she’d be willing to plunge into the icy water to find Deirdre’s body. I had the feeling she wouldn’t stop until she found her, not even if it meant following Deirdre to the bottom of the lake. I realized I might lose her, too.

I stared into the black water. Already I could see a thin film of ice forming on the top. How many minutes had passed since Deirdre fell? Even if she had survived the fall wouldn’t she have drowned by now? Why should Lucy risk her life if Deirdre were already dead?

I put my other hand on her arm and turned her to face me. “I don’t want you to do it,” I said. “It’s bad enough Deirdre’s gone. I don’t want to lose you, too.” Her eyes regarded me as if I were far away, as if that thin film of ice that was forming over the black water had gotten in between us. I couldn’t tell if she even understood what I was saying and then she looked back at the water and I saw such a look of longing on her face that I immediately started pulling her back to the shore.

“But we have to tell someone,” she said.

“Of course, you were right in the first place. We’ll go back to Miss Buehl’s cottage…”

“But what if she’s gone out? No. It’s safer to go back to the dorm and wake up the matron.”

Lucy led the way because she knew a shortcut following one of her narrow footpaths. We went single file, Lucy walking so fast I could barely keep up with her. I was glad she had shaken off the trancelike lethargy that had come over her at the lake,
but I was surprised that when we got to the dorm Lucy climbed up the drainpipe to the second-story bathroom. When I caught up with her inside I asked her what she was doing. “Why are we sneaking in? We’ve got to wake the dorm matron anyway.”

“I need to check something first,” she said. “Deirdre was writing in her journal before she ran out. What if she wrote about what we did, Jane? Do you want people to know you drowned a baby in the lake?”

“Drowned?”

“Not so loud.” Lucy put a finger to my lips. Her hands were ice cold.

“The baby was dead,” I said.

“It’s our word against hers. What if she wrote it was born alive and you and I killed it? Do you want people thinking that about you? Do you think you’ll get that scholarship to Vassar if that gets around?”

I shook my head and Lucy opened the bathroom door, poked her head out and then gave the all-clear sign. It wasn’t until I was following her down the hall that I wondered how she knew about the scholarship. I hadn’t told anyone but Miss Buehl and Miss North, who had written my recommendation letters. It didn’t seem the right time to ask, though, so I followed Lucy in silence.

We crept down the hall and Lucy opened our door slowly so it wouldn’t creak. We’d done the same thing countless times, but always with Deirdre. I kept looking behind me expecting to see her and then I would think of her in the lake, below the ice. I remembered my dream and hoped, for Deirdre’s sake, that Lucy was right about the fall killing her.

Lucy went straight into Deirdre’s single and I heard a drawer opening. When she came out she was holding Deirdre’s journal. She sat down at her desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the notebook to the last written page. I stood behind her and read over her shoulder. Under the Horace quote, which had been the last thing in the journal when I’d seen it this afternoon, Deirdre had written another line:
“Whatever happens now, it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas.” There was nothing about the baby being alive at birth.

“What does she mean?” I asked. “She makes it sound like it’s all your fault. That’s not fair.”

Lucy looked up at me. “She blamed me for hiding the truth. She said it would have been better if it had all come out into the open.”

“But you were only trying to help.” I was getting angry at Deirdre, forgetting that she wasn’t around to be angry at.

Lucy shrugged. “Apparently she didn’t see it the same way.”

“Well, we can’t let anyone see this,” I said. “We’ll hide it. We’ll dump it in the lake. I’ll never tell.”

Lucy smiled. “You’re a good friend, Jane, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Listen.” She read the line out loud. “‘Whatever happens now it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas.’ It’s perfect! All that shrink from Albany has been going on about is how one suicide attempt leads to another. Like it’s catching. They expected Deirdre to do this. Especially since I had the bad manners to cut my wrists in her bed. They’ll probably pat each other on the backs for seeing it coming.”

“But she didn’t kill herself,” I said. “It was an accident. We’ll just explain …”

“Don’t be silly, Jane. It looks like a suicide. It even fits the three sisters legend because she landed right in between the second and third sister. It’s what they’ll want to believe. They’ll lap it up like cream.”

“Maybe it was a suicide,” I said. “I mean, think how bad Deirdre must have felt about the baby …” I thought Lucy would be glad of my theory, but instead she seemed distracted. She looked around the room as if she had lost something.

“There’s just one more thing needed to make it perfect.” She popped up from her desk and crossed to the bed. I was a little startled at her energy. She snatched a piece of white paper from her bed and flourished it above her head.

“Voilà!”
she said, sitting back down at the desk.
“Ecce testimonium.”
It was the mimeograph of Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” “I think just the last stanza will do.” Lucy cut out the last stanza of the poem, being careful to cut evenly. Then she taped it into Deirdre’s journal, again taking time to line it up perfectly.

“Even if it was her suicide note,” Lucy said, “Deirdre was so fucking precise.”

“S
O YOU TWO MADE IT LOOK LIKE A SUICIDE
. Y
OU CHANGED
her journal and then took it to the dorm matron.”

“Yes. We said that I’d woken up and saw Deirdre’s door open, her bed empty, and her journal lying open on the bed. I know it sounds bad, but I thought she really might have killed herself, that she felt so bad about the baby…”

“But it wasn’t her baby.”

“No.”

“And what was it Deirdre said just before she fell?”

“‘Yes, Jane, let’s have a nice long talk. There’s a lot you might be interested to learn.’”

Roy watches me, waiting for me to take the next step.

“She would have told me it wasn’t her baby, that it was Lucy’s baby …”

“And you say Lucy flailed her arms just before Deirdre fell?”

“Yes, because she lost her balance …”

“But you say she was on the east ledge. You can’t fall from there because there’s a rock blocking the edge of the Point. But it is close enough to the edge of the Point to reach out and push someone …”

“I didn’t see that.” I’ve raised one hand to my mouth and I feel the wool of my mittens dampen with my breath. Roy reaches over and pulls my hand away from my face.

“Because you were trying to reach Lucy and fell. You wouldn’t have seen anything.”

I snatch my hand away from Roy and press both hands
over my eyes as if to blot out the picture Roy is drawing. I grind the heels of my hands into my eyes until bright sunbursts bleed into the blackness, sunspots that turn into the glitter of rock and ice, a miniature landscape of glaciers from which I look up and see, against a moonlit sky, like actors performing in front of a silver scrim, Lucy’s small pale hand reaching up and pulling Deirdre’s foot. A swift hard yank the strength of which must have surprised Deirdre because I see her mouth form a little O before she falls back.