Lost Girls

chapter 12

Early the next morning, inspired by six hours of semiadequate sleep and a larger than usual nasal breakfast, I decide to drive back up to Lake St. Christopher for another look around before taking on the day's more pressing tasks. Outside, the rain comes down in silver curtains. Cold enough to draw the blood away from fingers, toes, and face within a minute of stepping out the door. If it gets this bad up here at the end of September, what cruelties will December bring? I make a mental note to check out the army surplus store down the street and stock up on thermal long underwear.

Then I'm in the car, head buzzing, heat cranked, crunching onto the white-frosted stones of Fireweed Road. Rain syrups down the windshield, thinks about turning to ice before the defroster's warm breath decides the matter for it. Bringing the Lincoln to a stop in the squishing mud that has blurred the pattern of boot prints and car treads clearly visible just days ago.

But I'm not here to take the same route down to the water as before. Instead, there's a path that begins where the road ends and heads around the far side of the lake. Rain turns to mist as it bounces off the cover of pine needles and black ash boughs above. The air is quiet, and the turning leaves around me--yellow and red and an almost unbelievable gold--are uninterrupted for long stretches by any building, signpost, or litter. In fact I have to walk a full twenty minutes around the far end before spotting the first cottage, a shabby clapboard box that wouldn't pass for a garden shed in certain Toronto backyards. Look in its windows expecting abandonment but instead finding definite signs of life: a loaf of bread beside a knife on the tiny kitchen's cutting board, the embers of a fire in the brick hearth, an unfinished mug of coffee holding down the sun-yellowed page of a crossword-puzzle magazine. Beyond this I can see straight through and out the window at the front, which takes in a view of the water and the few road-accessible cottages on the far shore.

''You make a habit of putting your nose up against other people's glass?''

An old woman's voice behind me. Not a day under eighty, judging from the wrinkled erosions mapped into her skin, shoulders collapsed at her sides. There, standing at the top of the slope next to a woodpile I hadn't noticed on the way in. Her tone is disapproving, pitched up through the grinding sand in her chest. But she takes me in with a squint that softens her a little, adds a scornful humor to her face, blotched and fuzzy as a bruised peach. The accent is the same as the others up here--clipped and tight--but beneath it there is also the slight rise at the end that I've heard before in those who've grown up in Scotland, the north of Ireland, or one of those damp, peaty places.

''I'm not a snoop by vocation,'' I answer. ''But I do apologize for--''

''Names first. I'm Helen Arthurs. Widow of Duncan James Arthurs.''

I wonder for a second if I'm supposed to recognize the dead husband's name, but seeing as I don't, I make no mention of it.

''I'm Bartholomew Crane. Just to explain, Mrs. Arthurs, I was walking along this side of the lake for the purposes of an investigation of sorts--''

''Bartholomew Crane, you say?''

''Call me Barth.''

Shifts a little inside her bundled layers of knit sweater, windbreaker, and scarf. Then she slowly pulls the folds of her neck out of the encasement of her clothes, a turtle's head emerging from its shell.

''But tell me now, Mr. Crane, what are you really doing up here at a quarter to eight on a rainy bugger of a morning?''

''You know something? I'm not quite sure myself.''

I smile up at her as charmingly as I can, hoping she'll simply stand aside and let me go. But she does nothing of the sort.

''I'm here on business.''

Nothing.

''I've been hired as Thomas Tripp's defense attorney, if you'd like to know the truth.''

''Oh, I always like to know the truth, Mr. Crane.'' She laughs now, though her stance is unchanging. ''Now, speaking of the truth, there are some things about that whole business you may not know.''

''Oh, yes?''

The squint returns. Puts one hand on a tree trunk next to her and the other on her hip, gives me a good looking-over, lingering on the mud-caked dress shoes and loosened silk tie of black and emerald stripes.

''I'm sure of it,'' she says. ''But if you ask around here you won't get much help. They all think the teacher's the one. If you ask me, though, I'd say it isn't exactly so.''

''That's encouraging. But you know, I really should be heading back.''

Neither of us moves. Odds are the old lady's clueless, her brain softened by too many years spent alone in the empty woods, or maybe just by too many years, period. But you can never be sure. There's always the possibility that she had her bird-watching binoculars on the day in question and saw something that may be of help to old Thom Tripp. Nothing for me to do but try to grease her wheels by stepping forward to rest my foot on a protruding root halfway up the incline.

''Mrs. Arthurs, it's been informative, truly, but I must--''

''Don't you want to hear?''

''Hear what?''

''What I think happened to your missing girls.''

''They're not mine. In fact--''

''I think they're in that lake there.''

She sticks the hand on her hip out in the direction of the water, but her fingers are too crooked with arthritis to indicate any point in particular and their wayward pointings take in everything before her at once.

''Well, that would seem the most likely suggestion,'' I say, now a little closer to her than I would like. ''But the police have conducted extensive searches--scuba divers, underwater sensors, and the rest. And nothing, I'm afraid.''

''I didn't say they're ever going to find them.''

She holds up her chin in a gesture of triumph and the loose folds of skin that enwrap her neck are drawn tight enough to show the bulging pipe of her throat.

''You beg the question, Mrs. Arthurs, so I'll ask it. How do you know that's where they are?''

''Because it weren't your man that took those young girls away, although God knows he may have had some hand in the business somehow.'' She flicks her hand dismissively through the air before her. ''No, it weren't him, if you ask me. It was the Lady.''

''The Lady?''

''That weren't her real name, of course. It's only because nobody had a bloody clue what to call the wretched thing that we all got to speaking of her as the Lady, or the Lady in the Lake, though there's not many alive today who'd remember her as she was then.''

She's setting me up. Without even an invitation inside for a cup of coffee and lump of bread she's going to go ahead with this tale of hers no matter what evasions I might attempt. And the tough old bird has got me stuck here, nodding at her to continue.

''She was barren, you see,'' she says now, voice lowered as though there was a risk of being overheard. ''At least they made her barren, so she couldn't have no more.''

''I'm sorry?''

''Gave her a hysterectomy, is what they did. But that was only salt in the wound, because they did that after they made her childless. Had her little ones taken from her, on account of a mental hospital not being a fit place for a mother to bring up children. So the doctors or the government or whatever--they took her kids away, and were never seen by their blood mother again. At the time there were some who said it was the taking the kids away that made her go strange. Some others say it was the operation they went ahead and did on her. But I say she was damn crazy to begin with.''

''So where is she now?''

''Oh, she's of no use to you, Mr. Crane. She's been good and dead for fifty years now.''

The old lady juts her chin out at the lake and I involuntarily turn, as though she's got something right there in her sights before her. But there's only the gray surface of the water, pocked by rain.

''Nobody knew what her real name was, you see, because back then all the crazy people were just put away and nobody much cared about why or where they came from. It was 1945, the war not long over and all the boys back home, and she just showed up in town one day, a bag o' bones with her hungry kids holding her hands, like they'd just come back from the war themselves. Christ knows, they probably had.''

A swipe of a knuckle under her nose wipes away a dried stalactite hanging from one of her nostrils. Her face now gone pale--was always pale--except for the splatter of liver spots the color of tea stains on linen.

''Now, people tried to do her a good turn at first, you understand. Got her to do housekeeping work if they could afford to pay her, but it never worked out for one reason or another. Mostly, I suppose, because she didn't talk proper English to nobody. And she never told a soul her name nor those of her wee ones. Like she knew and wouldn't say, or had forgotten altogether. And of course there was her behavior to think of too.''

''Behavior?''

She peers into the rain that falls between us, pulls tight the scaffolding of lines inscribed over her forehead and empty cheeks.

''Indecency. Lived like a gypsy. Camping out in the woods here. And when they bathed, they'd just go down to the water without a stitch on and wash themselves right out there in plain sight. In the middle of the day. Starkers.''

''And this--''

''Was a terrible temptation, of course. Word got out. Boys back from the service started coming round to watch her stand there washing herself on the rocks. And she'd turn around slow so's they all could get a good long look. She knew they were watching, sure as day. And so who could be surprised when our boys--some of them married men--started visiting her at night. None left disappointed, is what was said. And we couldn't let that go on in addition to everything else, could we?''

I say nothing to this, but she must take it as solemn agreement, because she draws a racking breath and continues with renewed volume. Behind her something scuttles away through the leaves.

''Well, there wasn't anything for us to do, was there? We had those poor kids of hers to consider in the long term, you see. So we got her put away at Bishop's Hospital up the road there, which isn't a real hospital at all, it being nothing more than where the old folks with no family were put and some of the boys that came back not quite right from the war. And which would've been all right if she hadn't busted out.''

The old woman coughs once and sends a pearl of spit tumbling through the air at such velocity that my ducking lunge comes a full second too late.

'' 'Twas the winter after she was put away that she went and escaped and she was still nobody, not a name under God she could go by,'' she goes on. ''Just this poor thing with the wind ripping up her hospital gown and only the blue cotton slippers they used to give them in there on her feet. And when she fell through the ice of that lake there after she'd run away, there weren't a funeral or nothing like that, because any family she would've had around here weren't admitting to belong to her. A woman who went around for a week in a freezing cold March, cooing at the little kids from town while they were walking to and from school, trying to get them to come back with her into the woods, come for a nice walk with Mommy. For that's what she said, using the few words she could say proper. You see what she had going on in her head? But of course none of us cared a whit about that, did we? Our first concern was to protect our own children. Keep them from this creature who wanted nothing but to take them away.''

''Mrs. Arthurs, I really must be getting--'' I start, but a drop of rain that lands directly in my eye cuts me off and for a moment Mrs. Arthurs is washed away in tears. When they clear I see that she now struggles to hold back her own.

''There was nothing else for it,'' she goes on finally. ''And so it was that my own Duncan along with some of the other men in town got together and went into the woods--these woods right round here--to find her out. Hunt her down. And when they came upon her they found her lying in the tree trunk she'd made as her bed, talking to herself like the madwoman she was. Well, the men had a meeting right there among themselves and decided that instead of taking her back to the hospital where she'd just get out again, they might as well go ahead and put an end to the matter.''

''An end to her, I take it.''

She glances out at the lake again, nods once as though answering a question distinct from my own.

''But she was fast. Faster than any of them expected. Chased her all the way down out of the bush and onto the ice that was breaking up under the first days of spring sun, though all the men had the sense to stop at the bank. Stood there and watched her, just like I did, for I'd heard all their whooping from up here and come down to see for myself. All of them there--the bank manager and the fellows who ran the town stores and the ones who worked the quarry--all the men of Murdoch watching her out on the middle of the ice. We could see it was cracking, the water bubbling up dark around her feet. But that wretched woman, do you know what she did? Turned round to us and gave us a look. Just gave us this long look, you see, and opened her arms out wide like she was bringing someone to hold to her breast. She did all that, which was terrible enough, and then she does something worse. From the black hole of her mouth she lets out an awful cry. Hateful and mournful all at once. Truth was it got to a point we were all left wishing for the ice to break through and swallow her up just to be rid of the noise. And then finally it did, and down she went. But not for a second did she stop making that sound or move her arms to grab at the ice or try to pull herself up. Just kept crying out with her mouth wide open until the water came up and flooded it closed. But the last thing we saw of her--and we all saw it, I know, despite the distance she was at--the last thing we saw was that look. And I can tell you now, sure as Christ, there weren't nobody who saw it who had any doubt that woman had something monstrous in her heart.''

She smacks her lips closed, presses them white.

''That's quite a story, Mrs. Arthurs.''

'' 'Tisn't a story.''

I take another step and pull up my lapel to combat the cold that's now reached below my skin to the bones. Only now does the old woman move aside to let me pass.

''A question,'' I say when I'm standing beside her at the top of the slope, surprised to find that on even ground she's not much broader than the trees around her and little more than half my height. ''Why do you believe the Lady in the Lake has anything to do with this? I mean, you have to admit, the likelihood--''

''Do you have any children of your own, Mr. Crane?''

''No, I don't.''

''Ah, well then,'' she says, and shoos me off with a wave of her hand. ''You wouldn't know then, would you?''

''Know what, Mrs. Arthurs?''

''What a mother or father will do.''

I head back into the trees, leave her to collect whatever wood she'd require to cook her dinner, to her crossword puzzle and view of the weed-choked shore. It isn't until I've found the path again that I call back to her.

''About the Lady. How many children did she have?''

''Two girls,'' the old woman shouts through the trees. ''Isn't that a pickle?''