Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (18 page)

Mrs. Lambert looked perplexed, but she gestured for Gilda
to step inside. “Come in,” she said. “It’s already getting so cold out here!”

The house was virtually empty of furniture. Boxes lined the entranceway.

“We’re getting ready to move,” Mrs. Lambert explained. “It’s going to take us some time to pack everything up.”

“Where to?”

“Hawaii.”

“Awesome! I mean—that sounds nice.”

“My husband and I can’t take the cold anymore.” She rubbed her arms. “I guess I’m not getting any younger.”

The atmosphere in the Lamberts’ house had an icy edge; it was virtually as chilly inside as it had been outside. Gilda remembered reading that “cold spots or other changes in temperature may be signs of spirit activity.”

“You wanted to ask me something, Gilda?”

“I’m researching a story for the school paper,” Gilda fibbed, thinking it was better not to mention the fact that a ghost had telephoned her from the Lamberts’ house. “We might feature a memorial profile of your daughter, since she would have been a senior this year.”

Mrs. Lambert’s face broke into a quivering smile, but her eyebrows arched inward. A contortion of excruciating pain twisted her face. Gilda sensed a darkness surrounding Mrs. Lambert—a residue of sorrow.

“Oh—I’m sorry.” Despite her own familiarity with grief, Gilda wasn’t sure what to say to Mrs. Lambert.
She has one of the saddest faces I’ve ever seen
, Gilda thought.

Mrs. Lambert shook her head. “Sometimes, after all this time, something will just set me off.”

Gilda knew the feeling. Sometimes a single, unexpected reference to her father triggered a flood of emotion.

Summoning her courage to continue gathering information despite Mrs. Lambert’s discomfort, Gilda decided to pretend she was a real detective on official business. “Mrs. Lambert, I wonder if you could tell me about some of the things your daughter was interested in,” she suggested. “Maybe I could take a look at her room?” Gilda knew she was going out on a limb with this request, but it was worth a shot. If Mrs. Lambert still kept them around, Dolores’s belongings might offer important clues.

Mrs. Lambert hesitated. Her eyes moved over Gilda’s pink skirt and tattered backpack wistfully. “Her room is upstairs,” she said, turning to lead Gilda toward the second floor. “I kept it just the way she left it.”

Upstairs, Mrs. Lambert opened the door to reveal a perfect little girl’s bedroom where everything was pink and quite literally frozen. “I need to pack up this room for our move, but I haven’t been able to make myself do it yet.”

“It’s cold in here,” Gilda observed.

“We closed off the vent in this room. I don’t go in here much.”

The pale pink walls in Dolores’s room perfectly matched her ruffled pink bedspread. A collection of teddy bears and bunny rabbits huddled together as if trying to stay warm. Girlish posters featuring ballerinas, kittens, and inspirational messages decorated the walls: “Hang in there!” “Never give up!”
“Believe in yourself, and reach your goal.” “Think thin!”

Mrs. Lambert waited for Gilda in the doorway, as if entering her daughter’s bedroom would break a spell of some kind.

“Was Dolores a dancer?” Gilda eyed a poster of a ballerina posed in an expressive arabesque. “
If you can dream it, you can achieve it. If you can think it, you can become it
,” the poster urged.

“She took a few ballet lessons, but I think she just liked the poster.”

Gilda surveyed the motivational messages blaring from the walls. She herself was intensely goal-oriented, but something about the combination of posters seemed hysterical. “I guess Dolores must have had some big goals she was working to achieve,” she said.

Mrs. Lambert cocked her head as if seeing her daughter’s posters for the first time. “I don’t know of any big goals. She always wanted to lose a few pounds, but unfortunately, she took after her mom in that department.”

Gilda glanced at Mrs. Lambert’s figure. She was a large woman, but her clothes were noticeably baggy, as if she had recently lost a significant amount of weight but never bothered to shop for a smaller wardrobe.

“
I
thought she looked just fine,” Mrs. Lambert continued, “but Dolores was at that age when she was starting to get really concerned about her weight. She just wanted to get rid of the baby fat. Once, she got so upset I took her to Jenny Craig with me, but it didn’t really work. We just ate the diet food for snacks and then went to McDonald’s for French fries.”

Mrs. Lambert’s eyes filled with tears as she surveyed her
daughter’s belongings from the safety of the doorway. Her skin looked puffy, as if a pool of pain rippled just beneath the surface of her face.

Gilda turned back to the poster, her eyes lingering on the sinewy tendons and muscles of the dancer’s body. Something about the pictures made her think of Danielle and the Eating Disorders Awareness Club.

“In your news article, you can say that Dolores’s main goal was doing well in school,” Mrs. Lambert declared, suddenly walking into the room. “I told her, ‘Dolores, this school is going to be tougher than your old school,’ but she still wanted to do it. She was just so proud when she got into Our Lady of Sorrows, so excited about everything—” Mrs. Lambert’s voice broke. She blinked quickly, fighting tears. “You know how it is; at a certain age, you just don’t want to tell your mother everything?”

“Definitely,” Gilda agreed. “My mom thinks I’m working at the library right now.”

“She
does
?”

“It’s okay.” Gilda wished she hadn’t blurted that fact. “She doesn’t want to know all my details.”

Mrs. Lambert looked concerned. “I’m sure your mother wants to know all your details, Gilda.”

“Believe me; she’s got enough on her mind as it is.” Gilda pulled open Dolores’s desk drawer and found a Hello Kitty notebook and a bunch of pencils with chubby erasers bundled together with a rubber band. “Would it be okay for me to take a look?” Gilda asked, pointing at the notebook.

“I suppose, but I really should be getting back to my packing.”

“It’ll just take a second.”

Gilda flipped open the notebook before Mrs. Lambert could protest further, and found Dolores’s notes from English class. “
To be or not to be
?” Dolores had written at the top of the page in fat, girlish handwriting. “
Hamlet thinks about the value of his own life. He is MELANCHOLY
.” Gilda flipped through a few pages of
Hamlet
notes, wishing that she had time to read every page carefully in search of personal messages or other clues. She was uncomfortably aware of Mrs. Lambert’s presence behind her, watching her every move. Just then, something in the notebook caught her eye—a poem:

It was the same Emily Dickinson poem Mr. Panté had shown Gilda’s English class at the beginning of the school year.
That poem is in our poetry textbook, so she must have had some personal reason for copying it in her notebook
, Gilda thought.

“Mrs. Lambert, who was Dolores friends with?” Gilda turned abruptly and caught Mrs. Lambert scowling behind her.

“She had lots of friends,” said Mrs. Lambert defensively. “I mean, I think she missed her friends from her old school, but whenever I’d suggest calling them, she’d just tell me she didn’t want to see them anymore.”

“Did she have many friends at Our Lady of Sorrows?”

Mrs. Lambert abruptly took the notebook out of Gilda’s
hands and closed it. She stuffed it back in Dolores’s desk drawer. “I’m sorry, Gilda, but I don’t like that poem,” she said. “There’s something so sad about it.”

She doesn’t want to think her daughter was unhappy
, Gilda thought, noting with interest that Mrs. Lambert knew exactly why she was asking about friends. She knew Mrs. Lambert was eager for her to leave, but the more time she spent in Dolores’s room, the more questions bubbled in her mind.

“So—Dolores
didn’t
have friends at Our Lady?”

“Well, I don’t remember all the names. She told me she was friends with some popular girls.”

Something about this statement rang false, but Gilda sensed it would be fruitless to press the issue further with Mrs. Lambert.

“Look,” said Mrs. Lambert, pulling a photograph of her daughter down from its perch high on a display shelf. “This is my favorite picture of her.”

The photograph looked very different from the school picture Gilda had seen in the Our Lady of Sorrows yearbook. With her chin resting in the palm of her hand, Dolores looked pretty—less puffy and anxious. Something caught Gilda’s interest—the purple, heart-shaped stone that gleamed on Dolores’s finger. Gilda felt sure it was the same ring she had seen in the bottom of the teacup in the ruins. “Pretty ring,” Gilda observed, hoping Mrs. Lambert would tell her more.

“It was a real amethyst, and it was
gorgeous
. I know Dolores felt so bad when she lost it.”

Gilda’s ears perked up at this piece of information.
I bet I know where the ring is
, she thought. “This might sound like an
odd question, Mrs. Lambert, but did Dolores ever mention anything about a club called the Ladies of the Lake?”

“I don’t remember anything like that. What type of club is it?”

“To be honest, I’m not really sure. I only know that it’s a secret club.”

Mrs. Lambert shook her head. “Dolores really wanted to be popular, so I doubt she’d go for something secret.” She picked up the photograph of her daughter, rubbed away some dust using her shirtsleeve, then placed it back in the same spot on the shelf with a gesture of finality. She stood still for a moment, her hands clasped tightly in front of her abdomen. “Gilda,” she said, “I think we’re done now.”

Mrs. Lambert seemed more cheerful as she led Gilda to the door. “Good luck with your article and your studies,” she said. “It’s always nice to see the girls from Our Lady of Sorrows. Everyone was so thoughtful after the tragedy happened. If you can believe it, that sweet girl Danielle Menory still stops by to help me with errands.”

Gilda stopped abruptly, as if she had just bumped into a wall. “
Danielle Menory
comes over here?”

“Isn’t she
something
? She does it completely out of the kindness of her own heart,” said Mrs. Lambert. “Just last week, I hurt my back and she came over twice to help me put away groceries and pack some boxes. And she won’t even let me pay her a dime! She is really something.”

There’s definitely something fishy about this
, Gilda thought. “Mrs.
Lambert, was Danielle here on Friday evening, by any chance?”

“Why, yes, she was. Can you believe that—coming over on a Friday night to help a neighbor?”

“It’s impressive,” said Gilda, struggling to contain her excitement at having discovered another major clue at Mrs. Lambert’s house. “And were you
with
Danielle the whole time she was at your house?”

Mrs. Lambert gave Gilda a quizzical look.

“I mean, did you let her out of your sight for any length of time?”

“That’s an odd question.”

“I’m only asking because I received a phone call from your house on that night, but there was some interference, and I couldn’t quite hear who it was. I thought maybe Danielle was the one who called.”

“Oh, so that was you! Well, there you go, Gilda, mystery solved,” said Mrs. Lambert cheerfully. “Danielle was just here for a few minutes; she put away some things in the kitchen, and when I came back down, she had already left. I bet she tried to give you a ring while she was here. She does the school paper too, right?”

“Right.” Had it been Danielle’s voice on the phone? The idea of soft-spoken Danielle whispering “
You will drown in the lake
” was almost as hard to imagine as the notion of a phone call from a ghost. Still, there was something far too suspicious about the fact that Danielle had been at Mrs. Lambert’s house on the very night that Gilda received the eerie phone call.

What if I’m onto something really big
? Gilda wondered. Then, a more disturbing thought entered her mind as she remembered the threatening, whispery voice on the phone:
What if my life really is in danger
?

… H
earing Lord Fangue’s evil proclamation, a swarm of bats emerged from a nearby cave and defiled themselves in Dulcia’s crimson hair. The end.”

Gilda looked up to gauge the class’s response to her story, which she had just read aloud. Loaded with Gothic elements—mystery, bad omens, a spooky setting, and a woman in distress—Gilda’s lengthy tale described the plight of beautiful, dim-witted Dulcia Schmetterling and her gloomy life in Spinsterloche Castle. In a freakish turn of events, Dulcia’s husband is apparently murdered by a loathsome chicken—an “uncanny, insane hen” who still lurks on the grounds of the castle. Tricked by the evil Lord Tibor Fangue, who demands a “juicy chicken dinner,” Dulcia cuts off the vile chicken’s head, only to discover that this very hen is actually her husband, and that he has been under Lord Fangue’s spell all along! Now Dulcia has killed her true love by mistake. In the tragic conclusion, Dulcia is forced to marry the hoary-eyebrowed object of her hatred—the wretched Lord Fangue.