The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  I try the boathouse door—hoping that the lock’s still broken from the break-in weeks ago—but the door won’t budge. I notice that the fanlight above the door is broken and remember that once when I was in high school Carl and I got in that way, but I’d needed Carl to give me a boost up. I’m not getting in there on my own.

  I start back toward the factory, figuring that I’ll go in the side door, but when I approach the side of the building I can see that there’s a car parked at the end of the alleyway between the station parking lot and the factory. It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks a lot like Gavin’s Jaguar.

  I quickly duck back into the shadows of the park and follow a narrow path that leads up to the train tracks directly behind the factory. There’s a hole in the fence here that I discovered once when Paolo and Francesca took off after a squirrel and squirmed through, nearly giving me a heart attack when I saw them on the tracks. I’m not quite as slim as a greyhound but I suspect the hole was made by the same teenagers who like to break streetlights and I’m betting I’m not too much wider than they are.

  This section of the park is just a narrow strip between the train tracks and the river. I can hear the water moving against the muddy banks as I work my way along the fence, feeling with my feet for the hole. The smell of the river is strong here, the ground beneath my sandals soft and damp. A vine, clammy with the day’s humidity, brushes against my face and I’m reminded of the fat, swollen seaweed that Kyle tried to get me to eat weeks ago. The same dead-fish, low-tide smell fills the air, coating my throat and lungs, a smell that could drown you on dry land.

  I’m tapping my foot against the fence when suddenly it goes through empty space and I trip, landing on both knees in the mud. It would be easy, I think, to sink into this mud and just cry but then I think of Bea and take a deep breath, holding it in while I press my face and chest into the mud and slither through the narrow opening in the chain-link fence.

  I wipe the mud off my hands onto the back of my dress and listen for trains. When I’m sure that all I hear is the river, I cross over to the back of the factory, scanning the area first for any sign of Gavin, but there’s no one. The loading dock is on this side, raised so that the crated glassware and windows could be loaded right onto the train beds. I climb up onto this first and then look up at the brick wall, trying to imagine where Neil found the handholds to scale the sheer surface.

  After a few minutes of staring at the blank wall I realize how foolish I’d been to think that just because Neil found a way up to the roof I could, too. Especially in the dark. I’ll have to chance going around to the front.

  First, though, I sit down, my back to the loading platform wall and try to gather my strength. I look out through the trees toward the river, but it’s so dark that I can’t tell the water from the hills or the hills from the sky. Then, as I watch, a thin band of silver appears on the water, travels across the river and touches the opposite shore at just the spot where there’s a break between the hills. The moonlight seems to cleave the hills in two and light up a winding stream between them just as the stream in the Lady window appears when the light shines through the glass.

  I look back at the brick wall. Now that the moon has risen above the factory I can make out the pattern in the brick: a simple chevron motif created by a pattern of slightly protruding bricks. Leave it to Penrose never to leave well enough alone. Even the back wall of his factory had to have a decorative touch. Fortunately for me, it makes a perfect ladder. I climb it quickly, without giving myself time to think about the drop or the likelihood of crumbling brick, and pull myself over the railing onto my rooftop garden. The French doors are locked, but I put my hand carefully through the panel that Neil broke last night and open the door.

  The loft is perfectly quiet. Too quiet I realize. There’s no sign of the dogs. I’m trying to remember if I could have possibly left them out in the courtyard—surely not in this heat—when a shaft of moonlight comes through the skylight, brightening the room and glancing off the face of the man sitting at my kitchen counter.

  “NEIL! MY GOD, YOU SCARED ME HALF TO DEATH. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

  “We had a date, which I guess you’ve forgotten. I thought I’d surprise you by cooking dinner.” He strikes a match to light one of my long, tapered candles and I see that the table is set for two. “Instead you surprise me by coming in through the roof.” He looks at me and I can see his eyes widen as he takes in the mud on my dress.

  “Where are the dogs?” I ask, crossing the room to the sink to wash my hands.

  “I let them out in the courtyard. I figured they’d let me know when you came home. Juno, tell me what’s happened. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  Instead of answering I splash water on my face and then, leaning over the sink, I lift my hair up and pour water down the back of my neck. I’d like to hold my head under the tap and run the cold water until the low-tide smell of the river is gone, but then Neil lays his hands on my shoulders and starts kneading the tensed muscles. I turn around so quickly his hands fly off my back like leaves whipped by a sudden wind.

  “I know,” I tell him, “about you and Christine. That you saw her all those times and you were sleeping with her. The baby was yours.”

  Neil bows his head—a quick duck that is almost like a man nodding off—and shuts his eyes.

  “How did you think I wouldn’t find out once the DNA test was done?”

  “Slept with,” he says, “I wasn’t sleeping with her, I slept with her once. She told me that she was seeing someone else so I thought the baby was probably his.”

  “So you thought you might get away with lying to me. You still think you can lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying, Juno. It only happened that once. It’s true we did see each other a lot back in March.”

  “But I thought Dr. Horace didn’t give you her number until May?”

  “He didn’t, but I’d gotten in touch with her before that. I wanted to find out about you and Bea so she came up to The Beeches—and then she told me she was writing about the window and we started talking about Clare Barovier’s paintings and the drug trial—”

  “The drug trial?”

  “Yeah. At first I thought she was asking because she wanted to know if I was really cured and whether I was going to stay cured or not. I got the idea she was … you know … interested in me. I knew she kind of liked me back in college.”

  Neil looks so bashful saying this that I nearly soften toward him, but then remind myself of what happened next.

  “So you were happy to reciprocate? I guess it’s flattering to have an old flame come calling.”

  “Juno, I’d been in a mental hospital for fourteen years. It was flattering to have anyone come calling. Being with Christine reminded me of you—”

  “Oh please, don’t give me that crap. Like sleeping with my best friend was the next best thing to sleeping with me. That’s not fair to me and it’s not even fair to Christine.”

  Neil nods—again with that heavy dip of the head that looks as if he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open. In the candlelight the dark circles under his eyes look cavernous. A man haunted. “No, it wasn’t fair to her and I told her so right away—well, the next time I saw her anyway. I told her I didn’t think we should see each other anymore because I still loved you and I still believed that you might love me again someday if I was really better. I had this silly idea that you couldn’t be so beloved and be absolved from returning that love—”

  “Wait, you said it just like that? In those exact words?”

  Neil laughs. “What difference—?”

  “Just tell me. What did you say to her exactly?”

  “Well, it’s embarrassing, but I quoted that line we liked so much in Dante class—what Francesca says: ‘Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving.’ I know it sounds stupid, but it always gave me hope.”

  “And what did she say?” My voice comes out hoarsely, barely a whisper.

&n
bsp; “She said she thought I was right, that you and I had been meant to be together from that first day we met at the Cloisters and that was what she’d always been jealous of—finding someone you were meant to spend your whole life with—because it had never happened to her. I think she realized then that it wasn’t me she wanted but us. She wanted what the two of us had. She insisted that we could go on being friends without any physical relationship between us. She even said she’d try to find out the next time she saw you if you still felt anything for me. I guess she didn’t have time.”

  “No, she did in a way. She asked me if I believed that line from Dante.”

  “And what was your answer?” Neil asks, lifting his hand to push away a strand of damp hair clinging to my neck.

  “I told her I couldn’t answer a question like that so quickly. I said I needed time to figure that one out.”

  “And did you?”

  I remember full well the answer that came to me as her train pulled out of the station, but before I can tell Neil a low moaning wail cleaves the air around us. Even when I realize that it’s one of the dogs I’m still chilled by the sound.

  “Expecting anyone?” He says it with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. In fact, his eyes, I notice now, have that same glazed look they used to get when he stopped sleeping. I recognize, too, the look of suspicion from his manic stages. He thinks it’s Falco who’s in the courtyard. I wish he were right.

  “I saw Gavin Penrose at the train station and I had an idea he might be waiting for me. I wanted to avoid him, but I didn’t think he’d break into the factory. I don’t know who else it could be though. Ernesto and my father are the only ones with keys and they’re all the way up on Lake Champlain.” I reach past him to the phone. “I think I’d better call the police.”

  “It’s dead,” he says as I lift up the handset. “I tried it while I was waiting for you.”

  I depress the on/off button, remembering that the line had gone down during the storm last night. I had assumed, though, that it would have been fixed by now, but Neil’s right. The phone’s dead.

  “What would Gavin want with you?” Neil asks, following me over to the top of the spiral staircase.

  “I went to Regula’s gallery today and saw one of Penrose’s paintings that I think Gavin is selling illegally—” I’m trying to find a way to see the door to the courtyard from the top of the stairs, but I can see only as far as the light table, where the partially assembled Lady window lies in shadow. Neil’s so close behind me that I can feel his breath on the back of my neck as I lean over the iron railing.

  “The Drowning Tree?” Neil asks. “Was that the painting?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Christine asked if I’d seen it at Briarwood. She said it was missing from the college. You think Gavin would have killed her because she found out he had stolen it from the college?”

  “I don’t know, maybe she just asked too many questions about the painting and Gavin thought she was threatening him, while all she was trying to do was find out what happened among Augustus, Eugenie, and Clare a hundred years ago. There’s a figure in the water in the painting and I saw a statue in the pool where Christine was drowned—”

  “Under the weeping beech? Christine told me she read something in Eugenie’s notebook about a statue in the sunken gardens at Astolat. She thought it was a re-creation of the scene from The Drowning Tree and she wanted to know if I’d ever seen it on the sketching trips I took with Dr. Horace, but we never went up the Wicomico to Astolat.”

  As if summoned into being by his mention of the stream, a bar of light lengthens over the the table, traveling up the rippled surface of the glass stream in the window. I take a step back and lose my balance when I bump into Neil. I nearly topple down the stairs but his hand catches in my hair and pulls me back. Something hard and cold grazes my shoulder and I see he’s holding one of my large carving knives. In the darkness I can see his eyes glittering. He’s ready to take on whoever’s down there.

  “Come on,” I hiss, untwining his hand from my hair and pulling him toward the side door. Neil hesitates for a moment and then we both hear a sound like sandpaper as whoever is down below walks across a floor gritty with glass particles. It’s a sound to set your teeth on edge and it seems to release Neil from his stasis, propelling him across the room and out the side door. On the landing outside he stops for a moment and slides the knife into his back pocket. Then he grabs my hand and pulls me down the stairs so quickly that the old rusted-out metal frame shakes and groans with our weight. When we hit the ground I start for the street, but Neil pushes me back against the wall and points toward the street.

  The green Jaguar is still there. The windows are tinted, though, so I can’t see if anyone’s inside.

  “That’s Gavin’s car,” I whisper.

  Neil nods and looks behind him toward the riverfront park.

  “We’ll be trapped if we go that way,” I tell him. “No one’s at the boathouse.”

  “Can we get into the boathouse?”

  “It’s locked, but I think you could get in through the fanlight if you could get up to it.”

  Of course any mention of a difficult height to scale only serves to inflame Neil’s ardor to scale it. He sets off running toward the park and it’s all I can do to keep up with him. It’s not until we’re at the boathouse that I can afford the breath to remonstrate with him.

  “Neil, this is crazy. There are half a dozen better ways to get away from Gavin than taking to the water.”

  “But how many ways to prove he killed Christine? You think Christine went with him to find the statue under the beech tree, so if we find it we’ll know why he was willing to kill her.”

  “But why do we have to do it tonight?” I ask. “Why not wait until the morning?”

  “Because if Gavin gets there first he might destroy the statue.”

  I try to argue with him again, but he’s already scrambling up the doorway and hoisting himself through the broken fanlight. I’m waiting to hear a crash as he hits the floor on the other side but instead there’s only the click of the door unlocking. I push it open into empty space; Neil has already vanished into the shadows of the stacked kayaks.

  There’s an old metal desk a few feet from the doorway. I slide open the top drawer and feel around for the flashlight I know Kyle keeps there. When I switch it on I see the white underbelly of a canoe floating toward me.

  “This one looks big enough for the two of us,” Neil says, his voice echoing in the hollow hull.

  “It’s Kyle’s two-man outrigger canoe,” I tell him. “He brought it here from Hawaii.” It’s also named Kingfisher and it’s Kyle’s favorite boat, but I don’t mention any of that to Neil; I’m too horrified at the thought of taking to the water in any boat with him. He’s moving forward so quickly, though, that all I can do is follow—grabbing two life vests just in case I can’t talk him out of it.

  When was I ever able to talk Neil out of anything? I wonder, trailing him down to the sandy beach.

  He’s already got the canoe flipped over with the prow facing out into the river. He reaches for the life vest in my hand, but I hold it back.

  “I can’t, Neil. I can’t get in that boat.”

  Neil’s eyes meet mine—they have a glassy shine in the moonlight—and he nods. “I can understand,” he says, “but unless you’re more afraid of me than Gavin Penrose, you don’t have any other choice.”

  I turn to look over my shoulder and see a figure approaching from the factory—the vague silhouette of a man who may or may not be Gavin Penrose. Who else could it be, though?

  I turn back and look at Neil, his eyes holding mine. Although they still have that glassy shine I can see how much he loves me. “Okay,” I say, handing Neil his life jacket. I slip mine on and stuff the flashlight into a zippered pocket. Neil pushes the boat into the water and waves for me to climb in. He couldn’t look at me with so much love and still hurt me, I think as I wade
into the river. But as the cold water washes over my ankles I remember that he’d looked at me much the same way the last time we were on the water—just before he’d tried to drown us both.

  I’M GLAD AT LEAST THAT WE’RE IN THE OUTRIGGER CANOE BECAUSE I KNOW IT’S LESS likely to tip. The only problem with the Kingfisher, though, is that it’s white, making us a visible target from the shore. I risk a look back, but the motion sets the boat rocking and I quickly face forward again.

  “Anyone following us?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “Good. He might try to drive across the bridge and onto the estate, but it’s a good forty-minute trip that way. If we paddle fast we should be able to get across the river in ten minutes. How far upstream was the beech tree?”

  “Not far.”

  Neil picks up the pace and I have to concentrate to keep up. I lock my eyes on the blade of his paddle as it dips into the water and try to imitate the exact motion. I’m surprised at how good he is at this and then I remember that he’s had practice on those trips with Dr. Horace. He rotates his body just right to get the farthest reach on each stroke, burying the paddle blade deep into the water and pulling us smoothly across the river. Although I struggle to keep up with him I feel as if he’s doing most of the work and that my stroke is only a faint echo of his—like I’m a bird soaring in his tailwind, moving easily in a current he’s cleared for me. I relax a little and let the rhythmic push and pull of paddling calm my nerves.

  Just put the water behind you, Kyle always tells his beginning kayakers, and I do. I feel the river sweeping under my paddle and out to the sea. I even take a moment to notice how beautiful it is to be out on the river in the moonlight, the path we’re following lit up by white ripples on the water. It seems like no time at all before we’ve reached the other shore. Neil lifts up his paddle and holds it parallel to the water, letting us drift with the current while we scan the shore for the mouth of the Wicomico. “Have you got that flashlight?” he asks.