Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

  Away from the sadly diminished Main Street, the town regains some of its initial charm. Many of the houses still could use a fresh coat of paint, but the yards here are tidier, full of flowers, and the bones of the old houses shine through. I recognize several Dutch Colonials that must have been built when the town was first settled in the early eighteenth century, a stately Greek Revival, and then, farther down the street, several lovely Queen Anne Victorians that represent the town’s last flowering of prosperity in the early nineteen-hundreds. One of the Queen Annes has been stripped of its old paint and is in the process of receiving a new sky blue coat. A ladder leans against a steeply pitched gable above the front porch. There’s an elaborately carved relief within the gable featuring a woman’s face surrounded by swirling acanthus leaves, fruits, and flowers. Sadly, half of the woman’s face has been destroyed by the elements. Her one remaining eye stares at me balefully beneath a sunflower crown. She’s clearly some kind of nature goddess—Persephone or Pomona, perhaps. Coming through the open front door, along with the smells of fresh sawn wood and new paint, are strains of Irish folk music. Someone is renovating the house, maybe a couple from the city.

  I remember that Jude and I used to talk about doing that someday. When we still lived in the city we would spend our weekends driving around upstate, looking at old farmhouses and dilapidated Victorians in forgotten Catskill towns, and dream of buying and renovating one. But when I got pregnant with Sally and Jude took a job on Wall Street, it made more sense to buy a new house in Great Neck, where the schools were good and the commute into Manhattan under an hour. “Someday when Sally graduates high school,” Jude used to say, “and I can work more from home, we’ll buy an old house to fix up in some little town upstate.”

  I pause in front of the Queen Anne, inhaling the scent of freshly sanded wood and new paint. A few late-summer roses still bloom on the fence and heavy viburnum clusters are turning the color of old paper on a tree in front of the porch. Through an arbor gate I spy a deep, shady backyard that slopes down to a stream. I can imagine sitting in that backyard in a lawn chair, watching the sky go from blue to lilac to dark purple as the fireflies come out….

  I pull myself out of that little domestic reverie when I realize I don’t know who would be sitting in the lawn chair next to me. Not Sally, surely. She’d be barricaded upstairs in her room plugged into computer and iPod—or at the school working on her art with Shelley Drake. And then in just under two years she’d be off to college. What would I do with a big old house like this one now? I ask myself as I continue down the street. It’s not even something I can daydream about anymore.

  Two houses away is a small Craftsman bungalow painted butter yellow and covered in late-blooming roses. A sign on the front gate for Dorada Pottery directs visitors to a meandering stone path, around the side of the house, and down a flight of stone steps to a little studio that hangs over the edge of the stream. The front door is propped open by a large glazed urn planted with fragrant herbs. Smaller urns and pots surround it, some containing herbs or flowers, others holding smooth stones or shells. A wind chime hanging beside the open door moves languidly in the light breeze, its music braided into the trill of running water.

  I step inside the small shop. The walls are lined with shelves holding ceramic ware in shades of green and blue, some unadorned, others painted with flowing abstract designs. The shapes are elegant and simple, their curves inviting one to touch them. I move toward a vase with a sinuous shape embedded into the clay under a matte green glaze. Its impossible to tell if the swelling curve is a flower or a woman’s hip or some other shape. I reach for it, but then hesitate, unsure if I should handle the wares in the unattended store.

  “Go ahead,” a voice calls from the back of the shop. “They’re made to be touched.”

  I let my hand fall on the cool, creamy glaze and turn the vase around. The swelling shape turns out to be both woman and flower: a nude figure unfolding from thick petals.

  “That’s Dorada.” A woman in a dark blue linen smock, her long silver hair swept up, steps out of the back room. She’s wiping her hands on a blue-and-white-striped dishtowel, but there are smudges of clay still on her forearms, smock, and even one long gray-green swipe on her cheekbone that makes her eyes glow a deep cobalt blue.

  “Dorada?” I repeat, trailing my finger along the line of the woman’s hip as it slips into the folds of the petal. Is it the name of the woman, I’m wondering? But then I recognize the name. “Oh, Dorada Ware. It’s the name of the line of pottery, not the name of a woman.”

  “Well, it’s both. Actually it’s the name of two women: my aunt Ada and her partner, Dora. Dor-Ada.”

  “You must be Beatrice Rhodes, then,” I say, holding out my hand. “I’m Meg Rosenthal. I teach at Arcadia and I’m writing a paper on the fairy tales of Lily Eberhardt and Vera Beecher. I came across your aunt’s name in a journal and I thought you might be able to answer a few questions.”

  Beatrice Rhodes shakes my hand with a surprisingly firm grip for a septuagenarian. Her skin, though, is soft as velvet. All that time soaking in clay, I suppose.

  “I’m happy to tell you whatever I can, but I came here the year before Ada and Dora stopped teaching at the school, and they didn’t have much to do with Vera Beecher after that. Lily died right about the time I arrived.”

  “Did your aunt and—” I stumble for a moment, unsure of how to identify Dora’s relationship to Beatrice. The old woman smiles.

  “I called them both aunt. They treated me equally as kin. But now that I’ve gotten old as they were, I think of them as Ada and Dora.”

  “Did Ada or Dora ever say why they left Arcadia?”

  “You mean why they left Vera Beecher’s colony, don’t you? As you see, they stayed right here in Arcadia Falls.” She holds her hands up to indicate the little studio full of their pottery, and I realize that she doesn’t just mean that they stayed in Arcadia for the rest of their lives, but that their spirits still reside here. “I still use their molds and their recipes for clay and glaze. Of course, I do my own designs as well, but when I sit down at the wheel I can still feel Aunt Ada’s hands over mine as she taught me how to throw my first pot.” She laughs and a cloud comes over her blue eyes. “It was a disaster, that first pot! A lumpen mess. But Dora said that it had the shape of my hands in it and insisted on firing it anyway. She kept it on her dresser to hold her hairpins to the day that she died.” She ducks her head to pull out a leather-bound album from beneath the counter. “Here, I’ve got pictures of all the designs we’ve made over the years.”

  I politely turn the pages even though my interest is in the women and not the pots they made. They’re lovely to look at, though, long-necked vases that bloom into flowers at the rims, perfectly round bowls whose shapes echo bird’s nests or rounded river stones. I notice that a number of the designs incorporate lilies.

  “Your aunts must have been very fond of Lily Eberhardt,” I say. “Do you think they left the colony because they didn’t want to be reminded of her?”

  Beatrice looks at me, her blue eyes now clear as a flame. “No,” she says. “They left because they blamed Vera Beecher for her death.”

  “I thought Lily was running away with Virgil Nash when she got killed. Shouldn’t they have blamed him?” I ask, remembering that this was the Merling twins’ point of view.

  “They thought that Vera drove Lily away and that if they hadn’t argued she wouldn’t have tried to cross the clove in the middle of a snowstorm. They would have nothing to do with Vera or the colony after Lily died. I heard them talking sometimes about how intolerant and exacting Vera could be—how she ran the colony—and then the school—like a dictator. In the years after they left the school, neither if my aunts was ever asked to speak or teach a class there.”

  “That’s too bad,” I say, closing the album. “In Vera’s notebooks she says that she hoped that the potter’s kiln would be a ‘communal hearth’ for the colony, and Lily spoke fondly
of them in her journal.” I blush remembering what she’d actually written: that the sounds coming from their bedroom sounded like the cooing of doves. It’s not my embarrassment that Beatrice notices, though.

  “Lily’s journal? You’ve read Lily’s journal?” she asks, her eyes wide with amazement.

  “Just the first twenty pages or so. I stopped to read some of Vera’s notebooks—”

  “But where did you get it?”

  I realize that I shouldn’t have mentioned the journal, but it’s too late now. “I found it in the cottage … Fleur-de-Lis. That’s where I’m living….” I stop, noticing how agitated the old woman has become. Two bright pink spots have appeared on her cheeks and her eyes look feverish. She’s twisting the dishtowel in her hands. “Why is that so strange?”

  “Because Lily’s journal disappeared after her death. Ivy St. Clare came here to ask Ada and Dora if they knew anything about what happened to it. I remember it because Dora, who never raised her voice to me once in forty years, screamed at Ivy to ‘get out and never come back.’ The aunts found me later hiding in a closet and Dora told me she was sorry for raising her voice, but that when a person accused someone you loved of stealing, you really had to stick up for her.”

  “So you think Ivy St. Clare accused Ada of stealing Lily’s journal?”

  “She must have. And to think it was in the cottage all along. Right under Ivy’s nose!” A ripping sound draws both our attention to the dish-towel in Beatrice’s hands. She’s torn it clean in half.

  “But she didn’t know about it because it was hidden.”

  “She should have looked more thoroughly before she accused my aunt of stealing.” Beatrice carefully folds the torn dishcloth into a small neat square. Her hands are shaking. “My aunts would have loved to have had a look at that journal. I heard them say once that if they did have Lily’s journal they might know why Lily left that night….” Her voice trails off and an abstracted expression comes over the blue eyes that seemed so sharp a moment ago. Then she shakes herself. “Have you found out anything from the journal about why Lily left?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t gotten to that part. But I promise that I’ll tell you when I do.” I lay my hand over Beatrice’s soft weathered one. It seems little enough to promise an old woman after upsetting her.

  I walk back to Main Street, noticing that the carved relief in the gable of the Queen Anne is gone. Without the placid face of the goddess the house looks strangely forlorn, even though it has acquired a few more yards of sky blue paint. There’s still no sign of the housepainter, making the progress seem as if it had been done by helpful elves. When I enter the Rip van Winkle Diner, though, I find my housepainter. Not an elf at all, but Sheriff Reade in sky blue paint–splattered T-shirt and faded jeans. I hesitate, wondering if I should join him in his booth. He seems happily engaged in a book and it’s not as if we exactly hit it off on the two occasions that we’ve met.

  But when he looks up from his book and sees me, he breaks into a smile so spontaneous that it would seem rude to ignore him.

  “Mind if I join you?” I ask.

  “Not at all,” he says, laying the book facedown.

  I glance at it, but the front cover is ripped and the spine too creased to read the title, so that conversational gambit is out. “You’ve been painting, I see,” I say, opting for the obvious. “You’re working on that Queen Anne on Maple Street?”

  “That’s the one. How’d you know it’s a Queen Anne?”

  “The spindle work, the half-timbering on the front gable, the decorative shingles … and it’s the most common type of Victorian, so it’s a safe guess.”

  He laughs. “Well, you’re right. It was built in 1885 by Eliphalet Nott, who ran the town newspaper back when there was one. Sadly, the Nott family lost all their money in the Great Depression and the house hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint, a window caulked, or floor varnished since then. The roof needs reshingling and there’s water damage in the basement.”

  “But it has great bones,” I say. “Are you planning on living there?”

  “Me? I’d rattle around in there like bones in a casket. It’s an investment property. I’m fixing it up to sell to some likely couple from the city. Since Nine-Eleven there’s been a steady influx of New Yorkers moving up here.”

  “I’m surprised that the town sheriff has the time to do all that work. There must not be a lot of crime in the area—”

  I’m interrupted by the appearance of the waitress, who refills the sheriff’s iced tea without asking and asks me what I’d like. I order a grilled cheese with tomato, iced tea, and a slice of apple pie.

  “Are you Doris?” I ask. “Your cousin Dymphna said to try the apple pie.”

  “She would,” the woman says, shaking her head so that her pink cheeks wobble. “She bakes ’em.”

  “I guess Dymphna’s moonlighting,” I say to Sheriff Reade when Doris leaves.

  “Most of the folks around here do more than the one job,” he says. “It’s not easy to make ends meet, and I doubt the school pays Dymphna what she’s worth. Maybe you teachers do better.”

  “No … I mean, I was glad to get anything, considering I hadn’t worked since college and I don’t have my certification or Ph.D. yet, but the salary is low compared to other schools. I figured it was because Arcadia is relatively new. It hasn’t had the time to acquire a big endowment.”

  “Vera Beecher left the school very well endowed. It’s just that Ivy St. Clare is stingy. Since it’s the biggest employer in the area—practically the only employer—she can get away with paying the locals low wages. Sometimes I think that St. Clare’s taken the medieval theme of the school to heart and believes we’re all her vassals. I’ve had to remind her a number of times that the Arcadia Falls Police Department is not a department of the Arcadia School and that I’m not in her employ.”

  “She must not like you questioning the students, then.”

  “No,” Reade says with a grin. He leans forward and lowers his voice. “She’s pressured me to have Isabel’s death declared an accident, but I’m not convinced that it was. Until I am, I’ll question anyone I think has information, including the students.”

  “Like Chloe, you mean. She was very upset after you questioned her.”

  He groans and shakes his head. “You make it sound like I water-boarded the poor kid—”

  He’s interrupted by Doris Byrnes delivering my order. She gives me a suspicious look, clearly unhappy that I’ve annoyed the local sheriff, and puts my sandwich and pie plates down so hard they clatter on the linoleum surface of the table. When she leaves Reade leans back over the table.

  “I knew Isabel Cheney a little,” he says. “She came into the station last year to interview me for a story she was writing for the school newspaper.” He breaks out in a grin at the memory, transforming his face from severe to handsome in an instant. “I felt like I was being interrogated by the CIA! She was very thorough—and very level-headed. I just don’t see her running willy-nilly into the woods and falling over the edge of a cliff.”

  “You think Chloe Dawson pushed her?” I ask, appalled that a girl who’s spending so much time with my daughter is under police suspicion. “Isabel Cheney was nearly twice Chloe’s size.”

  He swears under his breath and runs his hand through his hair—a habit I notice he has when he’s thinking. It makes his short blond hair stand up like dried pine needles, bristling with electricity. “That wouldn’t mean much if Chloe surprised her. I do know that there’s something she’s not telling me….” He stops and cocks his head at me. “Just like I know that there’s something you’re not telling me right now.”

  “Me?” My voice comes out high and squeaky. The fact is that I have remembered something. “It’s nothing,” I prevaricate. “Just something Chloe said the night of the bonfire. But kids are always saying things like that—”

  “Like what?”

  I sigh. “She was angry that Isabel had told Dean St. Clare
that she’d done all the work on their paper. She said she had a plan to get even with Isabel.”

  “And you didn’t think this was worth telling me when Isabel showed up dead the next day?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I honestly didn’t remember it until now.”

  He makes a disgusted noise and gets up. “Do me a favor,” he says, peeling a few bills out of his wallet and laying them on the table. “The next time you have information about a murder investigation, come and see me right away. Okay?”

  I nod numbly as he walks out of the diner. I had no idea that Isabel’s death was being treated as a murder. I push away the half-eaten apple pie, my appetite spoiled. How can I keep Sally at a school where a girl was murdered? Should I leave? But go where?

  I leave the diner in a haze and start toward my car, but I’m not ready to go back to the campus. Instead I wander into the first store I see—the little New Agey gift shop, Seasons. I’m greeted by the sounds of clattering bamboo, running water, and birdsong, as if I’d stepped into a Buddhist meditation garden. The store is dim after the bright sunny street, the sunlight filtered through colorful madras curtains. When my eyes adjust I realize that the sounds are coming from a recording. There’s no bamboo grove, although there is a bamboo curtain screening an alcove full of crystals, candles, and books. At first I don’t notice the saleswoman behind the counter. The kurta she wears blends in with the wall hanging behind her as do her short, pixie-cut sandy hair and freckled skin. She sits still as a baby deer gone to ground. When I make eye contact, she presses her hands together in front of her chest and inclines her head in my direction, but she still doesn’t speak. I smile and step through the bamboo curtain into a dimly lit alcove lined with books. Celtic Wisdom, I read from one spine; Making Magic with Gaia is another. While my back is turned, I hear the door open and a burst of laughter and loud teenage voices disrupt the bamboo-grove quiet.