The Ghost Orchid

by Carol Goodman

  He turns away, moving in a slow circle to shine the candlelight onto the grotto walls, but nothing is there. No one is in the grotto but the six sitters, all of whom, except Frank Campbell, who is leaning forward with his hands covering his face, stare back at him with glassy, frightened eyes.

  “My God, look at the ceiling!” cries Signore Lantini.

  They all look up at the domed ceiling above their heads. It’s covered with white marks.

  “They look like handprints,” Tom Quinn says, climbing up onto the chair that he vacated and holding the candelabra as close as he can to the ceiling. Then he climbs down and moves to the back wall, where a trail of handprints snakes down to the stone bench.

  “Look at her hand!” Mrs. Ramsdale cries, getting up from her seat and coming around the table on unsteady legs. She grabs Corinth’s hand and holds it up so that everyone can see the smear of white paint on Corinth’s glove. Tom reaches across Mrs. Ramsdale and takes Corinth’s hand from her, pulling Corinth toward the wall and placing her hand next to one of the painted hands. He can feel her hand trembling under his and he can smell the rose water she uses to rinse her hair as she leans against him for support.

  “The prints are much too small to be made by Miss Blackwell,” Signore Lantini says. “They appear to be children’s hands.”

  “My children’s hands!” Aurora says.

  “I don’t know about that,” Tom says, “but I think I do know where the paint came from.” Tom turns and holds the candelabra over Campbell’s head. “It’s no good, Mr. Campbell, I saw you dabbing your hand with paint when you were pretending to put on hand lotion.”

  Campbell remains motionless in his chair.

  “The poor man’s fainted,” Mrs. Ramsdale says, her voice trembling now, not because of the fright the séance gave her but because she can see that Tom Quinn is still holding Corinth Blackwell’s hand. And because she saw the look that passed between them before.

  Lantini steps forward and grabs the painter’s shoulders, giving them a firm shake, while Mrs. Ramsdale leans forward with her little vial of smelling salts. Campbell’s head falls back limply, and Mrs. Ramsdale, dropping the vial to the floor, screams.

  A tuft of feathers protrudes from the lapel of Mr. Campbell’s evening jacket. It looks oddly decorative until Lantini moves the jacket’s lapel aside to reveal the blood-soaked waistcoat underneath. The homemade arrow—James’s arrow—-has been driven clean through his chest.

  Chapter Nine

  With November the skies over Bosco grow heavy and gray and the gardens draw in on themselves. In the overgrown hedges, seed pods, like small bells, rattle in the cold wind that sweeps down out of the north woods. The dried brush, instead of seeming sparser, feels thicker—a thicket of thorns woven by a malicious fairy to insulate us from the outside world. There are no phones in the main house, only in the office in the old gatehouse, and so our only contact with the outside world depends on the phone messages taken by Daria Tate.

  The pink slips that haphazardly find their way into our lunch boxes, though, might as well be written in Sanskrit. I receive a message from my mother that reads, “The keys are in the alarm,” which makes no sense because my mother owns neither an alarm system nor a car and there aren’t even locks on the doors to her house. David gets a message about a job opening at the New York Botanical Garden a week after the job has been filled. Bethesda learns that her cat has been taken to the vet for “his yearly dairy injection,” and Nat gets a pink note with a smiley face informing him that Oprah has picked his book for her book club. When he calls the number on the message, though, he reaches his agent, who tells him that her aunt’s book club in Boca is reading his book and would he answer a few questions for them on the speakerphone?

  The strangest message, though, is the one that comes for Zalman from his Russian grandmother. The message, translated from the Russian (a language, Daria explains, she picked up from a Russian muralist her mother once dated), is that she has fallen and broken her leg; the problem is that Zalman’s grandmother has been dead for thirty years.

  “Which means I was on the phone with a dead woman,” Daria tells me when I come into the office to pick up my mail.

  “I’m sure you just got the name wrong,” Nat, who’s come up behind me and is helping himself to a ream of Bosco stationery, says. “Like you thought my agent was Oprah.” He rolls his eyes at me. “Sheesh, like I’d even consider going on Oprah.” But he would have. I have a sudden image of the suit he’d planned to wear. A Hugo Boss he’d gotten on sale at Barneys last year. I can even see in my vision how handsome he looks in it.

  “Yeah, well, actually it wasn’t as weird as the callers I get who want to tell their stories to the writers,” Daria tells us.

  “You’re kidding,” I say.

  “No, I get a couple a day.” Daria holds up her right hand, thumb and pinky extended to mimic a phone receiver. “ ‘Hello, is this the place that has all the writers? Well, go get one, ’cause I’ve got a story to tell they’ll pay good money for.’ ”

  Nat laughs, but I’m thinking of how lonely those people must be. “Amazing,” he says. “If they think that’s all it takes, why don’t they write it themselves?”

  Daria shrugs. “Too much trouble, I guess. Easier to tell it to someone over the phone like a psychic hotline. Diana tells me to hang up on those calls, but they just keep calling back, so now I have them tell their story to me and I pretend to be writing it all down.”

  “Really?” I ask. “But why do you bother?”

  “I don’t know; it’s something to pass the time. There isn’t much else to do—I’ve already read all your files.”

  We both stare at Daria openmouthed. “Our files? You’re allowed to read our files?” Nat asks.

  “Yeah, but—no offense—I’m really more interested in the older stuff. Like this letter I came upon today.” Daria lifts up a delicate sheet of onionskin paper, its surface embossed with the impressions of an old manual typewriter. It’s been so long since I’ve seen anything manually typed that the page looks as antiquated as an illuminated manuscript. “This is from a historian researching Bosco. He says that there’s a local story, supposedly passed down by the Lathams’ servants, that the artist Frank Campbell was shot through the heart during a séance here.”

  “I thought he died of a heart attack,” I say.

  “That the official story,” Daria says, her voice lowering to a theatrical whisper and her eyes widening with delight. I see now why she loves listening to the crank callers. I’ll bet she also loves conspiracy theories, urban legends, and telling ghost stories around a camp bonfire. “The local lore is that the ghost of an Indian shot an arrow through his heart to avenge the massacre of his tribe on this very spot.” She punctuates the last four words by stabbing the air with her index finger.

  I glance over at Nat to see how he’s reacting to this ghost story and am surprised to see how ashen he looks. But it’s not the specter of slaughtered Indians that has him rattled.

  “You’re allowed to read our files?” He repeats his earlier question, but before Daria can answer, Diana Tate’s voice bursts out of the intercom demanding Daria’s presence in her office.

  “Gotta go,” Daria says, grabbing a steno pad and a bottle of water.

  “I can’t believe that adolescent is reading our files,” Nat says as we walk back to the mansion together. “That means she’s read our letters of reference.”

  I wonder why that upsets Nat so much and then I remember that his mentor was Spencer Leland, the director of the famous MFA program Nat had attended. Leland had written a groundbreaking experimental novel in his twenties and then nothing but a slim collection of short stories and an even slimmer memoir in the next forty years. He was famous, though, for mentoring young writers. When he died, seven years ago, of lung cancer, Nat wrote an essay about him in the Atlantic Monthly that had brought me to tears. I picture the old teacher, in the donnish English tweeds he always wore, and his trad
emark shock of white hair, writing a letter, and I know what Nat is worried about. He’s always been afraid that Leland’s original letter of recommendation contains some hint of an inner failing in Nat’s writing. Some inner failing that explains why he hasn’t been able to write his second novel. The reason I’m so sure this is what Nat’s afraid of is it’s the same thing I’m afraid of—that the recommendation letter Richard Scully wrote has some similar caveat about my own character and talent.

  “I’m sure she’ll keep whatever she reads to herself—” I begin.

  “Are you? The girl’s a pothead. She’ll probably post our letters on the Internet.”

  “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” I say before considering my words. I’m not sure what I’m more appalled at, insulting Nat or using such an obvious cliché combined with an unintended pun. Nat looks genuinely abashed, and I realize he has no idea that we all know he’s been getting high with Daria.

  “Nat,” I say, “I’m in the room right next to you. It smells like a Nirvana concert in there.”

  “Really? Shit . . . Do you think anyone else has noticed . . . ?” He looks so worried I’m genuinely sorry for him.

  “I wouldn’t worry. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to kick you out—”

  Nat stops in the middle of the path and looks so pale I’m afraid he’s going to pass out.

  “Here,” I say, leading him to a bench on the side of the terrace. “Sit down. I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re Bosco’s most famous writer. They wouldn’t dare kick you out.”

  Nat drops his head into his hands and moans. “A writer who hasn’t produced a book in nine years,” he says. “You don’t think they’re all looking over my shoulder every minute of the day waiting for me to fuck up?” He lifts his head and looks down the hill. More than ever the tangle of brush looks like a wall closing in on us—as if the tangled shrubs were growing, encroaching on the house. “God, sometimes I can’t stand this place.” He gets to his feet and starts heading back inside, but then he stops a few feet away and looks back at me. Cocking his head to one side, he manages a weak smile. “Hey,” he says, “do you want to get high?”

  If I was nervous about being in David’s room—in the back on the third floor—I have all the more reason to refuse Nat’s offer to share a joint with him in the central suite. Although I told Nat that I didn’t think Diana Tate would have him evicted for smoking pot, I’m not so sure about what she might do with me—an unpublished author, breaking the rules of nine-to-five quiet, and engaging in illegal activities. But that’s exactly what I find myself doing. Maybe because Nat had looked so hopeful when he asked me; maybe because anything is better than going back to my room and facing the blank screen of my computer.

  We don’t meet anyone on the stairs going up, or in the hallway. After placing a rolled-up towel against the bottom of the door and opening a window, Nat assures me that Bethesda—whose room is on the opposite side of the suite from mine—has no sense of smell and is so absorbed in her work that she would never notice anything. “And she wouldn’t say anything if she did,” Nat says, lighting the joint. “She’s my pal.”

  I suspect that if Bethesda knew I was in here with Nat, sitting cozily across from him on the cushioned window seat, our feet almost touching, she’d be less than congenial. I wonder if Nat simply has no idea how she feels about him or just chooses to ignore it.

  “You’ve known her for a long time?” I ask, taking the joint from him and inhaling. It’s been ages since I’ve smoked pot and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to keep from coughing, but the sweet smoke coils down into my lungs and stays there like an animal curling into its lair.

  “Since college,” he says. “We were in writing classes together. If she hadn’t decided to write criticism instead of fiction, I’d probably hate her by now.”

  I laugh and exhale at the same time. It’s the first time since I’ve met Nat that I feel he’s being totally honest. What I wonder is if Bethesda’s decision to write biographies instead of novels had something to do with knowing that Nat wouldn’t have been able to put up with competition from her.

  “Well, she certainly doesn’t like me very much. I honestly had no idea Muse of Water was her title. I had no intention of poaching on her territory.”

  “Yeah, she can be a little crazy that way. That’s the thing about writing biographies: you have to worry no one else is working on your subject at the same time. Bethesda’s been researching Aurora Latham for years now—she’s invested.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have anything to worry about from me—I’m not writing a biography, and if things go on the way they have been, I probably won’t even finish the novel.”

  “Not going well?” Nat asks. I glance at him and see that he’s arranged his features into a look of polite concern, but he can’t disguise the hidden pleasure in his voice. Nothing makes him happier, I realize, than to hear that someone else is having trouble writing. I look toward his desk and see the ream of blank stationery neatly stacked by the side of his ancient Olivetti typewriter, the black Moleskine notebooks arrayed like soldiers next to a green glass bottle that seems to gather all the sunlight in the room into its dark, musty interior.

  “I’m a little stuck,” I say. “I’ve gotten to the first séance, the one where the artist Frank Campbell dies, but I can’t figure out what happened. It was supposed to be a heart attack, but he was a young man.” I’m still staring at the green bottle. There’s a smell coming from it, something sweet and decaying, emanating from the bottle like a small black cloud.

  “So you think someone killed him?”

  I drag my eyes away from the green bottle and see that Nat has leaned forward to pass me the tiny nub of the joint. His face is only inches from mine, so close I can see the shadows his long, dark eyelashes make on his cheekbones and smell the scent of pine needles on his skin. I close my eyes after drawing in the smoke, and the spark of the joint becomes a candle flame burning in the dark. My whole body is prickling, as if hands were moving over my skin, pulling me deeper into the blackness. And then I feel something brush against my lips, a light, feathery touch that could be the sweep of a bird’s wing or a kiss.

  I open my eyes and find myself looking into Nat’s eyes, which have turned the same green as the old medicine bottle on his desk, and I can’t for the life of me tell if he’s just kissed me or I imagined the whole thing.

  “I’ve got to go,” I say, swinging my legs down from the window seat, too embarrassed to know what else to do. “I’ve just thought of something.”

  “When inspiration strikes . . .” Nat says, looking away from me out toward the ruined garden.

  “Yeah, thanks . . .” I say, involuntarily touching a finger to my lips and feeling again that sweet, fleeting pressure against my lips. Whether it was a kiss or not, I know that it tugged at something inside of me, pulling me out of the darkness.

  “Sure, anytime,” he says, keeping his face toward the window. It’s only from his reflection that I can see the look of disappointment on his face.

  I close Nat’s door as quietly as I can, but it’s not quietly enough. Before I can turn to walk back to my room, I hear a door open at the end of the hallway and look up to see Bethesda standing there. She looks as severe in her black cardigan and jeans as a nineteenth-century governess who’s caught her charge playing hooky. Without a word she holds up an imperious finger and points toward her room. I consider ignoring the enigmatic hand signal because I’m dying to get back to my room to write down what I’ve just thought of. On the other hand, it occurs to me, Bethesda might be able to verify a hunch I have.

  I follow her into her room, where she sits down at her desk and offers me a chair before speaking. I have a feeling that she can’t stand to be away from her desk for more than a few minutes. In contrast to the barren sterility of Nat’s workspace, Bethesda’s is a monument to productivity. Books are stacked so high that they would block out the light from the window even if the
drapes were open. Clearly, though, the curtains have not been opened in some time, as Bethesda has taken to using their thick muslin as a bulletin board. Small squares of notepaper, in a rainbow of colors, are affixed to the fabric with long pearl-tipped pins. The handwriting is so tiny that I have trouble making out what’s written on the notes without seeming to pry, but from the dates on top of each note I guess that she’s trying to assemble some kind of time line for her book. I notice that she has several of the pearl-tipped pins stuck into the sleeve of her black cardigan. When a draft steals in under the windowsill, fluttering the notes like a crazy patchwork quilt, I have a sudden image of Bethesda as a beleaguered fairy-tale princess locked in a tower to complete some impossible task, like spinning gold from straw or weaving silk from feathers.

  Bethesda waits for me to look away from the window to speak. “Are you encouraging Nat in his pot smoking?” she asks.

  I almost laugh, but when I see how serious she looks, I don’t. “He asked me to join him,” I answer. “I only went because he looked so . . . lonely.”

  “He doesn’t need new friends,” Bethesda tells me, sliding one of the pearl-tipped pins in and out of her sweater sleeve. “He needs to work and he’ll never do that if he keeps smoking pot.”

  Thinking of the strange miasma I’d seen curling out of the green bottle on Nat’s desk, I’m inclined to agree with her, but I’m too annoyed at her condescending tone to admit it. “I don’t know,” I say, “I got rather a good idea when Nat and I were talking. In fact, I was just going back to my room to write—” I start to get up, but my eye is caught by one of the slips of paper pinned to the curtain. It’s a letter on pale gray stationery with an engraved artist’s palette and the name Frank Campbell beneath it. The opening salutation reads: To My Muse of Water! Bethesda notices what I’m looking at and stands up, blocking my view.

  “In fact, I wanted to check this out with you,” I say. “Daria Tate says there’s a local legend that Frank Campbell was shot through the heart by an arrow during the first séance.”