The Lake of Dead Languages (44 page)

When I have breath enough to speak I turn to him and say, “How you must have hated me.”

He touches my forehead, strokes the damp hair back. “I didn’t hate you, Jane. I hated myself for not telling you there and then who I was.”

“We had Miss Buehl and her Girl Scouts shrieking and pointing at us. Hardly the moment to unmask.”

He lifts himself on one elbow and runs the back of his hand down the length of my arm. I feel his breath cooling the sweat in the hollow of my collarbone. “But that’s not why I didn’t show you who I was. I didn’t want to see the look of disappointment when you saw I wasn’t Matt.”

I look at him hard so that I don’t, by looking away, admit the truth of what he’s saying. I want to tell him he’s wrong, but I can’t. I would have been disappointed—more than disappointed,
crushed
—to have seen any face but Matt’s beneath that mask. And for a moment, I do see Matt’s face, rising in Roy’s features, as if the seventeen-year-old boy is looking out of his cousin’s eyes. I see him so clearly I feel as if every minutest hair on my body were sheathed in ice. And then he’s gone. Matt’s face fades from Roy’s, just as in my dream it sinks into the black water, only I suspect that this is the last time I will see that face.

I can’t lie to Roy, so I tell him the next best thing. “I’m glad it’s you. Here. Now.”

I
T’S STILL DARK WHEN THE PHONE WAKES US.
I
SEE FROM
the glowing green numbers on the digital alarm clock that it’s 5:33. The phone is on Roy’s side of the bed and he answers it by saying his name. I’m surprised by how unsurprised I am at this. As if I’d been with him for years and known how a cop always knows the call in the middle of the night is for him.

He listens without saying anything and then says, “I’ll be right there.” He swings his legs over his side of the bed and finds his jeans and shirt on the floor. When he stands up he sees me propped on one elbow, watching him, and he sinks back onto the bed and cups my face with his hand.

“I’m afraid this time it’s worse than getting interrupted by the Girl Scouts.”

R
OY DOESN
’
T HAVE FAR TO GO.
I
FOLLOW HIM DOWN THE
steps to the swimming beach where a little group is huddled in a circle of flashlights. I recognize three seniors, none of whom take Latin. The only one whose name I know is Mallory Martin, the girl whom my girls call Maleficent. She doesn’t look too maleficent right now, crying and shaking under a trooper’s heavy leather coat.

“We came out to watch the sun rise,” she’s telling someone.
I get the feeling she no longer needs an audience to tell this story. She’ll be telling it for the rest of her life. “We thought it would look cool—with all the statues? A bunch of girls talked about doing it yesterday at the Ice Harvest. At first we thought it
was
a statue.” She points a wobbly finger in the direction of the stones. On the lake, police officers bundled in heavy coats are moving slow-footed over the ice, their arms held out to their sides for balance. Their posture reminds me of something—it’s how Miss Pike told us to move through water looking for drowning victims, toes feeling the bottom, arms held out to feel for dead limbs. It reminds me of the morning they found Melissa Randall’s body.

I walk past Mallory Martin and her circle. I’m going to follow Roy onto the ice, but at the edge of the lake a police officer holds up his hand to stop me.

“I’m sorry, miss, we don’t want any civilians on the ice.”

Roy turns and sees the look on my face.

“It’s OK, Lloyd, she’s with me.”

I don’t even think about the slipperiness of the ice, but stride out to where Roy is. We pass the first stone and the ice statue standing next to it. I look at its face and am startled to see the detail there. Someone went to a lot of trouble. The surface of the ice is smooth and glowing, as if the wind last night had polished it.

At the second stone the kneeling ice figure has been whittled down by the wind, so that it looks more like a lump on the ice than a statue. I look from it to where the third statue should lie, but although the first light has reached that part of the lake there is nothing there. It’s as if the supine figure had sunk beneath the ice.

I turn to Roy to ask if this is what all the fuss is about and see the fourth statue. It’s stretched out on the second stone, a girl’s smooth marble-white body arched up as if in some terrible throes of pain or pleasure to meet the eight-foot ice pole thrust through its middle. It’s only when the light creeps
over her and touches her mermaid-red hair that I recognize Vesta.

“S
HE SAID SHE COULDN
’
T SLEEP AND WAS GOING TO GO
skating on the lake,” Athena is telling us for perhaps the third time. “She thought it would be cool to skate around the statues. Some other girls had talked about doing it at the Ice Harvest. I offered to go with her but she was still mad at me about keeping the light on. She said if I was going to go she’d just as soon stay and turn out the light.”

Athena looks up from the low chair in front of Dean Buehl’s desk and we can all see the deep shadows under her eyes. A lock of stringy, multicolored hair falls over her left eye and the hand she lifts to push it back is trembling so hard she quickly returns it to her lap and clasps both hands together. I can see from my seat on the couch along the side wall that her cuticles are ragged and bloody. She squints in the glare from the early morning light on the ice outside Dean Buehl’s window. I look away from her to the frozen lake. Mercifully, the view of the east cove is blocked by the Point. I wonder if they have removed Vesta by now or will they still be taking pictures of the body? I notice two police officers standing on the Point looking down into the east cove. One has set up a tripod and is taking aerial shots of the crime scene.

“And
you
heard nothing, Jane?”

I flinch at the sound of my name and look up at Dean Buehl, but it’s Dr. Lockhart, who is standing at the large plate-glass window behind Dean Buehl’s desk, who has asked the question. For a moment I don’t understand what she thinks I would have heard, then I remember the shrieks and moans coming from the ice last night. Could they have been Vesta’s cries for help and not the ice?

“There was a storm,” I say. “I heard wind and the ice buckling.”

“The ice buckling?” Dr. Lockhart repeats. I look up at her,
but the glare from the lake ice surrounds her like a harsh aura and I have to shade my eyes to look in her direction. Even so, I can’t read her expression.

“Yes,” I say, “cracks and pops and …”

“Moans?” she asks. “Shrieks? That’s what the ice sounds like. Did you go out and look?”

“I did go out,” I say, “I went to the Point, but I never looked over.”

Even Athena swivels her head and stares at me.

“I ran into Officer Corey—he was … um … patrolling the area.”

There’s a moment of silence during which I vividly remember what happened on the Point after I ran into Roy Corey. I look down at my hands and see they are bright pink and for a moment I’m sure I must be blushing, but then I realize it’s only the morning light from the window.

“So did you both look over the Point to see where the sounds were coming from?” Dean Buehl finally asks. I think we’re both surprised that Dr. Lockhart isn’t the one to ask, but she has turned back to the window, her attention drawn to the two men taking pictures on the Point.

“I was going to, but Officer Corey led me back from the Point—I guess he was afraid it was too dangerous out there …” I’m mercifully interrupted by a soft knock on the door, which opens to admit Roy Corey. For a moment I’m so happy just to see his face that I don’t think about the fact he’s a police officer.

“What’s going on here? Why is this student here?” he directs the question to Dean Buehl, but it’s Dr. Lockhart who answers.

“It’s her roommate you’ve been peeling off the rocks out there. We thought she might know something about it.”

At the word “peeling” I see Athena’s face crumple. She turns to look at me. “What does she mean? I thought she was stabbed to death.”

“Why did you think that, Ellen?” Dr. Lockhart steps away from the window, walks around Dean Buehl’s desk and
perches on its edge. She crosses one long, gray-stockinged leg over another and waits for Athena to answer. I notice there’s a small pull in her pantyhose, just where her skirt rides up, and for some reason it makes me absurdly happy to see some tiny flaw in Dr. Lockhart’s usually perfect ensemble. Otherwise, she is as calm and cool as ever. I wish I could say the same for Athena.

“S-s-someone told me,” Athena says. I remember that’s what she said to me when I asked her how she knew about my roommates’ deaths twenty years ago. I’ve never heard her lisp before. “Didn’t someone say she was stabbed? I mean, I thought with all those big ice poles lying all over the place …”

“Which you took such an interest in during the slide show …”

“Dr. Lockhart, if you have some theory to share with the police, perhaps you’d like to come down to the station …”

“Yes, I’d like that, Officer Corey. I’d like to know why a police officer was on the Point last night, preventing one of our teachers from looking over to see where all those awful sounds were coming from?”

Roy looks at me.

“I didn’t say he prevented me …” I start to explain, but then I think about what happened on the Point last night and it occurs to me that, effectively, that’s what he did. I falter and look up at Roy and he sees my hesitation.

“It was windy and the rocks were icy,” he offers the explanation to me instead of Dr. Lockhart, but it’s she who replies.

“So did you look over the Point to see where those noises were coming from?”

“I assumed it was the ice,” Roy answers.

“Then you’re either even stupider than the average cop or you’re trying to cover up something you did see,” she says calmly.

I can see a muscle in Roy’s jaw flinch, but it’s Athena who
loses her composure. She springs out of her chair so abruptly it topples, hitting Roy in the kneecap and forcing him to step back.

“Why are you so mean?” she screams, lunging at Dr. Lockhart. The impact of Athena’s collision with Dr. Lockhart knocks the desk back a good six inches, sending Dean Buehl’s swivel chair careening backward into the window. I hear glass shatter, and for a sickening moment I imagine Dean Buehl propelled out into the air, but it’s Athena I’m moving toward. I throw my arm over her head in a shoulder hold that I learned from Miss Pike’s lifesaving class and pull her back, her arms flailing as though she really were a drowning victim. Apparently she’s a victim who doesn’t want to be saved, because as soon as she gets her balance she sinks, sidesteps, and drives her elbow into my solar plexus. While I crumple over in pain, she runs from the room. When I can lift my head, I look for Dean Buehl, afraid of what I’ll see, but she’s all right, visibly shaken but untouched by the glass of the shattered window behind her, every inch of which is veined by an intricate maze, somehow magically suspended, as if held in place by the bright morning sun streaming in now through the cracks.

R
OY HELPS ME TO A SEAT ON THE COUCH.
D
EAN
B
UEHL
moves gingerly away from the shattered window and sits down next to me on my other side.

“Are you all right, Jane?” Dean Buehl asks. “I had no idea that girl was capable of such violence.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “It wasn’t Athena’s fault. She was …” I falter, unable to come up with a plausible explanation for my student’s behavior. The word “provoked” comes to mind. “Upset,” I say instead, which sounds weak in view of the destruction left in Athena’s wake. “I should go talk to her.”

“I think it’s better if I go,” Dr. Lockhart says. “I’ve been working with her. I think I understand her issues.”

“She seemed pretty angry with you,” Roy says.

“That’s all part of the therapeutic process,” Dr. Lockhart says, putting on her coat. I look to Dean Buehl and she nods to me.

“Candace is right, she should go.”

Dr. Lockhart smiles at me like a child who’s won at some squabble mediated by grown-ups. When she’s gone Dean Buehl adds, “Candace has a special empathy with these girls—she had the same sort of upbringing. Over the years I’ve seen so many girls like Ellen and Candace, girls whose parents have too little time for them and leave their care to us.”

“Abandon them to you,” Roy says.

“Don’t be too harsh, Detective Corey. It’s what they know; it’s how they were brought up. I’m sure they think they’re doing what’s best for their children. Maybe it’s the best they can do for them.”

I have a sudden vision of Olivia, left with Mitch for safekeeping, that reawakens the pain in my stomach where Athena jabbed me with her elbow. I’m supposed to go see her this weekend.

As if reading my intention, Roy stands up, reassuming an official air. He addresses Dean Buehl, but I understand the message is for me. “You understand now that this is an official murder investigation no one should leave the campus.” Dean Buehl nods and, when he looks in my direction, so do I.

I
CAN TELL
R
OY WANTS TO COME WITH ME WHEN
I
LEAVE
Dean Buehl’s office, but there’s the phone call to be made to Vesta’s parents and Dean Buehl asks him to stay. I stand in front of the mansion for a moment wondering where Athena and Dr. Lockhart have gone, but there’s no sign of them. I’m stalled here trying to think of the words I’ll use to explain to Olivia that I have to cancel again. I canceled the last weekend I was supposed to visit because of the snow. How can I disappoint her again?

I head back to my cottage to pick up my purse and the
overnight bag I’d packed yesterday with clothes and papers to grade. I cut through the woods to avoid the police officers on the Point. I find, to my surprise, a narrow trail carved through the snow that leads me right back to my house. I find another one that gets me to the faculty parking lot. Someone’s grown tired of staying on the regular footpaths and made their own, just as Lucy used to.