Arcadia Falls (5 page)

“Thank you, that’s very kind.” When she’s on the intercom with Dymphna, I wander back to the window and look out at the lawn. The day has turned overcast again and the sleeping girl is gone. Before I turn away, my eye falls on Ivy St. Clare’s sketchpad still lying on the window seat. Her last touches to the drawing had subtly changed the figures beneath the ground. It’s clear now that they are heading toward the sleeping girl. The one closest to the girl has reached a hand up out of the grass and is about to pull her down to join the rest of them.

I
follow Ivy St. Clare back through the rose parlor, from which the sleeping artist and her charcoal sketches have vanished, and then up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor.

“This was the Beecher family’s winter parlor,” she announces as she opens the double oak doors. “Vera loved to read here on snowy days.” The scene inside the parlor might be a pageant entitled “Snowy Day.” Girls in white dresses lounge on settees and chintz upholstered chairs. Swaths of transparent tulle lie on the floor or are draped over tables and bookshelves. In the center of all this white froth Isabel Cheney stands still as a statue in a long white Empire-waist
dress while a woman with silvery hair—Ms. Drake, I assume—kneels at her feet. Isabel looks every bit a goddess, but the woman at her feet is not worshipping her—she’s letting down the hem.

“I don’t understand,” Isabel is saying as we enter. “The length was perfectly fine yesterday.”

“Maybe you grew another inch.” The comment comes from the dark-haired fox-faced girl I saw earlier—Chloe. She’s draped across a love seat, her white dress spread out around her so no one else can sit next to her. She’s surrounded by a circle of girls sitting on the floor and balancing on the arms of the love seat who giggle at her next remark. “Around the waist, that is.”

“Is that why you two failed to clean Fleur-de-Lis in time for Ms. Rosenthal’s arrival?” The dean’s crisp voice cuts across the laughter. “Because you were wasting time arguing?”

Isabel Cheney looks from the dean to me, her face pinking with embarrassment. Although I’ve only just met her I feel I’ve betrayed her trust.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chloe says. “
I
cleaned upstairs. Isabel was supposed to be cleaning the downstairs, but when I came down I found her with her nose in a book
as usual.”

“You said you’d clean the downstairs if I did the whole research paper for our group!” Isabel counters.

“You would have done it all yourself anyway since you think you’re smarter than anyone else.”

“Girls!” Dean St. Clare’s voice silences the girls. “You were
both
responsible for the cleaning of the whole cottage and you were supposed to work on that research paper
together
. Here at Arcadia we are not allowed to barter chores.”

“But Dean St. Clare, I’ve done some really interesting original research—” Isabel begins, but Ms. Drake stands up and interrupts her.

“Dean St. Clare,” she says, removing a pin from her mouth. “I’m afraid this is all my fault. I’ve pushed the girls to work so hard on First Night. And Isabel has done such a good job researching the old festivals here. Perhaps if you take a look at her paper—” The woman leans down
to retrieve an orange folder—the same one I saw Isabel Cheney carrying earlier—from a chair, but Dean St. Clare holds up one hand.

“I’m sure Miss Cheney has done an admirable research job—she always does—but that is not the point. This school was founded on the spirit of collaboration and cooperation. Women helping women to achieve their artistic goals. And you two”—she levels an icy stare on Isabel and then Chloe—“have utterly failed. I have half a mind to replace you in tonight’s festivities—”

“That’s not fair!” Chloe stands up, her too-long white dress poofing out around her. She looks really upset. “Isabel got to be the goddess since last May. She’s stepping down tonight and I’m just starting. So it’s not an equal punishment.”

Goddess? I
think, beginning to wonder what sort of festival is planned for tonight. I remember that the founders of Arcadia put on elaborate festivals—May Day dances and winter solstice pageants—but I didn’t know they were still celebrated. Maybe Sally was right about this school being a little
off
.

“Perhaps if the girls agreed to come by tomorrow to clean,” I say, “and I can get those journals later.”

Dean St. Clare looks at me as if she has not only forgotten my presence but who I am. Then she shakes herself. “Those are both good ideas, Ms. Rosenthal. I’ll collect the material you need and have it ready for you tomorrow. And you two—Chloe and Isabel—come downstairs to my office. I’m not done with you yet.”

“Chloe still needs her dress altered,” Ms. Drake says. “Why don’t you take Isabel first and I’ll send Chloe down as soon as I’m done with her?”

“Very well,” the dean says. She suddenly looks tired. “Come with me, Isabel. And Ms. Rosenthal, don’t forget to stop by the kitchen for the food Dymphna is packing for you.”

She turns to lead the way back to her office with Isabel in tow. I follow because otherwise I’ll have no idea how to find the kitchen again. I stay back a few yards, though. When the dean turns a corner Isabel turns to me. “I’m really sorry about the cottage not being cleaned,” she says.

“I’m
really sorry I said anything, Isabel.”

She grins at me. “It’s okay. I’m used to being in trouble. The kitchen’s just down this hall, by the way.” She turns to go and I watch her straighten her shoulders as she follows the dean. I hope I haven’t gotten her in too much trouble. She is, after all, the first friend I’ve made here.

In the kitchen I find Dymphna standing at a massive cast-iron stove, ladling stew into a plastic container. “Please, that’s way too much,” I tell her.

“Don’t argue, she’ll only give you more.”

The voice comes from a man sitting at a butcher block table against the far wall of the kitchen. He’s wearing a navy blue windbreaker emblazoned with a shield that reads
ARCADIA FALLS SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.
He looks up from a bowl of stew and smiles crookedly at me. His face is lined enough to mark him as a man in his forties, but the glint in his pale green eyes is boyish.

“Dymphna’s like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Always trying to fatten you up.”

“Aye, leave off, Callum Reade, why do you come out here if you’re not after my cooking. I know it’s not my beauty,” Dymphna says in an aggrieved voice, hiding the smile on her broad face by leaning down to smell the stew.

“Ah, you underestimate your charms, Dymphna, you witch.” He lifts the bowl to his lips and tips the last bit down his throat, stands up, and brings the bowl over to the sink. I notice the glint of a sheriff’s badge under the jacket and, when he leans into the sink, the dull metal gleam of a pistol handle at his waist. “But I’m afraid I’m here tonight to see your boss. She free now?” He looks toward me and I realize he’s asking me, not the cook.

“Um, she just called a student into her office,” I say, wondering why the town sheriff is on the campus. Has there been a crime?

“Which student?” the sheriff asks.

“Isabel Cheney.”

“Really?” The sheriff exchanges a look with the cook. “What did she do? Tongue-lash the opposing team in debate club? Hack into the school’s computer and sabotage Chloe Dawson’s GPA?”

“She and Chloe Dawson were supposed to clean my cottage and they didn’t. What is it between those two girls? They were at each other’s throats.”

“Beats me,” the sheriff says, running his hands through his hair until it stands up straight from his scalp like fresh-mown wheat. “I’m just a small town sheriff, not an adolescent psychologist. But I’ll tell you this—I wouldn’t get between those two when they go at it.” He winks at me and shoulders his way out the swinging door.

“Are the local police always so involved with the school?” I ask looking down at the large plastic vat of stew to hide the blush I can feel heating my face. I can’t remember the last time a man winked at me.

“Well, there was some trouble at the First Night festival last year. Now the dean likes to enlist the cooperation of the sheriff beforehand. Besides, Callum Reade likes to keep an eye on things. Here.” She hands me the large container of stew.

“That’s really too much,” I try to tell her again but she shakes her head.

“You can freeze what you don’t eat tonight. You’ve got a growing girl and”—she gives me a quick up and down look and shakes her head again—“you look like you haven’t had a decent meal in a while yourself.”

“I haven’t had much of an appetite since my husband died last fall,” I say, surprising myself with my own honesty. The only one in Great Neck who’d noticed the ten pounds I’d lost was a mother at a field hockey game who asked what my secret was. Grief, I’d wanted to tell her, and the stacks of bills I can’t pay, and finding out that my daughter’s college fund was spent a year ago without my consent. Instead I had told her I’d cut down on carbs. But to plump, motherly Dymphna I say now, “Everything just tastes like dust.”

She clucks her tongue while pulling a loaf of bread out of a tin bread box. “That’s how Miss Vera took on when Miss Eberhardt died back when my mother was head housekeeper here. Wouldn’t touch nary a crust for a fortnight,” she said. She begins cutting thick slices of the brown, grain-flecked bread with a serrated knife in her right hand while using her left to slather each slice with butter from an earthenware crock: a balletic display of coordination I’m tempted to applaud. “My mother
said that she nearly starved herself to death, and that she wasn’t really herself for a whole year—not until she got the news that Virgil Nash had killed himself. Then she started eating again.”

“Really? Are you sure that was the reason?”

Dymphna pauses in her cutting and buttering of bread, both knives arrested in mid air. “My mother told me she called her to her office that day and told her to take down a painting of Nash’s that hung in the dining room. ‘I’ll not have the work of a suicide hanging over our girls,’ she said to her. And that night she came down to dinner for the first time since Miss Eberhardt’s death and ate everything put in front of her. My mother never had no trouble with her appetite again.”

Dymphna rests both knives on the counter and brushes crumbs from her apron. She wraps the buttered bread in wax paper and puts it and the plastic vat of stew into a canvas sack that she hands to me. “There’s nothing like revenge to sharpen the appetite.”

I leave Dymphna’s kitchen laden with foodstuffs. Before I could get out she’d added an apple cake, a dozen apples, a tin of oatmeal, coffee beans, and a quart of milk to my sack. I feel a little like the girl in Rossetti’s poem who returns from the Goblin Market with forbidden fruits to tempt her sister’s appetite. As I’m walking through the front door of Beech Hall, Chloe Dawson brushes by me in a cloud of white fabric. In addition to her own dress she has another white dress draped over her arm.

“Chloe,” I say as she rushes by, “stop a minute, please.”

She turns around and I see that her heart-shaped face is swollen and tearstained.

“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about what happened. I never meant to get you and Isabel in trouble.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says, “it’s Isabel’s. She
wanted
to do the research paper by herself. Now we’re both going to get Fs on the paper. Do you know what that will do to my GPA? I’ll never get into an Ivy now. Have you seen her, by the way?”

“No,” I say, scanning the lawn. “But there seem to be some students gathering over there under that tree.”

“Yeah, that’s First Night. Maybe she’s there.”

“Honey,” I say, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you forget about the fight with Isabel and your GPA for tonight and have a good time?”

“That’s exactly what I plan to do, Ms. Rosenthal,” she says with a brilliant smile. “I plan to have a good time getting back at Isabel.”

I walk back to the cottage chilled by Chloe Dawson’s gleeful anticipation of revenge. I’ve certainly witnessed competitiveness and nastiness among the girls at Sally’s high school. Last year a few girls posted insults and embarrassing pictures on the Internet. The Burn Thread, as it became known, was the subject of half a dozen assemblies and letters home from the principal. I’d hoped, though, that the Arcadia School, which promoted “the collaborative spirit” on its website, would be free of such mean-spiritedness.

But then there’s a long history of betrayal and rivalry at Arcadia, from its beginnings when Vera Beecher met Virgil Nash in New York in the 1920s when he was a poor but promising artist teaching at the Art Students League. When he lost his job there—over an incident in which he allowed one of his students to pose nude—Vera Beecher invited him to come to her childhood home at Arcadia to start an artists’ colony with her and a handful of other students, including Lily Eberhardt, in whom Vera was rumored to have taken a particular interest. It was also rumored that Virgil Nash and Lily Eberhardt had had an affair. Nash left the colony abruptly after its first summer. His career after that had gone in an unexpected direction. He’d become a society portraitist, patronized by a rich clientele. He became wealthy but dissolute, a man who had traded his talent for commercial rewards. In the late forties, though, he had returned to Arcadia and painted a series of portraits of Lily Eberhardt, which were altogether different from his society portraits. He was just beginning to receive acclaim for his new work when Lily died—killed when she fell into a ravine during a snowstorm. According to the local gossip picked up by the press she’d been on her way to meet Nash and run away with him. Two weeks later her body was found buried in the snow. A year later Nash killed himself, many believed over grief at the death of his muse.