The Lake of Dead Languages (46 page)

“Did you know she wasn’t Hannah’s?”

Mrs. Corey sighs and smoothes the afghan over my shoulders. “Hannah was my little sister,” she says. “When she came home with that baby everyone else believed her when she said it was hers, but I could tell. She didn’t nurse her—when Mattie was born she nursed him. It’s not that she didn’t treat Lucy good—she took extra pains with her. She seemed … I don’t know … almost in awe of her. And then she didn’t look a bit like her or any of us …”

“Did you confront her?”

“Only once. When she let Matt and Lucy start school together. I asked her if she thought it a good idea, encouraging the two of them to be so close. She asked me what I meant, weren’t they brother and sister? When I didn’t say anything to that she looked away and told me to mind my own business. We never spoke of it again, but when she asked me to keep Mattie here … well … she said she was sorry she hadn’t listened to me before.”

She sits back and folds her hands in her lap. She looks away from me to the mantel. I follow her gaze and see there the picture of Matt. It’s a posed portrait with a flag in the background. His school picture for his senior year at Manlius. His hair looks darker than I remember it and longer, the seventies haircut looks dated. I look away from the picture to Mrs. Corey. I want to ask her what else Matt said about me. What else did he say to give the impression that I was his girlfriend. But I realize suddenly how little it matters anymore.

“Did you know who Lucy’s real mother was?” I ask instead.

“I guessed it was that friend of hers, Helen Chambers.
That’s who the girl looked like, after all. And then after Hannah died I found out that Helen Chambers had owned the house on River Street. She’d left it to Cliff and Hannah when she … when she passed on.” She unfolds her hands and plucks on the tufts on the upholstery. She doesn’t want to say “killed herself.” I look down at the worn chintz pattern on the couch and realize I’ve seen it before.

“And then you inherited the house from Hannah.”

“I was the only one left,” she says, “but I couldn’t hardly bear to be in that house for five minutes. Roy helped me move some of the furniture—Hannah’d always had better than what we could afford—but neither of us could bear to clear out the attic rooms. We figured whoever bought the house would clear it away, but then the house never would sell. People must’ve thought it was unlucky.”

I remember that it’s what I suggested to Dr. Lockhart, but then, how had she come to live there?

“But you sold it eventually?” I ask.

“Only last year. I’d been renting it out summers, and then I got this letter from someone at Heart Lake …”

“From someone at Heart Lake?”

Doris Corey frowns. “I don’t remember. Let me see, I think I still have the letter. It had something nice in it about Lucy, so I saved it.” Doris Corey gets up and pushes open the top of a roll top desk—a desk I suddenly remember as standing in the Tollers’ front hall. I look around me and recognize other pieces of furniture from the Toller household—a highboy carved of some dark wood, a wingback chair, a grandfather clock. They crowd around the couch, these relics from the past, like the dead heroes clamored around Aeneas in the underworld.

“Something nice about Lucy?” I repeat. “But how …”

Doris Corey comes back to the couch and hands me a letter written on pale gray stationery in blue-green ink. “Dear Mrs. Corey,” I read. “I’d like to inquire about purchasing the house on River Street. I know it’s been vacant for many years
and I understand how you might be reluctant to part with your sister’s old house.”

Doris Corey points to the first paragraph. “I thought this girl must be either very naive or very rich. Or both. Imagine keeping a piece of real estate for sentimental value!”

I continue reading.

“I’d like to assure you that the house would be in very good hands. You see, I, too, have sentimental reasons for wanting to live in the house on River Street. I attended Heart Lake for three years in the late seventies (because of circumstances outside my control I had to leave) and that was how I came to know your niece, Lucy. Although she was several classes ahead of me, she was kind enough to take an interest in me. I had a very lonely childhood and I’ve never forgotten the kindness she showed me, almost as if she were an older sister. When she died I felt as if I had lost a part of my family, almost, indeed, a part of myself. Now that I’ve returned to Heart Lake (I often think that my decision to work with troubled adolescent girls is a way of repaying my debt to Lucy) I would cherish the opportunity to live in her old house.”

There followed a generous cash offer for the house.

“Can I use your phone?” I ask, handing the letter back to Doris Corey.

I dial Dean Buehl’s office. She answers on the first ring and at the sound of my voice nearly shouts at me. “My God, Jane, we’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where are you? Are Athena and Dr. Lockhart there with you?”

Doris Corey must see how pale I get because she wraps the afghan around my shoulders.

“No. How long have they been missing?”

“Since Athena stormed out of my office this morning. We’re afraid she’s done something to Dr. Lockhart—”

“Dean Buehl,” I interrupt. “Was Dr. Lockhart a student at Heart Lake?”

“Well, yes, for a few years, but she didn’t like people to
know because she was expelled. But you know all about that, Jane, I told you …”

I remember standing at the train station looking across the tracks at the small girl posed rigidly beside her luggage, her face set in a frozen glare, while Miss Buehl told me that she had been expelled for breaking the fanlight above the front door of Main.

“She’s Albie. You hired Albie, didn’t you? You felt sorry for her and you hired her.”

“Well, yes. That poor girl had been through so much. All she wanted was to come back to Heart Lake. But I didn’t lie, she wasn’t an old girl because she didn’t graduate …”

“But you should have told me.”

“But Jane, I thought you knew. After all it’s what her name means in Latin: white. That’s why she was called Albie.”

Candace. It means fire-white. That’s what I feel now—a mix of fire and ice that tingles in my veins and gets me to my feet, Doris Corey’s afghan falling to the floor like a pile of brightly colored leaves.

“Listen,” I say to Dean Buehl, “explain all of this to Roy Corey. Tell him that Dr. Lockhart is Albie and tell him I’m on my way back.”

B
EFORE
I
GET BACK ON THE
T
ACONIC
I
STOP AT A PAY PHONE
and make another call. I could have used Doris Corey’s phone but I’d been ashamed to make this call in front of anybody. I’m out of change so I call collect.

Mitch accepts the charges and without a word to me hands the receiver over to Olivia.

“Mommy? Are you almost here? I’m waiting up for you so you can read me my bedtime story.”

“Honey,” I say, and then pause, letting my head rest on the cold, grimy metal pay phone booth, “Mommy’s going to be a little late, but I’ll try to be there when you get up.”

There’s a silence so long that I think the connection’s been
broken, then I hear a small voice, which sounds in the rushing static as though it were underwater. “But you promised.”

There’s just nothing I can say to that. I tell her I’m sorry and that I’ll try to make it up to her and I get off the phone before she can ask me just how I think I’m going to do that. Then I get in the car and drive north and try not to think about Olivia. I think, instead, about another little girl: Albie.

I try to remember what Deirdre and Lucy told me about her, but the truth is I was never that interested. She was a homely little kid who tagged along following us all over campus. Lucy seemed to accept her adulation as her due. Deirdre felt sorry for her, because, like herself, she was shuttled from school to school, unwanted. Even
Domina
Chambers had taken an interest in her. I had tried to talk to her once or twice, but she never seemed to like me. Maybe she saw me as a rival to Lucy’s affections.

As I drive farther north, the rain turns into icy sleet. My windows frost up and my car slithers and fishtails on the upgrades. I drive fast, though, wiping the frost away from the windshield with the heel of my hand like a child pushes tears away.

Or was it the other way around? Had I seen her as a rival? After all, how many poor scraggly “orphan” girls could Lucy befriend? I think of all the times I caught her spying on us in the woods. How many times had she watched us without me knowing? I remember the figure I thought I saw on the Point when Lucy and I sank the tin in the lake, the sense I had of being watched the night Deirdre died … What was it Roy had said? If someone was hiding on the west ledge it would have looked like I was the one who made Deirdre fall to her death.

When I reach the Northway I expect better road conditions, but instead I hit fog. The sleet, which I expected to turn to snow as I got farther north, turns back to rain. Most of the traffic stays in the right lane and crawls slowly through the dense white shroud. I get in the left lane and do eighty.

And that last night … the night I’d gone down to the icehouse to meet Matt. I had that same sense of being followed through the woods. What would she have made of that final scene on the ice? I close my eyes against the picture and nearly run into the guardrail. She would blame me for Lucy’s death. Had I even thought, twenty years ago, of looking for her after Lucy died? To comfort her? No, I was too busy with my own grief. The next thing I knew about her was that she’d been expelled for smashing the stained-glass fanlight. The one inscribed with the school’s motto. I remember the day Lucy explained to Albie what the motto meant. “It means there’s always a place for you here. And it means I will always be here for you, too …”

But Lucy hadn’t been able to keep that promise. In her rage, Albie had thrown rocks through the window—through the broken promise of those words. Then she had been sent to St. Eustace.
St. Useless.
Where they sent you when you were no use to anyone.

I spot the Corinth exit with barely enough time to cut across two lanes of slow-moving traffic and skid onto the exit ramp. The fog is even worse now that I’m off the highway. I can barely see the side of the road. I roll my windows down and fix on the little reflective bumps that mark the median to gauge the two-lane road that climbs up to Corinth. About halfway, I come up against a slow-moving lumber truck that is crawling up to the mill. There’s no way to pass it, so I put my car in low gear and tail so close behind that I can smell the sickly sweet smell of fresh-cut pine.

I can tell I’ve reached town by the yellow tinge to the fog as I pass the mill. I sniff at the familiar scent of pulp. I used to think when I was little that the yellow smoke that rose from the mill was the ghosts of trees, and the white paper the mill produced their earthly remains—the bleached white bones of northern forests.

Finally, the truck pulls off and I accelerate through the rest of the village, crossing the bridge so fast my teeth vibrate.
I’m on River Road, passing the old Victorians, which loom out of the fog like prehistoric monsters. At the end of the road, just before the turn off to Heart Lake, is the little house that always seemed to me like something out of a fairy tale. The only thing I hadn’t realized was that as far as the woman living in it is concerned, I’m the bad witch. I made Deirdre fall off the Point. I let Lucy drown under the ice. I lied at the inquest and got her favorite teacher fired. I sent her into Siberian exile.

I turn the engine off, wishing I’d thought to park farther down the road or at least turned my headlights off. When I do that now I see that the house is not completely dark. Like the first night I found Dr. Lockhart here, there’s a light in the attic.

What I should do is find a phone and call the police—see if they can reach Roy. What I do instead is reach deep into my book bag until my fingers graze cold metal. Dr. Lockhart’s keys. I still have them. That I should use them seems the next logical step. I open my glove compartment and look for something I can use as a weapon. There’s the flashlight, but its batteries are still dead and it’s made of cheap, light plastic. The only other thing in the glove compartment is the small aerosol can of deicer. I slip it into my pocket, figuring I can use it like mace. Then I get out of the car as quietly as I can and walk through the unshoveled snow to the front door. By the time I make it there my jeans are soaked to the knees and I’m sweating under my down parka. The snow, I notice, is slushy and steaming, exuding a thick white fog like some pestilential vapor. When I touch the doorknob I find it’s warm.

There are only three keys on the chain and I already know that two of them are for Dr. Lockhart’s office and filing cabinet. I put the third key in the lock and it turns easily. I push open the door into a darkness that feels smoky, as if the fog from the melting snow had somehow gotten inside and turned black. I look around the living room, trying to make
out the shape of furniture, but after a moment I realize that the room is completely empty. There isn’t a single stick of furniture on the first floor.

But the light I saw was coming from the attic. As I go up the stairs the darkness pales and turns pink. When I get to the head of the stairs I see why. There’s a night-light in the shape of a pink poodle plugged into an outlet. The only other source of light comes from the room on the left. Matt’s room. I go in and see that the light comes from a green-shaded banker’s lamp on one of the desks by the window.

Lucy’s desk. There’s no other word for it. Even before I walk across the room and reach it I know it will be exactly as I saw it the last time I was in this room twenty years ago. The same lumpy pottery cup that Matt made for her in second grade holding the same collection of peacock-blue fountain pens. A brass eternal calendar in the shape of a globe, the day marked February 28, 1977. There’s a blue Fair Isle cardigan hung across the back of the chair, which, when I lift, holds the shape of the chair in its shoulders. I see by its faded label it’s from Harrods. It’s the sweater I borrowed from Lucy and left in the woods.