The Lake of Dead Languages : A Novel by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman [Goodman, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: ?
ISBN: 9780345487155
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2005-12-27T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

WE'LL HAVE TO TAKE THE BOAT," LUCY SAID AS WE were leaving the dorm. "It's the only way we can be sure it sinks deep enough."

"It" was the way Lucy referred to the thing in the tea tin. She had placed the tin in her gym bag and carried it, not by the handles, but cradled upright in her arms--the way a person would carry a cake in a box.

Before we left the room I checked on Deirdre. She was sleeping soundly, her lips moist and parted, her cheeks pink in the overheated room. She didn't look like a person bleeding to death, but like someone drugged.

"I gave her some of that tea she's always saying is such a good sleep potion," Lucy told me. I noticed the red lacquer box lying empty beside the bed. "She'll be OK."

When we left the dorm I turned onto the path but Lucy steered me into the woods. "We can't risk taking the path," she said. "We might run into someone."

The campus felt deserted. I knew that some teachers stayed on over break. Miss Buehl, for instance, tended her lab experiments and followed animal tracks in the snowy woods. There was a groundskeeper and Mrs. Ames, but I imagined that the workers from the town, like my taxi driver, would have gone home by now rather than risk getting caught out here in the storm.

Lucy's footpath through the woods was so narrow we had to walk single file. At first I kept my eyes on her back, on her pale blue snow parka, but my gaze kept drifting to the navy blue gym bag that she cradled over her right hip. Although I couldn't see it in the bag I kept picturing the tin. The gold mountains under a blue sky. A green lake in the foreground.

I turned my eyes to the path. It had been trod into the snow over many weeks and then frozen into a knee-deep crevasse--a miniature of the ones in the film strip on glaciers Miss Buehl showed us. I thought of the weeks it took Lucy to make the path and wondered if it would be filled in by the approaching storm.

We came out at the south tip of the lake, not far from the Schwanenkill. When I looked up I noticed for the first time that there was a thin sheet of ice covering the lake.

"Damn, it must have frozen just last night," Lucy said, more to herself than to me. She shifted the gym bag to her left hip and eased herself down the bank. She swayed in the deep, untrodden snow and I thought that I should offer to hold the gym bag, but I didn't.

Lucy stretched one leg down to the lake's surface and tapped it with her booted toe. A splintering sound echoed across the lake.

"How thick is it?" I called and heard my words echo hollowly. I looked up at the sky and saw that the ominous green clouds hung low over the lake like a shallow dome.

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