26
When I finish the journal my face is wet with tears. Is it because Lily hadn’t betrayed Vera after all? Or because somehow her plans all went awry? Did Vera read the journal and reject her pleas for forgiveness? Did she force Lily out into the storm? Or did Lily flee and throw herself from the ridge into the clove after Vera rejected her?
I get up off the couch and cross to the fireplace. I run my fingers along the broken tiles as if they were a braille message that could tell me what happened in this room sixty years ago. But the only answer I get is a knock at the front door which makes me nearly jump out of my skin.
In the seconds it takes me to answer, I’ve posited half a dozen disasters that could have befallen Sally. Finding Callum Reade on the other side of the door doesn’t dispel any of them. He must read the look of panic on my face.
“It’s nothing to do with Sally,” he says. “I got a call from the dean saying she was handling the girls’ punishment and thanking me for not summonsing them. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. She sounded pretty severe….” His voice trails off and I realize he’s staring at me—at my chest, to be precise. I look down, afraid I’ve answered the door in my nightgown, but it’s worse than that. I’m wearing his sweatshirt—and nothing else under it.
When I look back up, his eyes lock on mine and I feel something click inside of me, like a bolt sliding home. As if he’d heard it, he steps toward me and stops when he’s an inch away. I don’t move back. He moves his hand to my face, his fingers stroking my cheekbone, his palm cupping my jaw. I feel as if I am one of his wood carvings, taking shape under his hands. Then he tilts my face up and leans down to kiss me.
For a moment, as his lips first brush mine, I feel as if we are suspended in time. We’ve both become statues frozen in the moment of the kiss. I almost want to stay like this forever. Almost.
I’m not sure who moves first, but suddenly we’re both moving. His arms wrap around my back, pulling me tight against him; his hands slip beneath the heavy sweatshirt. When he finds bare skin beneath, he moans. Or maybe I’m the one who moans. He takes a step back—somehow we’re at the foot of the stairs—and places his palm flat against my sternum.
“I don’t want to rush you,” he begins. “I don’t know if you’re ready.”
Instead of speaking—I’m not sure I can—I press my hand over his and move it over my heart so he can feel how fast it’s beating. Then I interlace my fingers in his, turn, and lead him upstairs to my room.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, he asks, “When you answered the door you looked like you’d been crying. Was it Sally you were upset about?”
“Partly,” I answer. “But also about something I’d been reading …” I stop, unsure if I should go on. For a few hours I’ve forgotten that a world exists beyond this bed. Now I’m reluctant to let it in. But then I glance toward the window and see that the sky is lightening above the tips of the pine trees. The world will be with us soon enough anyway.
I tell him about finding Lily’s journal and all that I’ve read in it, along with what I learned from Beatrice Rhodes. By the end I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed—in his sweatshirt again—reading the last bit of the journal to him. When I’m done, Callum doesn’t say anything right away. He lies with one arm bent beneath his head, looking up at the ceiling. I resist the urge to trace the lines of his face with my hand or push my fingers through his short hair that seems to bristle with electricity when I touch it.
“So Lily didn’t mean to leave Vera after all,” he says about three seconds before I would have completely changed the subject. “I’m glad. I always thought less of Lily for it.”
“So now we have to think less of Vera. She must have read the journal and been unable to forgive her.”
“Maybe,” he says, frowning. “But if she’d read the journal then why has it been lost all these years?”
“Do you think Ivy kept the note from Vera?”
“I think Lily was foolish to trust her. Make me a promise: if you ever have something important to tell me make sure you do it face-to-face, okay?”
I smile at the implication that we will have important things to tell each other in the future. He grins back at me. “You mean,” I say, leaning down so that my lips are inches from his ear, “if I have to tell you this, for instance?” I whisper the rest in his ear. I’m not sure who blushes the most.
“That,” he says, pulling me down beside him, “should definitely never appear in writing!”
When we finally get out of bed, I find I’ve barely got enough time to shower if I want to have time to run by the dorm and check on Sally as I was planning to do before class.
“I’m coming back here to keep an eye on the Halloween bonfire,” Callum says at the door, “Or Samhain bonfire, as these crazy pagans are calling it.”
“Oh, I guess if you have to come back here—”
He grabs me and burrows his head in my neck. “I’ll be back here for you if you want me,” he murmurs, brushing his lips against my clavicle.
I shiver and press my lips against his earlobe. “Yes, I want you to come back,” I say. “After the bonfire?”
“After the bonfire.” He lifts his head and grins at me. “As long as roast sheriff isn’t on the witches’ menu tonight.” Then he turns and leaves before I can tell him it isn’t a very funny joke.
I stop at Sally’s room, but Haruko tells me that Sally went out early. “She was meeting Chloe to talk about tonight’s thing.” She rolls her eyes on the word thing.
“You’re not too into these rites, are you?” I ask.
“Not really,” she says. “I thought they were kind of fun at first, but now I think some people take them too seriously.”
“By ‘some people,’ do you mean Chloe?” Haruko looks visibly uncomfortable. If Sally finds out I’ve been grilling her roommate, she’ll never forgive me. “Forget I asked you that,” I say. “It’s none of my business.”
“No,” Haruko says, “actually it is your business. I think there’s something really bothering Chloe. Someone ought to talk to her and you’re probably the best one to do it.”
“Why me?”
“Because Sally says you know how to listen without judging people. I think Chloe’s afraid to tell anyone about what happened the night Isabel died because people will judge her, but she might talk to you if you tried.”
“Okay.” I want to ask Haruko if Sally really said that about me, but don’t. “I’ll try to talk to Chloe.”
I leave Haruko, determined to repay the girl’s trust by talking to Chloe. First, though, I have to get through Folklore. Fortunately, there’s only one report left and the students are all anxious to get out early so they can get ready for tonight’s festivities. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to end the class early and have enough time to talk to Chloe before my seminar. Since she’s the one giving her report today, it will seem natural to ask her to stay after.
She comes to the front of the room carrying a large artist’s portfolio. “I don’t really have all that many mementos and photographs that I felt like sharing,” she begins. “My parents travel a lot—my father works for the State Department—and so I’ve been in boarding schools since I was, like, ten.”
A few students make sounds of agreement and I realize that many of these students must have been sent here by parents too busy to deal with them at home.
“So I decided I wanted to do something a little different for my project. I hope that’s okay with you, Ms. Rosenthal?”
Chloe should have cleared a change of topic with me first, but I can tell her that when I talk to her after class. “I’m curious to see what you’ve done,” I say.
“I started thinking that the Arcadia School was more like my family than my own family and so I did the project on the school’s history. Isabel and I were working on a paper together about the history of Arcadia before First Night, but then … well, after Isabel died the dean said she didn’t need to see the paper and that I should just forget about it … but I haven’t been able to. I mean, Isabel did a lot of work on the project—more than I did, honestly, and I thought it would be a sort of tribute to her to finish it.”
Someone in the classroom snorts. I turn to glare at Tori Pratt. “Do you have something you want to share, Victoria?”
“Isn’t what Chloe’s done, like, plagiarism? She’s just taking Isabel’s work and trying to pass it off as her own.”
“Isabel wrote the paper, but I’ve illustrated it.” Chloe opens the portfolio and takes out several pieces of stiff bristol board. She places them on the easel. The first picture facing out is a watercolor of a woman holding a baby beneath the copper beech tree.
“Is this supposed to be from The Changeling Girl?” I ask.
Chloe shakes her head. “Not exactly. You see, Isabel had this theory that The Changeling Girl was autobiographical and that it was really a story about what women had to give up to become artists. She thought Lily Eberhardt had given up her own child in order to stay at Arcadia with Vera Beecher.”
I’m so stunned to hear the same version of events that I’ve just read in Lily’s journal that I don’t say anything. Chloe removes the first picture and slides it behind the others. The new watercolor shows Lily standing on the edge of the ridge, still holding the baby. With her is another figure, which I guess is supposed to represent Vera Beecher. The tame, bucolic landscape of the campus lies below them on one side, the wild rocky cleft of the clove on the other. Vera is gesturing toward the clove as if demonstrating the view, but I already have a queasy feeling that something else is going on in these pictures.
“Vera Beecher believed a woman couldn’t be an artist and a mother, too,” Chloe says, “so she asked Lily to give up her baby. But Lily wouldn’t….”
Chloe slides the last picture in front. As I feared, it shows Lily Eberhardt leaping into the clove, her white dress billowing about her like a cloud, her baby floating beside her like an angel in a baroque altarpiece. It’s strangely beautiful but also very disturbing. The class seems stunned by it as well. Any minute now they’ll recover and start asking questions about how Isabel could have come up with this bizarre story—and I don’t want that. I want to find out first.
“Okay,” I say, “that’s a really original way to approach the topic and I’m sure you all have a lot of questions for Chloe, but I wanted to give you extra time today to get ready for the Halloween celebration, so why don’t you save your questions for tomorrow? Class dismissed.”
The class is quick enough to shake themselves out of their stupor and leave. Chloe starts to slide her pictures in the portfolio, but I tell her to wait. “I want to talk to you about your project,” I say.
As they pass on their way out, Tori Pratt says something to Justin Clay and then laughs. Chloe glares at them as they leave, but as soon as they’re out the door, Chloe’s lower lip begins to quiver.
“I know I should have okayed the project with you before I did it, but I thought you’d like it!” she wails. “You’re so into that changeling story and Isabel’s paper was all about that.”
“It’s okay, Chloe, I’m not angry, I’m just curious. Where did you get Isabel’s paper? I thought she was delivering it to the dean the afternoon of the bonfire.”
“She was … I mean she did. But when I checked my e-mail the next day I saw she’d also sent it to me.”
“Huh. I’m surprised. When I saw the two of you I thought you were mad at her because she hadn’t given you the paper.”
“I was, but I guess she figured that if she sent it to me before she went to the dean’s office it would look like she’d done what she was supposed to do. She knew I wouldn’t get it until after she turned the paper in to the dean. The whole thing backfired, because when Dean St. Clare found out we hadn’t worked on it together she gave us both Fs anyway.”
“And the dean kept the paper?”
“Yeah … I guess so.” Chloe furrows her brow, confused at the direction I’ve taken.
“And do you know where Isabel got the idea that Lily Eberhardt had a baby that she gave up?”
“No. Isabel was really secretive about her sources. She kept bragging that she was doing original research, but she wouldn’t say what she meant. And then she didn’t even send the bibliography with the paper when she e-mailed it to me.”
“I see. Do you have the paper?”
Chloe nods and takes out a folder from her portfolio. “I’m really sorry I didn’t talk to you about it first. I thought it would be a way of making it up to Isabel….”
An anguished look crosses her face. I put my hand on her arm and lean toward her. “Is there something you’re not telling about what happened that night?” I ask. “I remember that you were mad at Isabel.”
Chloe looks up at me, her eyes wide, frightened at what she’s let slip. I’m frightened, too. If Chloe admits to hurting Isabel, what will I do? “She was always so sure of herself,” she says, looking miserable. “I just wanted to give her a little scare.”
“What kind of a scare, Chloe?”
“You know those white dresses that Ms. Drake made for us? Well, there was an extra one for a girl who had to go home. I took it and hung it from a tree near the edge of the woods. Then I made sure Isabel ran in that direction—”
“So she’d think it was a person hanging in the tree and be frightened by it?”
“Yeah. She was a wuss about that kind of thing.”
“So did it work?”
Chloe bites her lip and nods. “She went into the woods right where I’d rigged up the dress, and a minute later I heard her shriek. I thought she’d run straight out again, but instead she must have run deeper into the woods.”
“And you didn’t follow her?”
Chloe shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears. “We’re not allowed in the woods and I’d already gotten in enough trouble.”
I sigh, exasperated at the fractured logic of teenagers. They often choose the most inconvenient times to follow the rules. Then I notice that Chloe still looks fidgety. It’s a look I know well from Sally.
“Is there something else you’re not telling me, Chloe?”
“It’s nothing really. It’s just … I thought I saw someone—another one of the girls—farther up the hill, but then she vanished and I thought I must have imagined it….” She looks embarrassed.
“What is it Chloe? What did you see?”
“It’s stupid…. It was just one of the girls in a white dress. But when she vanished I thought of the story about the white woman who haunts the woods and it kind of freaked me out. That’s why I didn’t try to follow Isabel. Pretty stupid, huh? I was trying to scare Isabel, but I ended up scaring myself.”
After I send Chloe on her way, I start walking toward the Lodge, but halfway across the lawn I stop at the bench beneath the beech tree and sit down to think. Although Chloe’s pictures depicted a garbled version of Lily’s story, it bore enough resemblance to the real thing to make me wonder if Isabel had had access to Lily’s journal. I take out the paper now and read the first paragraph.
Lily Eberhardt wrote in her private journal, “We carried the seeds of destruction into paradise.” She was referring to the romantic triangle between herself, Vera Beecher, and the painter Virgil Nash. In fact the seed of destruction that she and Vera Beecher brought to Arcadia was their assumption that motherhood and artistic creation were mutually exclusive—an assumption that was tested the first year of the colony when Lily Eberhardt became pregnant. Lily’s attempt to hide her pregnancy is what brought about her death.
I put down the paper and exhale. How else could Isabel have learned about Lily’s pregnancy unless she read Lily’s journal. But how could she have gotten it? Then I remember: the week before I arrived Isabel and Chloe were cleaning Fleur-de-Lis … or at least they were supposed to be cleaning. Hadn’t Chloe said that she found Isabel with her nose in a book when she was supposed to be cleaning? Isabel must have found the journal behind the panel in the fireplace. She must have thought she’d struck gold and that the dean would be impressed when she saw the paper—but she hadn’t been. I imagine Ivy’s reaction to this first paragraph. Her first question must have been where had Isabel found the journal. Had Isabel realized then that she would be blamed for stealing the journal from Fleur-de-Lis?
Chloe wasn’t the only one who caught a glimpse of a figure dressed in white on the night of the bonfire. On my way back to the cottage I saw someone in white flitting through the woods. I thought it was my imagination—as Chloe did—and then, later, when Callum told me about the wittewieven I thought I’d spied the white woman who haunted the clove. Now I wonder if it was Isabel Cheney coming back from Fleur-de-Lis after putting Lily’s journal back where she found it. It’s the kind of thing a teenager would do—repairing a wrong by hiding the evidence. Did she think the dean wouldn’t keep after her to find out where the journal was?
I look up toward the dean’s office. In full sunlight the glass is an opaque surface reflecting trees and sky; it’s impossible to tell if anyone is looking out. On First Night, though, I saw the dean silhouetted against the dark windowpane. She’s always watching, Callum had said. Had she watched from her window on First Night, waiting for a chance to confront Isabel and take the journal? Was she the white woman Chloe had seen in the woods behind the Lodge? Had she followed Isabel into the woods and confronted her at the top of the ridge?
I get to my feet, agitated by the picture in my head of Ivy St. Clare cornering a frightened girl on the edge of the cliff … but my mind balks. Ivy couldn’t want the journal enough to kill for it, could she? I wonder what Callum would think. If my cell phone worked I could call to tell him what Chloe’s told me, but as it is I can’t think of anyplace private enough to make that call. I’ll call after my last class, I promise myself as I cross under the copper beech. The thought of talking to Callum later—of seeing him again—sends a pulse of desire through my core so strong I have to stop and put my hand on the beech’s trunk to steady myself for a moment. Images from last night flood through my mind as steady as the fall of wine red leaves from the tree. Have I gone too fast? What do I really know about this man? The force of my desire scares me. I take deep breaths to calm myself, and then, recovered, I give the tree a farewell pat. Its bark is smooth and curiously warm. Then I walk briskly to the Lodge.
I reach the Lodge, still deep in thought. Peter and Rebecca are in the lounge, dark heads bent together, whispering. They look up when I enter, four identical brown eyes staring at me like the eyes of deer caught grazing. I look from them to the paintings above their heads: Nash’s last three portraits of Lily.
As I look at the paintings I think of a young Callum Reade, held spellbound by the force of Lily’s gaze. She was looking at me as if she saw right through me to my soul and knew all my secrets, he had said. Could the man who painted her like this have abandoned her in the snowstorm to die?
I look back down at Rebecca and Peter, who are now exchanging quizzical looks at my behavior. “The first day we met you said it was fascinating that the man who did these paintings of Lily killed her. Tell me again why you said that,” I ask.
“Everyone knows that she died on her way to meet him—” Rebecca begins.
“—and that he left for the city without telling anyone she didn’t show up,” Peter finishes for her.
“It was in the middle of a blizzard and he must have known that she was coming through the clove,” Rebecca adds.
“But he didn’t even go back to check if she was okay.”
“He must have felt guilty because he killed himself later.”
I shake my head. “You’re right. It would have been as good as killing her not to look for her. But what if she came and then went back because she never intended to leave with him in the first place?”
“Then it wouldn’t have been Nash’s fault at all,” another voice says.
I turn and find Shelley standing in the doorway. She’s wearing her smock, which is spattered with white paint. As she comes into the lounge I see that her face and hair are also paint-splattered and her pupils are unnaturally dilated. She looks like she’s waking from a trance.
“The tragedy is that everyone blamed him,” Shelley continues. “No one would have anything to do with him after Lily’s death. My mother, who had taken classes with him here at Arcadia and very much admired him, said she saw him in Europe the next summer. He was a drunken wreck, she said. He killed himself on the one-year anniversary of Lily’s death.”
“That is tragic,” I say, thinking of Lily’s description of how full of hope Nash had been while making these last paintings.
“Yes,” Shelley agrees. “Even more so if Lily didn’t die going to see him. Do you have some reason to think that she was on her way back from Nash when she died?”
I start to answer but then remember the twins. “Peter, Rebecca,” I say, “would you mind if we canceled class today? I need to talk to Professor Drake.”
Two identical heads shake in perfect unison. “No problem. We still have to work on our costumes. We’re going as the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.”
“Wait, I know this,” I say, proud to possess this bit of esoteric knowledge. “They’re the twin children of Magneto.”
Peter and Rebecca exchange one of their unreadable looks, and then reward me with identical smiles. “Pretty slick, Ms. Rosenthal.”
Shelley, though, is staring at me. “I’ve never heard of them. What body of mythology are they from?”
“Marvel Comics,” I answer. “One of the advantages of having a teenager.”
On the way to Shelley’s studio I tell her about Isabel’s paper and my fear that the dean might have confronted Isabel to get Lily’s journal back. “What I don’t understand is why Ivy would want the journal so desperately,” I conclude.
“I think I have an idea why. There’s something my mother says in her letter….” When she opens the door, I’m so dazzled by a burst of white light that I don’t quite follow what she’s saying. At first I think the light must be coming from the windows, but the light at this time of day is still subdued. The glare is coming from the dozen or so high-powered spotlights arranged around the room. Shelley sees me squinting and apologizes.
“Oh, my, let me turn these off,” she says, scurrying from lamp to lamp. “I borrowed them from the film department so I could paint last night. You know how it is when the muse hits you; nothing else matters, not even sleep.”
I nod, but really, what do I know of that kind of single-minded devotion to one’s art? I’ve barely finished a thought—let alone a drawing—in the past sixteen years without being interrupted by something I had to do for Jude or Sally. I feel a bit envious looking at what she’s done. Clearly the source of her inspiration was the May Day photograph of Gertrude, Mimi, and Lily. She’s reproduced the figures of the three women on an enormous canvas. On such a large scale they look like goddesses—the Three Graces, perhaps. But she didn’t stop there. The white-clad women have wandered into her paintings of the woods where they slip in and out of the shadows like shrouded ghosts.
“Wow, all this from one photograph?” I ask.
“The photograph gave me the idea for the first painting, but it was my mother’s letter that made me decide to let the women wander through the woods.”
“Her letter?”
“I was just telling you!” She sounds annoyed and I realize that lack of sleep has made her irritable. “Here,” she takes a cream-colored envelope out of her smock pocket and shoves it into my hands. “You’ll see.”
I slip the heavy pages out of the envelope and read.
January 15, 1948
Dear Mother,
I apologize for not writing sooner, but the last few weeks have been very upsetting. You’ll have heard by now about poor Lily Eberhardt. A few days after Christmas, I found Ivy in the Hall foyer placing a statue Mr. Nash had done of Lily in a dark alcove. It was so beautiful—it depicts Lily as a water nymph standing in a pool of water lilies. I asked where it came from. Ivy said that Lily had left it behind when she ran away with Mr. Nash, but I didn’t believe a word of it. I thought Ivy was just jealous—why else would she hide the beautiful statue in a dark alcove as if it were some ordinary piece of bric-a-brac?
A week later, a package arrived with three paintings of Lily that Nash had sent to Miss Beecher. It was clear from the letter Mr. Nash enclosed that Lily wasn’t with him. That’s when they began to look for her. It took three more days before they found her body frozen in the clove. I was in the Rose Parlor working on my portrait (you were right about staying here over the vacation—I’ve learned so much that I wouldn’t have if I’d gone with you and Father to Chamonix) when her body was brought into the main hall. I thought that a wild dog had gotten loose in the house, there was such an inhuman howling echoing through the halls, but when I went to find the source of the noise I came upon this most extraordinary tableau. The body was laid out on the big oak refectory table upon a red and gold tapestry runner. From her long blond hair that was spread out all about her, I knew at once that it was Lily. Her face was white as snow. Vera was knelt before her, and Ivy stood behind Vera with one hand on her shoulder. I came from behind so neither of them saw me.
“She looks like she froze to death,” Vera said. “Are you sure the fall is what killed her?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Ivy answered. “Remember? I checked to make sure.”
Today the medical examiner confirmed what Ivy said. He’s decreed that Lily died of a blow to the head, caused most likely when she slipped and fell in the clove and struck her head on a rock.
I thought perhaps that the term might be postponed (and waited to write you until I knew), but when I went to Miss Beecher’s office to ask I found Ivy there—sitting behind Miss Beecher’s desk!—and she told me no, it was Miss Beecher’s wish that the school continue as usual.
I wondered, though, if you would wish me to continue here as it was primarily for the sake of studying with Miss Eberhardt and Mr. Nash that you sent me, and now both of them are gone. I feel the loss of Miss Eberhardt, most especially as she behaved like a mother to me. Nor do I like the way Ivy is taking over. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s better for me to leave here. I think I’ve learned all that I can from this place.
Yours truly,
Fleur Sheldon
I look up from the letter and meet Shelley’s intense blue stare. “Do you see what’s wrong?” she asks.
I’m tempted to say that what’s wrong is that her grandmother had clearly abandoned her daughter in this school and had such a stilted relationship with her that Fleur felt it necessary to sign her full name on a letter to her mother. But I know that’s not what she means.
“Ivy says that she checked to make sure that the fall killed her. So she and Vera must have been in the clove when Lily fell.”