The Drowning Tree (45 page)

“The Drowning Tree?”
Neil asks. “Was that the painting?”

“How do you know?”

“Christine asked if I’d seen it at Briarwood. She said it was missing from the college. You think Gavin would have killed her because she found out he had stolen it from the college?”

“I don’t know, maybe she just asked too many questions about the painting and Gavin thought she was threatening him, while all she was trying to do was find out what happened among Augustus, Eugenie, and
Clare a hundred years ago. There’s a figure in the water in the painting and I saw a statue in the pool where Christine was drowned—”

“Under the weeping beech? Christine told me she read something in Eugenie’s notebook about a statue in the sunken gardens at Astolat. She thought it was a re-creation of the scene from
The Drowning Tree
and she wanted to know if I’d ever seen it on the sketching trips I took with Dr. Horace, but we never went up the Wicomico to Astolat.”

As if summoned into being by his mention of the stream, a bar of light lengthens over the the table, traveling up the rippled surface of the glass stream in the window. I take a step back and lose my balance when I bump into Neil. I nearly topple down the stairs but his hand catches in my hair and pulls me back. Something hard and cold grazes my shoulder and I see he’s holding one of my large carving knives. In the darkness I can see his eyes glittering. He’s ready to take on whoever’s down there.

“Come on,” I hiss, untwining his hand from my hair and pulling him toward the side door. Neil hesitates for a moment and then we both hear a sound like sandpaper as whoever is down below walks across a floor gritty with glass particles. It’s a sound to set your teeth on edge and it seems to release Neil from his stasis, propelling him across the room and out the side door. On the landing outside he stops for a moment and slides the knife into his back pocket. Then he grabs my hand and pulls me down the stairs so quickly that the old rusted-out metal frame shakes and groans with our weight. When we hit the ground I start for the street, but Neil pushes me back against the wall and points toward the street.

The green Jaguar is still there. The windows are tinted, though, so I can’t see if anyone’s inside.

“That’s Gavin’s car,” I whisper.

Neil nods and looks behind him toward the riverfront park.

“We’ll be trapped if we go that way,” I tell him. “No one’s at the boathouse.”

“Can we get into the boathouse?”

“It’s locked, but I think you could get in through the fanlight if you could get up to it.”

Of course any mention of a difficult height to scale only serves to inflame Neil’s ardor to scale it. He sets off running toward the park and it’s
all I can do to keep up with him. It’s not until we’re at the boathouse that I can afford the breath to remonstrate with him.

“Neil, this is crazy. There are half a dozen better ways to get away from Gavin than taking to the water.”

“But how many ways to prove he killed Christine? You think Christine went with him to find the statue under the beech tree, so if we find it we’ll know why he was willing to kill her.”

“But why do we have to do it tonight?” I ask. “Why not wait until the morning?”

“Because if Gavin gets there first he might destroy the statue.”

I try to argue with him again, but he’s already scrambling up the doorway and hoisting himself through the broken fanlight. I’m waiting to hear a crash as he hits the floor on the other side but instead there’s only the click of the door unlocking. I push it open into empty space; Neil has already vanished into the shadows of the stacked kayaks.

There’s an old metal desk a few feet from the doorway. I slide open the top drawer and feel around for the flashlight I know Kyle keeps there. When I switch it on I see the white underbelly of a canoe floating toward me.

“This one looks big enough for the two of us,” Neil says, his voice echoing in the hollow hull.

“It’s Kyle’s two-man outrigger canoe,” I tell him. “He brought it here from Hawaii.” It’s also named
Kingfisher
and it’s Kyle’s favorite boat, but I don’t mention any of that to Neil; I’m too horrified at the thought of taking to the water in any boat with him. He’s moving forward so quickly, though, that all I can do is follow—grabbing two life vests just in case I can’t talk him out of it.

When was I ever able to talk Neil out of anything?
I wonder, trailing him down to the sandy beach.

He’s already got the canoe flipped over with the prow facing out into the river. He reaches for the life vest in my hand, but I hold it back.

“I can’t, Neil. I can’t get in that boat.”

Neil’s eyes meet mine—they have a glassy shine in the moonlight—and he nods. “I can understand,” he says, “but unless you’re more afraid of me than Gavin Penrose, you don’t have any other choice.”

I turn to look over my shoulder and see a figure approaching from
the factory—the vague silhouette of a man who may or may not be Gavin Penrose. Who else could it be, though?

I turn back and look at Neil, his eyes holding mine. Although they still have that glassy shine I can see how much he loves me. “Okay,” I say, handing Neil his life jacket. I slip mine on and stuff the flashlight into a zippered pocket. Neil pushes the boat into the water and waves for me to climb in.
He couldn’t look at me with so much love and still hurt me
, I think as I wade into the river. But as the cold water washes over my ankles I remember that he’d looked at me much the same way the last time we were on the water—just before he’d tried to drown us both.

I
’M GLAD AT LEAST THAT WE’RE IN THE OUTRIGGER CANOE BECAUSE
I
KNOW IT’S LESS
likely to tip. The only problem with the
Kingfisher
, though, is that it’s white, making us a visible target from the shore. I risk a look back, but the motion sets the boat rocking and I quickly face forward again.

“Anyone following us?”

“Not that I could see.”

“Good. He might try to drive across the bridge and onto the estate, but it’s a good forty-minute trip that way. If we paddle fast we should be able to get across the river in ten minutes. How far upstream was the beech tree?”

“Not far.”

Neil picks up the pace and I have to concentrate to keep up. I lock my eyes on the blade of his paddle as it dips into the water and try to imitate the exact motion. I’m surprised at how good he is at this and then I remember that he’s had practice on those trips with Dr. Horace. He rotates his body just right to get the farthest reach on each stroke, burying the paddle blade deep into the water and pulling us smoothly across the river. Although I struggle to keep up with him I feel as if he’s doing most of the work and that my stroke is only a faint echo of his—like I’m a bird soaring in his tailwind, moving easily in a current he’s cleared for me. I relax a little and let the rhythmic push and pull of paddling calm my nerves.

Just put the water behind you
, Kyle always tells his beginning kayakers, and I do. I feel the river sweeping under my paddle and out to the sea.
I even take a moment to notice how beautiful it is to be out on the river in the moonlight, the path we’re following lit up by white ripples on the water. It seems like no time at all before we’ve reached the other shore. Neil lifts up his paddle and holds it parallel to the water, letting us drift with the current while we scan the shore for the mouth of the Wicomico. “Have you got that flashlight?” he asks.

I take the flashlight out of my life vest pocket and shine it over the water toward the shore. The beam of light picks up a steep, rocky bank and catches particles of quartz glittering on the rock face. A dead end. Could we have overshot the creek?

Just when I’m about to suggest we paddle upstream there’s a break in the rock wall and the light vanishes under an arched canopy of weeping willows dark as an underground tunnel. I hadn’t noticed during the day how overgrown the creek’s mouth was or how narrow a passage it makes through the steep hills and overhanging trees.

“Don’t worry about paddling,” Neil says, steering the canoe into the narrow passageway, “just hold the light on the right side of the bank.”

It’s darker under the trees than out on the river in the moonlight. The beam of my flashlight briefly spotlights patches of river grass and thick-stalked irises that sway with the rhythm of Neil’s paddle. I glimpse something black and oily slipping into the water and nearly drop the flashlight. Instead its beam pierces the dark water and glances off something white beneath the surface: a face looking up through the water with blind eyes.

I’d forgotten about the other statues. We pass the one of the crouching boy—Narcissus—and I realize we must be close. Still I’m not prepared for the yet deeper darkness as we pass under the branches of the weeping beech.

Neil backpaddles to keep us steady. “Is this it?” he whispers in a voice hushed with awe, as if we’d entered some medieval cathedral.

“This is where I found her.” I shine the flashlight down into the water, sweeping the beam through the silty depths like a paddle. The illuminated water casts up rippling strips of light onto the branches above our head and for a moment the effect is so dazzling I forget why we’ve come. It’s as if we’re in an underwater cavern looking up through a streaming forest of phosphorescent seaweed.

“I think I see it,” Neil says. “It looks like a statue that’s toppled over into the water.”

I hold the light steady on the white marble hand that had been threaded through Christine’s hair when I found her.

“It looks like there’s some kind of brass plaque attached to it,” Neil says.

“There’s something about a plaque in Eugenie’s notebook,” I say. “That might tell us what we need to know.”

I look toward the shore, trying to see past the curtain of leaves, wondering how long it’s been since we left the boathouse. As if reading my thoughts, Neil says, “We still have time. I’m going to try diving for it.”

He takes off his life jacket and strips off his T-shirt, handing me the soft bundle of cloth.

“Hold the light on it,” he tells me. He slips out of the boat and into the water as smoothly as that animal I saw on the shore a few minutes ago, but still the boat rocks and it takes me a moment to steady myself and aim the flashlight back on the statue. I can see Neil’s face pressed close up to the plaque, his cheeks distended with held breath so that he looks like a personification of the wind in some Renaissance painting. When he comes up I breathe in and realize I’d been holding my breath, too.

“I can’t read it,” he gasps, “but it feels loose. I think the piece of statue it’s attached to isn’t that big. We could probably get it up if we did it together.”

“Together?”

“The water’s not cold at all,” he says, splashing a little of it onto my leg. “And I can tie the towline around one of these branches so the canoe won’t drift. But if you don’t want to—”

“No, it’s all right. It’s not even that deep, right?”

Neil smiles. “That’s my girl.”

I take off my life jacket and stick the flashlight back in its pocket but don’t bother zipping it. Getting out of a floating canoe is no easy feat. I swing my legs around and dangle them into the water—which feels pretty damn cold to me—but when I try to push myself off, the whole boat tips and topples me ungracefully into the water along with the life jackets and flashlight.

Neil dives and retrieves the flashlight and sticks it into the waistband of his jeans, lit end up. Thankfully, it’s an underwater model so it’s still working. The life jackets, though, have drifted too far downstream to reach. He ties the canoe to one of the branches of the beech tree that has snaked over the brick wall and into the water.

“Okay?” Neil asks.

I nod, trying to conserve my breath.

“We’ll dive on three,” Neil says.

I take in a large breath on “two” and dive down, following the beam of light coming from the flashlight. I can see Neil’s fingers working their way under the marble and I plunge my hands into the muck, trying not to think about what could be under there. We both pull up at the same time and, amazingly, the lump of marble comes free. We haul it up onto one of the submerged rocks from the stone wall and come up for air.

“Okay, let’s try to stand on this rock and get it onto the bank,” Neil says.

The rock is coated with algae and moss, making the footing treacherous. I slip the first time and stub my toe on the wall, but the second time we’re able to get the slab of marble and bronze up onto the bank. We stand there for a moment, waist-deep in the water, panting. Then Neil pulls himself up onto the wall and, turning, offers me a hand up.

“The secret to eternal life better be inscribed on this plaque after all that trouble,” Neil says, pulling the flashlight out of the waistband of his jeans. “I think it gave me a hernia.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” a male voice says, “but I thank you for retrieving my property.”

I look up to an opening in the tree. Gavin Penrose is holding the branches back with one hand. In the other hand he’s holding a gun aimed at us.

O
UT OF THE CORNER OF MY EYE
I
SEE
N
EIL REACHING AROUND TO HIS BACK POCKET
where, I remember, he hid the carving knife. Gavin notices, too.