The Geometry of Sisters (18 page)

The ability to sleep had left Maura. She rested her head on the pillow, and felt as if she'd been through a hurricane. Everything in her
life was broken, pieces all around. But outside, the night was calm and still. She climbed out of bed, pulled on her jacket, walked outside.

The sound of the waves began to soothe her. She walked the path, listening to their constant motion, rolling in from far out at sea. She reassured herself that Travis and Beck were safe in their beds, that they were going to be okay. They were together—they'd get through this. The air was cold; she jammed her hands into her jacket pocket, found the pacifier.

It shocked her fingers, tactile memories of her first daughter's earliest days. She thought of that young mother and baby at the football field; she had been thinking of them as herself and Carrie eighteen years ago, but in that instant everything changed. She'd been wrong—the girl in the parking lot had been Carrie, holding her baby, the one Beck had been so sure about.

“Carrie!” she said out loud.

The white waning moon spread a thin net across the ocean. Salt spray misted her face. The sound of honking filled the air: a flock of geese flying south, right over her head, so close she could almost feel their wing beats.

Turning to watch them pass, Maura looked at the mansion. There was that strange light again: the top floor glowed, a green, watery jewel. She saw a silhouette in the window: a person facing the sea, watching her. She shivered, took a step toward the house, and suddenly the lights went out.

She ran toward the building. As a teacher, she had a passkey— heavy, ridged, magnetized metal, and she dug it out of her bag. She climbed the wide marble steps, whisked the passkey in the electronic lock, and let herself into the front door.

Nightlights burned in bronze sconces all along the quiet hallways. She climbed flight after flight of graceful, curving limestone stairs. It was late, but she saw several students in the halls. They
looked curious, obviously wondering why she was there. One nodded, and Maura waved as she tore up the steps.

As she passed the third-floor landing and approached what should have been the fourth floor, she came to a brick wall. How bizarre, she thought. Compared with the rest of the mansion's gracious French architecture, this seemed clunky, hastily installed, not at all in keeping with James Desmond Blackstone's vision. The top floor was literally bricked off, but nothing could have kept her out.

In the center of the wall was a wide door with a conventional lock. Maura rattled the knob, but it didn't budge. But somehow the latch hadn't caught; she pushed the door open easily. This walled-off part of the stairwell was pitch-dark and smelled musty, but beneath the dust and dampness was the unmistakable scent of chlorine. Winded from her climb and the triumph of getting through the steel door, she headed up the last few steps.

At the top, she stood in total blackness. Her heart was pounding as she felt her way around. It seemed to be a landing just like those on the floors she'd passed, about forty feet square, with balustrades to prevent a fall to the landing below. Running her hands along the cool limestone walls, she felt what was unmistakably a thick wooden door.

So this had been Mary Langley's room, she thought. She'd heard Beck and Lucy talking about the girl's ghost, about how she haunted Newport Academy. There were intimations of a family tragedy, of a lost sister…. Maura had heard some of it, but blocked it out. What significance did Mary have to her? Maura had her own lost girl. “Carrie,” she said. Placing her hands on the doorway, she rested her ear against the carved wood, trying to hear inside.

Yes, that was the sound of water. Gentle movement, as if someone was swimming. Maura's spine tingled in spite of herself.

She reached for her passkey. Hands trembling, she felt to see if the door had an electronic lock like the one at the building's
entrance. Amazingly, it did. Maura swiped her card, waiting for the click. But it didn't happen. Crouching down, she peered under the door.

There it was, luminous, cool, and green: ghost light. She pressed her eye as close as she could to the space between the floor and the door, and tried to see. There were shadows.

Movement: perhaps it was the flicker of water in the pool, or maybe it was Mary and her lost sister, wandering the top floor of their old school.

Why did this make her feel so close to Carrie? She'd been thinking about her daughter so hard, it felt almost as if she'd conjured her. Stretched out on the floor, her cheek on the cold stone, Maura stared at the celadon spirit light and felt her eyes flood. She placed her hand against the door; it was warm to the touch. Heat from the pool, from steam…

She felt as if Carrie was inside the room. Crazy, she knew. But even so, she lay on the hard floor by the narrow stripe of green light and let the feeling stay in her heart, a gentle glow that took her back to Columbus, to her home, to those beautiful times when nothing was perfect but everything was okay, those days over a year ago when her family was all together, before her husband died and her darling girl ran away.

10
THE NEXT DAY KIDS WERE TALKING ABOUT MRS. Shaw getting spooked by Mary Langley's ghost. One girl had spotted the teacher heading to the fourth floor at night, when she wasn't usually in the dorm. Someone else had seen her running—flying—back down. Rumors began, and spread fast: she'd climbed the stairs to contact the spirit world, she'd gone to battle dark forces, she'd attempted to investigate the story of Mary's death, she'd wanted to commune with Mary herself.

The streak of brilliant October sunshine ended, and heavy fog rolled in. Gray and cold, it hovered over the coastline, darkened the day. The temperature staggered downward, and the boiler kicked on, making strange creaking noises in the old pipes. The upper-classmen called it “Mary weather.” Whenever Mary's ghost was disturbed, she summoned the fog from far out at sea.

It was almost Halloween, and eerie tales of Newport Academy were too delicious not to spread throughout the school. The Pumpkin Carve and Blackstone Blaze were coming up fast—no one would know exactly when until the stack of firewood for the bonfire appeared by the football field.

“Hello, Ghost Hunter,” Stephen Campbell said, stepping into Maura's classroom between periods.

“I'm glad you think it's funny,” Maura said.

“Seriously, you're the school's superhero,” he said. “My second-period geometry class was in awe of you. They practically had you in a sword battle with the Dark Lord on the fourth-floor landing.”

“The Dark Lord?”

“You haven't been here long enough,” Stephen said. “Cities have urban myths. Newport Academy has school myths, and that's one of the biggest ones.”

“Who is he?”

“Percival Vanderbilt. The White Knight's archenemy.”

“And who is the White Knight?”

“None other than James Desmond Blackstone himself. Vanderbilt tried to keep this school from being built—he saw Blackstone's fortunes rising, encroaching on his own. He said that Blackstone was shanty Irish, and as such didn't know a thing about education. He had a lot of influence here in Newport, but Blackstone was a fighter, and he wasn't going to give up. The kids like to say the battle rages on, the Dark Lord and the White Knight.”

“What's James Desmond doing haunting his own school?”

“Protecting Mary Langley cracking the whip to make the kids study, reminding everyone of his power the way he did in life. Pick one….” He gave her a grin, and Maura smiled back in spite of herself.

“Why would he have to protect Mary?”

“She was Vanderbilt's niece,” Stephen said. “Her father didn't measure up in Vanderbilt's eyes, and he objected when Langley married his sister. Langley was a friend of Blackstone, and Vanderbilt took his sending Mary here as the worst kind of affront. But as time went on, he wanted to know his niece—his sister had died, and Mary connected him to her. The story goes that Percival picked Mary up at school on a foggy December night, the tail end of a big snowy nor'easter, and his carriage crashed right off the cliff, into the water. Langley never saw Mary again.”

Maura couldn't speak: she could feel Langley missing his daughter. She touched her desk. There were paperclips in a tray. A blue notebook. She raised her gaze to the window, to the impenetrable fog, wondered where Carrie could be.

“Have I upset you?” Stephen asked.

“Did she drown?” Maura asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You said that the carriage went off the cliff. Did Mary drown?”

“Yes,” Stephen said. “J.D. and Patricia grew up with the story. People ran to the edge, saw the carriage floating in the sea, just like a boat. Mary was inside, hands on the windows. They tried to get down to rescue her, but a big wave swamped the carriage, and it sank.”

Maura stared at her blue notebook. She thought of Carrie in the water. She hadn't drowned, but the experience had taken her away.

“Would you take a walk with me?” Stephen asked.

She hesitated only for a minute, then nodded and stood. Her classes were finished for the day and Stephen's must be too. Grabbing her coat, she followed him down the corridor, and went outside to wait while he got his. The air was cold and damp, the mist so thick it blocked any view of the sea. She sat on a bench, and when she looked up, she saw Blackstone Hall disappearing in the fog.

It looked so very like another Newport mansion she knew, that stood a mile south along the cliff. She remembered the day J.D. had shown it to her, the house he'd grown up in. It had been a foggy afternoon, just like this. He hadn't driven her through the front gates; he'd said his parents would insist they stay for dinner.

“What would be so bad about that?” she'd asked. “Don't you like to eat with your parents?”

“That's not it,” he said, shaking his head. He parked his motorcycle in the driveway to the service entrance.

“Service entrance?” she'd asked.

“For deliveries,” he'd said.

“You make it sound like a hotel,” she'd said. “What kind of house needs ‘deliveries’?”

He hadn't answered. Just led her down a path, through a cut in the hedge, onto the public Cliff Walk. They'd walked a hundred yards, waves crashing on the left. The tall hedge on their right prevented them from seeing into the property. Soon the gravel path slanted downhill slightly, and they walked into a stone tunnel under the lawn.

They were quiet. She thought about Andy, his proposal by the covered bridge, knew that she was supposed to leave Newport at the end of the summer. She'd thought, “supposed to.” Because by then her feelings had her on such a roller coaster, she wasn't sure she could.

It was dark in the tunnel, except for the opening at the other end, fifty yards away. Halfway there, they stopped. J.D. turned to his right, dug in his pocket for his keys. Maura heard the rasp of a lock. He gave her his hand, pulled her through an iron gate. Inside the gate, they found themselves on stone stairs that led upward, into the private property behind the hedge—J.D.'s yard.

“I made that gate,” he said. “When I was seventeen.”

She heard him, but was struck speechless by what she saw. There, a football field away, looming out of the thick fog, was the biggest house she'd ever seen. It looked like a French château, something she'd studied in eighteenth-century history. Two wings jutted out toward the sea on either side of a classical garden.

They walked toward it, and as they got closer, she saw more details: columns and a portico, stone lions on the terrace, marble urns planted with cascading flowers. Windows faced the sea, and through them she saw tapestries and large paintings and carved marble fireplaces and a curved staircase.

“Now I know why you need deliveries here,” she said. “It's like a museum. You live here?” she asked.

“You know where I live,” he said.

“The warehouse,” she said.

He nodded.

“Why? You don't get along with your family?”

“I get along with them fine. I just don't like living here. I want… more.”

“More?” she laughed. “How could there be more?”

He laughed too. “All this gets in the way,” he said. “Of what I want.”

“What do you want?”

He stared at the house, then turned to her. “Real life,” he said.

“Is that why you made the iron gate?” she asked. “Instead of letting your parents hire someone to do it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That's exactly why.”

“That's why you didn't want to drive into the front driveway,” she said. “With me … I'm too ‘real life’ for this place.”

“That's not the reason,” he said. He stared at her, blue eyes burning through the fog.

“Then what is?”

“You're going back to Ohio,” he said. “You haven't told me why, or who's waiting for you there. Is it that guy?”

“Stop, J.D.”

“Look, I know you had a boyfriend,” he said. “Katharine told me even before you got here. But that's changed.”

She'd clamped her mouth shut, unable or unwilling to talk about it. She couldn't think about Andy or talk about him to J.D.

J.D. held her, pulled her close.

“You know you can't go back,” he said.

“We can't talk about that,” she said.

“Maybe not now,” he said. “But we will. Because I'm not letting you go.”

“Shhh,” she'd said, letting him kiss her.

“And then,” he said, stopping, “we'll find a place—not the warehouse, and not here. A house. We'll live together, and I'll bring you
here to meet my parents. You'll be the first girl I've done that with.”

“Shhh,” she'd said again, and he'd kissed her again as the fog swirled around them.

Eighteen years later she strode with Stephen through the mist; he took her along a bluestone path to the cliff. They passed trimmed hedges, overgrown vines, wind-twisted cedars. They took the path down to the beach, and Maura hugged herself to stay warm as they walked along the hard-packed sand. Off the cliff, away from memories of J.D., she began to breathe easily again.

“It feels good to get away from school,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “The walls can really close in. The academy is its own little world…. Besides, I've been wanting to talk to you.”