The Glory Hand (17 page)

'Something wrong?' Abigail was grinning at the shock on Cassie's face. 'Look, it's no big deal.' She pointed towards the water. 'There's an old piling, a post just underneath the surface. There used to be a loading dock there. We jump onto the post, and hop back up . . . that's all.'

Cassie nodded, angry at herself for letting so simple a trick rattle her.

'You try it,' Abigail taunted. 'Try it, and I'll give you your shoes back. You're much better on your feet than I am - at least Sarah thinks so. If I can do it, it should be no sweat for you.' Cassie hesitated. 'Unless you're afraid of getting a little wet.'

'Of course not.'
How could she know?
Cassie held her voice steady, but her feet refused to step to the edge.

Abigail dipped Cassie's shoes toward the water. 'These things stink.
I
'm not going to hold them here all day.'
Cassie
reached out for them again, but Abigail jerked them
away.

My mother bought them for me .. .

The thought allowed her to marshal her anger, gave
her
the strength to overcome the stirrings of nausea brought on by the stagnant smell of the water. She squinted into
the
lake, but the way the sunlight shimmered off the murky surface it was hard to see the underwater piling that Abigail had pointed to. 'Do it,' Abigail said, 'before your stinking shoes get the washing they deserve.'

'Go to hell.' Cassie stepped up to the edge. Her reflection in the water stared back at her, like a specter hovering just beneath the surface, waiting to strike. She wavered, trying to get up the nerve.

She was so close to the edge, it didn't take much of a shove to send her flying into the air. One of them pushed her, and . . .

No time to panic. Reach out with your feet for the piling. Bend your knees, jump off of it the way they did.

But Cassie's feet knifed into the water and she sank in over her head.

For a moment, beneath the surface, choking on the brackish water, she opened her eyes just long enough to see that there
was
no piling. Abigail and the seniors . . .
They lied to me\
But if they had lied, then how could they . . .? They had rebounded off the water, she'd seen them.

Cassie sank into the stagnant shadows, and though she thrashed her arms and kicked her feet in panic, she started to black out, spiraling downward in a cold pirouette, as helpless as a clockwork ballerina on a music box. The waves pulled her beneath the dance pavilion, where rusty nails and barbed fishhooks bristled from the pilings.

I want my mother.

Cassie felt her body drenched with water as foul as kerosene, jerking like the straw men on Consecration night the moment they had burst into flame.
The Burning Man
. . . She remembered him, too, the way her panic to escape had made her thrash and choke in the vortex of the sinking
Pandora.
Her eyes sealed shut, but she could feel tendrils of
seaweed
clutching at her body, like the Burning Man
reaching
for her, entangling her legs as she kicked and
fought
and struggled against him.

Arms grabbed her, pulled her back up to the surface, more suddenly, she thought, more brutally than her mother's arms. The laughter of the seniors rang in her ears like the shouts of the dying on the
Pandora.
At last, her mouth opened wide, in a scream for breath.

Chapter 13

'I mean really, Cass. The water was only six feet deep.' Robin eased Cassie down on her bunk and began towel-drying her hair. 'But what else is new? You always had a flair for melodrama.' She sniffed Cassie's hair and stuck her finger down her throat, pretending to puke, a pantomime usually guaranteed to get a rise out of Cassie. Not this time. Cassie's eyes were darting around the room, as though to ferret out fresh dangers. In the light reflected off the lake, the shadows in the cabin were the same undulating green as the depths beneath the dance pavilion.

At least the cabin was empty, except for the two of them - and Iris, who was squatting on the floor, rummaging frantically through the books she had dumped out of her trunk. The other girls from Lakeside wouldn't see her like this, Cassie thought. But what if the reason they weren't here was because the seniors were telling them what had happened? She could imagine Chelsea, Melanie and Jo hooting with laughter as Abigail described her sobbing, her face smeared with slime when Robin had dragged her out of the water. 'Thanks for fishing me out,' she said, taking the towel from Robin.

'Sure.' Robin tilted her head to one side, the way she always did when she was trying to figure Cassie out. 'You look like hell.'

'Thanks.' Cassie snuck a look at her reflection in the window. Robin was right: her face was gray, her hair hopeless, and the terror showed in her eyes. On the inside, she had lost it, too; the good feelings she had gathered at camp had spilled out in the murky water and been washed away. She wrapped a blanket around her so that Robin wouldn't see she was shivering. 'Did you get my shoes?'

Robin tossed them into her lap. 'Anyway, you beat Abigail where it counts. She can't dance worth shit.'

'Sure.' Cassie pressed the soft pink leather between her fingers. The victory didn't matter to her anymore. The Chill was all that was real, the Chill that filled her mouth with the taste of brackish water and humiliation.

'Surface tension!' Iris lifted a dog-eared paperback entitled
Amazing Facts of Science
and waved it at them.

'What?'

'It was surface tension. That had to be how they did it, how the seniors could
bounce
off the water like that. It has to do with molecular resistance and . . .'

'Iris, for Chrissake.' Robin rolled her eyes. 'We know you're here on scholarship. You don't have to keep trying to prove it.'

Iris folded the page down to mark the place, closed the book and tossed it back into the footlocker. She left the cabin, murmuring something about KP.

'Iris always tries too hard,' Robin said. 'I mean, anything she could have come up with out of one of those dumb books would have to sound lame.'

'I really blew it.' Cassie tried to laugh.
Abigail and her friends saw me freak out.
'Thanks again for . . .'

'Just stick with me, sweetheart.' Robin faked a Bogie accent, then switched to her regular voice. 'Hey, your teeth are chattering.' She helped Cassie into her sleeping bag, the way Cassie used to zip her in when they had camped in back of Cliffs Edge on summer nights. Then Robin stood up with an impatient toss of her head. 'Your dad told me to take care of you, but this is ridiculous.'

Robin didn't like being cast in the role of protector, Cassie knew. She much preferred it when Cassie was in control, the way she had been on Nantucket, leaving Robin free to be the dizzy blonde. Those had always been the rules for their friendship, and maybe it was too late to try to change them now. 'I'm fine,' she said, as if to prove that the old rules still held.

'You'll live.' Robin gave her an affectionate punch on the arm, then backed towards the door: 'I'll be at the stables, feeding the horses. They need me more than you do.'

The screen door banged shut behind Robin, and Cassie closed her eyes, slowed her breathing until it came as regularly as the water lapping against the pilings beneath the cabin. Her body was trembling, her muscles tense from that one terrible moment when she had known she was over the edge, a dead weight falling - the moment when she had known exactly what was about to happen, yet could do nothing to stop it.

But worse than the fall, worse than the shock of the plunge into the cold water and the helpless thrashing for breath, had been the sight of the other girls who did
not
sink, Abigail and her friends, who were somehow beyond the rules ... or in league with them.

Cassie's stomach rumbled with the stagnant water she had swallowed. The faint smell of rot, of rust and tangled seaweed from that underwater moment was more intense than a memory. It seemed to be filtering up through the floorboards, and she breathed through her mouth to avoid it. Her hands felt cold against her cheeks, a stranger's hands.

She opened her eyes and looked over the edge of the bunk at the floor. Had it always been like that? Green algae was filtering up through the cracks between the boards, as if it would seep into the room and creep up the legs of the bunk bed and . . .

Come off it. You freaked out because they pushed you in. You made an ass of yourself. Now forget it.

The red, blue and yellow signal flags along the wall hung limp in the still air. Because her mother had forbidden her to sail, Cassie had never learned the nautical code, but she wondered if somehow the flags might be spelling out a warning.

The sleeping bag was suddenly stifling. She unzipped it and climbed out. The Chill was creeping over her again, she could feel it, and to fight back, she tried to use a secret her mother had taught her to battle stage fright before a
performance: focus on something concrete. . .anything. . .' The curtains, the floor. Focus on something real to make the panic dissolve like smoke.

But the floor smelling of algae, the rafters with their sharp steel hooks, the signal flags with their secret warning . . . none of them could do it for her. They seemed too much like Abigail's tricks, disturbing her with a threat she couldn't put into words.

Cassie slipped into a pair of white shorts and a Casmaran T-shirt. She had to get out of here, alone, to get away from the lake, and . . .

Out on the lawn, the girls from Lakeside were playing softball. Melanie was pitching, and the bases were loaded. If they spotted her, Cassie was sure they would make her come over and take Melanie's place. She turned her back on them and ran towards the woods.

The trail followed the shore of the lake until it forked in two. The senior cabin was barely visible up the steep path that led to the left, and she hurried down the one to her right. Okay, she admitted, she was afraid. But why? So the seniors were bitches - so what? Were they any worse than the ninth grade girls at the Windward Country School in Washington - the girls who had placed obscene phone calls to the spinster headmistress, and taken a pig fetus from Biology and left it for the school nurse with a note saying it was an aborted baby?

But when she reached the dance pavilion, the reassurances no longer worked. There was something different about the mischief of the seniors at Casmaran, something that was . . . She peered down into the lake. There was no hint of a submerged piling there, not even a shadow.

How had Abigail done it? Another malicious prank, it had to be. But there were starting to be too many of them, and they were getting harder to explain. Her mouth still tasted of stagnant water, and she plucked a blade of grass to chew. She took the trail that led away from the lake and plunged into the deep forest.

The sharp, bristling evergreens with the coffin scent she remembered from the night of Consecration, seemed to have receded, leaving silver birches, and poplars, and aspens dappled with sunlight. The ground which had seemed so thorny, so unyielding that night was now scattered with thousands of tiny blossoms, buttercups and daisies in thick knots poking up through the bed of pine needles. Their fragrance made it hard to believe that she could have ever been frightened here. There was an innocence about this place, like the forest in an Early American painting she'd seen once, where a lion and a iamb lay side by side, a place where you could never lose your way. Nantucket had no forests like this, she thought. On the island, the trees were stunted, twisted by the fury of gales from the sea.

Today for the first time (how could she have missed them before?) she noticed charming little touches: a miniature stone bridge that arched a brook, a handrail of rope and logs where the trail steepened, a stone bench where a weary hiker might rest. It was as if the trails had been designed for prim Victorian ladies to walk without sullying their petticoats. Had the precautions been Miss Grace's doing, Cassie wondered, when the old lady still had all her marbles? Better not to think about Miss Grace, she decided. Better not to think about Abigail,
or
the lake,
or
Miss Grace.

She took a shortcut, pulling herself up a gully, then followed the trail as it switchbacked down the side of a ravine.

The tree.
She stopped the moment she lay eyes on it, as if all along it had been her destination. The oak seemed different from the other trees in the forest, different from the sharp-edged pines and the fragile poplars. The oak's branches seemed to grasp the sky, giving form and meaning to it. She wished she could be as unshakable, as rooted in eternal certainties, as its thick, gnarled limbs. The ancient tree looked exactly the same as when her mother had come here, she imagined. In its vast life span, what were the years that separated their two visits to Casmaran?

She knelt down on one of its roots that buckled the earth, and realized that what she had at first thought was merely the pattern of the bark, were initials that had been carved into it - hundreds, so many it looked as though the trunk had been raked by claws. She ran the palm of her hand across the grooved and pitted surface, as if to read a message in Braille.