Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

  “And was she?” Callum asks.

  Ivy doesn’t answer right away. She looks out at the lawn toward the bonfire that is now burning in full force. She cranks open the narrow casement on the left side and the room is suddenly full of the sound of young voices raised in song. The sound seems to help her come to a decision. “Yes,” she says, her back to us. “She was alive. She opened her eyes when I knelt down beside her and she said my name. I saw the statue where it had fallen beside her.”

  I cover my mouth to keep from crying out. I can picture the moment all too well. Lily lying hurt in the snow, looking up to see her own daughter, thinking she had come to help her.

  “I raised it and struck her.” She turns away from the window. Her right fist is clenched as if she is holding the statue she had used to kill Lily.

  “But why?” I ask, unable to stay quiet anymore.

  “I did it for Vera. So she would be free of her at last.”

  “But you didn’t tell Vera that,” Callum says, his voice cold. “You let her think that Lily had died from the fall. You let her think that her lover had died running away from her.”

  “I didn’t think that through at the time,” Ivy says. For the first time since she began her story, she looks ashamed.

  But Callum doesn’t let the point go. “You soon found a use for Vera’s guilt, didn’t you? You were the only one who knew her secret. She thought you were protecting her, but you were controlling her.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Ivy turns away again and startles at something she sees through the window. Silhouetted against the orange glow of the bonfire are two figures walking briskly across the lawn toward Beech Hall. I recognize Chloe from her flowing robes and Shelley Drake from her mane of kinky hair lit red by the firelight. She’s trying to catch up to Chloe.

  “Whatever can be wrong with that girl?” Ivy says. “She’s been a wreck since Isabel Cheney’s death.”

  “You mean since her murder,” Callum says, getting to his feet. He moves between the Dean and the door, blocking her exit.

  Ivy frowns, creasing her face into a cluster of wrinkles. “Murder? But Isabel fell from the ridge.”

  “Isabel had Lily’s journal,” I say. “You knew that as soon as you read her paper.”

  “Her paper? Once I knew that Chloe and Isabel hadn’t collaborated as they were supposed to, I didn’t bother reading it. What was the point?”

  Callum glances at me and I shrug. I can’t tell if Ivy’s telling the truth or not.

  “So you weren’t in the woods that night?” he asks.

  She looks like she’s about to deny it, but then she sighs. “Yes, I went to the ridge for a little while. I often go there.”

  “The scene of the crime,” Callum says.

  Ivy smiles. “No, young man, that’s not it at all.” She turns to me. “Do you remember what I told you the night they brought Isabel’s body up from the ravine? That Vera believed Lily’s spirit haunted the ridge?”

  “Yes, I remember,” I answer. “But then why would you go there when it was you who killed her? I would think it would be the last place you’d want to be.”

  “I go there because I think that if there is such a thing as spirits and if Lily’s spirit is in those woods, then that’s where Vera’s spirit is, too. That’s why I was in those woods on the night of the bonfire, to be close to Vera, not to hurt that silly girl. Really, what kind of monster do you think I am?”

  “The kind that would kill her own mother!” The words come from the doorway where Chloe Dawson stands robed in sepulchral gray, one arm held straight out, only the tip of her pointed finger showing under the belled sleeve of her robe. In her blue face paint, she looks like an avenging fury. Ivy utters a strangled cry and takes a step back, but then she recovers herself.

  “What nonsense! I didn’t have a mother. I’m an orphan,” Ivy cries. I look angrily at Shelley, who’s come in behind Chloe.

  “I didn’t mean to tell Chloe,” Shelley says, “but she was asking so many questions that it just came out.”

  “That’s why you killed Isabel,” Chloe says, taking another step toward the dean. Callum grabs her arm to keep her from getting any closer. “She read in Lily’s journal that Lily was your mother, and you couldn’t bear for anyone to know that you had killed your own mother.”

  Ivy drags her eyes away from Chloe and toward me. Her face, framed against the black window, is white with shock, her black eyes bottomless pits of dark. “Is that what Lily wrote in her journal?” she asks.

  I look to Callum for help, but he’s busy with Shelley, who’s tugging at his sleeve. I look back at Ivy. What can I do? It’s all bound to come out now. “Yes,” I say. “Lily had a baby with Nash. She gave birth at St. Lucy’s while she was working on the murals there. She named you Ivy because of the way your fingers clung to her.” I’ve included this detail as a proof of Lily’s love, but Ivy’s look of horror deepens. “She thought you’d been adopted, but when she found out you hadn’t, she brought you here—”

  “Vera brought me here!” Ivy cries. She holds up her hands, clenched as if she were trying to hold on to the story as she knows it, but the sight of her own hands, curled in like tendrils of ivy clinging to a wall, makes her cry out again.

  “Lily wanted you to think that,” I say softly. I step toward her, but she backs away. Her legs hit the window seat and she falls backward, her shoulder hitting the frame of the open casement window. She grasps the frame to keep from falling out. She looks around the room, at the ring of faces, and then her eyes move from the live faces in the room to the painted one behind the desk. The monumental figure of the Muse of Drawing looks back at her with Lily’s eyes. Ivy gasps and then she swings her legs around and deftly slips out of the window and onto the lawn.

  Callum is immediately at the window, but he’s much too big to get through the narrow opening. Through the glass of the middle section I can see Ivy running toward the bonfire. We’re all too busy watching her to notice that Chloe has opened the casement window on the other side. I grab for her as she slips through, but get only a handful of mottled gray sheet for my trouble. I quickly measure the narrow window with my eyes and decide I’ll just fit.

  “I’ll go after them,” I say.

  I jump to the ground before anyone can object. I look back and see Callum framed in the bay window, scowling at me and yelling something, but I don’t wait to hear what he’s got to say. I turn just in time to see Chloe’s pale robes, aglow in the light of the bonfire, disappearing over the rim of the hill. I run after her, skirting the edges of the bonfire, threading through the groups of students sitting on the lawn. When I reach the crest of the hill, I see Chloe running between the skeletal shapes of leafless apple trees. She’s heading toward the edge of the woods near the Lodge, presumably because she’s seen Ivy St. Clare run in that direction.

  I turn back toward the Lodge and see Callum and Shelley coming out of the Hall. If I wait, I’ll lose Chloe. And if she catches up to St. Clare at the ridge, one or both of them might end up dead in the ravine. Just then, I glimpse Sally sitting with Clyde and Hannah. Sally looks up at me, her mouth a round O of surprise. I shout at her to tell Sheriff Reade where I’ve gone, and I run down the hill, keeping my eyes fixed on Chloe. I’ve underestimated the slope of the hill, though. About halfway down, I lose my footing, fall, and roll to the bottom.

  Luckily I don’t seem to have injured anything. I get to my feet, dizzy but with both feet firmly planted on the ground, facing the rows of apple trees. Their bare branches gleam silver in the light of the newly risen moon, their shadows all pointing west as if directing me toward the woods. When I look that way, I catch a glimpse of Chloe’s pale robes slipping between the deeper shadows of the pine trees.

  I try to run straight in that direction, but the apple trees block my way. In the moonlight their gnarled trunks assume contorted faces, much like Ivy St. Clare’s wrinkled pixie face, scowling and grimacing at me. The dark pine woods are a relief in
comparison. The moonlight that filters through the treetops onto the forest floor casts only the straight shadows of the tall pine trees. The ground is covered by soft pine needles that glisten under my feet. I see Chloe ahead of me, her white robe silver now in the moonlight. I follow her, climbing steadily uphill. She slips in and out of view between the broad-trunked pines, but it’s clear now where we’re headed.

  It must seem natural to Ivy to head for the top of the clove, the place where she goes to commune with Vera’s spirit. How must she feel tonight, though, going to the place where she killed Lily, knowing now that Lily was her mother? What state will Ivy be in when she gets to the top of the ridge? And how will she react to Chloe if Chloe gets there before me?

  Which she will at this rate. As hard as I push, I can only run so fast uphill. Chloe has the advantage of a head start and youth.

  Her one disadvantage turns out to be those flowing robes. I catch up to her at the fallen tree because the roots have snagged the hem of her robes. She’s cursing and yanking on them when I reach her.

  “Chloe, wait!” I call, my voice coming out in hoarse, breathless gasps.

  She turns her head in my direction and I stop, frozen to the spot. I’ve forgotten about the blue face paint. In the moonlit clearing her hair, robe, and marble-painted arms gleam, but her face is invisible. There’s only a black hole where it should be.

  My call has also caught Ivy’s attention. She’s standing on the top of the ridge, just above Chloe. “Both of you leave me alone,” she calls. “This is none of your business. It’s between Vera and me.”

  Chloe turns away from me, toward Ivy, and I see Ivy scream, her hands rising to cover her mouth. I can guess what she sees—an empty, faceless shroud. From the look of horror on her face I imagine that it’s Lily’s face she sees in the darkness. I reach for Chloe to keep her from going any farther. I manage to grasp her arm, but just then I hear a voice behind me.

  “Mom?”

  In the moment I take to turn toward Sally, Chloe escapes my grasp. Shielding Sally with my arm I watch as Chloe takes a step up the hill and Ivy takes a step backward, placing her on the edge of the cliff. She totters, looking backward over her shoulder into the deep drop. She seems to gain her balance for a moment, but then she looks again at Chloe. She sets her mouth in a firm line and takes one more step backward into thin air, choosing the sharp drop into the abyss over the abyss that’s staring her in the face.

  Callum finds us on the edge of the cliff, my arms clamped so tightly around Chloe and Sally that my biceps will ache for a week. He shines his flashlight over the edge of the cliff, illuminating Ivy’s broken body a hundred feet below us. Then he shines the flashlight on each of us in turn—Sally, Chloe, and then me. He holds it on me.

  “Are you okay?” He practically barks the question. Chloe shields her eyes from the light and whimpers at the harshness of his voice, but I understand the fear underlying it.

  “We’re okay,” I say. “Ivy jumped. She killed herself.”

  Callum nods—one curt bob of his head— and then stands up. Waving the flashlight over his head he calls into the night, “We’re over here!”

  Here echoes in the chasm below us. Chloe begins to shake and I relax my grip enough to pat her back. Callum kneels down next to us and I whisper in his ear, “Can you get Chloe away from the edge?”

  As soon as he puts his arm around Chloe, I put both of mine around Sally. Callum turns Chloe firmly away from the clove and guides her downhill. The second her gaze is torn away from the drop, she begins crying, as if she’d been held transfixed by the dizzying abyss and only now realizes how close she came to going over. I hear voices coming up the hill—Shelley Drake, Toby Potter, Dymphna Byrnes—all of them ready to take care of her. And us, I suppose, but I don’t turn to them just yet.

  “Honey,” I say to Sally, “it’s okay. We can go now.”

  “I was afraid that something was going to happen to you.” She speaks so low I have to lean my head toward her mouth. “That’s why I followed you. But if I hadn’t … you could have stopped her….” She begins to shake and I pull her tight against me.

  “I don’t think anyone could have stopped her.” I’m not sure if it’s true, but Sally doesn’t argue. I hold her to me as the moon rises high enough in the sky to reach down into the chasm. I can feel it, an icy wave, moving through me the way a current of cold water sometimes comes over you in the ocean, only this wave is made of light, flowing into the clove, sweeping over the waterfall, the tumbled rocks and, finally, the broken body of Ivy St. Clare. Just as the snow covered Lily’s body sixty years ago, so the moonlight blankets Ivy now. They’re down there together, I think. As if Lily had been lying there all these years waiting to pull her daughter—her murderer—down into the clove with her.

  I, too, start to shake. Then I feel myself covered with warmth. Callum’s behind us, wrapping a blanket around both our shoulders, coaxing us away from the edge. I have to close my eyes before I can break the pull of the clove and go with him. But even as I walk down the hill I carry its chill with me, like a lump of ice lodged in my gut.

  For the next few weeks every time I close my eyes I see the clove covered in moonlit snow. At night I dream of it. Each night it’s the same: I’m standing on the edge of the cliff, looking down into the clove. Lily in her white May Day dress stands at the bottom. Instead of a wreath of flowers around her head, her blond hair is rimed with frost. She holds out her arms and another white-clad figure joins her. It’s Ivy St. Clare. She has a wreath of ivy in her hair. The two women link arms and then they both hold out their arms. They’re waiting for the third member of their party—the third Grace—and I suddenly know it’s me they’re waiting for. I feel the pull of their wills dragging me down into the clove, my feet move closer to the edge, my weight leans over … and then I see, to my relief, another figure is joining them.

  Thank God, I think, it doesn’t have to be me. But when the third robed figure lifts its head, I see that beneath her cowled hood there’s nothing. The third figure has no face.

  Then I fall.

  I wake up flinching against the sensation of plummeting downward. Unable to go back to sleep, I go downstairs, creeping softly so as not to wake Sally. Since Ivy St. Clare’s death, Sally has stayed in the cottage with me. At first I was glad to keep her close, but as the days have passed and she’s shown no sign of wanting to go back to the dorm, I’ve begun to worry. Is she staying with me because she thinks I need her? Or because she’s frightened of something? Should we just leave the school altogether? Or would running away only make it worse? I feel as if we’re still on the ridge, clutching each other to keep from falling over the edge. I’m afraid that if I let go we’ll both fall; but if I don’t we’ll never find our way to safety.

  I almost hoped in the first few days that the school would close and take the decision out of my hands. After all, it wouldn’t be surprising if parents withdrew their children after two deaths. Then we could all disband, leaving Arcadia to its ghosts and its stories. But that’s not what happened.

  I was surprised by how many people came to Ivy’s funeral. I recognized some from the village—Doris from the Rip van Winkle Diner, Beatrice Rhodes, Fawn from Seasons—but there were many more who looked far too stylish to be locals.

  “Alums,” Dymphna informed me in a hushed whisper as we stood in line to file past Ivy’s casket. “And the trustees. There’s a meeting afterward. If you ask me, which no one did, they could’ve waited a day.”

  Looking around, I recognized some of the faces of wealthy and influential arts patrons I’d seen in the society columns of the Times. Toby Potter, in a Victorian morning coat, told me the names of those I didn’t know. Apparently, many alumni of Arcadia had gone on to become curators, collectors, dealers, and critics. A good many of them had come from wealthy families or had married into wealth and wielded power and influence in the New York art world. A few were artists themselves.

  “They must be very ded
icated to the school,” I whispered to Toby.

  “They probably want to make sure she’s really gone.” Toby whispered back while keeping his eyes on the procession heading toward the open casket. “I think some of them are afraid she’ll pop out of the casket and demand more money for the endowment.”

  I shuddered at the image. I found this viewing of the corpse macabre. The few funerals I’d been to over the years had been Jewish ones, all closed-casket. I was dismayed to find myself steered by Toby into the line for the viewing. The last thing I wanted to do was look into her face. I was wondering if I could somehow file past without looking, but when I reached the casket, I found it impossible not to. I was shocked then at how peaceful Ivy seemed. Her face, which had been so wizened and lined in life, had relaxed, whether from some trick of the mortician’s craft or because death had released some tension in her features. Still, I couldn’t look at her for long without recalling that look of horror I’d seen on her face as she stood on the edge of the clove. I let my eyes drift down to the collar of her suit, on which I saw the pin she’d always worn in life: the wreath of ivy surrounding the two saints borne aloft on a cloud. I said a little prayer that she had at last found some peace.

  At the end of the service the minister asked if anyone would like to say a few words about the deceased. There was an awful silence and I thought that no one would come forward. But Shelley Drake cleared her throat and rose to her feet. She was oddly dressed for a funeral, in a lavender floral print and matching lavender shoes. The chapel felt horribly still and I wondered if I was the only one afraid of what Shelley might say.

  “We’ve come here today as a community broken by grief and tragedy,” she began, her voice thin and wavery as the light filtered through the old stained-glass windows. “Many are perhaps wondering if there is a future for Arcadia after the terrible events of these last few months. But I know what Ivy St. Clare would say if she were alive.” Shelley looked toward the open casket. “She would ask, What is the purpose of art if not to offer a refuge in times of loss and disillusionment? These recent deaths, of one who was at the beginning of her artistic career, and one who was reaching the end of hers, are all the more tragic because they are linked to each other. We may never know what really happened, if Ivy St. Clare was guilty of Isabel Cheney’s death, but it’s clear from her suicide that she felt responsible for it and for the death of Lily Eberhardt. She believed her actions would preserve the institution of the Arcadia School. We know that she was tragically misguided, but should we then throw away this refuge for the artistic spirit? We may never understand why Dean St. Clare did what she did, but we can hope that in the years to come the artists who come here, and who are nurtured here, will redeem her sins. After all, what is art but a way to shape and corral the chaos and senselessness of tragedy and disappointment?”