The Seduction of Water (33 page)

“Why didn’t he tell the police you hired him to steal the jewels?”

“Who were they going to believe? A wealthy pillar of the community or a reform school dropout with a criminal record? I believe he tried it on his defense attorney and was smart enough to be talked out of trying it on a jury. I knew, though, that he wasn’t smart—or patient—enough to wait twenty years to retrieve the
ferronière
. He would tell his sister.”

“So you sent one of your men to the Rip Van Winkle train station to scare her into telling where it was.” I picture the station as I passed through it today. The woman who stood in front of me who put down her suitcase and stepped forward toward the tracks. “Only he went a little overboard; he scared her so much she fell onto the tracks into the path of an approaching train.”

Harry makes a disapproving tsking sound. “That’s what comes of not attending to important business yourself. It gets bungled. By the way, how do you know I didn’t go myself?”

“Because you would have realized the girl who fell under the train wasn’t Rose McGlynn. It was Katherine Morrissey. Rose McGlynn—” I close my eyes and picture it again. The girl silhouetted against the sun setting over the river, turning and stepping back toward the tracks, the other girl stepping forward. “—my mother, was standing behind her. When she saw what had happened—when she knew what you were willing to do to get your property back—she picked up Katherine’s bag and left her own on the platform so everyone would think the dead girl was Rose McGlynn and you wouldn’t keep looking for her.”

“Very good, Iris, you’ve got your mother’s brain. Unfortunately you’ve also inherited her recklessness. Imagine her writing those books, telling the whole story as a fairy tale and describing the
ferronière
so precisely.”

“You never read them, though; you didn’t catch her that way.”

“No. I have you to thank for that. The minute I saw you at the gallery I knew you were Rose’s daughter.” He touches the cold metal shaft of the revolver under my chin and uses it to tilt my face up toward him. It’s the first time in my life I’m not glad to be told I look like my mother. I wonder if he plans to shoot me and then try to blame it on Aidan.

“But if you didn’t know until this year, who killed my mother at the Dreamland Hotel?”

“Well, that’s a very interesting story—too bad you won’t get a chance to write it. I was in Europe that summer so I didn’t know about it until I got back in the fall. I could tell something had happened to Peter because his slow, decorous decline into alcoholism, which had been going on for years, suddenly became a headlong plunge. I checked around a bit and heard about the fire at the Dreamland and finally pieced together that Vera had followed Peter there to catch him with some woman. When I found out the woman’s maiden name was Katherine Morrissey I wasn’t surprised, nor was I very interested. I’d known they’d had an affair years ago. It was careless of me, though, not to look into it further. My guess now is that Peter was trying to get the necklace from Kay—whom he recognized as Rose, of course—and that Vera mistook their ‘business meeting’ for a romantic tryst.”

“So Vera shot my mother because she thought she was Katherine Morrissey.” This hurts me more than anything else I’ve learned so far. That my mother’s death was a mistake—a case of mistaken identity.

Harry reads my tears as fear for my own life. “I’m very sorry, Iris, that it has to end this way, and I wish I could think of any easier way to take care of you. Peter and Vera didn’t realize how lucky they were that your mother’s body was burned so completely that no bullet was found, but I can’t depend on having the same luck.”

As soon as he says the word
fire
I become aware of the smell on his clothes, the sickly sweet fumes of polyurethane.

“Aren’t you worried that the fire will look suspicious?”

“An old hotel, careless workmen, all those cans of polyurethane left near a pilot light in the kitchen, every floor coated with the stuff . . . not only will it be easy to explain, it should be mercifully quick. The smoke will probably get you first.” He moves so quickly I don’t have time to react. The hand holding the gun swings back and then arcs down—a quick glint of cold metal that explodes into a white light inside my head, and then darkness.

Chapter Thirty-two

Now I’m the one floating on the surface looking down at my mother swimming below me. She is trying to tell me something, but when she opens her mouth no words come out, only bubbles that rise through the water and pop around my head—one, two soft explosions and then a series of sharper cracks like Morse code. My mother opens her mouth wide and one large bubble drifts slowly toward me, its thin skin shimmering like the plastic bags in Mr. Nagamora’s dry-cleaning store. When it bursts the water around me convulses and knots itself into a hard muscle of current that flings me out of the water onto something hard. I reach for my mother, but instead feel only the hard-packed mud of the riverbank—which slowly, as I struggle to open my eyes, turns into the cold wood floor of my attic bedroom.

The explosions below me have stopped but I know what they were—thirty six-gallon cans of polyurethane set near an open flame. Peeling myself off the floor requires so much effort I wonder if I’ve been lacquered to the floor with polyurethane, but except for the tacky residue on my shoes, my clothes and skin feel dry. There’s only a little dampness around my right temple where Harry struck me with the butt of his gun.

The memory of the gun does wonders to clear my mind. Although my flashlight is gone there’s enough light coming in through the window to dimly illuminate the room—which means that the moon has risen far enough to light the west side of the hotel. How long have I been unconscious? Long enough for Harry to get downstairs, move the polyurethane cans into the kitchen and make sure they were close enough to a flame to explode. He’d wait to make sure they had caught fire before leaving.

I drag myself over to the window and using the edge of the windowsill pull myself up to look out. Six floors below me the garden and the drive leading away from the hotel are empty. The gazebos and flower beds, the narrow graveled paths and hedgerows look like a miniature landscape from here—a Christmas village set up in a shopfront window, lit by flickering red and orange bulbs . . . My mouth turns dry as I realize that the garden is lit up by the fire on the ground floor.

The door, when I try it, is locked. I stick my hand into my pants pocket, but it’s empty. Did he search me and find the extra room key I hid there before he arrived at my door? Or could it have fallen out of my pocket when I fell? I dive to the floor by the bed, palms flat against the wood to feel for the key, willing myself to stay calm and search carefully, to ignore the sensation I have that the floor is already warm to the touch—that the flames are already licking at the ceiling of the room below me.

How long, how long
becomes the chant in my head as I crawl over the floor. How long for the fire to rage through five floors and reach the attic? Will anyone see it from town and send help? But it would be too late—we always knew that up here—that’s why my father installed a pump system from the lake. The pump system that Harry shut down at the beginning of the summer. Had this always been the plan? To burn the hotel down once he had what he wanted? I try to push the questions from my head for now.
Later,
I promise myself; there will be a later if only because I can’t let him drive away from this, leaving the burned-out shell of the hotel like the hollow carapace an insect sheds.

I’ve searched every inch of floor around the bed and haven’t found the key. I sit back on my heels and try to remember where I was on the bed when Harry hit me. I picture myself falling. Then I remember that often when I was little and I’d lost something—an earring, a bookmark—my mother would run her hand between the bed frame and the mattress and retrieve the lost item, flourishing it the way a magician pulls a coin from behind a child’s ear. I stick my hand down between the mattress and the cold metal frame and find dust. But then, halfway down the frame, my fingers loop through a piece of string and when I pull it out I see it’s the worn ribbon that my mother had threaded through the extra key. It must have caught on the metal railing as I fell to the floor—if it hadn’t Harry might have heard it when it hit the floor.

I hold my breath when I turn the key in the lock—Harry might have blocked the door some other way—but the door swings open into the dark hallway. I take one look back and see that he’s left the registration book on the bed. I guess he wasn’t interested in my mother’s story after all. I grab the book, stick it into my canvas bag—which I strap onto my back like a backpack—and leave before I can think about what else I’m leaving behind. Nothing that matters, I say to myself, touching my throat, and then covering my mouth with my hand when I smell the smoke. I dart back into the room and grab a towel from the bathroom, wet it, and use it to cover my mouth as I feel my way down the hall.

When I reach the fifth floor I can hear the fire below me—a rushing sound curiously like water. The only other thing I’ve ever heard like it is the falls after a heavy rain. Keeping one hand on the wall, one hand holding the damp towel over my mouth and nose, I start down the darkened hall. The back stairs, which lead down to the kitchen, might be safer because they’re enclosed, but when I open that door a wave of smoke pours out, nearly overwhelming me. I close it quickly and crouch down on my knees, crawling with my shoulder to the wall until I can breathe easier. It makes sense, I realize, that if Harry started the fire in the kitchen the back stairs would fill with smoke first. I can only hope that the fire is still contained to this side—the north side—of the hotel and that the main stairs are still intact. As I head toward the stairs I listen to the rushing sound of the fire to see if I can tell if it becomes any fainter as I move south. Instead the sound seems to swell in my ears, a dull roar pulsing with the beat of my heart, taking the shape of human voices—horrible cries and moans, which I know are my own imaginings.

I stop and listen. I’ve come to the top of the main stairs and I can see from the window the terrace below lit up as though for a gala ball, only the shadows moving on the terrace aren’t the shadows of guests dancing, they’re the shadows of flames engulfing the hotel. The fire sounds like a multitude—a great throng of people shouting. I have an image of all the guests who have ever stayed here over the hotel’s long history—all their voices, let loose by the fire, crashing together—but then I hear one voice, clear and distinct above the rest, calling my name.

I take the towel away from my mouth and call back. “Aidan!”

I think I hear an answering call from the floor below so I start down the stairs, calling Aidan’s name as I go. When I reach the fourth floor, though, the landing is empty. I stop and listen, but what I hear isn’t a voice, it’s the crashing of glass from below me accompanied by a scream.

“Aidan?” I call again. Had I imagined that it was him? Could it be Harry—somehow caught in his own inferno—and if it’s Harry am I willing to risk my life to save him? Because if the crash is what I think it is—the landing windows exploding from the fire—I should head to the south stairs and try to get out that way.

“Aidan?” I call again when I reach the third-floor landing. Other than the splintered glass from the shattered window the landing is empty.

This time I hear my name. Not from below me, but from above. I’m sure then that I’m imagining the voice—that Aidan come to rescue me is no more real than my vision of my mother in the river.

I sink down to the floor, not so much to avoid the smoke that has thickened the air around me as because I am suddenly very tired. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when she left here to go meet Peter Kron at the Dreamland Hotel—a giving in to the inevitability of the fate she so narrowly avoided on the train tracks at Rip Van Winkle. Maybe, having stolen another woman’s identity, she felt as if she had been living on borrowed time all along.

I touch my throat and the metal disc there feels cool. I unlatch the chain to look at it one more time—not the portrait of the saint but the engraved words on the back.
TO ROSE, WITH LOVE, FROM HER BROTHER JOHN
. This is what my mother left me in the bedpost—not the net of tears but the secret of her identity. The necklace Harry left with is Natalie Baehr’s copy, which I had in my toiletries case. He’s bound to realize it’s fake once he sees it in good light. At least I’ve left one surprise for Harry. My mother must have taken the real one to her meeting with Peter Kron even though she would have known that he might kill her once he had it. I think I know why she went. Peter must have threatened to hurt her brother. That would have been the name that he left on the phone message that finally got her attention. She would have gone to bail him out—just as she’d stood up in court years earlier to plead his case.

I put the necklace back on—even if it doesn’t answer all the questions it might at least raise some when I’m found—but keep my fingers on its cool metal. Catalina della Rosa, patron saint of single women. By flinging her bridal pearls into the Venetian canal she escaped an arranged marriage. How had Anthony Acevedo put it? Santa Catalina protected you from marrying the wrong man. My mother had fled the city and Harry Kron and found my father. She loved my father. I feel sure of it now. She didn’t leave for another man but to help her brother—a child she was bound to protect before I was ever born, just as the selkie has to go back to her children under the sea.

When I hear my name again it sounds as if it’s coming from the depths of the sea and when I open my eyes the smoke is so thick it’s like looking through murky water. A light splits the dark and I see a figure above me. When he leans over me I see the hump on his back where the wings are struggling to break through the skin.

Yes, I think, touching the medal at my throat, Aidan’s the right man.

“Come on, Iris, you’ve got to rouse yourself. Breathe into this.” He gives me a wet handkerchief to hold against my mouth and, shifting his flashlight into his other hand, tries to lift me up. “We’ve got to go out the window,” he says when I fail to rise up with him.

“That’s easy for you to say, you’ve got wings.”

Aidan laughs, but it turns into a cough. It occurs to me that winged angels don’t cough. “I’d save your breath if that’s the kind of nonsense you have to say. Come on.” I get to my feet this time and Aidan steers me toward the stairs leading down to the second-floor landing, which are dark with smoke. I can hear the roar of the fire, like a beast crouching in wait for us.

“I thought we were going out the window,” I say.

“The second-floor window,” he says, nudging me forward. “Unless you really can sprout wings like the men in your mother’s book. I grabbed some sheets to tie together to make a rope, but it won’t be long enough to reach the ground from the third floor.” Aidan keeps talking as we descend the stairs, to calm me, I guess, as if I am a nervous horse that has to be blinkered to be led out of a burning barn. “Aren’t you wondering how I knew you were here?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond before answering his own question. “I knew you were planning to come up here when you said you’d forgotten your book for the train—it meant you planned on taking a longer ride than just back downtown. Then I followed you to the station in Marble Hill and saw you get the Metro-North. I took the next train. I hitched a ride across the river, but he was only going as far as the turnoff to the hotel, so I had to hike all the way up the mountain. Harry’s car passed me on the way down—I hid on the side of the road—and it half scared me to death. I thought he must have killed you already. As soon as I got to the garden I saw the fire in the kitchen. I stopped in the office just long enough to call the police in Kingston and give them Harry’s license plate number. It should be interesting to the police when they pull him over, reeking of polyurethane, fleeing the scene of his own hotel on fire.”

We’ve reached the second-floor landing and he kicks out the plywood boards covering the window. I hear them crack against the flagstone terrace. I can’t help but remember Joseph’s body broken on those stones. “He’s the one who killed Joseph,” I say turning to Aidan. “It’s not enough that he’s caught for trying to kill me and destroying the hotel.”

“Well, then let’s get out of here, so we can tell the police our story.” Aidan drags me down in front of the window, takes off his backpack—which is what I took to be his incipient wings—and pulls out a bundle of sheets. “Guess where I got these?” he asks me as he starts knotting the sheets together.

I shake my head and look down the stairs toward the lobby. The flames have climbed the carpet runner and are licking at the wooden banister on the landing. While I watch, they shoot up the wall opposite the window, drawn by the airwell of the stairs. I see the ceiling around the chandelier blacken and bubble.

“All the sheets had been stripped from the beds—damned efficient staff you’ve got here, Miss Greenfeder . . . “ Aidan is tying the end of the sheets to a radiator next to the window and tugging at it to test the knot. “But I remembered a couple of sheets we stashed in the dumbwaiter on the third floor.” Aidan looks up from tightening all the knots along the rope he’s made. “Remember that day, Iris?”

I nod at him and see his eyes widen. At the same moment I feel a searing pain hit my back, as if I had been lashed with acid. Aidan grabs me and throws me to the floor, using the weight of his body to smother the flames. Then he puts my hands around the sheet-rope and pushes me out the window.

“Just hold on,” he says. I’m out in the cold air looking up at him, his head and shoulders dark against the bright flames behind him.

I’m the one who’s supposed to hold on to you,
I try to say, but the roar of the flames drowns out my words as the fire bursts through the window.