Strangely, I believe her.
* * *
—
Sunday, Ellis and I go down to the lake. Ellis has brought a picnic basket with cheeses, cranberry juice, fennel crackers, and a map of the surrounding terrain.
The lake glitters gold in the early-morning sunlight, its surface calm and even. I know Alex’s body isn’t in there—the silted floor was searched by divers, every cave scoured along the shore—but I can’t help shivering.
“What’s this?” I ask, pointing to the map.
She unfolds it across the grass and gestures to the lake with her cheese knife. “The lake,” she says. “And here”—she points a half mile east, on Godwin grounds—“is where Cordelia Darling’s body was found.”
So that’s what this is, then. Another murder, dissected and resolved.
“With water in her lungs,” I murmur. Cordelia Darling had drowned on dry land, reason enough for some to suspect witchery.
I just wish Ellis had brought me here to discuss a different Dalloway Five death. Anyone’s except Cordelia’s.
Ellis has assembled a little sandwich of cheese between crackers; she offers it to me, and I take it just to have the distraction. The taste is sharp and peppery all at once.
“You can see where Cordelia was found from here,” Ellis says, and she touches my chin, gently directs my face toward the sunrise. “Look.”
Yes, I can see it. The patch of grass is as indistinguishable as any around it, especially from this distance. Godwin rises above Cordelia’s temporary grave on its wooded hill, shuttered windows and uneven gables: a shadowy tombstone.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I tell her. “Someone drowned Cordelia, or she drowned on her own, and then she was carried a half mile that way. Mystery solved.”
“Mmm, yes, the answer is rather obvious, isn’t it?” Ellis says with an arched brow; I can’t tell if she’s making fun of me.
But this time, it’s my turn to have the upper hand. “The lake didn’t exist in the early eighteenth century,” I say. I tap the map. “This was just a valley. The lake itself was man-made as a flood prevention measure in 1904. There was just the Hudson, and it runs narrow through here.”
Ellis’s brow furrows, and she hunches over the map again, presumably to examine the little topographic lines that show the steepness of the cliffs and depth of the valleys around Dalloway School. “Really?”
I take another bite of cracker. “Really.”
“Curious,” Ellis murmurs, and I can’t help but feel somewhat gratified that I’ve finally said something to throw her off balance. It feels like winning.
“Besides, even eighteenth-century bigots knew that it’s not impossible to carry a skinny teenage girl half a mile across land,” I say, “soaking wet or otherwise.”
Ellis looks up. “Yes. But we also know that it doesn’t take that much water to drown a person, considering. You could drown in your bathtub. You could drown in a shallow puddle of rainwater.”
“You could,” I agree, “but then why not leave the body in the bathtub to be found later? Why take her outside? That only makes you more likely to get caught.”
It’s enough to make Ellis fall into pensive silence for the next several minutes. I occupy myself with the cheese and crackers, and drink a long swig of sour juice straight from the bottle. Ellis squints out across the lawn toward where Cordelia’s body was found. The way her face scrunches up cuts a wrinkle right below the single freckle on her cheekbone.
“Are we really doing all of these?” I ask her eventually, after she’s finally reached over to steal the cranberry juice from me.
“All of them,” Ellis says, with a faint lilt of surprise to her tone. She looks at me. “What else, Felicity? There’s no better way for me to write about their deaths.”
I sigh. “Lovely. When will we be finished? I do have my own thesis to work on, you know.”
“It won’t take too long,” Ellis promises. “I have to be done by the end of winter if I want to get the book written and revised by deadline. I’ll need all of spring to work on revisions.”
“Fine. But you still haven’t explained to me how Cordelia Darling’s body ended up drowned on dry land.”
Ellis’s gaze cuts back toward the lake, her eyes narrowed against the bright sunlight. “Isn’t it obvious?” she says. “Whoever drowned her brought her out here to make it look like magic. They wanted the Dalloway girls to be blamed for it. And they got what they wanted.”