Arcadia Falls

28



I meet Callum under the beech tree and as we cross the lawn toward the hall, I tell him what I’ve learned from Chloe and from Shelley about Fleur’s letter. He listens attentively, nodding as he holds the door of Beech Hall open for me. As soon as the door closes behind us, he pulls me into the alcove in the foyer and kisses me. He pushes me against the wall and I push back—not to resist him but to press myself harder into his mouth, his skin, his scent. That pine and lemon and musk scent that I seem to have developed an addiction to. For a moment our desire is so perfectly matched that we hover in place like dragonflies with linked wings, and then he pushes a little harder and something hard jams into the small of my back.
“Ouch,” I say, swiveling to remove the obstacle. It’s the bronze statue of Lily standing naked in a pool of water, her long hair crowned by a wreath of flowers and streaming down her back. It’s the water lily statue that Nash promised her on his last day at Arcadia.
“Lily seems to be coming between us,” he says, placing the statue back in its dark niche.
“Maybe she’s brought us together. If I hadn’t gone to the barn that day …”
He strokes my face. I close my eyes, wanting to melt into his arms again, but mentioning the barn reminds me of what I’ve learned. I push him a few inches away and tell him what Chloe told me about the trick she played on Isabel and seeing someone else in the woods. Then I take out Fleur Sheldon’s letter. “See?” I say, pointing at Fleur’s account of the conversation between Vera and Ivy above Lily’s body. “Ivy says she checked to see if Lily was dead, so she and Vera were there when Lily fell in the clove. And yet they left her body there. They must have had something to do with Lily’s death.”
“It’s not much in the way of evidence,” he says, shaking his head. “And Chloe only saw a glimpse of a woman in white. Everyone was dressed in white that night. We have no way of telling if it was Ivy or not. Even if it was her, it doesn’t mean that she pushed Isabel from the ridge.”
“So you’re not going to do anything?” I ask. “That woman might be guilty of murdering a child. How can we let her stay here in charge of all these young girls if that’s possibly true?”
He strokes my arm, trying to calm me down. “I’ll question her about that night again. You should go back to the bonfire. That’s the best thing you can do to keep Sally and the other girls safe.”
As frustrated as I am not to go with him, I have to admit he’s right. “Okay,” I say, “but will you come find me at the bonfire when you’re done?”
He grins and pulls me tight against him. “I’ll find you wherever you are.” He kisses me again—hard and quick—and then leaves before I can think of an excuse to go with him. I watch him disappear down the long shadowy hallway and then turn to go out the front doorway.
As I do, the statue of Lily catches my eye. The bronze gleams where Callum’s hand has rubbed away the dust. I pull a tissue out of my pocket and rub the statue until it glows. It should be someplace where the light catches it, I think as I return it to the niche. Fleur had said in her letter that Ivy hid the statue in a dark alcove because she was jealous of Lily.
I pick the statue up again.
Fleur had seen Ivy placing the statue in the alcove before Lily’s body was found. But that had to be wrong. Nash had promised the statue to Lily on the last day before he left for his show in the city. She’d been going to the barn so he could give it to her, but she never made it back. The only way Ivy could have been in possession of the statue before Lily’s body was found was if she had taken it from Lily in the clove. Together with the letter, the statue proves that Ivy and Vera met Lily in the clove. If Callum confronts Ivy with the statue, he’ll have a much better case.
I start off down the hall, clutching the statue in my hand. The figure’s hip fits smoothly in my palm, its weight a reassuring heft….
I stop dead in the hall, a picture forming in my head of Lily climbing up through the snow, seeing Vera at the top…. Lily’s holding the statue in her hand. What would Vera think when she saw her holding Nash’s gift? Did they fight over it? Did Vera take it from her? Did she strike her in anger?
I hurry on, hoping I’ll reach Callum before he goes into the dean’s office. I find him standing in front of her door, paused there to collect his thoughts. I’m afraid he’ll be angry when he sees me, but his first response is a smile, which he quickly schools into a frown.
“I told you to wait—”
“I know, but I realized something.” I explain how the statue couldn’t have been in the alcove before Lily’s body was found unless Ivy and Vera were in the clove that day. He takes the statue from me and turns it over, studying the ornately carved wreath on the figure’s head.
“Can DNA survive from blood over sixty years old?” I ask.
Callum smiles and slips the statue into the deep pocket of his coat. “I’m not sure,” he says. “But I’ll tell you one thing: Ivy St. Clare won’t know for sure either. Thank you. This might be just the thing to get her to confess. Now you should get out of here—”
Before he can finish, the door swings open and Ivy St. Clare appears in the entrance.
“Are you two going to stand there gossiping outside my door all night or come in?” she asks.
“I was just going,” I say, but Ivy shakes her head.
“I think you’d better come in, Ms. Rosenthal,” she snaps. “After all, you’re the one who’s been reading Lily’s journal, haven’t you?”
“How did you know I had it?” I ask, following Ivy into the office.
“From the still life you did,” she says, walking to the window seat where her sketchpad lies open. She sits down and looks up at me. “Vera and I looked all over for it after Lily died, but we finally decided that she must have given it to someone for safekeeping. I always suspected it would turn up someday.”
“Do you know what’s in it?” I ask.
Ivy shrugs. The motion makes the hollows above her clavicle bones deepen. She looks, I think, almost skeletal. “I imagine she unburdened herself about her affair with Virgil Nash. She seemed to think that Vera would forgive her if she confessed all, but she was wrong.”
“How do you know that?” Callum asks.
Ivy looks up, pursing her lips. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what else you’ve found. There is something else, isn’t there?”
Callum takes out Fleur Sheldon’s letter and hands it to her. She squints at it and then fumbles for the reading glasses hanging around her neck.
“Ah, Fleur Sheldon. I’d recognize her precious schoolgirl handwriting anywhere. Let’s see what she wrote home to Mummy.” We wait while she reads. Callum looks poised to spring on her if she so much as smudges the letter, but she merely hands it back to him and takes her reading glasses off. “She always was a little snoop,” she says. “And remarkably talentless. I hired her daughter out of pity—”
“It’s clear from this that you and Vera Beecher knew of Lily’s death before her body was found,” Callum says, cutting short what’s bound to be a long list of Shelley Drake’s failings.
Ivy sighs. “I suppose one could deduce that from Fleur’s ramblings, but what of it?” She shrugs and smiles. “Surely even an officer in a backwater like Arcadia Falls knows that doesn’t constitute evidence of a crime.”
Callum smiles and removes the statue from his pocket. “No, but a murder weapon with the victim’s blood on it does.” He brandishes the statue so close to Ivy’s face that she blinks and presses herself back against the window. For the first time since I’ve known her, I see a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes. But she quickly recovers.
“That’s Nash’s statue of Lily. An idealization, if you ask me, and rather amateurish. He sent it back to Vera with his paintings of Lily.”
“No, he didn’t,” I say, pointing at the letter that she’s let fall in her lap. “Fleur says that she saw you putting the statue in the alcove before the package with the paintings arrived. Nash gave it to Lily the night he left Arcadia. That was why Lily went to the barn. She was carrying it when you and Vera found her on the ridge.”
“Was Vera angry when she saw her carrying Nash’s statue?” Callum asks. “Did she grab it from Lily? Is that when Vera struck her?” I’m startled that Callum has imagined the scenario as I have, but when Ivy pales I realize why he’s accused Vera and not Ivy.
“Vera would never have hurt Lily! She worshipped her. Look at her!” Ivy tilts her chin toward the painting behind her desk where Lily, as the Muse of Drawing, stands in her Grecian robes holding a pencil to her lips, her long golden hair flowing around her like a halo. “Lily wasn’t human to Vera. She was an ideal. Vera would never have hurt her.”
“Then we won’t find Lily’s blood on this statue when I send it to the lab in Albany?” Ivy’s eyes flick from the head of the statue back to Callum’s pale eyes. It’s a tiny motion, but Callum sees it and pursues his course. “You realize that you’ll be charged as an accessory. If you tell us what happened now, though, the judge would take your assistance into consideration. After all, Vera’s dead. What difference does it make if the world finds out that she killed her lover sixty years ago?”
“What difference?” Ivy leans forward, the tension in her small, wizened body evident in her clenched fists and the cords standing out on her neck. “Vera’s memory is what holds this place together. It’s what I’ve worked my whole life to preserve. I will not allow you to soil it with some sordid story the two of you have cooked up.”
“Well, this is the story we’ll tell,” Callum says, slipping the statue back in his pocket and plucking Fleur’s letter out of Ivy’s lap. “Let’s go, Ms. Rosenthal. I’ll take you to the station and you can make your statement.” He lays his hand on my arm and steers me toward the door, but before we’ve taken two steps Ivy springs to her feet. “It was me,” she cries. “I killed her. Vera did nothing.”
We turn. I’m grateful for Callum’s hand on my arm because Ivy is terrible to look at. Her lips are stretched tight in a grimace that could be a scream, but I realize with horror is actually a smile. Every tendon in her neck and arms stands out like a road map of the secrets she’s kept hidden all these years. She’s triumphant, I realize, to have this one service left to do for her idol. This must be what Callum counted on. “Tell us,” he says softly.
Ivy sinks back down onto the window seat. She looks out the window toward the lawn where the students stand around the newly lit bonfire. “I heard Nash and Lily agree to meet at the barn in this very room,” she says. “I was here, in the window seat, with the drapes closed. They never knew I was here.”
I think back to what Lily had written in her journal about that last conversation with Nash. “Then you knew that Lily wasn’t planning to go with Nash?”
“Yes, I knew. I was disappointed. I had hoped that she would leave with him. I knew that eventually she would turn Vera against me. I’d never be safe here—and where else could I go? She even had the nerve to make me her go-between. She gave me a note to carry to Vera—”
“But you never gave it to her, did you?”
Ivy smiles. “No, I didn’t. Why should I? I told Vera that I overheard Lily planning her elopement with Nash and that I’d seen her heading toward the barn to meet him. She was standing right where you are now, Ms. Rosenthal. When I told her that, Vera swayed like a tree in the wind and collapsed to the floor. I sat by her and took her hand. I asked if she wanted me to go to the barn to see if I could bring Lily back. I meant to go and tell Lily that Vera didn’t want her, but when Vera realized that she might still be able to catch up to Lily, she rushed from the Hall. She didn’t even stop to take a coat, but ran out into the snow. It was coming down hard by then. I had to run to keep up with her. I was afraid I’d lose her … afraid, too, that if she saw Lily coming back from the barn she’d think she had decided not to run away with Nash. That Vera would forgive her. It was snowing so hard I could barely see the ridgeline above us. I held Vera back, afraid she’d fall over the edge if she went farther. Afraid she might throw herself over. ‘She’s gone,’ she cried. ‘Gone, gone, gone.’ But then Vera gasped and looking up, I saw a shape appear out of the swirling snow, like a ghost appearing out of the fog, like those stories the villagers tell of a white woman rising out of the mist in the clove—” Her voice trembles at the memory, the image still horrible to her after all these years. “It was Lily standing on the edge of the ridge. I was so shocked I forgot to hold on to Vera and she ran toward Lily—only to welcome her back, I think—but Lily must have been startled to see her. She stepped back and fell.”
“Are you sure she fell?” Callum asks.
“Yes. I’m positive. Vera would have thrown herself over into the clove with her if I hadn’t stopped her. We could see her below us. I was sure she was dead, but Vera wanted to go down and check. I told her she was too upset to make the climb. I even told her she was too old! I told her I would go down. I made her sit on a fallen log below the crest of the hill. ‘If I know you’re watching me,’ I told her, ‘you’ll make me nervous.’ I promised that I’d call for her if Lily was still alive.”
“And was she?” Callum asks.
Ivy doesn’t answer right away. She looks out at the lawn toward the bonfire that is now burning in full force. She cranks open the narrow casement on the left side and the room is suddenly full of the sound of young voices raised in song. The sound seems to help her come to a decision. “Yes,” she says, her back to us. “She was alive. She opened her eyes when I knelt down beside her and she said my name. I saw the statue where it had fallen beside her.”
I cover my mouth to keep from crying out. I can picture the moment all too well. Lily lying hurt in the snow, looking up to see her own daughter, thinking she had come to help her.
“I raised it and struck her.” She turns away from the window. Her right fist is clenched as if she is holding the statue she had used to kill Lily.
“But why?” I ask, unable to stay quiet anymore.
“I did it for Vera. So she would be free of her at last.”
“But you didn’t tell Vera that,” Callum says, his voice cold. “You let her think that Lily had died from the fall. You let her think that her lover had died running away from her.”
“I didn’t think that through at the time,” Ivy says. For the first time since she began her story, she looks ashamed.
But Callum doesn’t let the point go. “You soon found a use for Vera’s guilt, didn’t you? You were the only one who knew her secret. She thought you were protecting her, but you were controlling her.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Ivy turns away again and startles at something she sees through the window. Silhouetted against the orange glow of the bonfire are two figures walking briskly across the lawn toward Beech Hall. I recognize Chloe from her flowing robes and Shelley Drake from her mane of kinky hair lit red by the firelight. She’s trying to catch up to Chloe.
“Whatever can be wrong with that girl?” Ivy says. “She’s been a wreck since Isabel Cheney’s death.”
“You mean since her murder,” Callum says, getting to his feet. He moves between the Dean and the door, blocking her exit.
Ivy frowns, creasing her face into a cluster of wrinkles. “Murder? But Isabel fell from the ridge.”
“Isabel had Lily’s journal,” I say. “You knew that as soon as you read her paper.”
“Her paper? Once I knew that Chloe and Isabel hadn’t collaborated as they were supposed to, I didn’t bother reading it. What was the point?”
Callum glances at me and I shrug. I can’t tell if Ivy’s telling the truth or not.
“So you weren’t in the woods that night?” he asks.
She looks like she’s about to deny it, but then she sighs. “Yes, I went to the ridge for a little while. I often go there.”
“The scene of the crime,” Callum says.
Ivy smiles. “No, young man, that’s not it at all.” She turns to me. “Do you remember what I told you the night they brought Isabel’s body up from the ravine? That Vera believed Lily’s spirit haunted the ridge?”
“Yes, I remember,” I answer. “But then why would you go there when it was you who killed her? I would think it would be the last place you’d want to be.”
“I go there because I think that if there is such a thing as spirits and if Lily’s spirit is in those woods, then that’s where Vera’s spirit is, too. That’s why I was in those woods on the night of the bonfire, to be close to Vera, not to hurt that silly girl. Really, what kind of monster do you think I am?”
“The kind that would kill her own mother!” The words come from the doorway where Chloe Dawson stands robed in sepulchral gray, one arm held straight out, only the tip of her pointed finger showing under the belled sleeve of her robe. In her blue face paint, she looks like an avenging fury. Ivy utters a strangled cry and takes a step back, but then she recovers herself.
“What nonsense! I didn’t have a mother. I’m an orphan,” Ivy cries. I look angrily at Shelley, who’s come in behind Chloe.
“I didn’t mean to tell Chloe,” Shelley says, “but she was asking so many questions that it just came out.”
“That’s why you killed Isabel,” Chloe says, taking another step toward the dean. Callum grabs her arm to keep her from getting any closer. “She read in Lily’s journal that Lily was your mother, and you couldn’t bear for anyone to know that you had killed your own mother.”
Ivy drags her eyes away from Chloe and toward me. Her face, framed against the black window, is white with shock, her black eyes bottomless pits of dark. “Is that what Lily wrote in her journal?” she asks.
I look to Callum for help, but he’s busy with Shelley, who’s tugging at his sleeve. I look back at Ivy. What can I do? It’s all bound to come out now. “Yes,” I say. “Lily had a baby with Nash. She gave birth at St. Lucy’s while she was working on the murals there. She named you Ivy because of the way your fingers clung to her.” I’ve included this detail as a proof of Lily’s love, but Ivy’s look of horror deepens. “She thought you’d been adopted, but when she found out you hadn’t, she brought you here—”
“Vera brought me here!” Ivy cries. She holds up her hands, clenched as if she were trying to hold on to the story as she knows it, but the sight of her own hands, curled in like tendrils of ivy clinging to a wall, makes her cry out again.
“Lily wanted you to think that,” I say softly. I step toward her, but she backs away. Her legs hit the window seat and she falls backward, her shoulder hitting the frame of the open casement window. She grasps the frame to keep from falling out. She looks around the room, at the ring of faces, and then her eyes move from the live faces in the room to the painted one behind the desk. The monumental figure of the Muse of Drawing looks back at her with Lily’s eyes. Ivy gasps and then she swings her legs around and deftly slips out of the window and onto the lawn.
Callum is immediately at the window, but he’s much too big to get through the narrow opening. Through the glass of the middle section I can see Ivy running toward the bonfire. We’re all too busy watching her to notice that Chloe has opened the casement window on the other side. I grab for her as she slips through, but get only a handful of mottled gray sheet for my trouble. I quickly measure the narrow window with my eyes and decide I’ll just fit.
“I’ll go after them,” I say.
I jump to the ground before anyone can object. I look back and see Callum framed in the bay window, scowling at me and yelling something, but I don’t wait to hear what he’s got to say. I turn just in time to see Chloe’s pale robes, aglow in the light of the bonfire, disappearing over the rim of the hill. I run after her, skirting the edges of the bonfire, threading through the groups of students sitting on the lawn. When I reach the crest of the hill, I see Chloe running between the skeletal shapes of leafless apple trees. She’s heading toward the edge of the woods near the Lodge, presumably because she’s seen Ivy St. Clare run in that direction.
I turn back toward the Lodge and see Callum and Shelley coming out of the Hall. If I wait, I’ll lose Chloe. And if she catches up to St. Clare at the ridge, one or both of them might end up dead in the ravine. Just then, I glimpse Sally sitting with Clyde and Hannah. Sally looks up at me, her mouth a round O of surprise. I shout at her to tell Sheriff Reade where I’ve gone, and I run down the hill, keeping my eyes fixed on Chloe. I’ve underestimated the slope of the hill, though. About halfway down, I lose my footing, fall, and roll to the bottom.
Luckily I don’t seem to have injured anything. I get to my feet, dizzy but with both feet firmly planted on the ground, facing the rows of apple trees. Their bare branches gleam silver in the light of the newly risen moon, their shadows all pointing west as if directing me toward the woods. When I look that way, I catch a glimpse of Chloe’s pale robes slipping between the deeper shadows of the pine trees.
I try to run straight in that direction, but the apple trees block my way. In the moonlight their gnarled trunks assume contorted faces, much like Ivy St. Clare’s wrinkled pixie face, scowling and grimacing at me. The dark pine woods are a relief in comparison. The moonlight that filters through the treetops onto the forest floor casts only the straight shadows of the tall pine trees. The ground is covered by soft pine needles that glisten under my feet. I see Chloe ahead of me, her white robe silver now in the moonlight. I follow her, climbing steadily uphill. She slips in and out of view between the broad-trunked pines, but it’s clear now where we’re headed.
It must seem natural to Ivy to head for the top of the clove, the place where she goes to commune with Vera’s spirit. How must she feel tonight, though, going to the place where she killed Lily, knowing now that Lily was her mother? What state will Ivy be in when she gets to the top of the ridge? And how will she react to Chloe if Chloe gets there before me?
Which she will at this rate. As hard as I push, I can only run so fast uphill. Chloe has the advantage of a head start and youth.
Her one disadvantage turns out to be those flowing robes. I catch up to her at the fallen tree because the roots have snagged the hem of her robes. She’s cursing and yanking on them when I reach her.
“Chloe, wait!” I call, my voice coming out in hoarse, breathless gasps.
She turns her head in my direction and I stop, frozen to the spot. I’ve forgotten about the blue face paint. In the moonlit clearing her hair, robe, and marble-painted arms gleam, but her face is invisible. There’s only a black hole where it should be.
My call has also caught Ivy’s attention. She’s standing on the top of the ridge, just above Chloe. “Both of you leave me alone,” she calls. “This is none of your business. It’s between Vera and me.”
Chloe turns away from me, toward Ivy, and I see Ivy scream, her hands rising to cover her mouth. I can guess what she sees—an empty, faceless shroud. From the look of horror on her face I imagine that it’s Lily’s face she sees in the darkness. I reach for Chloe to keep her from going any farther. I manage to grasp her arm, but just then I hear a voice behind me.
“Mom?”
In the moment I take to turn toward Sally, Chloe escapes my grasp. Shielding Sally with my arm I watch as Chloe takes a step up the hill and Ivy takes a step backward, placing her on the edge of the cliff. She totters, looking backward over her shoulder into the deep drop. She seems to gain her balance for a moment, but then she looks again at Chloe. She sets her mouth in a firm line and takes one more step backward into thin air, choosing the sharp drop into the abyss over the abyss that’s staring her in the face.