Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

  Ms. Drake sighs and shakes her head, but when the librarian turns to retrieve the forms she looks up at me and crosses her eyes. I try to swallow the laugh that bubbles up and end up coughing instead.

  “It’s all the dust from all the old books,” Ms. Drake says, slapping me heartily on the back. “I’m Sheldon Drake, by the way, but everybody calls me Shelley … well, except for Miss Bridewell here. Birdy, why is it that I call you Birdy, but you never call me Shelley?”

  “I’ve no idea, Miss Drake. Perhaps for the same reason that you are always the last one to turn in your reserve list. It’s our natures.”

  “Hm … you mean I have slovenly habits, I suppose. Or derangement due to inhalation of toxic paint fumes.” Shelley holds up her hands and wriggles multicolored fingers. They’re spotted with paint and smell like turpentine. “Or perhaps it’s due to the artistic temperament’s tendency toward left-brainedness … or is it right-brainedness? I lean to whatever side it is that can’t remember the difference between them.”

  “It’s no excuse,” Miss Bridewell says, handing each of us a stack of forms. “Shall I show you how to fill it in?” she asks me.

  “I’ll show her,” Shelley volunteers. “I think even I have mastered the intricacies of the reserve list form by now.”

  The librarian looks dubious, but Shelley Drake grasps me by the elbow and steers me into a small alcove off the entranceway. She upends a bag of books on the table and sits down, gesturing for me to do the same, which I do while formally introducing myself.

  “The new English teacher! My drawing class was all in a twitter over you. I saw that you attended the bonfire with Sheriff Reade last night…. Oh, and you must be Sally’s mother! She’s in my Intro Drawing class. She’s got a great eye. She really should be encouraged.”

  “I’ve always encouraged her—” I begin.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest you hadn’t. It’s just that I get the sense from her work that she’s holding herself back—as if she’s afraid of what might come out if she really let herself go. Just a first impression, of course, but I’d like to challenge her a bit this semester, if you don’t mind—oh, here, make sure you alphabetize your list for each class. Birdy’s a real bear for alphabetizing. Have you got the call numbers? She’ll send it back, in triplicate, if you don’t. You can look them up on the computer catalog. I write them down on my own copies of the books so I don’t forget.”

  For someone who claims to be disorganized, Shelley Drake is quite efficient. She fills out her forms in about three minutes and then helps me with mine, all the while keeping up a nonstop patter about the land mines of bureaucracy to avoid at the Arcadia School. She talks so relentlessly that I don’t have a chance to ask her how, exactly, she plans to challenge Sally. When she’s finished both our forms she stands up and gives my outfit a skeptical stare.

  “That won’t do for tea, you know.” She looks at her watch. “Do you have time to go home and change?

  I look at my watch—Jude’s watch, which I haven’t been able to take off and which is still set on Japanese time. When I subtract an hour, I see it’s 3:45. “I’d better run. I have to bring this box back to my cottage….” I look down at the table. My canvas book bag is there, and the stack of color-coded reserve forms, but no purple hatbox.

  “What’s wrong?” Shelley asks, her freckled face creased with worry.

  “I’ve lost Vera Beecher’s journals.”

  “Close your eyes,” Shelley Drake orders me.

  “What?”

  “Just do what I say. Close your eyes.”

  I’m not sure why, but I obey her. For all her daffiness, Shelley exudes a certain authority.

  “Good. Now, picture the hatbox. Do you see it?”

  In my mind’s eye I see the round purple hat-box embossed with faded gold lettering. I even remember the name of the milliner: Violet du Lac. “I do,” I tell her.

  “Good. Where is it?”

  In my mind’s eye I look up from the box and into the painted blue eyes of Lily Eberhardt, her face striped with light.

  “In the studio at Briar Lodge where I taught my senior seminar with Rebecca and Peter Merling. Damn, I must have left it there.” I open my eyes and am startled to find another pair of blue eyes staring at me—not Lily Eberhardt’s, but Shelley Drake’s. “I don’t remember taking it with me, but then I was feeling a little dizzy.”

  “The Merling twins have that effect on people. The good thing is that hardly anyone ever goes to Briar Lodge. Your box is probably still there. Come on.”

  “You don’t have to come with me—” I begin as Shelley grabs both stacks of forms, hers and mine, and sweeps back into the library’s entrance hall.

  “I know a shortcut,” she says, tapping the edges of the forms on the desk in front of the librarian. She’s deftly plucked the pink sheets from each form before the librarian can get ahold of them, but not before she can complain.

  “But I need to stamp those—”

  “Don’t worry,” Shelley calls back as she pulls me out of the library. “I’ve got a copy of your stamp in my studio.”

  We leave the astonished Miss Bridewell sputtering behind her desk and burst out into the late-afternoon sunshine, Shelley collapsing against my shoulder in a fit of laughter. “Oh, dear,” she says, nudging me off the path that goes down to the campus and through a gap in a bordering hedge. “I’ll pay for that later, but it was worth it to see the expression on her face.”

  “Do you really have a copy of her stamp?”

  “Absolutely. I carve them out of rubber. You wouldn’t believe the time it saves…. This way now …”

  She directs me by leaning against my arm and pushing me through the shrubbery. At first, though, I think she must have gotten the wrong path. We’re blundering through a dense thicket of thorny bushes that scrape my arms as I follow her.

  “Sorry,” Shelley says, holding a thorny branch out of my way, “I haven’t used this trail in a while and it’s grown up a bit since. We’ve had a lot of rain…. oh, look, blackberries! They’re almost ripe…. Ah, here we are. The rest of the way’s a bit clearer.”

  We emerge from the blackberry thicket onto a narrow footpath that follows the same ridge I was on last night. The campus lies to the east in a gentle declivity. Far below the steeper western ridge is the village of Arcadia Falls, separated from the school by a deep cleft in the mountain, which the Dutch called a clove. Witte Clove, I remember Callum Reade called it last night. As we approach it, I hear the roar of the cataract that gives the village its name: Arcadia Falls. We’re suddenly at the head of the falls, looking down into a dark, shadowed gash in the ridge filled with large boulders and cascading water. It makes me feel dizzy again just to look at it.

  Shelley points toward an old weathered barn that’s listing to one side in an overgrown field beyond the clove.

  “That’s the barn Nash used for those late paintings of Lily Eberhardt,” she says. “She was on the way there to meet him the night she died. Her body was found down in the clove. I’ve always wondered why she tried to get across it in the middle of a snowstorm.” Shelley shakes her head and then turns away from the view of the barn, taking a path that leads down to Briar Lodge.

  I stay for a moment looking down into the deep clove that lies between the ridge and the barn. It looks only slightly less sinister in the daylight than it did in last night’s moonlight. There’s a ledge about twenty feet below the ridge where the water pools, and then a steeper second cascade that plummets another hundred feet. There’s a path that winds down to the left of the falls that looks like it would be a challenge to a mountain goat. If you lost your footing, you could fall and break your neck on one of those protruding rocks. How much more dangerous would it be navigating it at night? And in a snowstorm? Shelley’s right; it didn’t make any sense for Lily to try crossing the clove that night—unless she’d been so frightened of Vera’s anger when she told her that she was leaving with Nash that she was afraid of s
pending the night with her in the cottage.

  I turn away from the clove and follow Shelley, keeping my eyes on her white smock as she makes her way through a dense stand of pine trees that cover the eastern slope of the ridge. Sunlight pours through the trees, catching a drift of pine needles falling through the air. For a dizzying moment the summer scene evaporates and I see a winter night and a lone figure making her way down the hill through the snow. But then I dismiss the image from my mind. For one thing, according to the story, Lily never made her way back down this hill from the barn.

  The hatbox is right where I left it on the table in the parlor. “Oh, thank God,” I say, pouncing on the box. “I can’t believe I was so stupid. Dean St. Clare would have had my head.”

  “She does take the legacy of Vera Beecher quite seriously.” Shelley stands with her back to me, staring up at the paintings of Lily Eberhardt while I open the box to check that the letters and journals are still there. Since I didn’t open it earlier I have no way of knowing if anything is gone, but the box is full to the brim with letters and clothbound journals. It certainly doesn’t look as if anything’s missing. Lying on top of everything is a photograph of three women standing beneath a blossoming apple tree, their arms wrapped around one another’s waists. I recognize the slim blonde on the left as Lily, but I don’t know the other two. I start to turn it over to see if their names are written on the back but am arrested by Shelley’s next statement. “Sometimes I think that’s all this school is to her: a reliquary to preserve the rotting corpse of Saint Vera.”

  I close the box, startled by the harshness of the sentiment. But when Shelley turns around she’s smiling. “But you’ve found the box, so you don’t have anything to worry about … except, of course, getting to tea on time. We’ve got twenty minutes, which is what it’ll take me to scrub the paint off my hands. I’ll see you there.”

  She disappears before I can thank her for helping me find the hatbox. What a strange person, I think as I hurry back to my cottage. I can’t quite decide how much her “disorganized artist” persona is an act and whether I like her. But I’m sure of one thing: I’d never meet anyone like her in Great Neck.

  I manage to make it back to the cottage by taking the ridge trail the rest of the way. I stow the hatbox in my bedroom closet, change into Sally’s dress—which fits perfectly—and make it to Beech Hall by 4:30 on the dot. So what if I’m panting and sweating underneath the thin cotton lawn dress? Tea is held in the Rose Parlor, which gets its name from the faded pink upholstery, the roses on the wallpaper, and vaguely roselike designs etched into the glass French doors.

  The teachers themselves are arrayed in tight bouquets around the room. I approach a group of women who are all wearing nearly identical A-line dresses in tastefully muted colors, upswept hair, and pearls. “I teach twentieth century art,” a woman who introduces herself as Miss (not Ms.) Pernault tells me. After polite introductions to a math and biology teacher, I forget their names almost as quickly as I hear them. They return to the conversation they were having when I intruded: a bitter comparison of Arcadia salaries to those at other private schools.

  I drift over to a contingent of more brightly dressed people, younger and of mixed gender—I can’t help noting that the faculty body is clearly dominated by women—and find that they are the fine arts and English teachers. They’re complaining about budget cuts. I’m beginning to suspect why it was relatively easy to get this job. The Arcadia School is apparently the cheapskate of the Northeast.

  After a few minutes of listening to one woman bemoaning the high price of gouache, I detatch myself and approach the only person standing by himself: a tall, gangly thirtyish man standing near the entrance to the room. He looks like he dressed as hurriedly as me. I can see the comb marks in his damp hair and a piece of tissue is clinging to a shaving cut on his neck.

  “I’m Meg Rosenthal,” I offer, holding out my hand.

  “Colton Briggs, math department,” he says, switching his teacup to his left hand to grasp my hand with his long damp fingers.

  “I’m teaching English,” I say, pretending he actually asked.

  “I see,” he says, and then stands there looking at a spot two inches above my left shoulder.

  “How did you decide to be a math teacher?” I ask, reverting to strategies I learned from teen magazines. Ask the boy what he’s interested in.

  “I’m just teaching here while I finish my Ph.D. in economics,” he whispers, leaning closer to me. Then he leans back and glances nervously side to side as if he’s just revealed his true superhero identity.

  “Oh,” I say, smiling encouragingly. “What area of economics do you specialize in?”

  “Randomness and improbability,” he answers.

  “Oh, like the Black Swan theory. My husband, who died last year, was a hedge fund manager. He loved to talk about the Black Swans—”

  “Well, no,” Colton Briggs says without even the usual sympathetic murmur I get when I parade my recent widowhood. “My work does not primarily concern the Black Swan concept; it focuses more on Burton Malkiel’s ‘random walk’ theory….”

  He proceeds to deliver a lecture on the economist’s discovery that a stock chart and the steps a drunken Frenchman took in crossing a deserted snowy field at night traced similar patterns without pausing to ascertain my interest level or comprehension. When he’s done I half expect him to give me a quiz. Before he can, I excuse myself to get a cup of tea.

  “Arcadia blend or herbal?” the girl behind the middle urn asks when it’s my turn.

  “What’s Arcadia blend?”

  “Something Vera Beecher made up. I think it’s half darjeeling, half assam, and some kind of spice. It’s pretty good.”

  In the spirit of fitting in, I agree to give it a try. I recognize the tea I had yesterday in the dean’s office and which Sheriff Reade had in his thermos. I still can’t identify the spice, but it’s certainly growing on me. I wander over to the French doors and pretend to be fascinated with the view. After being lectured by Colton Briggs I’m not quite ready to reengage with anyone. It occurs to me that this is one of the few social occasions I’ve been to in sixteen years that doesn’t revolve around either Sally’s education or Jude’s business. Perhaps I’ve lost the knack of being myself.

  I scan the room for Shelley Drake, but she’s missing from the scene. I feel a twinge of guilt that I might be the reason she’s late.

  I turn back to the French doors, wondering if anyone would notice if I slipped out, and immediately catch sight of Shelley on the lawn in front of the copper beech. The bright halo of kinky gray hair would be hard to miss even if she weren’t flailing her arms in the air. She’s talking to two students whom I also recognize: Chloe Dawson and Clyde Bollinger. Chloe looks like she’s crying, while Clyde, his hands in his pockets and head bowed down, seems to be trying to make himself small. What, I wonder, could the two of them have done to make Shelley Drake so angry? She hadn’t struck me as a particularly strict teacher.

  “Someone must have tampered with Shelley’s art supplies.”

  I turn and find a short man who, despite the heat, is wearing a three-piece velveteen suit. Even if the suit weren’t bottle green, his pointy ears and sharp cheekbones would make him look like an elf.

  “I met her earlier and she seemed so … easygoing.”

  “Ha!” The barking laugh is much louder than anything I would expect to come out of such a diminutive person. “Shelley’s got the whole free-spirited artiste thing down to a tee, but unfortunately she’s also inherited the curse of the Sheldons—what they called nerves when her great-great-aunt Honoria took the rest cure with S. Weir Mitchell, and manic depression when her mother took poetry classes with Anne Sexton at McLean, and what we call bipolar disorder now.” Moving closer, he stands on tiptoe to whisper in my ear. “Dean St. Clare made her agree to having her meds monitored by the infirmary before letting her back this year.” Although I’m half-repulsed by this man, I find myself le
aning in when he whispers again. “Not that she’s the only one.”

  I should, I realize, feign disinterest and get away from this malicious gossip, but instead I raise an eyebrow and ask, “No?”

  The little man grins and sidles next to me so he can indicate whom he’s talking about. “You see the rumpled tweedy fellow talking to St. Clare? That’s Malcolm Keith.”

  “That’s Malcolm Keith? Didn’t he publish that famous story in The New Yorker back in the early eighties that everyone thought was brilliant?”

  “Yep. He got a six-figure contract from Knopf on the strength of one story and then never wrote another word. He’s on Antabuse to keep him from drinking. He’s also got to report to the infirmary to make sure he’s taking his medicine.”

  “Gosh, I feel a little left out. The party’s obviously at the infirmary. I guess I could sign up for B12 shots. I have been a little anemic.”

  “That’s the spirit,” my new friend says, clapping me on the back. “I go for bee allergy shots once a week, more to see the mental health parade than to protect against anaphylactic shock. I’m Toby Potter, by the way. I teach art history—eighteenth-century painting’s my area: Boucher, Fragonard, great fluffy nudes and girls in pink dresses, that sort of thing.”

  “Meg Rosenthal. I’m interested in fairy tales in nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature….” I stumble a bit, unused to identifying my academic interests as my area of expertise rather than some eccentric pursuit to keep a bored Great Neck housewife entertained, but Toby Potter beams, turning his ugly face almost beautiful.

  “Marvelous! You’ll find nineteenth-century children’s literature good preparation for this place: it’s mad hatters and goblins all around. Oh, speak of the devil, there’s Shelley now, collaring the dean. I hope she’s not going to make a fuss.”

  But Shelley Drake seems to be doing exactly that. She looks like a wild woman—Cassandra on the walls of Troy warning her countrymen to lock the gates against that monstrous wooden horse. Her crinkly silver hair is floating around her face like an electric cloud; two feverish spots stain her cheeks. She’s practically giving off sparks. She goes straight to the dean and interrupts her in the middle of a conversation with Colton Briggs. At first Dean St. Clare looks annoyed, but then Shelley whispers something in her ear and the dean’s expression changes abruptly. They both rush from the room, leaving Colton Briggs standing by himself, awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot. He lifts his teacup to his lips, but, apparently realizing it’s empty, spins on his heel and heads back to the urns.