Arcadia Falls (38 page)

Someone in the classroom snorts. I turn to glare at Tori Pratt. “Do you have something you want to share, Victoria?”

“Isn’t what Chloe’s done, like, plagiarism? She’s just taking Isabel’s work and trying to pass it off as her own.”

“Isabel wrote the paper, but I’ve illustrated it.” Chloe opens the portfolio and takes out several pieces of stiff bristol board. She places them on the easel. The first picture facing out is a watercolor of a woman holding a baby beneath the copper beech tree.

“Is this supposed to be from
The Changeling Girl?”
I ask.

Chloe shakes her head. “Not exactly. You see, Isabel had this theory that
The Changeling Girl
was autobiographical and that it was really a
story about what women had to give up to become artists. She thought Lily Eberhardt had given up her own child in order to stay at Arcadia with Vera Beecher.”

I’m so stunned to hear the same version of events that I’ve just read in Lily’s journal that I don’t say anything. Chloe removes the first picture and slides it behind the others. The new watercolor shows Lily standing on the edge of the ridge, still holding the baby. With her is another figure, which I guess is supposed to represent Vera Beecher. The tame, bucolic landscape of the campus lies below them on one side, the wild rocky cleft of the clove on the other. Vera is gesturing toward the clove as if demonstrating the view, but I already have a queasy feeling that something else is going on in these pictures.

“Vera Beecher believed a woman couldn’t be an artist and a mother, too,” Chloe says, “so she asked Lily to give up her baby. But Lily wouldn’t….”

Chloe slides the last picture in front. As I feared, it shows Lily Eberhardt leaping into the clove, her white dress billowing about her like a cloud, her baby floating beside her like an angel in a baroque altarpiece. It’s strangely beautiful but also very disturbing. The class seems stunned by it as well. Any minute now they’ll recover and start asking questions about how Isabel could have come up with this bizarre story—and I don’t want that. I want to find out first.

“Okay,” I say, “that’s a really original way to approach the topic and I’m sure you all have a lot of questions for Chloe, but I wanted to give you extra time today to get ready for the Halloween celebration, so why don’t you save your questions for tomorrow? Class dismissed.”

The class is quick enough to shake themselves out of their stupor and leave. Chloe starts to slide her pictures in the portfolio, but I tell her to wait. “I want to talk to you about your project,” I say.

As they pass on their way out, Tori Pratt says something to Justin Clay and then laughs. Chloe glares at them as they leave, but as soon as they’re out the door, Chloe’s lower lip begins to quiver.

“I know I should have okayed the project with you before I did it, but I thought you’d like it!” she wails. “You’re so into that changeling story and Isabel’s paper was all about that.”

“It’s okay, Chloe, I’m not angry, I’m just curious. Where did you get Isabel’s paper? I thought she was delivering it to the dean the afternoon of the bonfire.”

“She was … I mean she did. But when I checked my e-mail the next day I saw she’d also sent it to me.”

“Huh. I’m surprised. When I saw the two of you I thought you were mad at her because she hadn’t given you the paper.”

“I was, but I guess she figured that if she sent it to me before she went to the dean’s office it would look like she’d done what she was supposed to do. She knew I wouldn’t get it until after she turned the paper in to the dean. The whole thing backfired, because when Dean St. Clare found out we hadn’t worked on it together she gave us both Fs anyway.”

“And the dean kept the paper?”

“Yeah … I guess so.” Chloe furrows her brow, confused at the direction I’ve taken.

“And do you know where Isabel got the idea that Lily Eberhardt had a baby that she gave up?”

“No. Isabel was really secretive about her sources. She kept bragging that she was doing
original
research, but she wouldn’t say what she meant. And then she didn’t even send the bibliography with the paper when she e-mailed it to me.”

“I see. Do you have the paper?”

Chloe nods and takes out a folder from her portfolio. “I’m really sorry I didn’t talk to you about it first. I thought it would be a way of making it up to Isabel….”

An anguished look crosses her face. I put my hand on her arm and lean toward her. “Is there something you’re not telling about what happened that night?” I ask. “I remember that you were mad at Isabel.”

Chloe looks up at me, her eyes wide, frightened at what she’s let slip. I’m frightened, too. If Chloe admits to hurting Isabel, what will I do? “She was always so sure of herself,” she says, looking miserable. “I just wanted to give her a little scare.”

“What kind of a scare, Chloe?”

“You know those white dresses that Ms. Drake made for us? Well,
there was an extra one for a girl who had to go home. I took it and hung it from a tree near the edge of the woods. Then I made sure Isabel ran in that direction—”

“So she’d think it was a person hanging in the tree and be frightened by it?”

“Yeah. She was a wuss about that kind of thing.”

“So did it work?”

Chloe bites her lip and nods. “She went into the woods right where I’d rigged up the dress, and a minute later I heard her shriek. I thought she’d run straight out again, but instead she must have run deeper into the woods.”

“And you didn’t follow her?”

Chloe shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears. “We’re not
allowed
in the woods and I’d already gotten in enough trouble.”

I sigh, exasperated at the fractured logic of teenagers. They often choose the most inconvenient times to follow the rules. Then I notice that Chloe still looks fidgety. It’s a look I know well from Sally.

“Is there something else you’re not telling me, Chloe?”

“It’s nothing really. It’s just … I thought I saw someone—another one of the girls—farther up the hill, but then she vanished and I thought I must have imagined it….” She looks embarrassed.

“What is it Chloe? What did you see?”

“It’s stupid…. It was just one of the girls in a white dress. But when she vanished I thought of the story about the white woman who haunts the woods and it kind of freaked me out.
That’s
why I didn’t try to follow Isabel. Pretty stupid, huh? I was trying to scare Isabel, but I ended up scaring myself.”

After I send Chloe on her way, I start walking toward the Lodge, but halfway across the lawn I stop at the bench beneath the beech tree and sit down to think. Although Chloe’s pictures depicted a garbled version of Lily’s story, it bore enough resemblance to the real thing to make me wonder if Isabel had had access to Lily’s journal. I take out the paper now and read the first paragraph.

I put down the paper and exhale. How else could Isabel have learned about Lily’s pregnancy unless she read Lily’s journal. But how could she have gotten it? Then I remember: the week before I arrived Isabel and Chloe were cleaning Fleur-de-Lis … or at least they were
supposed
to be cleaning. Hadn’t Chloe said that she found Isabel with her nose in a book when she was supposed to be cleaning? Isabel must have found the journal behind the panel in the fireplace. She must have thought she’d struck gold and that the dean would be impressed when she saw the paper—but she hadn’t been. I imagine Ivy’s reaction to this first paragraph. Her first question must have been where had Isabel found the journal. Had Isabel realized then that she would be blamed for stealing the journal from Fleur-de-Lis?

Chloe wasn’t the only one who caught a glimpse of a figure dressed in white on the night of the bonfire. On my way back to the cottage I saw someone in white flitting through the woods. I thought it was my imagination—as Chloe did—and then, later, when Callum told me about the
wittewieven
I thought I’d spied the white woman who haunted the clove. Now I wonder if it was Isabel Cheney coming back from Fleur-de-Lis after putting Lily’s journal back where she found it. It’s the kind of thing a teenager would do—repairing a wrong by hiding the evidence. Did she think the dean wouldn’t keep after her to find out where the journal was?

I look up toward the dean’s office. In full sunlight the glass is an opaque surface reflecting trees and sky; it’s impossible to tell if anyone is
looking out. On First Night, though, I saw the dean silhouetted against the dark windowpane.
She’s always watching
, Callum had said. Had she watched from her window on First Night, waiting for a chance to confront Isabel and take the journal? Was she the white woman Chloe had seen in the woods behind the Lodge? Had she followed Isabel into the woods and confronted her at the top of the ridge?

I get to my feet, agitated by the picture in my head of Ivy St. Clare cornering a frightened girl on the edge of the cliff … but my mind balks. Ivy couldn’t want the journal enough to kill for it, could she? I wonder what Callum would think. If my cell phone worked I could call to tell him what Chloe’s told me, but as it is I can’t think of anyplace private enough to make that call. I’ll call after my last class, I promise myself as I cross under the copper beech. The thought of talking to Callum later—of seeing him again—sends a pulse of desire through my core so strong I have to stop and put my hand on the beech’s trunk to steady myself for a moment. Images from last night flood through my mind as steady as the fall of wine red leaves from the tree. Have I gone too fast? What do I really know about this man? The force of my desire scares me. I take deep breaths to calm myself, and then, recovered, I give the tree a farewell pat. Its bark is smooth and curiously warm. Then I walk briskly to the Lodge.

I reach the Lodge, still deep in thought. Peter and Rebecca are in the lounge, dark heads bent together, whispering. They look up when I enter, four identical brown eyes staring at me like the eyes of deer caught grazing. I look from them to the paintings above their heads: Nash’s last three portraits of Lily.

As I look at the paintings I think of a young Callum Reade, held spellbound by the force of Lily’s gaze.
She was looking at me as if she saw right through me to my soul and knew all my secrets
, he had said. Could the man who painted her like this have abandoned her in the snowstorm to die?

I look back down at Rebecca and Peter, who are now exchanging quizzical looks at my behavior. “The first day we met you said it was fascinating that the man who did these paintings of Lily
killed
her. Tell me again why you said that,” I ask.

“Everyone knows that she died on her way to meet him—” Rebecca begins.

“—and that he left for the city without telling anyone she didn’t show up,” Peter finishes for her.

“It was in the middle of a blizzard and he must have known that she was coming through the clove,” Rebecca adds.

“But he didn’t even go back to check if she was okay.”

“He must have felt guilty because he killed himself later.”

I shake my head. “You’re right. It would have been as good as killing her not to look for her. But what if she came and then went back because she never intended to leave with him in the first place?”

“Then it wouldn’t have been Nash’s fault at all,” another voice says.

I turn and find Shelley standing in the doorway. She’s wearing her smock, which is spattered with white paint. As she comes into the lounge I see that her face and hair are also paint-splattered and her pupils are unnaturally dilated. She looks like she’s waking from a trance.

“The tragedy is that everyone blamed him,” Shelley continues. “No one would have anything to do with him after Lily’s death. My mother, who had taken classes with him here at Arcadia and very much admired him, said she saw him in Europe the next summer. He was a drunken wreck, she said. He killed himself on the one-year anniversary of Lily’s death.”

“That
is
tragic,” I say, thinking of Lily’s description of how full of hope Nash had been while making these last paintings.

“Yes,” Shelley agrees. “Even more so if Lily didn’t die going to see him. Do you have some reason to think that she was on her way back from Nash when she died?”

I start to answer but then remember the twins. “Peter, Rebecca,” I say, “would you mind if we canceled class today? I need to talk to Professor Drake.”

Two identical heads shake in perfect unison. “No problem. We still have to work on our costumes. We’re going as the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.”

“Wait, I know this,” I say, proud to possess this bit of esoteric knowledge. “They’re the twin children of Magneto.”

Peter and Rebecca exchange one of their unreadable looks, and then reward me with identical smiles. “Pretty slick, Ms. Rosenthal.”

Shelley, though, is staring at me. “I’ve never heard of them. What body of mythology are they from?”

“Marvel Comics,” I answer. “One of the advantages of having a teenager.”

On the way to Shelley’s studio I tell her about Isabel’s paper and my fear that the dean might have confronted Isabel to get Lily’s journal back. “What I don’t understand is why Ivy would want the journal so desperately,” I conclude.

“I think I have an idea why. There’s something my mother says in her letter….” When she opens the door, I’m so dazzled by a burst of white light that I don’t quite follow what she’s saying. At first I think the light must be coming from the windows, but the light at this time of day is still subdued. The glare is coming from the dozen or so high-powered spotlights arranged around the room. Shelley sees me squinting and apologizes.