Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (2 page)

I
n the moonlit landscape surrounding Our Lady of Sorrows, a blindfolded girl stumbled through the snow. It was the night before Thanksgiving, and only hours before, she had looked forward to several days of Thanksgiving vacation away from school. Now the idea of turkey and sweet potatoes seemed a remote, unlikely image—something that part of her mind realized she might never experience again.

Where was it that she had been trying to go? Was she truly alone, or were they still watching her?

She touched the smooth fabric of the blindfold that was tied so tightly across her eyes, it almost cut into her cheeks. Her nose and lips were numb, and as she struggled to remove the blindfold with clumsy fingers, it seemed that she might as well be touching someone else’s face. She gave up and left the blindfold on. They would only make her pay some price if she disobeyed the rules.

Waving her arms in front of her, she discovered that there were no longer tree branches to push out of the way.
Maybe I finally found my way back onto the main path
, she thought.

But now a new emptiness surrounded her—a fresh, frozen
silence, as if the world were waiting for something to happen. She walked a few steps and found that the earth had suddenly become perfectly, absurdly flat. As she took another step, her tennis shoes shot out from under her and her tailbone hit the ground with a thump.

Ice. For a moment, she lay on the comforting ice, the snow as soft as a powdery blanket. She had an overwhelming urge to give up—to allow herself to fall asleep.
But falling asleep could mean freezing to death
, she told herself.
You have to keep moving
.

She rolled onto her side, forced herself to move onto her hands and knees, and stood up shakily.

I don’t care anymore
, she thought, struggling once more to pull the freezing blindfold from her face. This time, she lifted the fabric enough to peek out at her surroundings with part of an eye.

The world was surprisingly bright in the moonlight: blank, white snow edged with a row of naked trees that seemed to observe her from a distance—a row of quiet, cold skeletons.

I’m standing on the lake
. The girl forced the blindfold over her temples and finally freed herself from it completely.

Disoriented because the snowfall blurred all boundaries between the lake and the shore, she decided to make her way toward the trees that beckoned with thin, leafless arms.

A soft crunching sound broke the silence—a sound that did not bode well.

Weren’t there people across the ice, waiting for her? A group of slender girls? If only she could hurry across before it was too late!

She took another step, and the sickening crunch of ice beneath her feet grew louder. A series of cracking sounds followed
like gunshot—multiple fissures hacking apart the flat surface of the ground.

Cold shot through her body, as if ice water had suddenly been injected into her veins and poured into her skull. The shock of plummeting down, down, down into a world without air; the lead weight of the chains on her limbs that only a split second before had been mere clothes. She gasped for oxygen and inhaled icy water; her struggling lungs were paralyzed, then crushed in a liquid black hole.

As her pain receded, she glimpsed the water nymphs who reached toward her with slender hands and flowing hair, pulling her down, deeper into the water to join them where they lived at the bottom of the lake.

“Gilda, you should at least give this school a
chance
.”

Gilda slumped in the front seat of her mother’s Oldsmobile and fanned herself with the glossy brochure from Our Lady of
Sorrows School for Girls. The air conditioner in the car was broken, and in the August humidity, the panty hose her mother had forced her to wear with her skirt and blouse made her feel as if she were sitting in a tropical swamp. Everything about the outfit she was wearing—the high-heeled, secretarial pumps purchased at Payless Shoes, the polyester blend of her navy blue skirt (not to mention her fear that there
might
be sweat stains on the armpits of her blouse following the ride in a sweltering car), felt just plain
wrong
. At the moment, Gilda felt intense irritation with her mother, the whole notion of a private school for girls, and the entire world in general.

“Gilda you’re being way too judgmental. Don’t forget, I went to a private school myself, and I am obviously no debutante.”

Gilda knew that this was true; her mother was a hardworking nurse who wasn’t afraid of things like needles, blood, and drains clogged with hair. On the other hand, Gilda knew that the Catholic school her mother had attended in Southfield had little in common with the rarefied, exclusive atmosphere of Our Lady of Sorrows in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, commonly known as “one of the wealthiest communities in the entire United States.”

They passed a sign announcing the Bloomfield Hills city limits, and the neighborhood of well-groomed lawns through which Mrs. Joyce had just driven suddenly became a landscape of progressively larger, more elaborate houses.

“Who
lives
in these places?” Gilda’s mother wondered, slowing down and gaping at an enormous white house with pillars. The house seemed to peer down at Mrs. Joyce’s aged, unwashed car with disapproval.

“The girls who go to Our Lady of Sorrows live in these places.”
If the houses in this neighborhood seem to look down their noses
, Gilda thought,
what will the girls at Our Lady of Sorrows be like?

“Gilda, they don’t give out many scholarships, so keep in mind that this is a rare opportunity. Especially considering the fact that your grades from junior high were all over the place, I think it was very nice of Brad to pull some strings and convince the headmistress to consider your application so late in the summer.”

“Nobody
asked
Brad to pull any strings.” Brad Squib was Mrs. Joyce’s new boyfriend, and since Gilda found him annoying, she resented the fact that he had done something to help her. Now she would have to display gratitude and appreciation rather than sullen grimaces when he was around. “Besides,” she added, “plenty of total geniuses have gotten bad grades.”

Gilda stopped fanning herself with the school brochure and paused to examine the image on its cover: a pretty girl sitting next to a lake, gazing dreamily into the distance.

Our Lady of Sorrows provides a beautiful, stimulating environment for girls who truly want to learn. The school also provides structured discipline to protect girls from potentially unhealthy influences.

Originally built as a country estate by automotive tycoon Stanton Jackson and his wife, Martha, in the year 1900, the Castle House that is now Our Lady of Sorrows reflects the Jacksons’ passion for medieval and Renaissance architecture and the couple’s love of the arts. Surprise, beauty, and mystery are found at every turn.

The Jacksons willed part of their estate to an order of nuns who opened Our Lady of Sorrows in 1951. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Our Lady of Sorrows was an elite finishing school for young women who wished to improve their skills as future wives, mothers, and elegant hostesses.

Our Lady of Sorrows has evolved into a school with an outstanding academic program that emphasizes both creativity and the scientific method. Many of our graduates have continued their education at Ivy League colleges.

What do students say about Our Lady of Sorrows?
“I feel so at home here! Everyone is so nice all the time!”

—Marcie

“At my old school, I used to spend hours putting on makeup and picking out clothes to wear every morning. Now I can roll out of bed and get dressed in ten minutes! Who knew I would love wearing a uniform!”

—Eloise

“I’ve been able to concentrate better on my studies without having boys around all the time.”

—Nichole

“You know,” said Gilda, tossing the brochure aside, “since I’ve never actually
had
a boyfriend, I find it a little strange that I’m being locked away in a convent where I’ll never
get
one.”

“I always found plenty of chances to meet boys when I was a teenager at a girls’ school,” said Mrs. Joyce. “Probably too many.”

“That was because you were a tart.” The words seemed to come out before Gilda could stop them.

Her mother abruptly stepped on the brake and pulled her car to the side of the road. “What did you just say to me?”

Gilda stared at her lap. “I didn’t mean it.” She
had
heard stories about how her mother had smoked in the girls’ bathroom and snuck out at night while her parents were asleep, but Gilda guessed that now was not the time to remind her mother of these facts.

Mrs. Joyce sighed with exasperation as she maneuvered back onto the street, following a series of winding roads with whimsical names like Butter Creek Road and Cherrybrook Lane. Gilda scowled out the window at enormous houses that sprawled on perfectly landscaped lawns. The surroundings seemed more like a series of little kingdoms than a single neighborhood.

Cherrybrook Lane ended abruptly, and Gilda found herself peering through the windshield at a landscape of soaring pine trees; it seemed that they had arrived at the edge of a forest. She and her mother faced an iron gate that had been left open. A small sign announced: O
UR
L
ADY OF
S
ORROWS
U
PPER
S
CHOOL FOR
G
IRLS
. An arrow pointed to a long driveway that disappeared into the trees.

“I guess this is it.” Mrs. Joyce drove slowly through the gate and followed a curving drive where tall trees provided a moment of relief from the scalding sun.

As the car entered a sunny clearing, both Gilda and her mother gasped.

“Brad said it was interesting, but I had no idea it was
like
this
!” said Mrs. Joyce. “No wonder they call it the Castle House.”

Gilda felt a rush of adrenaline and a ticklish sensation in her left ear that usually meant that she was about to have an encounter with something beyond the realm of the ordinary. She knew that there was something very interesting indeed about this school.

Our Lady of Sorrows appeared amidst the trees like an image from a dream. The school looked nothing like the institutional brick building where Gilda had attended junior high school. It also looked nothing like the self-consciously perfect houses in the surrounding Bloomfield Hills neighborhood. Gilda actually had to blink several times to make sure that her eyes weren’t deceiving her. It was as if Mrs. Joyce’s car had slipped through a time portal into a medieval world.

“It looks just like a castle,” Gilda breathed.

Instead of an ordinary roof, the enormous building had battlements and turrets that soared against the blue sky. Gilda half expected to see a soldier wearing an iron helmet and carrying a spear peering down at her from above. The stone walls were laced with creeping vines that partially concealed arched, stained-glass windows. Gilda sensed a brooding sadness about the building: there was something ominous about the weighty silence in the air.

Mrs. Joyce parked in a small lot behind the school where a handful of expensive cars huddled together in a corner of shade, then checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, fluffing her hair. Gilda was already making her way toward the school as if pulled toward it by an overwhelming magnetic attraction.