River Road (35 page)

“But she showed it to me. She might have shown it to someone else—Ross, for instance.”

“No, I checked on that when I went by for my little chat with him. He said Leia was going on about something to do with plagiarism that night but he thought
she
had possibly stolen someone else's work. Before she could tell him what was really on her mind, though, you burst into the kitchen and interrupted her. Thanks for that, Nan. Your hysteria over not getting tenure has been very useful.”

“She might have told Troy.”

“Troy's dead,” she snapped. “And good riddance. He was a posturing idiot, with all his Hemingwayesque macho prose and overinflated Greek allusions.” She went on harshly critiquing Troy's writing and then the literary failings of the rest of her students. I let her. Her voice echoed off the icy hills. It gave me time to think, to find some flaw in her plan. There must be some mistake she'd made that would expose her, but even if I came up with one she would dismiss it. She was the one who was arrogant. She believed that she'd plotted this scenario out perfectly, that all she had to do was dispose of me and she would be free
to bask in the success of
The Sentences
, no doubt enjoying the irony that she had evaded her own prison sentence.

We had reached the train tracks, which had been shoveled out by Amtrak crews. I listened for an approaching train, thinking I might be able to attract the attention of a passenger—a thought that made me laugh.

“What's so funny?” Cressida asked.

“I was thinking of that Agatha Christie novel in which an old woman sees a murder from a train window.”

“
4.50 from Paddington
. Thanks for reminding me.” She looked down at her watch, which had an illuminated dial. “The nine fifty-six will be through in ten minutes. Let's get across the tracks and into the boathouse. You have a suicide note to write.”

She gave me a nudge with the gun and I stumbled over the tracks. The narrow path to the boathouse was covered with ice. The river itself had reached an uneasy stasis. It was frozen as far as I could see but this close I could hear the creak and moan of the ice moving, nudged by the current flowing beneath the surface. Even if the temperature stayed this low it would be weeks before the ice was solid enough to venture across safely. If I tried to run across it Cressida would only have to shoot me down and give me a nudge into the water. I would join Troy and Scully and our bodies would stay trapped beneath the ice until the spring thaw.

“Come on,” Cressida said, “plenty of time to admire the river later. Time to make your amends. Just think of the boring AA meetings I'm saving you from.”

The cold pressure of the gun against my neck propelled me into the boathouse. It was darker in here, with only the glow from the open berths to light the high-ceilinged structure. I could use this darkness, I thought, with Cressida close behind me, if I rammed back into her and knocked the gun loose I could get away and hide in the dark—

But my plans were cut short by a flare of light. Cressida had taken a flashlight out of her coat pocket. She was aiming it at the far wall.

“Over there,” she said. “Under Leia's masterpiece.”

I walked toward Leia's self-portrait, which was lit up by the flashlight beam. The wavering light—
she must be cold if her hand is shaking
—made it look like there was life in those eyes, as if Leia was following my progress across the slick boathouse floor. They had the same startled look they'd had in the kitchen when I interrupted her talk with Ross.
Why didn't you listen to me?
they seemed to say now.
If you hadn't been so caught up in your own problems, if you had just stopped and listened, neither of us would be here right now.

She was right, of course, but it was too late. The irony was that I could hear her voice now. There was nothing else to hear but the creak of the ice and the stir of wings in the loft overhead.

I stopped and did what Leia was asking me to do.
Listen
. There
was
something stirring overhead in the loft. The last time there'd been the owl. I remembered looking up when it flew toward Scully. It came from the boat loft built high in the rafters, the place where the Blackwells had stored boating gear—life jackets, blankets . . . a person could hide in there and insulate themselves from the cold—

“Don't tell me you're afraid of facing Princess Leia,” Cressida snapped. “Or do you believe those ridiculous ghost stories the students tell?”

I looked back over my shoulder at Cressida. The light from the flashlight cast ugly shadows on her face, making her look like a ghoul from a horror movie. But it wasn't just the light; there was fear in her face. She didn't like looking at Leia's portrait either—and she didn't like the idea of ghosts.

“You mean like the ice hag?” I asked. “You know, Hannah told me she'd seen her lurking around the house, looking in my windows.”

“I'm sure Hannah Mulder sees a lot of things after a drink or ten at the Swan.”

“I think she saw you that night Leia died. I think she'll tell Joe that if I die.”

“And do you think anyone will believe anything Hannah Mulder says? But thank you for the heads-up. I can easily arrange for Hannah to have a little accident on her way home from the Swan. Just as easily as I arranged for her to ‘leave' that bottle of Four Roses on Leia's shrine.”

A floorboard in the loft creaked. I spoke quickly to cover it up.

“How many people will you have to kill, Cressida?” I asked. “Do you really think you can have all these deaths on your conscience without paying a price? Leia, Troy—”

Another creak came from the loft. There was someone up there. It could be some homeless person taking shelter, but I was hoping it was Troy. That he hadn't drowned in the river, that he'd dragged himself out and found shelter in the loft. He would be half frozen to death. The only way he could help would be if he could pounce right on top of Cressida. I had to get her directly underneath the edge of the loft.

I turned back to the painting of Leia and walked up to it, feeling a prickle at the nape of my neck as I passed under the edge of the loft.

“You can't even look at her, can you?” I said to Cressida. “A girl with her whole life ahead of her cut short because you were afraid of people finding out you plagiarized her story.”

Cressida moved forward but stopped a foot or two away from the edge of the loft, her head tilted as if consulting Leia's face.

“It wasn't just that,” she said. “When she came to me to ask—no,
demand
—that money she called me a leech. She said I didn't have any more of my own life to write about so I had turned to other people's lives to steal from—as if that's not what all writers do, as if that's not what
she
did when she wrote her precious poems about quilting circles or your boy Troy when he hung out with drug dealers in the projects.”

I heard another creak from overhead.

“You're right,” I said, hoping the surprise of hearing me agree would distract Cressida from the noise. “We are leeches. That's why I stopped after Emmy died. Because I'd cared more about getting something down on the page than about her and that moment's distraction—”

My voice wobbled. Cressida smiled, which only made her look more ghoulish in the flashlight's glare. “Poor Nan, what a terrible thing to live with. That's why artists should never have children. Well, you won't have to live with it much longer. Here—” She reached into her coat pocket. She had to hold the flashlight and gun in one hand in order to take out a red Sharpie. “You're going to write ‘I'm sorry, Leia. I'm sorry, Emmy' beneath the painting. Then I'll let you take the rest of the pills and you can have a nice, quiet nap on the ice.”

She was holding the pen out for me. I didn't move. I held my breath, waiting for her to come to me, hoping it
was
Troy up in the loft, hoping he saw his opportunity.

She stepped forward, the boards creaked—

She stepped back, dropping the pen and grasping the gun with two hands, the flashlight crossed over it, both aimed at the loft. “I see you, Troy Van Donk,” she shouted. “Come down slowly or I'll blow your brains out.”

I took a step forward and she aimed the gun at me. “And your favorite teacher's. Come down and join the party. You, Nan—over here so you can see your pet student.” She waved me out from under the loft. I came forward, hoping now that I'd been wrong, that it wasn't Troy.

“Don't come down!” I called. “She's just going to kill us both.”

“Yes, but it can be a quick bullet to the head or a slow, agonizing gang war execution. Which do you prefer, Mr. Van Donk?”

A hooded figure appeared at the edge of the loft and lowered himself down to the floor. The young man was so thin and scared-looking that for a second I barely recognized my cocky student, but then his eyes skittered toward me and I did.

“I'm sorry, Professor Lewis, I was gonna try to jump her but I was shaking so bad.”

“Have you been hiding here since the fight with Scully?”

“Yeah. He left me for dead in the river but I got out, made a fire, found some clothes up there . . .” He pointed to the loft. “I thought
you
were dead until I heard you two come into the boathouse yesterday.” He switched his gaze toward Cressida. “Did you really kill Leia, Professor Janowicz, all because she asked you for money?”

“She didn't ask, Van Donk, she was threatening to blackmail me.”

“It was so she could give me the money to pay back Scully. So I didn't get killed.” His eyes were glassy in the glare of the flashlight as he looked back at the painting of Leia.

“I guess Saint Leia wasn't so bad after all,” I said.

“Well, you'll all have a chance to be reunited,” Cressida said. “In the great writing workshop in the sky. Troy's eleventh-hour appearance calls for a change of plan, but I can accommodate this plot shift. Maybe I could write fiction after all! So, let's see, Nan, what do you think of this: kindhearted but too trusting Professor Nan Lewis went looking for her lost student, but when she found him hiding in the boathouse he shot her and then, in a surge of grief and self-pity, shot himself—all with a gun he got off the lowlife scum drug dealer who tried to kill him. How's that for a narrative even your dim-witted cop boyfriend can follow? Do you see any holes in it? Come on, don't be shy, let's workshop this sucker!”

There was a manic glee in Cressida's voice that made my skin prickle. The fact was, I couldn't see any flaws in the story she'd outlined. Then I looked down.

“Your footprints,” I said.

“Thanks for the reminder, Nan. I'll clean up in here. As for outside . . .” She looked over her shoulder at the open berths. “Look, it's snowing again. The weather has been very accommodating, although I must say that when my book takes off—which I'm sure it will, with all the publicity it will get after the recent tragic events the author witnessed at Acheron—I may chuck this job and move to someplace warmer. So”—she smiled at us—“let's move this party outside. I think an open-air shooting on the river is so much more poetic, don't you?”

I looked at Troy and nodded. We'd have a better chance of making a
run for it outside, which Cressida must have known. So why didn't she shoot us right here? Was she losing her nerve?

As she waved the gun to make us move, I saw her eyes snag back on Leia's self-portrait. Was that it? Did she not want to kill us in front of those accusing eyes? Troy looked at me questioningly. I was the older one, the teacher, I should have a solution. I nodded for him to go first. I followed, Cressida behind me. If I turned on her quickly, maybe I could divert her long enough that Troy could get away. But I saw how weak and faltering Troy's steps were. He'd never be able to run fast enough.

Cressida was right. It was snowing. Light, lofty flakes falling out of a black sky. I turned my face up and felt their feathery kiss on my skin. They seemed to carry their own glow with them, lighting up the frozen river. I could see the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge arcing south of us, its lights a string of garland against the looming mountains. The mountains were edged with a greenish glow as if the sun, long gone, still burned somewhere on the edge of the world. If that's where I was going, if Emmy was waiting for me there, I wouldn't mind dying so much . . . but Troy didn't deserve to lose his life.

I turned at the edge of the frozen river to face Cressida. “Let Troy go,” I said. “No one will take his word against yours.” I turned to him. “You'll take the blame for Leia's death and mine, but at least you'll be alive. You're young. You can survive this.”

“No,” Cressida said, pointing the gun at Troy. “Actually, he can't.”

I think I already knew that she wouldn't spare him before the gun went off, because I was already moving, already putting myself in between Cressida and Troy. Still the impact was shocking—a fireball exploding in my chest. I heard the crack of ice as I landed flat on my back. Cressida was staring down at me, shocked by this development. But Troy wasn't. Good boy, I thought, he'd seen it coming. He lunged at Cressida and knocked the gun from her hand. It skittered across the ice. I followed it with my eyes; it seemed to leave a trail of lights behind it and multiply into two guns that swam and bobbed and then blurred.
I closed my eyes and felt something brush against my face, something soft and feathery as a kiss, silky as a child's hair—

I opened my eyes and she was there, her face lit up from within, blond braids held back by pink barrettes, breath that smelled like cherry Chapstick—

“Emmy.” The word came out a wet rasp. There was something blocking my throat and liquid filling my mouth as though I was already beneath the ice, already drowning.