11
The last light has drained from the sky by the time they bring up the broken body of Isabel Cheney from the clove. The EMTs and police have brought floodlights to the edge of the ridge and aimed them down into the ravine to help the rescue crew see what they are doing. A few of the teachers stayed on the ridge, but most went back to the Lodge, where the students had gathered.
“If we let them go back to their dorms, they’ll just brood on their own,” Ivy St. Clare tells me. She arrived soon after word went out that Isabel’s body had been found. Now she stands on the crest of the ridge, a little apart from the teachers, her left arm wrapped around her tiny waist and cradling her right elbow, a cigarette held in the right hand. I stand next to her as we wait for the medical examiner to give the okay to move the body, and we wait while Isabel is strapped onto a stretcher and painstakingly carried up the steep slope. I stand next to St. Clare the whole time even though I’m soon freezing and footsore. If an octogenarian doesn’t need to sit down, I figure I don’t. I do take a jacket offered by an EMT after the dean turns it down and put it over my shoulders. “I’m glad you’re keeping them all together,” I tell her. “I don’t have to worry where Sally is.”
“Of course,” she says, squinting at me through her cigarette smoke. “This must make you feel worried for your daughter’s safety. I imagine many of the parents will feel that way. I’ll have to send a letter out first thing tomorrow, assuring them this was an unusual accident and delineating the steps that will be taken to make this part of campus off-limits. I’ve always thought that the ridge should be fenced off. I told Vera that after Lily died, but she said these woods were too old and too beautiful to ruin with fences and gates.”
Watching the men lifting Isabel’s body out of the ravine, I understand why Ivy looks so haunted. “Was this where Lily fell?”
“Yes, it’s exactly the same spot. We found her body just down there—” She points to the ledge where Isabel’s body was found. I can’t imagine how she can be so sure; there are no landmarks in the clove except for tumbled, moss-covered boulders and deep patches of fern and hanging moss. “It took weeks to find her because of the blizzard. She gave me her farewell note to give to Vera. When I told Vera that Lily was gone with Nash she collapsed. We thought Lily had left with him from the Lodge. We never guessed she was crossing the clove to meet him in the barn. We might not have found her until spring if Nash hadn’t had his paintings of her sent back to Fleur-de-Lis. That was when we realized that she wasn’t with him.”
“You mean he didn’t tell anyone when she didn’t show up at the barn?”
“No. He figured she had changed her mind about leaving with him. His male ego was so wounded, he sulked off to the city. As soon as his show was over, he sent the paintings of her back here and then he went off to Europe.”
“Are those the paintings hanging in the Lodge?”
“Yes. Vera couldn’t bear to look at them. I don’t think Nash could either, which is why he sent them back. I remember how Vera’s face turned white when we got Nash’s note. ‘These belong with the woman who inspired them,’ he’d written. ‘She’s not with him,’ Vera said. ‘She must have changed her mind.’ Vera was so happy.” Ivy sucks deeply on her cigarette and then drops it to the ground and crushes it beneath her foot. They’re French cigarettes, I notice. Gauloises. I imagine she only smokes them in private, away from the students. “But then Vera realized what must have happened. She ran up here, through snowdrifts that reached to her waist, and I ran after her. I was afraid she’d throw herself from the ridge. I made her wait for me to call from the Lodge and get men from the town to look for Lily, but she insisted on searching with them. It took all day to find her and half the night to bring her body up. We used the toboggan that Vera had brought back from Switzerland as a present for Lily because it was something she remembered from her childhood in the country. The men wouldn’t let her help carry it, so Vera ran back to the Lodge and collected candles. She made a path from the Lodge to the ridge of lit candles to light their way as they carried her body down the hill.”
She looks behind us as if she were expecting to see that candlelit path now … and we both gasp at the sight of lights moving through the woods.
“Fireflies,” I say, recovering first. “They’re just fireflies.”
Ivy turns to me, her face bleached white by the floodlights, her eyes huge and shiny as an owl’s. “Of course, they’re just fireflies,” she says as though I were a child, “but when Vera came up here in the summer she said they were the ghosts of the lights that lit Lily’s way back to the Lodge that night. That’s the real reason she wouldn’t fence off these woods. She believed that Lily’s spirit was wandering lost and that she’d someday find her way back. On the anniversary of her death, Vera would lay out the candles just as they were on that night so that Lily could find her way home. I was tempted more than once to tell her that if Lily’s spirit was looking for anything, it was the path to the barn and Virgil Nash. That’s where she was going when she died—not back home to Fleur-de-Lis.”
The bitterness in her voice is unmistakable. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the body being carried up toward us was Lily Eberhardt’s. But it’s not. It’s Isabel Cheney’s. As the men finally reach the ridge with the stretcher, I pick up one of the flashlights and approach them. Other teachers think to do the same. We form a protective circle around them to light the way through the woods down to the Lodge. It’s not a path of candles, but it’s enough like one to make me feel as if we are reenacting an old rite—something even older than the procession of Lily Eberhardt’s body. The burial procession of the summer goddess, sacrificed so that the autumn goddess might rule over the land.
The same spirit seems to have moved those waiting in the Lodge. Candles have been lit in the windows and a group of students, including Sally, and teachers stand outside holding lit candles. Word must have gotten to them that Isabel is dead because the mood is somber. The assembled crowd is silent as we pass. Glancing at the faces of Isabel’s classmates I recall those faces last night in the glow of the bonfire. They look as if they had all aged overnight from innocent children into careworn adults. I remember Isabel’s speech. “There are times I think that these years will turn out to have been the best years of my life,” she’d said. Had she had some presentiment that they would turn out to be the last years of her life?
The thought of someone dying so young makes me want to be with Sally, but when I ask her if she’s ready to go home she tells me no. “The other kids are going to stay here at the Lodge and talk. It’s kind of a tribute to Isabel. I know I didn’t really know her, but I’d like to stay.”
The last thing I want is for Sally to be out of my sight, but then I remember that I promised her she could be just like any other kid at the school. That it wouldn’t make a difference that her mother was a teacher here.
“Are you all staying in the Lodge?” I ask, scanning each of their faces in turn, trying to detect any sign that they’re planning to do something else.
“Oh yes,” Hannah Weiss assures me. “Ms. Drake and the dean will be here, too.”
“And Sally can stay in my dorm room afterward,” Haruko says. “My roommate never showed up.”
Both Hannah and Haruko seem like good prospective friends for Sally. How can I say no? “Okay,” I say. “Come back in the morning to get dressed though, okay?”
I leave before I can reconsider. Two more police cars have arrived—one with the Arcadia Falls insignia on it, one that has the markings of the state troopers. An officer is cordoning off the edge of the woods and telling students to stay out of the area. I imagine that in the morning they’ll search the woods for any other clues to Isabel’s demise. In the meantime, the campus is so well populated by law enforcement that even I can’t imagine how Sally could come to any harm here. I can go home and get some sleep.
When I finally make it to my bedroom in the cottage, though, I realize that it’s not going to be easy to fall asleep. As soon as I close my eyes I see Isabel’s body being lifted out of the ravine. When I open my eyes the bathrobe hanging over the closet door becomes that ghostly white figure flitting through the woods. The white woman.
I flip on the lamp on my nightstand, banishing the shadows back into the corners, but I still feel them lurking there. When I got like this when I was little, my mother would read to me; only a story would calm me down. It didn’t matter if the story was frightening. I liked fairy tales in which children lost their way in the woods. As long as they found the way back, I could go to sleep. On my bedside table now is my old copy of The Changeling Girl—the one that belonged to my grandmother—but for once I don’t think that’ll help. It’s become too real in this place where it was written.
Instead, I reach for the purple hatbox with Vera Beecher’s journals and letters. I open the box and take out the picture of the three women that lies on top. I turn it over now and find, in ink faded to pale lavender, the words May Day, 1928. Lily Eberhardt, Gertrude Sheldon, and Mimi Green.
I turn over the picture and look more closely at the three women. I’ve seen pictures of Lily Eberhardt from the thirties and forties, but never one of her this young. Nineteen twenty-eight was the first year of the colony. Lily would have been only nineteen years old. She looks radiant, in a long white dress and with a wreath of daisies around her loose, waist-length hair, her face bathed in soft early-morning light. She’s holding her right arm out as if inviting someone just outside the frame of the picture to join the threesome. She looks as if she wants to embrace the whole world, as if the joy inside of her is about to overflow. It’s almost painful to look at someone so young and happy, knowing that she would die alone in a frozen ravine twenty years later. That look reminds me of Isabel’s face last night—but at least Lily had another twenty years.
I recognize the woman in the middle, Gertrude Sheldon, from histories of the period. She was a wealthy arts patron who went on to found the Sheldon Museum in New York and to shape the careers of many prominent mid-twentieth-century painters. I hardly recognize the society matron in this wild maenad in medieval-style dress and messy hair, but I do recognize someone else. Shelley Drake. Her granddaughter, perhaps?
The third woman is dwarfed by Gertrude Sheldon’s statuesque form. Her face is half-hidden by a square-cut helmet of hair—the style favored by Louise Brooks and any number of 1920s flappers. I vaguely recall reading about an artist named Mimi Green who was at the Art Students League and who later worked on a mural with Lily Eberhardt, but she’s absent from the later records of Arcadia. Perhaps there’s more about her in Vera’s papers.
I prop the photograph against the lamp on my night table and turn back to the box. I pick up the first book, which is bound in brown cloth stamped with a beech tree, and something falls into my lap.
At first I think it’s a leaf. It looks as fragile as one and it’s pale green. It crackles when I touch it and releases a scent that’s instantly familiar. Lily of the valley. It’s the scent my grandmother always wore. It was a popular scent in the 1920s.
I unfold the page gingerly; it’s like forcing open a flower bud. I’m afraid that the paper will crumble to dust in my hands. But it doesn’t. The thin spidery lines of script on it are so faint that they might be the veins of a leaf instead of handwriting. The ink may have been blue once, but it’s faded to pale lavender—the same color as the writing on the back of the photograph. I have to hold the page under the bedside lamp to read it.
My darling,
As I write this I am afraid it might already be too late and that I have lost your love. My Lily Among the Thorns, you once called me. I am afraid that I have been little more than a thorn to you, but I don’t want you only to remember the thorns. The only way I can think to tell you how much you have meant to me is to tell you the whole story. I have written it these last few months because, after all the stories we have told each other all these years, I knew it had come time to finally tell my story. My hope is that it will explain to you why I have done what I have, but failing that, at least it should show you how much you have meant to me. You are my heart. I have left my story for you in the heart and hearth of our lives together.
You have my love always,
Lily
December 26, 1947
I stare at the date. It’s the night that Lily left Arcadia to run away with Virgil Nash, never to make it to their meeting place; she died in a cold ravine not a quarter mile from the cottage she shared with her darling Vera. You are my heart. A strange thing to say to someone when you’re leaving her. And the next line was stranger still. I have left my story for you in the heart and hearth of our lives together. What could that mean?
I pick up one of the brown journals and flip through it. There are lots of lists: lists of artists who came to the colony each summer, lists of art supplies needed and workshops to be taught, even lists of food items to be ordered for the kitchen. A wealth of the minutiae involved in the running of an art colony. I’m sure Vera’s journals will be an invaluable resource for my thesis, but they’re not what I’m in the mood for right now. What I want to read right now is the story Lily promises in her farewell letter to Vera.
I unload the hatbox onto my bed—making separate piles of Vera’s journals, inventory books, letters, and photographs. There’s no journal belonging to Lily. Perhaps Vera burned it. I picture her doing just that, smashing the tiles on the mantelpiece and then throwing the journal into the fireplace … into the heart and hearth of our lives together. Is that what Lily meant in her letter—that the journal was hidden in the hearth? And is that why the mantelpiece tiles were broken, because Vera had been looking for it?
Although I don’t have any real expectation of finding anything, I get out of bed and pad downstairs in my bare feet. I examine the tiles over the fireplace, looking behind each of the broken ones. There’s enough room to hold a book, but there’s nothing there. Of course not—whatever was there must have been removed by Vera on that night in 1947. And then she must have smashed the tiles in anguish over her betrayal … or had it been frustration? What if she had been looking for the journal and hadn’t been able to find it?
I run my hand over the wooden panel above the tiles, along the beech tree carved in the center. Its roots snake into the ground beneath the tree and there’s something buried deep within the twisted roots. I look closer and then rear back when I see that it’s a tiny baby curled up into a ball. The changeling baby of the story. It’s a disturbing image, but somehow it also draws me to it. I touch my finger to the perfect curve of the sleeping child … and the panel pops open. I’m so surprised I step back and nearly trip over the rug, but I catch my balance and peer into the narrow slot behind the panel … and then I pull out a slim green leather book embossed with a gold fleur-de-lis. Lily’s journal. Somehow still here after all these years. Any thought of sleep is gone now. I sink down into the musty old chair by the fireplace, open the book, and begin to read.