The Ghost Orchid (33 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

When I call Tom’s name, Nat hesitates for just a moment, but he still brings down the marble arm into David’s skull with a crash that reverberates through the crypt. David staggers and begins to fall, but Bethesda catches him and keeps his head from hitting the marble floor.

“You didn’t have to hit him so hard,” Bethesda scolds.

“You’re welcome,”
Nat says sarcastically. “Next time I’ll let him slice you open with this thing.” Nat picks up the scythe, but I take it from him and drop it down the well, where it clatters against the stones at the bottom. Then I kneel down next to Bethesda, who has her ear pressed to David’s chest. “Is he—?”

Bethesda shakes her head. “He’s breathing,” she says, “but shallowly. We have to get him back up to the house.”

“Well, I’m not carrying him,” Nat says petulantly.

Bethesda and I both look up at him and someone sighs as if exasperated, but then I realize the sound is coming from David. I look down and see his eyes flicker open. They settle on Bethesda, and I’m afraid for a moment that he’ll attack her again, but the white film is gone.

“I’ll go get that scythe now,” he says. “I left it in a storage shed up the hill—” Then he sees me and Nat and, I imagine, notices that it’s dark. “What—?”

“We’ll explain later,” I say. “We’ve got to get back to the house. Can you walk?”

David nods and struggles to his feet, leaning on Bethesda’s and my arms. Nat stands a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest. “How’s your head feel?” Nat asks.

“Like I was rammed by a truck.”

“Sorry about that,” Nat says with a smile that looks anything but apologetic. Before David can register what’s happened, Bethesda and I steer him up the steps. In the cemetery the white flowers have withered and shriveled up. They crackle under our feet as we walk across them. When we enter the narrow path back to the house, we have to walk two by two. I motion for Bethesda to go with David to keep an eye on him, and I fall back to have a word with Nat.

“It’s not his fault,” I tell Nat. “It’s not David who was trying to hurt Bethesda—or me—it’s this place.”

“Yeah, I get it, Ellis. He was possessed. So, maybe I was possessed, too.”

“The only one you’re possessed by right now is your grandfather. All the ugly things he ever said to you are all right in here”—I tap my finger on Nat’s forehead—“and you’re going to keep spewing out the bad stuff until you turn around and face it.”

“Oh, please,” Nat says, dodging away from my finger, “spare me the psychobabble. I thought you were a psychic, not a psychiatrist.”

I stop in my tracks, and Nat goes on a few more feet, his head ducked and his shoulders hunched. When he sees that I’m not following him, he stops and turns back toward me. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be so sensitive. I’m
sorry.
It’s just that right now I think we probably need your skills as a psychic more than as a psychoanalyst. Okay?”

It’s the closest I’m likely to get to an apology, so I continue walking. He’s right, I realize: whatever is happening here at Bosco requires the skills of a medium and, unfortunately, I’m the closest thing we have to one.

When we emerge onto the terrace, the snow is a deep wave that sweeps up over the hill and crests the marble balustrade. Although the snow has stopped falling, a steady wind blows a cloud of fine icy particles across the frozen expanse. A tsunami of snow that might at any moment break over the house and carry it away.

Or has it already carried everyone away?

Turning to the house, I see a wall of darkened windows that have been sealed by a milky coat of ice. Like blind eyes, I think, shivering as a gust of icy wind hits my back with so much force it almost knocks me off my feet. It’s like standing in the ocean and getting hit by an unexpected wave. I can feel the pent-up pressure of Bosco’s dead springs gathering to unleash their rage on the house.

David and Bethesda come back from the east side of the house to report that the door on that side, the one under the porte cochere, is locked.

“That’s funny,” Nat says. “In all the years I’ve been coming to Bosco the porte cochere door has never been locked.”

“Well, the porte co-SHARE door is locked now,” David says, drawling out the French word. “So much for tradition.”

Nat takes a step toward David, but Bethesda gets in between them. “Let’s check the library doors,” she suggests. “It’s got the best working fireplace. I bet Diana and Daria would take Zalman there if there wasn’t any heat.”

“The library doors would be the first ones they’d lock in a storm,” Nat says as we trudge through the deep snow to the double French doors.

A drift has risen halfway up the doors. Even if they aren’t locked, we won’t be able to open them without digging them out. As I stare at them, though, I see a flicker of light coming from beneath the waxy layer of ice that covers the glass. “Look,” I tell the others, “I think someone is in there. If you start clearing some of this snow away, I’ll try to get their attention inside.”

I press my face to the frosted glass to look in, but all I can see are amorphous globes of light hovering in the room like huge fireflies. I breathe on the window until a crack appears in the ice and I’m able to get my fingernails underneath to pry it away. I’ve cleared a small circle when one of the lights suddenly flares right in my eyes, blinding me. I take a step back and fall into the pile of snow that Nat and David have pushed away from the door.

“Who’s there?” a tremulous voice calls as the door opens a crack.

“Diana?” Nat calls. “It’s Nat Loomis.” David and Bethesda add their names, but the door still doesn’t open. I struggle to get up, but the wind pushes me down, as if I’m being dragged under by a riptide. My ears are filled with a sound like rushing water and I’m blinded by a gust of snow. Then I can feel someone pulling me up and through the narrowly opened doors. I’m still blinded by the powdery ice in my eyes and my tangled hair and the flaring candlelight in the dark room. Then my vision clears and I see it’s Nat who’s helped me through the door. He pushes away my hair, which is hanging in icy strands as if he’d fished me out of a frozen sea.

“Shut those doors,” Diana yells at us.

I’m surprised at the note of hysteria in Diana’s voice, but then I look back at the glass doors to the terrace and understand. Even now snow is lapping across the lintel, drawing wave patterns in a drift that reaches to the wainscoting, like surf marks of an encroaching tide. David and Bethesda have to struggle against the wind and drifted snow to close them.

“Maybe we should make for higher ground,” I say, only half joking.

“We can’t leave Zalman,” Diana says, waving toward the alcove. We all follow her into the alcove, where Zalman is seated in his wheelchair beside the library table. At the center of the table is a large branching candelabra—a hideous kitschy thing made out of the antlers of a moose. Daria’s sitting to Zalman’s right, scribbling away on a steno pad as Zalman dictates. It takes me a moment to realize, though, that Zalman’s words are barely audible and that his eyes look as blind and unfocused as Bosco’s frozen windows.

“I’ve gotten a few more words filled in,” Daria says, holding up the spiral-bound notebook. “You were right, Aunt Diana, if you break it into lines of ten syllables each, there are fourteen lines that he’s repeating over and over again.”

“Fourteen lines?” Nat asks.

“You mean he’s reciting a sonnet?” Bethesda asks, sitting down next to Daria and looking over her shoulder at the lines.

“Yes,” Diana says, walking over to the sideboard. “He lost consciousness earlier this evening and then when he came to, he started reciting. He’s been repeating the same sonnet for three hours now, but so softly we couldn’t tell at first that’s what it was. I asked Daria to write it down. I told you that steno class would come in handy.” Diana turns from the sideboard with a glass of scotch in her hand and David takes it from her without asking and sits down next to Bethesda. Glaring at him, Diana pours herself another glass and sits down next to David. I notice as she passes me that she reeks of the peaty scotch.

“Well, I have gotten pretty good, what with all the phone messages I’ve been taking. Here, do you want to hear it?”

“Absolutely,” Nat says, sitting down next to Diana. There’s only one chair left, the one between Zalman and Nat, which I take.

“Okay, but let me wait until he comes around to the beginning again. It would seem kind of rude to read out of step with him.”

No one questions Daria’s sense of decorum. Instead, we all do what she does, follow Zalman’s lips until he pauses, and then with a sharp intake of breath that sounds painfully hoarse (
three hours repeating the same sonnet!
), Daria’s voice chimes in with Zalman’s barely audible one.

“Elusive, evanescent as twilight,

this velvet snow obscures the murky bog.

A spirit, barely in your mortal sight,

moves shadowy and sudden through a fog

that slithers across a pond’s slick mossy skin

and merges with the weave of silent snow.

The spirit is an infant lost at birth,

forever roaming here; the blackbirds know

her loss, mark it in red, just as the earth

is mourning her with clouds, with snow, with rain.

Her tiny silhouette chills to your bone,

especially the shadow of her eyes,

so innocent and lost, so all alone,

for no one ever hears her ghostly cries.”

When they finish, we can all hear the moan of the wind outside, and then the hiss of Zalman drawing another painful breath as he begins again. I reach out and touch Zalman’s hand. “It’s all right,” I say, “we found her.” Then I take out of my pocket the broken china and spill the blue-and-white shards onto the table along with the crumpled white orchid. Instantly the room is filled with the scent of vanilla.

Bethesda reaches across the table and touches the china pieces. “Where did you find these?” she asks.

“What do you mean that you ‘found her’?” Diana asks at the same time. “Who did you find?”

“Alice,” Nat answers. “The first Alice, the one who was born and died on April ninth, 1883. Bethesda was right—that death certificate was never filed, but there was a birth certificate filed for an Alice Latham on April fifteenth—”

“So it was just a mistake—” Diana Tate begins.

“That a child was born on April ninth, died, and was suddenly reborn on the fifteenth?” Nat asks. “I don’t think so.”

“They must have replaced the dead baby with another,” Bethesda says. “But where . . . ?”

“With Corinth’s child,” I answer. “Nat remembered a grave site in the bog behind his family’s camp, and we went to look there. We found the name
Alice
written on a piece of china that had been wedged into the tree, and then we found these pieces beneath the tree—”

“But that can’t be right,” Bethesda says, “Aurora bought these teacups for the children in 1892, so that name couldn’t have been put on the tree when that baby died in 1883.”

“No, I think it was put over another name,” I say, “when Alice Latham came to the cabin in 1893 with Corinth Blackwell and Tom Quinn.”

“Well, at least that proves that they
did
kidnap Alice Latham,” Diana Tate says, taking a sip from her drink and putting the glass down so hard on the table that some scotch sloshes over the side. I turn to her, surprised at the emotion in her voice.

“Alice was her own child,” I say. “If the babies were switched without Corinth knowing, she wouldn’t have known that until she came to Bosco in 1893. By then all the other Latham children had died. Corinth would have been afraid for Alice’s life. I think that’s what
they
want us to know—what happened to them. What happened to Alice.”

“That’s why all the teacups have been breaking,” Daria says, taking out of her pocket a handful of broken china pieces and spilling them across the table so that they join the shards that I brought back from the bog. “This was Cynthia’s cup,” she says, picking out a
C, Y, N,
and
A
on the pieces of white china. “I was giving Zalman his tea around four o’clock today, and suddenly the cup just shuddered itself off the table.”

Nat and I exchange a look. Four o’clock was around the time the tamarack tree fell in the bog and I found the pieces of Alice’s cup buried beneath it.

“That’s when Zalman started babbling,” Daria says. “I went to find Aunt Diana and I heard a noise from one of the rooms upstairs, so I went up there and found Miss Graham’s door open.”

“My room?” Bethesda asks, turning an outraged glance at Daria. “I’m quite sure I left my door closed and locked.”

“Well, it was open and the noise had come from there,” Daria says, blinking back tears. The stress of having been here alone all day with a drunken aunt and a semicomatose poet has obviously gotten to her.