The Drowning Tree (10 page)

I run through in my mind watching her board the train and waving to her—or to the blank screen of her window—until the train left. Could she have possibly gotten off the train without me noticing her on the platform? It seems unlikely, but possible, especially if she walked to the north end of the train and exited on the other side of the stairs leading up to the station waiting room. From the station it was a short walk to the boathouse.…

When we stopped at the boathouse on the way to the station Bea had enthused over her trip up the Wicomico through the ruined water gardens of Astolat. Christine had been interested that so much of the sunken gardens remained and that you could reach them by water. She’d been fascinated with those gardens since she read about them senior year.
Could there have been some piece of research she thought she could discover by paddling up the creek in the middle of the night? It seems crazy, but then I remember what Nathan Bell said about Christine seeming obsessed by the Penrose window. We’d laughed about Christine soaking herself in a cold tub to replicate Millais’s
Ophelia.…

I lay my paddle across my lap and wipe my eyes, forgetting that my hands are covered with salt from the spray off the Hudson. Immediately the stinging is so bad I can barely see. The stream is fresh, but I’m certainly not going to dip my hands in that water. I use some of the water from the bottle of Poland Spring strapped under a bungee cord across the prow of my kayak to wash my hands and flush my eyes and decide I can’t afford to start crying now. If I give in to these images of Christine I’ll be a wreck by the time the police come. I also notice that while busy with hand-washing maneuvers I’ve drifted downstream. I paddle closer to the yellow kayak and force myself to look at the whole picture.

Again I hear Christine’s voice in my head.
You have to stick with what you see and follow where your eye leads you
. Advice she once gave me on writing art history papers.

My eye is certainly drawn to the bright yellow kayak—a strong diagonal slash in the bed of water lilies leading the eye to … what? There’s a pile of rubble half-submerged beneath the water, part of the stone wall that’s caved into the stream. The prow of the kayak is wedged between it and the part of the stone wall that’s still standing. If Christine paddled close to the wall she might have struck the submerged rocks and flipped over. But why would she drown? Even if she was unable to flip her kayak up because it was trapped between the wall and a boulder she should have been able to release her spray skirt from the rim of the kayak and swim to the surface. Right on the front of the skirt there’s a nice big bungee loop that you can pull to free yourself from the boat. I’ve gone over the drill in my mind dozens of times to assure myself that what has happened to Christine would never happen to me—or to Bea. Even if Christine didn’t know about the loop a little struggling should have released her. Unless she was unconscious when she went over.

I let myself drift downstream a bit and then approach the lily patch closer to the wall, coming up behind the yellow kayak, and peer into the water at the collapsed wall, where I see a hand reaching out from the
stone. For a horrible moment I think it’s another body trapped under the rubble, but then I realize that the hand belongs to a statue that’s been toppled headfirst into the water, probably when the wall caved in. I can just make out a marble leg and then, when a ray of sun creeps into the water, something metallic flashes like the bright gills of a carp. I bend over and see that it’s a flat piece of bronze—probably a plaque identifying the statue. When I straighten up I’m so dizzy I nearly topple backward. Is that what might have happened to Christine? Had she paddled over here to look at the statue—at night? with a flashlight maybe?—and lost her balance and flipped over, her head hitting the rocks hard enough to knock her out? Trapped beneath the water she would have drowned.

I look down into the water, where the woman’s golden hair sways between her white swollen fingers. It almost looks as if she’s grasping her own hair—as if her fingers had instinctively grabbed for something to hold onto in her last conscious moments. It’s the same gesture that the Lady makes in the Penrose window.

W
HEN THE POLICE COME THE FIRST THING THEY DO IS HELP ME OUT OF MY KAYAK
. Two uniformed officers take an arm each and yank me unceremoniously out of the boat—like pulling a cork out of a wine bottle—and deposit me on top of the stone wall, where I instantly sink to my knees. I have no feeling in my legs at all. Bea, who’d been hanging back by the patrol car, runs over and practically dives at me. I gather her close to me and we stay there—leaning against each other just like Francesca and Paolo—and watch the three policemen.

The two uniformed officers crouch on the edge of the wall while the third man, who’s wearing gray slacks and a white button-down shirt, makes a call on a cell phone. Within minutes a police van arrives and three more men approach the shore holding diving gear and what looks like an inflatable raft.

“Ma’am, you’ll have to move back now and clear the way for the recovery team. Do you need assistance moving?”

I look up at the plainclothes officer. In the shadow of the beech I can’t see his face clearly. While he waits for me to answer he unbuttons his shirt cuffs and rolls his sleeves up over tanned forearms. I look up into
pale gray eyes spaced far apart—the same silvery color as his short-clipped hair. His nose is slightly hooked. When I first moved into the factory I surprised a screech owl in the warehouse rafters with much the same steely expression.

“Ma’am? Do you need help getting up?”

I shake my head and, with Bea’s help, struggle ungracefully to my feet. A little ways up the bank is a rustic bench. We sit there facing the water, but only I watch; Bea lies down, draws her knees to her chest, and lays her head in my lap. My legs are throbbing with pins and needles, but I stay put, stroking Bea’s hair and watching the “recovery operation” under a darkening sky. The day that started out so clear is turning overcast. As the divers disappear beneath the beech tree I notice that the surface of the creek dimples with raindrops and realize that I’m already half soaked from the rain. Even though I’m pretty sure the woman in the water is Christine I’m hoping that maybe I’m wrong. By the time the men in wet suits have laid the grotesquely bloated form on the stone wall I’m praying that I’m wrong.

The gray-eyed officer comes back up the hill. I can make out his face better now and see that he’s probably a good-looking man when he hasn’t just had to look at a drowned corpse. He runs his hand over his close-cropped silver hair and cuts his eyes sideways to signal me to come with him. I nudge Bea off my lap and walk with the detective down the embankment toward the prone figure on the wall.

At first I think the body on the grass has been encased in black neoprene—like the wet suits the divers are peeling off—but then I realize that it’s just that the black leather jacket and the dress beneath it have been stretched tight by the body’s swelling, and the leather and cloth have taken on an oily sheen from algae.

“We’re guessing she’s been in the water a week, so you may not be able to identify her, but your daughter said something about you thinking the deceased might be her aunt. Would that be your sister?”

I shake my head, swallow, try to speak, and find my throat’s a little dry. I try again. “Not my sister—my best friend.” I remember what Nathan Bell said on the phone. “My oldest friend.”

“Don’t pay too much attention to the face,” the detective tells me, “look for distinguishing marks—a birthmark, a scar.…”

I look away, not just from the face but from the body. I look straight up into the heart of the giant beech, where its branches spring from the main trunk like the ribs of a groined vault. A groined vault made of green glass. If Neil were here he’d already be halfway up the smooth-skinned trunk. He was able to find handholds and footholds on surfaces that looked unbroken to others; he could see where the hidden cracks were.

Look
, he’d said to Christine and me the night he’d decided to scale the library tower,
can’t you see it—like a ladder leading to the moon
. And up he’d gone, clinging to the side of the gray stone wall like a water strider skimming the surface of a moonlit pond. Christine had followed, but for once I hadn’t. Looking up at the sheer wall had made me nauseous—everything had begun to make me nauseous. I hadn’t known it at the time, but I was pregnant. I’ve wondered since if that was the reason I didn’t climb the tower with them that night—not just the nausea but because of some subconscious instinct to preserve the life growing inside of me. It’s what I’d like to think, not that I could have done anything when Christine fell.

She landed on her side—if she hadn’t it might have been her back and not just her leg she broke—one arm cradled under her head as if she were pillowing her cheek for a nap. I’d seen her sleep like that a dozen times on train seats and couches in the library. If not for the unnatural angle of the leg bent beneath her I would have thought she was just napping, but then she raised her head and I saw the blood dripping from her right temple.

The detective kneels and pulls out a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. When he’s put the gloves on he touches a fingertip to the corpse’s chin and gently tilts her face to the left. The hair—now sodden and colorless—falls back from her face. Embedded in the swollen skin is a long scar above the right ear.

“It’s Christine,” I manage to say clearly with only the slightest tremor audible in my voice. “Christine Frances Webb.” I look up and the ribbed vault of the beech tree spins like a kaleidoscope filled with bits of green and yellow glass. Then I lean into the trunk of the tree and throw up on its knotted roots.

B
EA ASKS ME THE NEXT DAY IF
I
WANT HER TO PUT OFF HER TRIP AND STAY WITH ME
. As much as I’d like to keep her close to me after catching a glimpse of my worst nightmare (drowning in a boating accident) turned into horrifying flesh, I know how much the trip means to her. I tell her to go. I drive her to the Wal-Mart parking lot in Poughkeepsie, where she boards a bus with twenty-five happy teenagers. She shoulders her backpack and turns to wave to me from the steps of the bus. Only the smudges under her eyes hint at the sleepless night we both passed.

She’ll sleep on the bus
, I think as I wave to the rear end of the Greyhound until it has pulled onto Route 9.
And I will not
, I tell myself firmly,
compare this leave-taking with saying good-bye to Christine last Sunday. Go home, sleep
.

When I park my car in front of the factory, though, I find the silver-haired detective—at some point yesterday I’d learned his name was Daniel Falco—standing in front of the main entrance. He’s dressed in gray slacks and suit jacket, a pale blue tie loosened at his throat—church clothes—and he’s standing with his hands on his hips, head back, looking up at the inscription carved in stone above the doorway.
Ars longa, vita brevis
. Art is long, life is brief. Not a particularly comforting sentiment after what we saw yesterday come out of the Wicomico.

“Good morning,” I say, getting out the heavy ring of keys to unlock the door. “You’re up early.”

“I could say the same for you. I thought you might be sleeping somewhere in there, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to rouse the lady of the manor.”

“There’s a service entrance on the side for deliveries,” I explain, “and I don’t get many unexpected visitors. I took my daughter Beatrice to the bus for her camping trip. You did say yesterday that it was okay for her to go.”

I’ve gotten the door unlocked but the detective remains a few feet from the doorway, still looking up. Ignoring my reference to Bea’s departure he jerks his chin at the stone carving above the door.

“I asked my dad what that meant once and he told me it was the names of the guys who built the glassworks. Artie Long and Vito Brevis.”

I laugh but I’m so hoarse from crying all night that the sound comes out more like a bark. “Your dad had a sense of humor.”

“Nah, he just didn’t want to admit to his kid he didn’t know something.” He hooks a finger underneath the knot of his tie and pulls. The silk slithers under his collar, making a sound like running water.

“Your father worked for the Rose Glass Works?” I’m surprised because I thought I knew everyone in this little town, especially anyone connected to the glassworks.

The detective nods, folds his tie and stuffs it in his suit jacket. “My father and his father. If it hadn’t closed I’d probably have worked there, too, but when it closed down my family moved across the river to Kingston.”

“Were they cutters or blowers?”

“Blowers. Descended from Venetian glassworkers—at least that’s what my dad always told me.”

“What did your father do after the works closed?”

“Sat mostly. At home in a La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the TV or down at the Italian-American club, where he and the other descendants of the great Venetian glassblowers drank grappa all day and sometimes played a little boccie.”