Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (4 page)
Read Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake Online
Authors: Jennifer Allison
“Long enough.”
Miss Underhill was obviously in no mood for small talk. Gilda tried to think of something else to say.
“Hot, isn’t it?” she ventured.
“Scalding. I
hate
being out in the sun.”
As Gilda left her mother farther behind, she mused that if Miss Underhill was actually a vampire, the secluded setting would provide a perfect opportunity for her to steal a swift, deadly chomp on the neck.
Just then, Gilda noticed something strange. Across the lake, she saw a miniature castle—or rather, the crumbling
remains
of a castle. A solitary window peered from the only intact portion—a cylindrical structure large enough to contain a single room. All that remained of the rest of the little castle was a broken wall and the skeleton of an arched ceiling. It looked as if someone had built a small replica of the Castle House next to the lake and then thrown a grenade at it.
“What’s that?” Gilda asked, pointing.
“The ruins.”
“What happened to it?”
“It was built to look like a ruined building on purpose. It’s supposed to be picturesque or something. They have lots of fake ruins in England, so naturally the Jacksons had to have one for themselves when they built their estate.”
Gilda stared for a moment, as if hypnotized. The ruins looked at once beautiful and tragic; they gave her the feeling that she had stumbled into a lost, romantic world. But it was strange that they were created as a kind of trick—to look much older than they really were.
This is a place of illusions
, Gilda thought.
Gilda and Miss Underhill passed a sculpture of four slender water nymphs dancing. Walking in a prickly silence, they
reached a stone bridge that arched over a narrower portion of the lake.
Gilda noticed a memorial plaque cemented into the side of the bridge:
“Who was Dolores Lambert?”
Gilda let out a little yelp of shock as Miss Underhill seized her arm with a violent, pinching grasp.
“Keep your voice down around the dead,” Miss Underhill whispered fiercely.
Gilda was speechless with surprise and confusion. Who was dead? She hadn’t seen any tombstones around, so what was Miss Underhill talking about?
“A girl died here.” Miss Underhill dropped Gilda’s arm. “Dolores Lambert was a freshman when she drowned in the lake. You’ll hear it from the other girls, so I may as well tell you now. If you make any noise as you walk over this bridge, her ghost rises out of the water, screaming.”
Gilda stared into the dark, bruise-colored circles under Miss Underbill’s eyes and cringed from the sour-coffee smell of her breath. In the heat of the afternoon sun, she felt a delightful shiver of horror. “And then what happens?” she whispered.
Miss Underhill frowned at Gilda as if she were suddenly speaking a foreign language. “What?”
“You said her ghost rises out of the water screaming. Then what happens?”
“I don’t think I want to find out.”
Gilda’s mind raced with questions.
Was Our Lady of Sorrows truly haunted, or was Miss Underbill simply trying to scare her? What were the circumstances surrounding Dolores Lambert’s death by drowning
?
Gilda had just made up her mind; she wanted to attend Our Lady of Sorrows.
Y
ou’ve got to be kidding me. You’re actually going to attend Our Lady of Wallet?!”
“It’s called Our Lady of Sorrows, Wendy.”
Gilda lay on the purple carpeting of her bedroom floor. With her legs propped up on her unmade bed, she rested her head on a makeshift pillow of dirty laundry. She was attempting to carry on a telephone conversation with her best friend Wendy Choy while eating chips and salsa. Every now and then, a drop of salsa fell onto her polyester blouse, permanently staining it.
“Everyone knows that all the girls who go there are like millionaires or something,” said Wendy. “What are you munching?”
“Chips. Aren’t you curious about
why
I decided to go to Our Lady of Sorrows?”
“Clearly you hate me and feel the need to get as far away as possible.”
“True,” Gilda joked, “but there’s also another reason. I’ve got a psychic investigation on my hands.”
“Would you please stop it?”
“Stop what?”
“I said stop that right now! Sorry, Gilda—my brother was
just stuffing the cat into the cupboard again, even though I’ve told him a thousand times HEY! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!”
Wendy’s little brother, Terrence, was always doing things like sticking gum in his hair or trying to give the cat a bath in the toilet. Wendy often had to babysit Terrence after school while trying to finish her homework. As a result, she was very impatient with him. Gilda felt a little sorry for Terrence, since she knew what it felt like to be the younger sibling. She couldn’t understand why Wendy was so stingy about letting him tag along when they got together to watch television or to spy on neighbors. What was so bad about having a small, clueless fan who found everything you did fascinating?
“Go watch television and leave me alone for half a minute!” Wendy yelled. “Sorry, Gilda. So what were you saying about a psychic investigation?”
Gilda explained the bizarre exchange with Miss Underhill and the story she had heard about Dolores Lambert’s ghost.
“Weird.”
“I know. I may need your help with this one.”
“Okay, but I’m going to be really busy this year,” said Wendy. “I’m signed up for a college-level math class, and I also have a big piano competition coming up.”
In the old days, Wendy had had plenty of time to do things like perform séances, spy on neighbors, or try on purple toenail polish, but then her parents decided that it was time for her to get serious about her studies, become a concert pianist, and look after her little brother several afternoons a week besides. At least Wendy
claimed
that it was her parents who put the pressure on
her to become a high achiever. Gilda suspected that Wendy herself was the force behind most of the pursuits, despite her repeated claim that “All I want to do with my life is sleep!”
Gilda heard Terrence crying in the background.
“See?” said Wendy in a high-pitched whine. “I
told
you she would scratch you. Now your arm is going to be infected, and we might have to amputate it. Look, Gilda, I’ve got a cat trauma to take care of. I’d better go.”
Gilda sat down at her manual typewriter to write a letter to her father. It was something she did almost every day—much like keeping a diary. Gilda liked to think that her father could somehow read her letters, especially when they were typed on the antique typewriter that had once belonged to him.
Dear Dad,
Mom has no idea that I want to go to Our Lady of Sorrows just to investigate a haunting.
I have a gut feeling I’m going to be an outsider at this school, but that’s the price I pay for being a psychic investigator. Like my Master Psychic’s Handbook says, “Being a psychic isn’t a normal career, like being a doctor or a lawyer. At some point, there may be a price to pay for such an unusual, misunderstood lifestyle.”
I don’t mean to put you in a bad mood, but I think Mom is going on a date with Brad Squib tonight.
Don’t worry–I still can’t stand him!
Character Flaws of Brad Squib–official documentation:
- Too much nose and ear hair.
- Takes up too much space when he sits on the couch.
- Tries too hard to be likable, and this makes him doubly revolting.
- Jingles car keys in his pocket while talking. Always a sign of perversity.
- Grins in a sinister, cheesy way when he finds something funny, but doesn’t actually laugh.
- Wears aftershave that smells like motor oil.
- Always has to say something even if he knows nothing about the topic being discussed.
Documenting Brad Squib’s flaws gave Gilda a surge of creative inspiration and a desire to write a story. She was tired of thinking about Brad, though, so she decided to begin a sordid tale about Miss Underhill and Mrs. McCracken instead:
As the door closed behind their new victim (a sparkling, witty student on scholarship), Velma Underhill and Shirley McCracken shared a seizure of giggles that ricocheted across the forest. The hags cracked their knuckles and grinned like two arthritic hyenas ready to tear apart a carcass.
“She doesn’t suspect a thing,” cackled Velma.
“Of course she doesn’t!” her plump cohort replied. “They never do!”
“You don’t think she noticed my fangs?”
“No. But she might have noticed my tail.” Mrs. McCracken lifted her long skirt daintily to reveal a scaly, reptilian tail that swished back and forth.
“It’s a magnificent tail.”
“Don’t patronize me, Velma. I’m hungry. Get me a snack!”
Velma slithered into the hallway, where a herd of plump, jolly schoolgirls skipped blithely toward their next class. Velma grabbed a girl who was moving more slowly than the others by her long ponytail and dragged her whimpering back to the headmistress’s office.
Behind a locked door, the fiends sank their razor-sharp fangs into the slow-witted
girl’s neck until there was not a single drop of blood left in her body. Then they tossed her into the lake.
The evil schoolmarms panicked for a moment, realizing that they had forgotten to find out their victim’s name.
“What will we do?” Velma fretted. “We don’t know which school records to delete!”
“Don’t worry,” said Mrs. McCracken, picking a bit of flesh from her teeth with a toothpick. “Nobody will notice she’s missing.”
“Gilda?” Mrs. Joyce poked her head into Gilda’s bedroom. She had tied her wet hair in a towel turban and applied only part of her makeup: one eye was darkened with charcoal eyeliner and mascara and the other remained bare. “Oh. I thought you said you were going to clean your room today.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“Gilda, Brad is at the front door, and I’m not quite ready.”
Gilda turned to scrutinize her mother’s half-assembled appearance. “You look fine,” she lied. “Brad’s pretty casual himself, so I’m sure he won’t mind if you go out like that.”
“Would you mind going downstairs to chat with Brad for two minutes? You can tell him that you liked Our Lady of Sorrows.”
“You want me to ‘chat with Brad’?” Gilda looked at the ceiling dramatically, as if begging for some divine assistance.
“Gilda, please.”
“Oh, all right.” Gilda reluctantly trudged downstairs to face Brad Squib.
“So you liked Our Lady, huh?” Brad Squib sprawled on the couch, legs and arms spread wide apart, as if he were competing with the very furniture to see who could take up more space in the room.
Gilda stood across from him, her arms folded defensively. She didn’t want to sit down because then she’d be stuck in a lengthy, one-sided conversation from which there might be no escape. Whenever her mother said “I’ll be ready in two minutes,” it usually meant that she would be ready in something closer to thirty minutes.
“It was interesting,” Gilda said primly. “Thanks for passing along my application and everything.” As she spoke, Gilda noticed that Brad was chewing a piece of gum with a little too much gusto. The sight of his moving jaws filled her with inexplicable rage.
“That place just blew me away first time I saw it.”
“So how do you know the headmistress?”
“Sold her a car back in the days when I worked at a dealership, and she came back for two more, that’s how. Got her amazing deals on all three of them, too, so she owed me one.” Brad grinned. “Owed me three, actually.”
“She’s letting me into the school because she bought
cars
from you?”
“Well, my company also donated a car to the school, and she raffled it off at a fund-raiser a few years ago. Not that you didn’t get into the school completely on your own merits, of
course. Shirley just did me the solid of taking a look at your application after the deadline.”
“Well, thanks.”
“I made quite a few friends back at the dealership. I had a way with people, and that’s why they pay me the big bucks to direct regional sales now. Did I ever tell you how I—”
“Oh, I almost forgot to ask,” said Gilda, interrupting Brad. She had learned that if she didn’t cut him off in mid-sentence, he would go on for hours, telling her one success story after another. She didn’t know how her mother could stand it. “Did you ever notice anything strange about Mrs. McCracken—or hear anything unusual about Our Lady of Sorrows?”
“Strange?” Brad squinted at the ceiling and worked his chewing gum. He pointed at Gilda. “The hair. Am I right?”
Gilda couldn’t help but crack a smile, and Brad grinned broadly. “Does Shirley still have that crazy Queen of England hairdo?”
“You mean her beehive hairdo?”
“That’s what you call it? It’s like those furry hats the English soldiers wear when they guard the palace.” Brad raised a finger to emphasize his point. “Her hair is nuts.”
“Did she ever mention anything about a girl who drowned at the school?”
