I dodge around them when I see Sally. She’s standing in a circle of students—some in Halloween costumes, others in jeans and T-shirts, all underdressed for the brisk air—huddled around an urn of hot apple cider. She looks like she’s freezing. I take off my sweater and offer it to her, but she shakes her head. “I’ll be fine when they stop artfully arranging the logs and light the bonfire.”
“Artfully arranging?”
She nods. “Ms. Drake has been overseeing the construction since we got here. At least it got her unstuck from Chloe’s and my side. She attached herself to us like Velcro after class until we promised we would stay right here.”
“I’m afraid that’s my fault,” I admit. “I asked her to keep an eye on you.”
“Really, Mom? What did you think was going to happen to me here? Did you think I’d fall into the bonfire?”
The irritation in her voice immediately triggers a corresponding emotion and before I can stop myself I snap back. “Do I have to remind you that a student died the last time the school had a bonfire?”
She rolls her eyes at me. “I promise not to jump off a cliff. Okay?” She turns and heads back to the group of students who are now removing the top layer of wood from the bonfire. I consider following her but realize that in my present state of anxiety more talk will just escalate into an argument. I join Callum, who’s lecturing Shelley on fire safety and bonfire construction.
“It looks so much more picturesque the way we had it, Sheriff Reade. But if you insist …”
“I do,” he says. “That is, if you don’t want to burn down the campus. And make sure the students maintain their distance so they don’t light themselves on fire. Especially these kids in their long robes and capes.” He points to a girl wearing a flowing red cape whom I recognize as Rebecca Merling dressed as the Marvel superhero Scarlet Witch. Her brother Peter is in a blue bodysuit emblazoned with a silver lightning bolt and wearing a silver wig that makes him look more like Andy Warhol than a superhero. They’re standing behind a girl in a long white robe that’s been painted with grayish veins to look like marble. When she turns, I’m startled to see that her hair is dusted with white powder, her arms are painted gray, and her face is a deathlike blue.
“Christ, what’s Chloe Dawson got up as?” Callum asks.
“I’m surprised you don’t know, Sheriff Reade, what with your Celtic ancestry,” Shelley answers. I get the feeling she’s glad to have something to lecture him on after his intrusion into her bonfire construction. “That’s the Cailleach Bheur, the blue-faced hag, also known as the Queen of Winter. I was a little surprised when she came to me today and told me that she intended to dress up as this particular version of the Goddess. She asked me to help her draw marble veins on her robes and then she wanted to borrow marble dust from the sculpture room to rub on her arms and dust her hair so that she looked like a statue.”
“Why a statue?” I asked.
“The Cailleach Bheur rules the land through the winter, but at Beltane—or May Day, as you may know it—she turns to stone. Tonight, on Samhain, she’s reborn. Chloe plans to throw her marble robes in the bonfire to symbolize the transformation of the goddess from stone to flesh.”
“It sounds a bit morbid, if you ask me,” Callum says. “But I guess no one’s asking. Did you want to talk?” he asks, catching my eye.
I nod and start to follow him, but Shelley grabs my arm and holds me back.
“Sheriff Reade is right. This idea of Chloe’s to play the blue-faced hag is morbid,” she hisses in my ear. “She clearly blames herself for Isabel’s death. Perhaps if she knew that it was really Dean St. Clare who was responsible she would stop torturing herself.”
“I think we’d better leave that to Sheriff Reade.” I glance over at Chloe, standing motionless and apart from the group, her face an expressionless mask under the blue paint. Maybe I should have a word with her, I think, but when I glance in the direction of Beech Hall I see Callum, who has stopped on the lawn and is waving impatiently for me to join him.
“I’d better go,” I tell Shelley. “When I’m done with Sheriff Reade, I’ll come back and talk to Chloe. Just keep an eye on her, okay?”
“I won’t let her out of my sight,” Shelley assures me, squeezing my arm with a surprisingly firm grip. She turns and strides away, toward Chloe. When I look down at my arm, I see white fingerprints where she’s touched me. It must be the marble dust she used for Chloe’s costume.
I start walking toward Callum, but stop one more time to look back at Chloe. She’s standing on the crest of the hill overlooking the apple orchard. Motionless in the last rays of sunlight she looks eerily like a stone statue, an ancient one at that. I understand why she’s chosen this role. After Jude died, I felt for the longest time as though I had been turned to stone. I imagine Chloe feels much the same. Maybe she thinks that by burning her marble robes in the bonfire, she too will be reborn.
I turn away, brushing marble dust from my arm. I wish Chloe luck, but I could tell her that recovering from her grief and guilt won’t be that simple.
I meet Callum under the beech tree and as we cross the lawn toward the hall, I tell him what I’ve learned from Chloe and from Shelley about Fleur’s letter. He listens attentively, nodding as he holds the door of Beech Hall open for me. As soon as the door closes behind us, he pulls me into the alcove in the foyer and kisses me. He pushes me against the wall and I push back—not to resist him but to press myself harder into his mouth, his skin, his scent. That pine and lemon and musk scent that I seem to have developed an addiction to. For a moment our desire is so perfectly matched that we hover in place like dragonflies with linked wings, and then he pushes a little harder and something hard jams into the small of my back.
“Ouch,” I say, swiveling to remove the obstacle. It’s the bronze statue of Lily standing naked in a pool of water, her long hair crowned by a wreath of flowers and streaming down her back. It’s the water lily statue that Nash promised her on his last day at Arcadia.
“Lily seems to be coming between us,” he says, placing the statue back in its dark niche.
“Maybe she’s brought us together. If I hadn’t gone to the barn that day …”
He strokes my face. I close my eyes, wanting to melt into his arms again, but mentioning the barn reminds me of what I’ve learned. I push him a few inches away and tell him what Chloe told me about the trick she played on Isabel and seeing someone else in the woods. Then I take out Fleur Sheldon’s letter. “See?” I say, pointing at Fleur’s account of the conversation between Vera and Ivy above Lily’s body. “Ivy says she checked to see if Lily was dead, so she and Vera were there when Lily fell in the clove. And yet they left her body there. They must have had something to do with Lily’s death.”
“It’s not much in the way of evidence,” he says, shaking his head. “And Chloe only saw a glimpse of a woman in white. Everyone was dressed in white that night. We have no way of telling if it was Ivy or not. Even if it was her, it doesn’t mean that she pushed Isabel from the ridge.”
“So you’re not going to do anything?” I ask. “That woman might be guilty of murdering a child. How can we let her stay here in charge of all these young girls if that’s possibly true?”
He strokes my arm, trying to calm me down. “I’ll question her about that night again. You should go back to the bonfire. That’s the best thing you can do to keep Sally and the other girls safe.”
As frustrated as I am not to go with him, I have to admit he’s right. “Okay,” I say, “but will you come find me at the bonfire when you’re done?”
He grins and pulls me tight against him. “I’ll find you wherever you are.” He kisses me again—hard and quick—and then leaves before I can think of an excuse to go with him. I watch him disappear down the long shadowy hallway and then turn to go out the front doorway.
As I do, the statue of Lily catches my eye. The bronze gleams where Callum’s hand has rubbed away the dust. I pull a tissue out of my pocket
and rub the statue until it glows. It should be someplace where the light catches it, I think as I return it to the niche. Fleur had said in her letter that Ivy hid the statue in a dark alcove because she was jealous of Lily.
I pick the statue up again.
Fleur had seen Ivy placing the statue in the alcove before Lily’s body was found. But that had to be wrong. Nash had promised the statue to Lily on the last day before he left for his show in the city. She’d been going to the barn so he could give it to her, but she never made it back. The only way Ivy could have been in possession of the statue before Lily’s body was found was if she had taken it from Lily in the clove. Together with the letter, the statue proves that Ivy and Vera met Lily in the clove. If Callum confronts Ivy with the statue, he’ll have a much better case.
I start off down the hall, clutching the statue in my hand. The figure’s hip fits smoothly in my palm, its weight a reassuring heft….
I stop dead in the hall, a picture forming in my head of Lily climbing up through the snow, seeing Vera at the top…. Lily’s holding the statue in her hand. What would Vera think when she saw her holding Nash’s gift? Did they fight over it? Did Vera take it from her? Did she strike her in anger?
I hurry on, hoping I’ll reach Callum before he goes into the dean’s office. I find him standing in front of her door, paused there to collect his thoughts. I’m afraid he’ll be angry when he sees me, but his first response is a smile, which he quickly schools into a frown.
“I told you to wait—”
“I know, but I realized something.” I explain how the statue couldn’t have been in the alcove before Lily’s body was found unless Ivy and Vera were in the clove that day. He takes the statue from me and turns it over, studying the ornately carved wreath on the figure’s head.
“Can DNA survive from blood over sixty years old?” I ask.
Callum smiles and slips the statue into the deep pocket of his coat. “I’m not sure,” he says. “But I’ll tell you one thing: Ivy St. Clare won’t know for sure either. Thank you. This might be just the thing to get her to confess. Now you should get out of here—”
Before he can finish, the door swings open and Ivy St. Clare appears in the entrance.
“Are you two going to stand there gossiping outside my door all night or come in?” she asks.
“I was just going,” I say, but Ivy shakes her head.
“I think you’d better come in, Ms. Rosenthal,” she snaps. “After all, you’re the one who’s been reading Lily’s journal, haven’t you?”
“How did you know I had it?” I ask, following Ivy into the office.
“From the still life you did,” she says, walking to the window seat where her sketchpad lies open. She sits down and looks up at me. “Vera and I looked all over for it after Lily died, but we finally decided that she must have given it to someone for safekeeping. I always suspected it would turn up someday.”
“Do you know what’s in it?” I ask.
Ivy shrugs. The motion makes the hollows above her clavicle bones deepen. She looks, I think, almost skeletal. “I imagine she unburdened herself about her affair with Virgil Nash. She seemed to think that Vera would forgive her if she confessed all, but she was wrong.”
“How do you know that?” Callum asks.
Ivy looks up, pursing her lips. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what else you’ve found. There is something else, isn’t there?”
Callum takes out Fleur Sheldon’s letter and hands it to her. She squints at it and then fumbles for the reading glasses hanging around her neck.
“Ah, Fleur Sheldon. I’d recognize her precious schoolgirl handwriting anywhere. Let’s see what she wrote home to Mummy.” We wait while she reads. Callum looks poised to spring on her if she so much as smudges the letter, but she merely hands it back to him and takes her reading glasses off. “She always was a little snoop,” she says. “And remarkably talentless. I hired her daughter out of pity—”
“It’s clear from this that you and Vera Beecher knew of Lily’s death before her body was found,” Callum says, cutting short what’s bound to be a long list of Shelley Drake’s failings.
Ivy sighs. “I suppose one could deduce that from Fleur’s ramblings, but what of it?” She shrugs and smiles. “Surely even an officer in a backwater like Arcadia Falls knows that doesn’t constitute evidence of a crime.”
Callum smiles and removes the statue from his pocket. “No, but a murder weapon with the victim’s blood on it does.” He brandishes the statue so close to Ivy’s face that she blinks and presses herself back against the window. For the first time since I’ve known her, I see a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes. But she quickly recovers.
“That’s Nash’s statue of Lily. An idealization, if you ask me, and rather amateurish. He sent it back to Vera with his paintings of Lily.”
“No, he didn’t,” I say, pointing at the letter that she’s let fall in her lap. “Fleur says that she saw you putting the statue in the alcove before the package with the paintings arrived. Nash gave it to Lily the night he left Arcadia. That was why Lily went to the barn. She was carrying it when you and Vera found her on the ridge.”
“Was Vera angry when she saw her carrying Nash’s statue?” Callum asks. “Did she grab it from Lily? Is that when Vera struck her?” I’m startled that Callum has imagined the scenario as I have, but when Ivy pales I realize why he’s accused Vera and not Ivy.
“Vera would never have hurt Lily! She worshipped her. Look at her!” Ivy tilts her chin toward the painting behind her desk where Lily, as the Muse of Drawing, stands in her Grecian robes holding a pencil to her lips, her long golden hair flowing around her like a halo. “Lily wasn’t human to Vera. She was an ideal. Vera would never have hurt her.”
“Then we won’t find Lily’s blood on this statue when I send it to the lab in Albany?” Ivy’s eyes flick from the head of the statue back to Callum’s pale eyes. It’s a tiny motion, but Callum sees it and pursues his course. “You realize that you’ll be charged as an accessory. If you tell us what happened now, though, the judge would take your assistance into consideration. After all, Vera’s dead. What difference does it make if the world finds out that she killed her lover sixty years ago?”
“What difference?” Ivy leans forward, the tension in her small, wizened body evident in her clenched fists and the cords standing out on her neck. “Vera’s memory is what holds this place together. It’s what I’ve worked my whole life to preserve. I will not allow you to soil it with some sordid story the two of you have cooked up.”
“Well, this is the story we’ll tell,” Callum says, slipping the statue back in his pocket and plucking Fleur’s letter out of Ivy’s lap. “Let’s go, Ms. Rosenthal. I’ll take you to the station and you can make your statement.” He lays his hand on my arm and steers me toward the door, but before we’ve taken two steps Ivy springs to her feet. “It was me,” she cries. “I killed her. Vera did nothing.”
We turn. I’m grateful for Callum’s hand on my arm because Ivy is terrible to look at. Her lips are stretched tight in a grimace that could be a scream, but I realize with horror is actually a smile. Every tendon in her neck and arms stands out like a road map of the secrets she’s kept hidden all these years. She’s triumphant, I realize, to have this one service left to do for her idol. This must be what Callum counted on. “Tell us,” he says softly.
Ivy sinks back down onto the window seat. She looks out the window toward the lawn where the students stand around the newly lit bonfire. “I heard Nash and Lily agree to meet at the barn in this very room,” she says. “I was here, in the window seat, with the drapes closed. They never knew I was here.”
I think back to what Lily had written in her journal about that last conversation with Nash. “Then you knew that Lily wasn’t planning to go with Nash?”
“Yes, I knew. I was disappointed. I had hoped that she would leave with him. I knew that eventually she would turn Vera against me. I’d never be safe here—a
nd where else could I go? She even had the nerve to make me her go-between. She gave me a note to carry to Vera—”
“But you never gave it to her, did you?”
Ivy smiles. “No, I didn’t. Why should I? I told Vera that I overheard Lily planning her elopement with Nash and that I’d seen her heading toward the barn to meet him. She was standing right where you are now, Ms. Rosenthal. When I told her that, Vera swayed like a tree in the wind and collapsed to the floor. I sat by her and took her hand. I asked if she wanted me to go to the barn to see if I could bring Lily back. I meant to go and tell Lily that Vera didn’t want her, but when Vera realized that she might still be able to catch up to Lily, she rushed from the Hall. She didn’t even stop to take a coat, but ran out into the snow. It was coming down hard by then. I had to run to keep up with her. I was afraid I’d lose her … afraid, too, that if she saw Lily coming back from the barn she’d think she had decided not to run away with Nash. That Vera would forgive her. It was snowing so hard I could barely see the ridgeline above us. I held Vera back, afraid she’d fall over the edge if she went farther. Afraid she might throw herself over. ‘She’s gone,’ she cried. ‘Gone, gone, gone.’ But then Vera gasped and looking up, I saw a shape appear out of the swirling snow, like a ghost appearing out of the fog, like those stories the villagers tell of a white woman rising out of the mist in the clove—” Her voice trembles at the memory, the image still horrible to her after all these years. “It was Lily standing on the edge of the ridge. I was so shocked I forgot to hold on to Vera and she ran toward Lily—only to welcome her back, I think—but Lily must have been startled to see her. She stepped back and fell.”
“Are you sure she fell?” Callum asks.
“Yes. I’m positive. Vera would have thrown herself over into the clove with her if I hadn’t stopped her. We could see her below us. I was sure she was dead, but Vera wanted to go down and check. I told her she was too upset to make the climb. I even told her she was too old! I told her I would go down. I made her sit on a fallen log below the crest of the hill. ‘If I know you’re watching me,’ I told her, ‘you’ll make me nervous.’ I promised that I’d call for her if Lily was still alive.”
Arcadia Falls Page 31
