The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  “I’d like to ask Professor Da Silva that when we take Dante this semester. Why does Dante have to go down into hell to find his way again—just because he lost his way in the middle of his life? Do you think that means that when you’re at your lowest you have to go lower? To face your demons?”

  I looked up from my drawing. Christine was standing in the north arcade, hands buried in the pockets of her hooded Penrose sweatshirt, gazing up at the leering face of a monkey-demon. Even though she was wearing the same college sweatshirt as I was the effect on her was medieval. Her hair, loose under the sweatshirt, fell in smooth loops on either side of her face. She could have been an abbess, a dethroned queen in monastic exile, Guinevere pacing the stone arcades of Almesbury. I flipped a page in my notebook and started to draw her, lengthening her sweatshirt into monastic robes and turning the casual disarray of her hair into a medieval coiffure. When I came to filling in the background of columns in the east arcade I noticed that the protective glass panes on that side had frosted over so that the columns looked blurry. I imagined a painting of Guinevere, looking out into her cloistered garden and seeing figures from her past rising out of the mist, Arthur, Lancelot … and then I noticed that there was, indeed, a figure in the mist. Someone was sitting in the archway directly across from me, leaning against a column, a sketchpad resting on bent knees. For a moment I thought I was looking at my own reflection, but then the figure rose and walked south along the east arcade.

  “What is it?” Christine asked.

  I put a finger to my lips and waved her over with my other hand. When she was closer to me I pointed to the figure walking past the pink columns on the other side of the cloister. Just as I did the figure passed behind the last column and vanished. Christine and I looked at each other and then, when we looked back, he reappeared two arches back.

  “How …?”

  “He must have crept back under the stone bench,” I whispered. “He knows we’re watching him.”

  By now the figure—he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt much like ours so all we could tell was that he was tall and slim—had passed out of sight into the southeast corner of the cloister.

  “Let’s follow him,” Christine said. “He must have gone into the Unicorn Tapestries room.”

  Clutching my sketchpad to my chest I followed Christine south along the west arcade into the Nine Heroes Tapestry room and from there into the room that housed the museum’s most famous exhibit—the sixteenth-century tapestries depicting the hunt and capture of the unicorn. The room was empty except for the hunters in their plumed hats and their fine-boned greyhounds wandering through a heavily flowered wood.

  “There he is,” Christine said, pointing toward the windows facing out into the cloister. I glanced out the leaded glass windows and saw the hooded figure walking west along the south arcade. “Come on.”

  Christine headed back out into the Cuxa Cloister, but I lingered a moment in front of the last unicorn tapestry, the one that shows him collared and trapped beneath a pomegranate tree. The image had always disturbed me, even after our medieval art teacher assured us that the red stains on the unicorn’s milky white skin were pomegranate juice, not blood. What bothered me the most, I suppose, is that I’d admired the image for years—my mother had hung a framed print of it in my room when I first showed an interest in unicorns—without knowing I was looking at a dead creature.

  When I came out into the covered walkway Christine was standing at the entrance to the Early Gothic Hall on the west side of the cloister waving to me. When I followed her in I expected to find our mystery man cornered there but instead Christine was standing by one of the unglazed lancet windows overlooking the Gothic chapel, leaning so far over I was afraid she might fall and break her neck on the stone floor below, joining the entombed nobility whose stone coffins lined the chapel floor. When I joined her there I saw what she was pointing at. Someone had propped a sheet of cardboard on the folded hands of a tomb effigy and drawn a red arrow pointing east.

  “He’s pretty sure of himself,” I said. I expected that Christine would suggest we call off the chase, but she seemed intrigued.

  “I wanted to see the exhibit down there anyway,” she said, heading down the stairs to the lower level of the museum.

  We passed through the Gothic chapel (Christine retrieved the arrow placard from the tomb of the medieval knight) and into the Glass Gallery, which was empty except for a guard at the end of the hall.

  “We could ask the guard if he saw anyone come through here,” I suggested to Christine. But Christine shrugged and wandered over to a display of ivory diptychs. “I guess we’ll find him when he wants to be found.”

  While Christine looked at the display cases, I walked along the wall of windows. Set into the leaded glass were roundels of silver-stained glass. If he’d given me a chance, I thought, I could have impressed that boy by explaining how the yellow color was produced by applying a solution of silver nitrate to the clear glass and that the process was discovered in the fourteenth century. Instead I was left admiring the way the patches of yellow stood out against the bleak white and gray of the winter sky outside like the first daffodils coming up through the snow. I loved the way the yellow was the only color in the muted grisaille panels and stopped to get a closer look at the intricate painting that had been done on the glass when I saw another patch of yellow. A shock of sun-bright hair in the courtyard outside the window. The boy was sitting on the far side of the little Bonnefont Cloister, his back to the George Washington Bridge in the distance. He was smoking a cigarette. When he saw my face pressed up against the window he lifted a hand and waved.

  I turned back to tell Christine that I’d spotted him, but she was at the far end of the gallery talking to the guard so instead I went in the opposite direction to the door that led outside. I was sure he’d still be there but when I stepped outside I was alone in the cloister. A cold wind rattled the dry leaves of the espaliered pear trees, and I could still smell the smoke from his cigarette, but he was gone. I walked through to the Trie Cloister and then back into the glass gallery just in time to see the bottom of his sneakered feet disappearing up the stairwell. Christine was still talking to the guard, but when she saw me head up the stairs she followed me.

  “Did you see him again?” she asked as we arrived on the main level.

  I shook my head, not because I meant that I hadn’t seen him, but because I was so befuddled by the chase, but she took it as a negative. We went into the Campin room at the head of the stairs and Christine walked over to a fifteenth-century triptych of the annunciation.

  “What a tease!” she said, looking at the virgin but meaning, I suppose, the boy.

  As usual I gravitated toward the windows—even though these were clear hexagonal leaded glass and not stained—and sat down on a stone ledge beneath them. I felt tired and disappointed and hungry and cold. Like a pilgrim who’d come looking for sanctuary but been turned away at the monastery gate. Outside through the falling snow the blond-haired boy was loping down the steep cobblestoned driveway with nothing but his hooded sweatshirt to protect him against the snow. I breathed onto the glass and drew my initials in the steam from my breath. That’s when I noticed the folded paper wedged in the wood frame of the window. Prying it out I unfolded the paper and found that it was a sketch of a woman seated beneath a columned arch. She wore a long medieval robe, her face half hidden in the folds of its hood. As in my sketch of Christine he’d turned the prosaic college sweatshirt into a romantic garment, but this picture was of me, not Christine. He’d turned me into Guinevere pining for Arthur and Lancelot in the convent of Almesbury.

  In the lower right-hand corner of the picture there was a tiny drawing of a tree. I didn’t know then that it was a symbol Neil used to sign his paintings—a beech tree because his name meant beech forest in German. Or book forest, he told me later, only that wouldn’t make any sense.

  I turned the drawing over and was disappointed to see that he hadn’t sig
ned his name or written his phone number. I assumed I’d never see him again, but I was wrong. On the first day of spring semester I walked into Dante class and found our Cloisters Phantom (as Christine and I had taken to calling him) sitting in the back row. Later he told me that he’d heard Christine and me talking about the class in the Cuxa Cloister, figured out where we went to college from our sweatshirts, and applied to spend his junior spring semester as an exchange student at Penrose and then signed up for the Dante class. I’d spent that day at the Cloisters feeling like the pursuer, but in the end it was Neil who’d hunted me down. I’d never felt as wanted before—nor have I since.

  NOR HAVE I EVER FELT AS LOVED AS I FELT BY NEIL IN THE YEARS WE SPENT TOGETHER before he began to lose his mind. Beloved, really, adored. When we were in a room together he never seemed to take his eyes off me. He was always drawing me as one figure from romantic mythology or another: Beatrice, Guinevere, Halcyone, Isolde. I should have wondered why he never simply drew me as myself, but by the time I understood that what he loved was something inside his own mind—and that when his mind cracked so would his image of me—I was addicted to being loved like that. No wonder I still dreamed about him. No wonder I had imagined him as the indistinct figure behind the glass at Cooke’s today.

  Even here, walking under the arched canopy of twisted branches with Nathan Bell, I’ve got half an eye out for a sight of him behind the thick, overgrown foliage even though these woods are so dense—as lushly green and rich with wildflowers as the millefleurs tapestries at the Cloisters—that a dozen Neils could be passing by us ten feet off the path and I’d never see them. That thought sets my skin prickling, but whether from fear or excitement I’m not sure. How would it feel to see Neil again after all these years?

  When we turn into the final curve of the bridle path I get an answer of sorts. A figure steps out of the shadows into a patch of sun at the bottom of the path and for a moment the sun makes a halo of his bright hair. When he steps toward us, and into the shadows again, I see it’s Detective Falco, but for just that moment when I thought it was Neil I felt something take flight inside me that wasn’t fear.

  “Miss McKay, Mr. Bell.” The detective nods at me but extends his hand to Nathan and introduces himself. “Amy Webb said you’d be on this path. I thought I’d catch you before you got back to the house and have a word with you both alone. There’s not much opportunity for privacy at Mrs. Webb’s house.”

  “No, Christine always said the same thing,” I say.

  “Do you want to talk to both of us at the same time … or should I go back …?” Nathan takes a step down the hill and points one arm toward the road, the other toward the detective, flapping his arms up and down like a giant crow. I notice dark half-moons of sweat beneath his arms on the shiny fabric of his suit jacket that could well be from walking in the heat or from the nervousness I hear in his voice.

  “I thought as Christine’s closest friends you’d both like to hear the results of the autopsy together. It’s not an interrogation. If you have time we could walk up the path a bit. I think there’s a bench overlooking the river …”

  “I have to get back home to feed the dogs before dark,” I say. It’s a lie—I’ve asked Robbie to feed and walk Paolo and Francesca—but one view of Briarwood is enough for one day. “I don’t mind standing.”

  Nathan checks his watch. “I’ve got to catch the 6:16 back to the city,” he says, “I’m sure Juno could fill me in on whatever I need to know …”

  “You’ve got plenty of time; I’ll drive you there myself. That way if I have any further questions I can ask them on the way. Meanwhile, it will save time to tell you this together. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.” He smiles as if to disarm the expression of its implicit threat, but it has the opposite effect. It strikes me that for a man concerned with saving time he’s spending an awful lot of it in preamble.

  “You’ve ruled it a suicide, right?” I ask. “You wouldn’t be telling us together if it were still a homicide case.”

  Detective Falco cocks his head to one side in a gesture that makes him look like the bird now, but not the fragile kind that could be killed by a stone, more like the bird his name suggests—a bird of prey.

  “We haven’t ruled out homicide but it does look like it could have been suicide. The lab results indicate that she had a combination of drugs in her bloodstream that together could have killed her and there was very little water in her lungs. It looks like she took an overdose of pills, passed out, and then capsized. Her respiration at that point was so minimal she hardly breathed in any water.”

  “And the drugs in her system?” I ask.

  “They’re consistent with the pills we found in the container in her pocket. Fluvoxamine, an antidepressant sold under the brand name Luvox, and benzodiazepine, a tranquilizer and antianxiety agent sold under the brand name Klonopin.”

  “So could it have been an accidental overdose,” Nathan asks, “since these were drugs she was taking regularly?”

  “You mean, did she feel sort of depressed after her lecture, take twenty to thirty antidepressants and then worry she wasn’t going to be able to sleep on the train ride home so she took fifteen to twenty tranquilizers? And then, after washing all those pills down with a couple of cups of coffee—which we also found in her system—she decides to take a little kayak trip across the Hudson and up the Wicomico?”

  “I was just asking,” Nathan says, sounding a bit peevish. I can’t help but feel sorry for him. First he misses the funeral, then the aunts assume he was Christine’s boyfriend … I look from Nathan to Detective Falco and wonder if that’s why the detective’s being so hard on him. Does he think Nathan was Christine’s lover? Does he think Nathan did something to drive Christine to kill herself?

  “I don’t understand that last part at all,” Nathan continues, straightening his spine and raising his voice, which, unfortunately, just makes him sound shrill. “If she wanted to take an overdose of pills why not do it in the comfort of her own apartment? Why paddle up a stream in the middle of the night?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask Miss McKay here. You knew Christine the best. Any reason she’d stage a suicide like this?”

  “I still don’t—”

  Detective Falco raises his hand. “I know—she was feeling much better these days, she’d gotten her act together and was starting over—but you do admit she’d been suicidal in the past. Let’s just assume, for argument’s sake, that it was a suicide. Why do it like this? Why the boat?”

  “I guess to make a statement,” I say reluctantly. “Back when she and Neil would talk about famous suicides they discussed different methods—how the method made a statement more clearly than any note did. Virginia Woolf stuffing her pockets with stones, Sylvia Plath sticking her head in the oven … By dying in a boat and having her body drift down the stream to be found she could have been imitating the Lady of Shalott. She said in her lecture that the Lady of Shalott was one of those women whose deaths are a recrimination to the men who betrayed them, like Dido throwing herself on the pyre or Madame Butterfly singing her last aria. Even though she’s not a suicide per se the Lady of Shalott seals her fate by looking directly at Lancelot, and then she writes her name on the boat and makes sure it’ll drift down to Camelot so Lancelot can see it … but Christine’s boat didn’t make it down the Wicomico.”

  “Well, she didn’t know it would flip over. I guess hanging upside down in the water wasn’t the picture she was trying to draw.”

  I wince at the image, remembering Christine’s long blond hair waving in the clear creek, the bright yellow of the kayak reflected in the water …

  “Did you look at the kayak?” I ask. “Was there anything written on the boat?”

  “No. If she did write anything it washed off.”

  “But in order for it to make sense … for the whole scene she was setting up to make sense …” Nathan stops and starts again. “You’re saying she was trying to send a mes
sage to someone—a lover who spurned her. But who? As far as I know she wasn’t involved with anyone. Did she mention anyone to you, Juno?”

  “Not exactly, but I had a feeling that she was holding back something from me. She asked me a lot of questions about whether I was seeing anyone …” I notice Detective Falco’s eyebrow raised inquisitively but choose to ignore it. “… and about whether I was ever sorry about …”

  Falco sees my hesitation and nods his head. “Yes?”

  “She wanted to know if I ever regretted my choice to have Bea,” I say, remembering how Christine had blushed when she asked the question and the way the color had made her face appear fuller. It only takes me a moment longer to put the rest together. “That’s what you found in the autopsy,” I say, “and that’s why Christine wouldn’t see her mother when she came up here last month, because she knew Ruth would have guessed.”

  “Guessed what?” Nathan asks, looking from me to Falco.

  “That she was pregnant,” Falco says to Nathan. “She was four months pregnant.”

  “BUT SHE DIDN’T LOOK PREGNANT,” NATHAN SAYS, PULLING A HANDKERCHIEF OUT of his suit jacket pocket and mopping sweat off his forehead. I can’t help but feel sorry for him. Clearly Falco is trying to get him to admit to being the father of the child or at least knowing something about the pregnancy. But why then, I wonder, did he go out of his way to tell him with me here?

  “When was the last time you saw Christine?” Falco asks Nathan.

  “The Friday she left the city. We had lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central and I saw her to her train.”

  “Really? Christine didn’t mention …” the words are out of my mouth before I can help myself. Now I understand why Falco wanted me here—to see if Christine had said anything to me about a relationship with Nathan Bell. Well, it’s worked. I couldn’t be more surprised at the possibility that Nathan might be the father of Christine’s unborn child. It’s not just that he’s probably ten years younger than Christine. I can imagine Christine having an affair with a younger man, but in my imagination the man would look more like, well, Kyle or Neil when Neil was that age. Christine has always gone for the bad boy type—slightly dangerous men in torn jeans and motorcycle jackets, not pale, gawky aesthetes like Nathan Bell.