The Ghost Orchid (26 page)

“It doesn’t matter whose son he is,” he says, stroking Corinth’s hair and pulling her close to him to stop her shivering. “He’s been well paid. I’ve got lots of money and by tomorrow we’ll be far away.” His eyes are glittering in the moonlight with a hardness that reminds Corinth of the glass eyes of the rocking horse in the attic. She starts to tell him about Alice, but then remembers also about the other child—his child with Mrs. Ramsdale—and then suddenly she feels overwhelmed by
all
of them. James and Cynthia and Tam who died in the cold attic and the children in the cemetery behind the rose garden and her own baby—Tom’s and hers—dead beneath the bog mosses. She feels she has betrayed them all, but unlike Ne’Moss-i-Ne she’s escaping with her lover. She has no plans to throw herself from any cliff. She feels Tom lift her face to his, feels his lips sink into hers, feels his hands loosen her hair and his fingers combing through the length of it, shaking free a single black feather tipped with red.

In the hotel room they make love with the moonlight streaming in through the window, the white light lapping against them like water. The hardness is gone from Tom’s eyes now, and Corinth realizes it was only the money-glitter that she’s seen in men’s eyes before. He’d sold something to get enough money for them to run away and he’s exalted with it, a conquering hero, his smooth chest rising and falling above her like the white breast of an eagle.

Afterward she clings to him, fitting her knees into the bend of his knees and pressing her chest against his broad, strong back. Even when she falls asleep, she can feel herself holding him—only, as she sinks deeper into the blackness, he seems to shrink until she’s lying at the bottom of a well holding only a white stone that glows in the moonlight. As she looks at the stone, though, it’s eaten up by the darkness like the moon in eclipse and, looking up, she realizes that she’s trapped beneath the earth. Buried alive.

She awakes gasping, alone in the tangled bedsheets. For a moment she thinks he’s abandoned her, but then she sees Tom standing at the door listening to voices outside. Corinth slips out of bed, pulling a chemise over her head and wrapping herself in her shawl, and joins Tom at the door.

“You’ll have to open it before she wakes up the whole hotel,” she says.

He nods and opens the door. Wanda Norris is standing in the hallway, her hands held out stiffly at her sides like a statue of Justice, a leather pouch in one hand and a bloody handkerchief in the other. “What have you done with her?” she demands. “What have you done with Alice?”

Chapter Twenty-one

They come as stone, water, and wood.

That night, I’m unable to get the words out of my mind. I lie awake listening to the wooden frame of the old house creaking in the wind, the snow lashing against the windowpanes, and when I close my eyes, I imagine all the statues of the Muses, with their broken arms and damaged faces, stirring to life under the deep snow.

When I finally fall asleep, though, I dream not of the faceless stone woman but of the girl in the closet. In my dream I open the door (the padlock, unrusted, opens at a touch of my fingers) and free her hands, using a knife to cut the ropes. I lead her back to her bed and draw the white counterpane over her, tucking it beneath her thin shoulders. I can feel her trembling beneath the bedclothes. “Don’t go,” she whispers, “I’ll be punished for leaving the closet. And you’ll be punished for letting me out.”

“It’s all right—” I start to tell her, but then I see a shadow creeping over the white counterpane and the girl’s eyes widen until they are as wide and black as the eyes of the ghost I saw yesterday. I turn to face what is behind us, but before I can make out the shape silhouetted against the moonlit windows, I startle awake.

Only I’m not in my room. I’m standing at the foot of the attic stairs and the dark shape from my dreams is standing above me. I can see now it’s a woman who’s pushing a girl in a white nightgown in front of her—pushing her so roughly that the girl stumbles on the last step and careens into me—or, rather, through me. I feel her move through me like a current of cold water, and then someone lays an icy hand on my back. I whirl around and find David standing right behind me in the hall.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” he says, his lips curling in a smile that looks more amused than sorry. He’s wearing the checked hunting jacket over his pajamas and holding a glass of scotch in his right hand. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs to get a nightcap,” he says, holding out the glass toward me.

The scotch—or maybe it’s the jacket—smells so pungent, like leaves rotting in the fall, that I recoil. David tilts his head to one side and shrugs. “It’s not poisoned. See?” He takes a generous swig of the stuff and steps toward me. I immediately take a step backward. “You know what your problem is, Ellis?”

“No,” I say, making myself stand still. It’s only that he’s angry at me for running from his room today, I tell myself, and that he’s had too much to drink. “What’s my problem?”

“It’s that you can’t trust anyone.”

I almost laugh at the banality of his assessment, but I manage not to laugh, because the last thing I want is for him to think I’m laughing at him. “Yes,” I say, nodding seriously, “you’re right, that’s always been my problem.”

“Well,” he says, turning away from me and heading toward his own room. “You’ll have to trust someone sometime.”

I watch him retreat down the hallway, swaying slightly, and then I go back down to my room. I’m unable to go to sleep, though, for the rest of the night. Every time I close my eyes, I see the eyes of that girl in the attic and I wonder what she was so afraid of. Where was the woman taking her? My own eyes in the bathroom mirror the next morning have the same empty glaze. Still, I dress and struggle down to the dining room, because we all agreed to meet for breakfast.

We agreed to discuss the matter in the clear light of day when, we all believed, the events of the previous day might seem less ominous. The problem, I see as we gather around the dining table, is that the light of this particular day is anything but clear. The windows on the first floor are half covered in snowdrifts, so that the faint light coming in seems to be filtered by a thick screen of translucent marble. It’s like being sealed inside a marble vault.

“Mrs. Hervey couldn’t make it in,” Diana Tate tells us as she wheels Zalman into the dining room and Daria lays out plates of runny eggs and burnt toast, “but the roads should be plowed by noon. The storm’s eased up right now, but it’s supposed to get bad again tonight. So if you need anything from town, best take care of it today. Anyone who wants to go in can take the Range Rover.”

“I’ll go, but I can’t drive because it’s a stick,” Daria says, setting a cup of coffee down in front of Nat. “You can drive a stick, right, Nat?”

“That’s right,” Nat says, smiling at Daria. “I’d be happy to teach you . . .” Daria beams, but Diana hurries her back into the kitchen to get the rest of breakfast.

“ ‘You can drive a stick, right, Nat?’ ”
Bethesda mimics, catching Daria’s inflection to a tee.

“What?” Nat protests. “I can’t help it if the girl’s got a crush on me. The poor kid’s got no one here to talk to but those crazy callers.”

“Please,” Zalman interrupts, “we’re all tense after yesterday’s events and tired from too little sleep—”

I notice how pale Zalman is. “Did you get any sleep last night?” I ask.

The poet looks up from his plate and his lip begins to tremble. “It’s that
damned
dog,” he says in a low voice that nonetheless causes everyone to look up. It’s the first time that any of us has heard Zalman curse. “It comes every night and lies on my leg. At first I thought it was Madame Blavatsky’s dog and it was healing my leg, but now—” He breaks off and pushes his untouched plate away from him. “Now I think it’s sucking the lifeblood out of me. I haven’t written a decent sonnet in days.”

“Weren’t you working on a sonnet about a Native American legend?” Nat asks.

“Oh
that,
” Zalman says. “You gave me a good idea there, Nathaniel, only . . . well, here, let me read it to you.” Zalman withdraws from his bathrobe pocket a page folded in quarters and, clearing his throat, announces the title of the poem: “Ne’Moss-i-Ne’s Blackbird.”

“The spirit of Ne’Moss-i-Ne survives,

a red-winged blackbird swifter than starlight,

revealing truth each time she soars or dives,

a flash of wing by day, black ghost by night.

“The Sacandaga hurts where she once fell,

for once a year a crimson stain appears

beneath that cliff. Her soul-bird casts a spell,

and reddens near a mile with blood of tears.

“Past nightfall, crimson shimmer vanishes,

as soul-bird sprinkles starlight with her beak

and sings of how sky spirit lavishes

its love upon the gentle and the meek.

“The tortured have not suffered all in vain:

blood markings on her wings redeem their pain.”

When he’s done, the room is quiet for a moment and then Nat says, “I see—you’ve connected the statue here in the garden to the girl who threw herself from Indian Overlook . . . Did I tell you about that?”

Zalman shrugs. “I’m not entirely sure anymore where my ideas are coming from.” He glances around the room nervously as if the source of his ideas might be hiding in the china cupboards among the blue-and-white teacups. “It’s beginning to feel less like inspiration and more like an infection.”

“I think Zalman is right,” Bethesda says. “The spirits of the children have
infected
the place. We have to do something.”

“But what?” Nat asks. “What do they want?”

“They want their stories told.” The answer comes from the door to the kitchen, where Daria stands holding a pot of coffee and a basket of muffins. “Like the people who call here. God, don’t you people read any ghost stories? They want their murderers unmasked, their bones found and buried, and their stories told.” Daria puts down the coffee and the slightly burnt muffins, and sits down at the table, something her aunt would yell at her for if she were in the room. “We have to have a séance,” she says, looking directly at me. “And you can do it. Mira said you were a natural medium, only you weren’t ready to acknowledge your powers.”

“Mira? You talked to my mother?”

“Uh, yeah. We ran into each other in the garden and shared . . . uh . . . some history of the place.” Remembering the reek of marijuana in the garden on the day of my mother’s visit, I’m pretty sure that’s not all they shared. “And she told me about you. She’s very proud of you, you know. She says you get your artistic ability from your grandmother who was a painter and your psychic ability from your great-grandmother—”

“The one time I attended a séance, I fainted,” I say.

“Your mother thinks it was because you saw your great-grandmother’s spirit,” Daria says. “She said that she’d been trying to contact her for years, but you did it on your first try.” Daria pauses, but I don’t add anything to what she’s said. I saw something at that séance, but it wasn’t
anyone’s
great-grandmother. “Only it scared you so much, your mother decided not to talk to you about it until you were ready,” Daria goes on, “which she thought might be pretty soon. Come on,” she says to the room at large. “We used to have séances at camp all the time. It will be fun.”

“I can’t,” I say. “It’s a horrible idea. Look what happened at the last séance . . . I mean, the last time a séance was held here. We don’t know enough to start fooling around with that.”

“I agree with that part,” Bethesda says. “We need to know more. For one thing, I would like to know why there’s a death certificate for a stillborn child named Alice Latham but no stone for her in the graveyard.”

“Why is that so important?” I ask, amazed—and a little unnerved—that rational Bethesda has conceded so quickly to the idea that Bosco is haunted. Whatever she saw at her window must have been as real to her as the girl I saw in the attic.

“It’s an idea I have that I can’t explain yet. Maybe I just missed the gravestone. I’d like to go down to the cemetery today and look for it.”

“The cemetery’s under two feet of snow,” David points out.

“Then maybe you can help me shovel it,” Bethesda replies.

“Sure,” Nat says. “We can all help. I need to get outside.”

“No,” Bethesda says. “I want you to go into town to City Hall and have a look at the birth and death certificates for 1883. Use your charm with the clerks to see if the same certificate of death for little Alice Latham was registered and if there’s another birth certificate for an Alice who didn’t die.”

“You mean for the one who disappeared in 1893? You don’t have a birth certificate for her?” I ask.

“No, I don’t. Maybe you should go as well, Ellis. It’s the kind of research you should get used to if you’re going to write historical novels.”

I feel a prickle of resentment at how Bethesda has managed to send me and Nat away and keep David to herself, but I don’t want to give away my jealousy. After what I saw in the attic yesterday and my dream last night and the encounter with David in the hallway, I’m glad to be getting away from Bosco for the day. When I look around the table, though, I notice how tired everyone looks. David’s eyes look as glassy and distant as the stuffed deer hanging over the mantel. In fact, looking around the table, I have an image of a circle composed of lifeless dolls and stuffed toys in place of the live guests, and I have a sudden misgiving about what Nat and I will find when we get back.