The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman Page B

so that her towel gapes open and I’m treated to a view of her flat sternum. Before I can look away I notice a strip of pearly white skin—scar tissue—snaking across her chest. A mastectomy? I close my eyes and a vision of my mother’s scarred chest after she came home from the hospital blooms in the darkness. I open my eyes, preferring Fay’s censorious face to that vision. She’s holding a hand to her chest now as if she’s testifying at a Bible meeting.
    “I think she’s planning to write a book about Eugenie Penrose, and she doesn’t want anyone else scooping her research. All that nonsense about Eugenie’s sister, Clare, and awakening from the shadows. What do you think she meant by that? It was the oddest lecture I’ve ever heard atthe college. It made me wonder if she’d come a bit unhinged. Wasn’t she in a rehab clinic a few years ago for substance abuse?”
    “She had a little drinking problem, that’s all, but she’s completely over that—”
    “And wasn’t she hospitalized during her senior year for a drug overdose?”
    “That was an accident,” I say a little too quickly. “She was taking pain pills after she broke her leg skiing spring break and she just messed up on the dosage.” At least that’s what we’d told people had happened. What had really happened was that Neil had dared Christine to climb up the tower of the library. We’d all been high on mushrooms, and Christine had fallen and broken her leg and cracked three ribs.
    “You forget that I worked in the infirmary back then. I overheard the head nurse say she had taken over thirty Darvon—that’s no accident. When she came into Mr. Penrose’s office Sunday morning before the lecture she seemed quite agitated and she asked me for a glass of water so she could take a pill. She had one of those pill-sorters and it was
stocked!
And Mr. Penrose seemed concerned about her after the lecture. He asked me to place a call to her office this morning but she wasn’t in. Don’t you think she seemed depressed?”
    I slip down off the shelf, holding my towel tightly over my chest. I’d like to deny it, but then I remember Christine’s expression when I last saw her through the train window. And the lecture was a bit odd—all that preoccupation with madness and doom. And even though Fay is a bit officious for my taste, no one cares more about the fate of the college.
    “I think she was probably just under a lot of pressure getting her lecture ready,” I answer, turning my back to the door so that I can back out without exposing my towel’s limitations. The sight of Fay’s hand splayed over her chest makes me wince with the memory of her scar. “But I’ll call her tonight to see how she’s doing and I’ll ask her about the missing notebook pages. I’m sure if she kept any pages it was an accident.”
    B Y THE TIME B EA AND I GET HOME, THOUGH, IT’S TOO LATE TO CALL . W HEN I PICKED her up, Bea had hesitatingly expressed interest in a North Face backpack that she’d seen at the outlet store in Harriman two weeks ago when she’dgone there with her friend Melissa and Melissa’s mother, Lisa. When they’d dropped Bea off I’d noticed the back of the Ford Escort crammed with bags from Coach and Burberry’s and Diesel and felt a pang remembering the twenty-dollar bill I’d given Bea for the trip. Of course Bea had expressed total indifference to Melissa and Lisa’s purchases. While most of the moms I know in Rosedale have spent their daughters’ high school years fending off requests for Kate Spade bags I usually have to corral Bea into trading one set of worn Nikes and Levi’s for another. She’s always claimed complete disinterest in the trappings of high fashion but I also suspect she absorbed early on the true state of our financial circumstances (she knows, for instance, that the only money I’ve ever taken from Neil’s family has been put into a college trust for her) and made a pact with herself (Bea’s always