Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (10 page)
Read Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake Online
Authors: Jennifer Allison
The girls stared at Tiara.
“The ghost of Dolores Lambert—that girl who drowned—she’s right here in the room with us!”
At this, several girls made a splashing beeline toward the doorway, as if they had just learned that a school of piranhas was swimming around their feet.
Gilda pulled a small pen flashlight from her backpack and shone it into the water. “I still don’t see anything, Tiara.”
“I definitely saw something. I
told
you she was after me.”
The few girls who had remained to gather their belongings squealed in unison as the room suddenly went dark.
“Oh, crap,” Tiara whispered.
Gilda felt a prickling sensation at the back of her neck.
Maybe Tiara is right
, she thought.
The door burst open and one of the school’s maintenance workers shouted into the room. “Ladies! Everybody out!”
The girls left the locker room as Mrs. McCracken’s voice blared over the PA system: “Ladies, as you can see, we have some flooding. Please remain calm and stay away from the locker rooms for the remainder of the day.”
“I’m going to the nurse’s office,” said Tiara, whose face had a greenish hue.
“Are you okay?” Gilda had noticed that Tiara often asked to go to the nurse’s office during class. She wondered what Tiara did there.
“I feel really weird. I have a splitting headache.”
Gilda wanted to ask Tiara more questions about the face she had seen in the water, but Tiara dodged away hastily, making it clear that she was in no mood to talk.
News that Tiara had seen a ghost in the freshman locker room spread quickly, and by the end of the day, Dolores Lambert had made her presence known to several freshmen: she appeared as a mysterious reflection in the glass surface of a vending machine (from which she prevented three candy bars from emerging); she made drinking water taste “heinous”; she “put something sticky” in a student’s hand; she pulled hair and pinched buttocks.
People are acting very strange
, Gilda thought as she walked past the Triplets, who sat outside the nurse’s office, crying.
Are they acting this way because the school is haunted, or because they’re just having fun being scared
?
Lights continued to turn off without warning throughout
the day, and the distraught girls speculated and prayed that they would be sent home. No announcement of school cancellation came, however. They remained stuck at school—trapped in a dark, damp, mildewy castle.
Gilda decided it was time to do some serious research.
I need to know who Dolores Lambert really was
, she thought.
G
ilda felt small and chilled as she wandered under the vaulted ceilings in the school library, amidst carved, dark-wood paneling and shelf after shelf of books. The library was practically empty; nobody studied at the long, wooden tables that were dimly illuminated by small lamps.
Gilda rang a little bell at the circulation desk, but nobody appeared. Just as she was about to leave, she spied a row of books behind the librarian’s desk with the title
Our Lady of Sorrows
on each spine. She was in luck; she had found the old school yearbooks.
Gilda snuck behind the circulation desk and swiftly located the book from Dolores Lambert’s freshman year. She didn’t have to look far for information about Dolores because the first page of the yearbook was dedicated to her.
We knew you only a short time, but your spirit lives on with us
.
Beneath the dedication a picture of Dolores peered out of the yearbook with a hopeful, puppyish smile. She looked as if she expected a pat on the head for cooperating with the photographer. Her blond hair was parted in the center and secured with a plastic barrette over one prominent ear—the last, early-morning touch of a mother who felt compelled to overaccessorize her daughter on picture day. Gilda wondered why Dolores hadn’t had the sense to rebelliously remove that barrette.
Gilda flipped through the rest of the yearbook, searching for more information about Dolores. The interior pictures of the yearbook made the school seem like a boisterous, happy-go-lucky place—a bubbly contrast with the somber tone of the opening dedication to a drowned girl. Gilda perused photos of girls wearing formal gowns at dances, leaning toward the camera like bouquets of colorful flowers. There were pictures of smiling girls throwing snowballs at one another, playing instruments, dressing in costume for the school play, washing cars to raise money for charity, leaning together to share gossip in the lunchroom. Each photograph had a lively caption: “Having fun the ‘Our Lady’ Way!” “No ‘Sorrows’ in this bunch!” “Fun with hats!” There was a slightly disturbing picture with the caption “ ‘Kick the Freshmen’ Day! Sophomore Louise Daly gives the boot to Freshman Priscilla Barkley”—a picture that made Gilda wonder whether it was still a tradition to “kick the freshmen.” The book culminated with glamorous, professional shots of each girl in the senior class with several pages dedicated to their lists of “Remember whens”:
Remember when Lilly Fontaine had never been in a single car accident?
Remember when we wrote “WE LOVE YOU” on the blackboard in Mr. Panté’s class, and he never even noticed?
Remember when Sonya Roberts DIDN’T have a Mystic tan?
Remember when Cathy Jones tried to paint her white BMW pink using a felt-tip pen?
Where had Dolores Lambert fit into this school? There was little information on the freshman class and virtually no evidence of Dolores, who apparently hadn’t taken advantage of the clubs and extracurricular activities that were photographed. With the exception of her school picture, her identity remained mysterious.
Eager to continue her research, Gilda logged on to a computer and located a newspaper article about Dolores’s death:
Students and teachers of Our Lady of Sorrows, a private school in Bloomfield Hills, are in shock at the news of Dolores Lambert’s death by drowning on the eve of Thanksgiving.
Parents of the deceased girl alerted police when their daughter failed to return home from school. “She had been really busy working on a big school project, and she often got home late due to her study groups and extracurricular activities, so we didn’t really worry until it was too late,” Mrs. Frieda Lambert lamented, wiping tears from her eyes. Dolores was the Lamberts’ only child.
When officers discovered a break in the ice covering Mermaid Lake—a man-made lake on the school’s property—they immediately initiated a search-and-rescue mission.
Divers recovered Dolores’s body at approximately 3 a.m.
Police say that, to their knowledge, there were no eyewitnesses to the tragedy. They speculate that Dolores attempted to cross the frozen lake in an effort to take a shortcut to her home in the nearby Bloomfield Hills neighborhood—something students who live in the area had been known to do in the past. “The ice simply wasn’t frozen deep enough to support her body weight,” Officer Denzel Jones commented.
“Our whole school community is devastated by this tragedy, and our hearts go out to Dolores’s family,” said Headmistress Shirley McCracken, adding that students had been warned to stay off the ice until an official could test its safety. She also indicated that she would be enhancing safety precautions surrounding the lake and considering the construction of a bridge over the body of water.
Students remember a girl who was something of a loner, but who always had a smile. “I never really got to know her,” freshman Priscilla Barkley commented. “She kind of kept to herself. But she always smiled at you when she walked down the hallway, and the people I’m friends with don’t even do that all the time.”
It sounded as if nobody had known Dolores very well. Clearly, the school had been shocked by her death, but had anyone really
missed
Dolores? Rereading the article, Gilda noticed an odd detail: Mrs. Lambert said her daughter was “involved in extracurricular activities,” but the school yearbook didn’t show her picture in any of the clubs. She wondered if there was some way she could find Dolores’s mother and ask her a few questions.
Gilda suddenly realized that she had lost track of time: she was completely alone in the library. She wandered into the hallway and found that the lights were turned off. The school felt unusually quiet and still. Peering into the dim light of the long hallway, Gilda saw the silhouettes of statues that lined the walls like silent soldiers guarding a tomb.
At the end of the hallway, one of the statues
moved
.
Gilda stiffened. For a moment, she felt as if she might faint. Squinting into the dim light, she realized that the moving statue was actually a tall man—a man who stood in the darkness, staring at her.
The man slowly reached for something, and a moment later, the chandelier overhead filled the hallway with light. Blinking in the sudden glare, Gilda took a moment to recognize Keith—one of the school maintenance workers. She had often seen him clumping down the hallway, grimly carrying a toilet plunger or sighing with exasperation as he examined a radiator. Whenever something went wrong in a classroom—windows that wouldn’t open, fans that wouldn’t work—the teacher always sighed and said, “I’ll call Keith.”
“You gave me a fright, baby,” Keith said, slowly approaching Gilda and dragging a mop and bucket behind him. His voice reminded Gilda of a rusty engine. One of Keith’s eyes was surprisingly blue in contrast with his coffee-colored skin; the other resembled an opaque marble due to an untreated cataract. “I wasn’t expecting to see nobody in this hall.”
“Sorry I scared you,” said Gilda, attempting to sound nonchalant. She walked quickly, realizing that she had better hurry if she wanted to catch her bus.
“For a second, I thought you was that li’l ghost girl.”
Gilda stopped. “
Ghost girl
?”
“Sometimes, mainly when it floods up, I see strange things around here. Two times now it’s flooded real bad—so bad you got to dry it quick, or you get you some persistent mold and mildew and then the smell will make you think somethin’ died.
You’d wish your nose would stop workin’.” Keith swept his mop across the floor as he spoke.
“You said something about a ‘ghost girl’?” Gilda persisted.
Keith nodded. He paused and leaned against his mop. “One time, the pipes burst and they had to shut down the whole school because all them back rooms flooded like Lake Erie. So I was working all day, trying to get all the water out the building, when what do I see but a girl wearing her pink skirt just like you got on right now. And I says to myself: ‘That’s odd, because there ain’t no school today. I’ll be double damned if one of them freshmen is coming to school on a flood day.’ So I walk out the boiler room and look down the hallway just in time to see her walk right through a wall.”
A chill passed through Gilda’s body as she imagined what it must have been like to see a girl vanish into a wall. She also felt a surge of excitement: here was yet another sighting of Dolores’s ghost! She scrutinized Keith’s face. He seemed to enjoy having an audience for his ghost story, but Gilda didn’t get the sense that he was inventing the plot as he went along. Gilda reflected that janitors and maintenance workers were always at school during odd hours, when nobody else was around. They had to work alone, in obscure places like “janitor’s closets” and “boiler rooms.”
It makes sense that Keith would see a ghost if the school actually is haunted
, Gilda reasoned. “Do you see ghosts often?” she asked.
“No, no. Well, lots of times I do see dark shadows sneakin’ out the corner of my eye.”
Gilda wondered if Keith’s eyes could be trusted, since one eye was obviously blind. On the other hand, Gilda’s
Psychic’s
Handbook
noted that “it is not the eye that perceives reality; it is the
brain
. This may explain why some people see spirits walking around while others do not, despite their perfect eyesight.”
“How ‘bout you?” Keith asked. “You ever seen a ghost?”
“Sort of.” On impulse, Gilda rummaged in her backpack and handed Keith one of her business cards. “I investigate paranormal phenomena.”
