Arcadia Falls

29


Callum finds us on the edge of the cliff, my arms clamped so tightly around Chloe and Sally that my biceps will ache for a week. He shines his flashlight over the edge of the cliff, illuminating Ivy’s broken body a hundred feet below us. Then he shines the flashlight on each of us in turn—Sally, Chloe, and then me. He holds it on me.
“Are you okay?” He practically barks the question. Chloe shields her eyes from the light and whimpers at the harshness of his voice, but I understand the fear underlying it.
“We’re okay,” I say. “Ivy jumped. She killed herself.”
Callum nods—one curt bob of his head— and then stands up. Waving the flashlight over his head he calls into the night, “We’re over here!”
Here echoes in the chasm below us. Chloe begins to shake and I relax my grip enough to pat her back. Callum kneels down next to us and I whisper in his ear, “Can you get Chloe away from the edge?”
As soon as he puts his arm around Chloe, I put both of mine around Sally. Callum turns Chloe firmly away from the clove and guides her downhill. The second her gaze is torn away from the drop, she begins crying, as if she’d been held transfixed by the dizzying abyss and only now realizes how close she came to going over. I hear voices coming up the hill—Shelley Drake, Toby Potter, Dymphna Byrnes—all of them ready to take care of her. And us, I suppose, but I don’t turn to them just yet.
“Honey,” I say to Sally, “it’s okay. We can go now.”
“I was afraid that something was going to happen to you.” She speaks so low I have to lean my head toward her mouth. “That’s why I followed you. But if I hadn’t … you could have stopped her….” She begins to shake and I pull her tight against me.
“I don’t think anyone could have stopped her.” I’m not sure if it’s true, but Sally doesn’t argue. I hold her to me as the moon rises high enough in the sky to reach down into the chasm. I can feel it, an icy wave, moving through me the way a current of cold water sometimes comes over you in the ocean, only this wave is made of light, flowing into the clove, sweeping over the waterfall, the tumbled rocks and, finally, the broken body of Ivy St. Clare. Just as the snow covered Lily’s body sixty years ago, so the moonlight blankets Ivy now. They’re down there together, I think. As if Lily had been lying there all these years waiting to pull her daughter—her murderer—down into the clove with her.
I, too, start to shake. Then I feel myself covered with warmth. Callum’s behind us, wrapping a blanket around both our shoulders, coaxing us away from the edge. I have to close my eyes before I can break the pull of the clove and go with him. But even as I walk down the hill I carry its chill with me, like a lump of ice lodged in my gut.
For the next few weeks every time I close my eyes I see the clove covered in moonlit snow. At night I dream of it. Each night it’s the same: I’m standing on the edge of the cliff, looking down into the clove. Lily in her white May Day dress stands at the bottom. Instead of a wreath of flowers around her head, her blond hair is rimed with frost. She holds out her arms and another white-clad figure joins her. It’s Ivy St. Clare. She has a wreath of ivy in her hair. The two women link arms and then they both hold out their arms. They’re waiting for the third member of their party—the third Grace—and I suddenly know it’s me they’re waiting for. I feel the pull of their wills dragging me down into the clove, my feet move closer to the edge, my weight leans over … and then I see, to my relief, another figure is joining them.
Thank God, I think, it doesn’t have to be me. But when the third robed figure lifts its head, I see that beneath her cowled hood there’s nothing. The third figure has no face.
Then I fall.
I wake up flinching against the sensation of plummeting downward. Unable to go back to sleep, I go downstairs, creeping softly so as not to wake Sally. Since Ivy St. Clare’s death, Sally has stayed in the cottage with me. At first I was glad to keep her close, but as the days have passed and she’s shown no sign of wanting to go back to the dorm, I’ve begun to worry. Is she staying with me because she thinks I need her? Or because she’s frightened of something? Should we just leave the school altogether? Or would running away only make it worse? I feel as if we’re still on the ridge, clutching each other to keep from falling over the edge. I’m afraid that if I let go we’ll both fall; but if I don’t we’ll never find our way to safety.
I almost hoped in the first few days that the school would close and take the decision out of my hands. After all, it wouldn’t be surprising if parents withdrew their children after two deaths. Then we could all disband, leaving Arcadia to its ghosts and its stories. But that’s not what happened.
I was surprised by how many people came to Ivy’s funeral. I recognized some from the village—Doris from the Rip van Winkle Diner, Beatrice Rhodes, Fawn from Seasons—but there were many more who looked far too stylish to be locals.
“Alums,” Dymphna informed me in a hushed whisper as we stood in line to file past Ivy’s casket. “And the trustees. There’s a meeting afterward. If you ask me, which no one did, they could’ve waited a day.”
Looking around, I recognized some of the faces of wealthy and influential arts patrons I’d seen in the society columns of the Times. Toby Potter, in a Victorian morning coat, told me the names of those I didn’t know. Apparently, many alumni of Arcadia had gone on to become curators, collectors, dealers, and critics. A good many of them had come from wealthy families or had married into wealth and wielded power and influence in the New York art world. A few were artists themselves.
“They must be very dedicated to the school,” I whispered to Toby.
“They probably want to make sure she’s really gone.” Toby whispered back while keeping his eyes on the procession heading toward the open casket. “I think some of them are afraid she’ll pop out of the casket and demand more money for the endowment.”
I shuddered at the image. I found this viewing of the corpse macabre. The few funerals I’d been to over the years had been Jewish ones, all closed-casket. I was dismayed to find myself steered by Toby into the line for the viewing. The last thing I wanted to do was look into her face. I was wondering if I could somehow file past without looking, but when I reached the casket, I found it impossible not to. I was shocked then at how peaceful Ivy seemed. Her face, which had been so wizened and lined in life, had relaxed, whether from some trick of the mortician’s craft or because death had released some tension in her features. Still, I couldn’t look at her for long without recalling that look of horror I’d seen on her face as she stood on the edge of the clove. I let my eyes drift down to the collar of her suit, on which I saw the pin she’d always worn in life: the wreath of ivy surrounding the two saints borne aloft on a cloud. I said a little prayer that she had at last found some peace.
At the end of the service the minister asked if anyone would like to say a few words about the deceased. There was an awful silence and I thought that no one would come forward. But Shelley Drake cleared her throat and rose to her feet. She was oddly dressed for a funeral, in a lavender floral print and matching lavender shoes. The chapel felt horribly still and I wondered if I was the only one afraid of what Shelley might say.
“We’ve come here today as a community broken by grief and tragedy,” she began, her voice thin and wavery as the light filtered through the old stained-glass windows. “Many are perhaps wondering if there is a future for Arcadia after the terrible events of these last few months. But I know what Ivy St. Clare would say if she were alive.” Shelley looked toward the open casket. “She would ask, What is the purpose of art if not to offer a refuge in times of loss and disillusionment? These recent deaths, of one who was at the beginning of her artistic career, and one who was reaching the end of hers, are all the more tragic because they are linked to each other. We may never know what really happened, if Ivy St. Clare was guilty of Isabel Cheney’s death, but it’s clear from her suicide that she felt responsible for it and for the death of Lily Eberhardt. She believed her actions would preserve the institution of the Arcadia School. We know that she was tragically misguided, but should we then throw away this refuge for the artistic spirit? We may never understand why Dean St. Clare did what she did, but we can hope that in the years to come the artists who come here, and who are nurtured here, will redeem her sins. After all, what is art but a way to shape and corral the chaos and senselessness of tragedy and disappointment?”
It was a strange speech for a funeral, but I realized it was perhaps meant more for the board meeting that occurred later that day. It must have seemed appropriate to the board, because they unanimously appointed Shelley Drake interim dean.
At the tea and reception that followed the board meeting, I expressed my surprise to Toby Potter. “I wouldn’t have thought Shelley had the organizational skills to run a school,” I said. And then, because I was afraid I sounded too critical, I added, “I mean, her skills seem more artistic than bureaucratic.”
“In other words, you think she seems too flaky to run anything more complicated than a bake sale,” Toby deftly rephrased my reservations about Shelley with a malicious grin. “Don’t worry. I believe the whole ‘distracted artist’ air she cultivates may be a pose. I imagine she’s found it convenient in getting out of unpleasant responsibilities. I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns out to be an able and even draconian administrator.”
I was surprised at Toby’s assessment given what he’d told me the first time we met about Shelley’s history of mental instability, but then I remembered how well organized she’d been when she led the search for Isabel. She’d even managed to produce pink bandanas and whistles. “Do you think the board elected her as interim dean because of her organizational skills?”
“No.” Toby rocked back and forth on his heels like a wind-up toy, grinning gleefully. “They elected her interim dean because the Sheldons are the largest endowers of the school.”
“Really?” I looked over Toby’s head to where Shelley stood between a middle-aged woman in pearls and cashmere and a man in a navy blazer, pink pressed shirt, and khaki slacks—a couple who looked like they could have wandered in here from the Greenwich Country Club. Shelley was wearing the same loose flannel dress she wore to the funeral, and I noticed that its floral print was splattered with paint. She had tamed her kinky gray hair into a bun, but stray pieces stuck out like an ill-trimmed hedge. “I remember her telling me that part of the reason she taught at Arcadia was because it infuriated her upper-crust family. But if her family supports the school financially—”
“Then why would her teaching here make them angry?” Toby finished my question, then lifted his eyebrows, pursed his lips, and held up both hands. “No reason at all, I’d say. It’s hard to imagine what family she was speaking about. Her mother, Fleur Sheldon, died in a mental institution years ago. Our Shelley was appointed a guardian by the family law firm and brought up by nannies and boarding schools. No, Shelley might affect the role of rebellious artist when it suits her, but she’s done exactly what her grandmother Gertrude Sheldon would have wanted to do herself: take over Vera Beecher’s role as mistress of Arcadia.”
I looked over at Shelley to see her ducking her head, smiling shyly, and patting down her straying bits of hair. She seemed entirely in her element. Recalling Gertrude Sheldon’s jealousy of Vera Beecher, I had to conclude that Toby was right: she would have been delighted to see her granddaughter take over Arcadia.


In the days and weeks that follow I find that Toby is also right about Shelley’s hidden knack for organization. Or rather, reorganization. She seems to be everywhere, popping unannounced into classes, holding informal sessions in the dorms to see what direction the students want for Arcadia, even invading Dymphna’s kitchen to suggest vegetarian meal choices and lower-calorie desserts.
She even asks Callum Reade to come in to give a talk on campus safety. I attend because it’s mandatory, but I feel awkward and spend the session pretending to take notes so that I don’t have to meet his gaze, which seems focused in my direction whenever I look up.
I didn’t mean to leave things so awkward between us. At first I was so focused on Sally that I couldn’t spare the attention for him. When he came by the cottage, I kept him at the door and explained that Sally was there and that I had to concentrate on her. “She’s afraid that she could have lost me,” I explained, hating the hurt look in his face. “Now’s not the time to introduce anyone new into her life.”
He respected my wishes and stayed away. After a few weeks I began to wonder if they weren’t his wishes, too.
On those sleepless nights that I spent by the fire in my cottage, I told myself I couldn’t blame Callum for staying away. It was probably for the best. Sally doesn’t need to see me with another man yet, and, really, how much do I have in common with Callum Reade?
I’ve nearly convinced myself that I am over him when I run into him on the path to the cottage in the last week of the term. The leap my heart makes comes from being startled.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. It comes out more rudely than I meant it to. He tilts his head and stares for a moment before answering. There are deep shadows under his eyes, but otherwise it’s hard to read his expression. It’s dark here under the pines in the early dusk of approaching winter.
“Dean Drake asked me to have a look at this path to suggest where she should have security lights installed,” he answers after a moment.
“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid, as if I’d accused him of stalking me. “Isn’t that a little … I don’t know … presumptuous?”
He laughs. “You mean, don’t I have anything better to do? Yeah, well I thought so, too, but for years I told Dean St. Clare that there should be lights on this path so I figured there was no sense acting proud. Besides, I had another reason for wanting to come out here. I wanted to talk to you.”
“I see,” I say, forcing myself to look him in the eyes. “About that … I should have told you. I’m thinking of leaving after the winter break. Sally seems unable to get over seeing Ivy fall to her death. She’ll hardly leave my side. I think that maybe it would be better if I got her away from a place with such bad memories. So you see, there’s really no point … I mean … for you and me …”
Throughout this increasingly fragmented speech Callum has stood with his arms crossed over his chest, seemingly content to watch me blather on, making a fool of myself. When I splutter to a halt, he gives me a sad, condescending smile, as if I’m the village idiot.
“I figured you might not come back after the break. That’s why I wanted to talk to you before you go. I need to ask you something about the night Isabel Cheney died.”
“Oh,” I say, hoping the light’s not good enough for him to see me blush. “Of course. What can I help you with, sheriff?”
He seems to wince at my use of his title, but it might just be from the glare of the setting sun, which is slanting low through the pine trees. He shields his eyes and looks away. “You saw Dean St. Clare before the bonfire, right?”
“Yes, in her office.”
“And do you remember what she was wearing?”
“Um, a tunic and slacks.”
“What color?”
“Dark green, I think. Why—”
“And later when we saw her standing in the window, was she wearing the same thing?” Callum’s looking straight at me. The sun that had been in his eyes has lowered, but the amber light reflected off the lower half of his face has turned his eyes a piercing green-gold, their fix on me so unnerving that I have to close my own eyes. When I do, I picture Ivy St. Clare standing in her darkened window.
“I couldn’t tell. The lights were out in her office.”
He sighs. “Neither could I. Chloe said she saw a woman in white in the woods. But why would Ivy have changed into a white dress? She didn’t take part in the bonfire ceremony.”
“What does it matter?” I ask. “Ivy admitted that she was in the woods that night.”
“She admitted she was on top of the ridge, but she didn’t say anything about running into Chloe down by the apple orchard.”
“Maybe Chloe imagined the woman in white because she’d worked herself up into believing the legend.”
“Or maybe there was someone else in the woods that night, someone who pushed Isabel off the ridge.”
I realize now where the dark shadows under his eyes come from. Callum Reade was responsible for a young man’s death in New York City and he can’t bear the thought of leaving another young person’s death unsolved, even if it means chasing after a legend.
“Is that why you’re being so obliging to Dean Drake—so you can look for more evidence on the campus?”
He smiles. Unlike the smile of a minute ago, this one is sad and rueful. “You’ve found me out, Ms. Rosenthal. I’m searching the woods for signs and portents.” He holds his arms out, palms extended to the sky, and then looks up as if the signs and portents he spoke of might be hiding in the tops of the pine trees. Then he sniffs at the air and dismisses me. “Best get home,” he tells me. “It smells like it’s going to snow.”
I wake up that night because it’s too quiet. I’ve become accustomed to the sigh and creak of pine trees in the wind and the murmur of the Wittekill as it flows past my cottage, but when I wake up in the middle of the night there’s no sound at all. The cottage is wrapped in thick silence. I get up to look out the window, half expecting the whole forest to be gone, the trees come to life and walked off as in Lily’s fairy tale. Instead I find the trees shrouded in heavy white robes, their limbs muffled by the steadily falling snow. It reminds me of the night Lily first told the girls at St. Lucy’s the story of the changeling girl and Lily thought she had put the whole world to sleep with her story, only to find it was the snow that had muffled the creek. She’d described the girls as caterpillars breaking out of their cocoons and flitting mothlike to the window. For a moment, standing in my own darkened bedroom looking out at the white-robed trees, I feel them around me: those girls who had come far from their homes to leave their babies with strangers, listening to a story about a girl who lost her way in the woods. I feel them waiting for me to finish the story.
But I think they wouldn’t like the ending I would have to tell them.
Climbing back into bed, I burrow under the blankets, muffling the silence of the waiting girls, but I feel it all around me: a sense that time has been suspended and that I’ll be here forever, alone and insulated in the quiet of the snowstorm. It takes a long time for me to fall back asleep.
In the morning it’s still snowing. When I wake Sally up, I tell her to look out her window, remembering how her face would light up at the first snow each year. But when she looks out at the beautifully transformed world, she only sighs. “I guess they don’t have snow days here,” she says and hides back under the covers.
Sally turns out to be wrong. At breakfast, in the Dining Hall, Shelley—or Dean Drake, as she likes to be called now—announces that since it is the last day of the term, classes are canceled. “I don’t want anyone falling into the clove,” she says. She doesn’t have to add like Dean St. Clare, like Isabel for those names to reverberate in the silence that follows her announcement. The only one who does speak is Dymphna, but it’s a muttered whisper that only I hear because I’m standing next to her by the tea urn.
“Dean St. Clare would never cancel classes for a smidgen of snow like this.”
Surprised by the edge in her voice, I glance at her. Her round dimpled face is pink with suppressed anger. She may be the only one at Arcadia who really misses Ivy St. Clare.
“It’s probably Dean Drake’s inexperience that makes her a bit overcautious. I’m sure she’s just doing what she thinks is best to keep the students safe.”
“Are you saying that Miss St. Clare didn’t have the children’s safety in mind, then?” she asks, turning an even brighter shade of pink. “Don’t tell me you believe that nonsense about her hurting Isabel Cheney? She’d never do something like that.”
“But she confessed to killing Lily Eberhardt,” I say as gently and softly as I can. I notice that Shelley, while outlining the guidelines for how the dorm rooms should be left, is glaring in our direction.
“Well, yes, I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that. My mother always said that Miss St. Clare couldn’t abide Lily—that she was horrible jealous of her from the day she set foot here. But that was something altogether different. Arcadia was everything to the dean. She wouldn’t do anything to harm it—or one of the students.”
I could point out that she might have thought killing Isabel was her way of protecting the school or that it was an accident, but Clyde Bollinger has come up to the urn, holding his mug out for a cup of tea.
“Arcadia blend?” he asks.
“Sorry, love, it’s all gone and the new dean says we’ve got to serve decaffeinated beverages from now on,” Dymphna informs him. “So it’s chamomile or raspberry leaf, the latter being most beneficial in the toning of the uterus.”
Poor Clyde blanches. “Uh … no thanks. Could I have a word with you, Ms. Rosenthal?”
“Sure,” I say. “Why don’t we go up to the Reading Room? It should be empty while everyone’s here.”
Clyde nods gratefully and precedes me, giving a wary backward glance at Dymphna in case she might be planning to “tone” any other of his organs. I have to hurry to keep up with his long-legged lope out of the Dining Hall and up the stairs to the Reading Room. “If you’re after me to fix the tea and coffee situation, I’m afraid I can’t help,” I tell him when we get to the lounge, “but if you come by my cottage I will brew you a strong cup of Earl Grey.” It occurs to me that it might be a nice gesture to invite some of my students to the cottage since Shelley’s decision to cancel classes on the last day has robbed me of a chance to say goodbye to them.
“It’s not about the tea, Ms. Rosenthal. It’s about Chloe.”
“What is it?” I ask, motioning for him to sit down on the couch and pulling a chair in front of him.
He folds his long lanky body awkwardly down onto the low couch and crouches forward, elbows on knees. I can’t help but feel a pang of guilt. I was worried about Chloe when I learned that she was not going home after the dean’s death, but I’ve been too busy tending to Sally to keep more than a cursory eye on Chloe over the last few weeks. She’s seemed subdued, but not overly upset. She handed in her assignments on time, answered questions in class, and even looked like she’d put on a few pounds, although that might have been a trick of the heavy sweaters and baggy corduroys she started wearing when the weather grew cold.
“She doesn’t still blame herself for Isabel’s death, does she? I tried to tell her that it’s likely the dean pushed her and that she couldn’t have done anything to stop her.”
“I don’t think she buys that,” Clyde says. “She says that if she hadn’t played that trick on Isabel she wouldn’t have run up to the ridge. And now she says it’s her fault, too, that the dean died. She wants to perform some kind of purification ceremony on the winter solstice to stop the cycle of guilt and retribution.”
“I think we’ve had enough ceremonies,” I tell Clyde. “And besides, the solstice is tomorrow. Everyone will be leaving for winter break.”
“But she’s staying here for the break. She’s asked Ms. Drake—I mean Dean Drake—if she can stay on in the dorms and Dean Drake’s said yes.”
Getting up to my feet, I tell Clyde not to worry. “I’ll talk to Chloe. If I can’t convince her to go home, I’ll have her stay with me and Sally. We can observe the winter solstice together.”
It’s not hard to find Chloe. As soon as breakfast is over, the students abscond with the dining hall trays and run to the hill above the apple orchard for sledding. I pass Sally and Haruko heading back to our cottage.
“We still have Dad’s old sled, don’t we?” Sally asks. “You didn’t give it away, did you?”
Did I? I wonder with a stab of guilt. I’d gotten pretty ruthless by the end of packing in Great Neck, and I dimly recall placing a price tag on Jude’s old Flexible Flyer in the garage. But then I also remember going out in the middle of the night and taking the price tag off. He’d had it from the time he was eight and he’d pulled ten-month-old Sally on it around the backyard the first year we lived in Great Neck. “I’ll take her sledding when she’s older,” he’d said. Long Island winters being mild and most of our vacations being spent in Florida, the sled didn’t get much use over the last sixteen years, but at the last minute I couldn’t bear to let it go. It felt freighted with all the things we hadn’t gotten to do with Jude.
“I think it’s in the garage,” I tell Sally.
“I told you,” she says to Haruko. “My mom saved all the important things.” Then she turns and gives me a small smile that nearly breaks my heart. I’m afraid to speak lest I say something to ruin the moment, but then I see her shiver in her thin jacket and, unbidden, the words “You’d better get your down parka while you’re at it” pop out of my mouth. Sally rolls her eyes at Haruko, but her smile widens and the two girls turn to go. I watch them for a minute, saying a small prayer of thanks for the resiliency of youth. When I turn and see Chloe standing at the top of the sledding hill, though, my faith in that resiliency is shaken. She’s standing just where she stood on Halloween night, only in a powder-blue North Face parka instead of a white robe. Her face looks as haunted as it did that night. How could I not have noticed the deep blue bruises under her eyes and her swollen pink eyelids?
“Aren’t you going sledding?” I ask when I reach her. “It looks like fun.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t like the feeling of falling. It reminds me …” She doesn’t have to finish. I wonder if she has the same falling dreams that I do. We stand for a minute watching her classmates speed down the hill on their makeshift sleds, whooping with a mixture of fear and delight, laughing when they wipe out at the bottom. I can’t imagine being young enough to enjoy the sense of weightlessness, the rush of gravity, but it makes me sad that Chloe has lost that ability at such a young age.
“Look,” I say, “I hear you’re planning to stay here over break. Why don’t you stay at the cottage with Sally and me? It’ll be more comfortable than the dorm and I’m sure Sally will be glad of the company.”
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”
“Of course not,” I say, wondering if it will really be the best thing for Sally to share the house with such a morose roommate. “Bring your stuff over tomorrow.”
As I’m walking away from Chloe I run into Shelley. “I saw you talking to Chloe,” she says. “Is she all right?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “She still holds herself responsible for Isabel’s death.”
“For Isabel’s death? But she knows it was Ivy’s fault.”
“Yes, but if she hadn’t played that trick on Isabel—” The blank look on Shelley’s face reminds me that I never told Shelley about the dress trick. I tell her briefly, ending with the apparition of the white woman. “Of course she might have imagined that part.”
“No doubt. These girls can be quite hysterical.”
“Yes, they can,” I say, stifling the urge to laugh at Shelley Drake calling anyone else hysterical.