The Bones of the Story: A Novel

Chapter One

Now

I’m just having trouble getting back on track.

Nina Lawson isn’t the first student this semester—or even the first today—to attribute their academic woes to a deviation from some metaphorical track. As Dean of Liberal Arts, I’ve heard every excuse, sob story, and tragedy over the course of the last two years. But the image, coming as it does at the end of a long day at the end of a very long year, jolts me as if we’re both on a train that has suddenly jumped off the rails into an abyss.

To give myself time to craft a response I look down at Nina’s folder. I see that she comes from Newburgh—a small city about an hour south of campus—that she did well in her public high school even after her classes went remote in March of her senior year, and that she’d earned the Raven Society writing scholarship to Briarwood on the basis of a short story she wrote in high school. There’s a note in my assistant’s meticulous handwriting that Nina had to defer admission for a year to help her single, out-of-work mother with the bills. She has a work-study job in the financial office and an off-campus job at a local restaurant. No wonder she looks tired, I think, gazing up at her. Her light brown skin is mottled with acne. She’s slouched in a zippered sweatshirt, hood up, eyes swollen and bloodshot, lips raw and chapped. I wish you had come to see me sooner, I say in my firm-but-gentle voice. The withdrawal deadline passed six weeks ago.

Someone told me it had been extended, she says, not looking up.

During the earlier part of the pandemic it had been but not this year. We’re all trying to get back to normal. The twitch of Nina’s lips makes me flinch. What does normal even mean?

Did you try speaking with your professor?

She shakes her head, the irritation on her cheeks flaming red. I just . . . I wasn’t sure what President Hotchkiss wanted—and it’s weird, you know, having the president as a teacher.

It is weird, I could say, but instead I clasp my hands together and put on my best dean’s smile. It’s a Briarwood tradition that every professor and academic administrator takes a turn teaching the first-year seminar. I took my FYSem—I use the college vernacular to show her that I’ve been where she is now—with President Hotchkiss before he was president. I remember he could be demanding. Did you have trouble understanding the assignments? I recall that when I took the class freshman year, Hotch had taught FYSem as a sort of Socratic ramble punctuated by off-the-cuff writing assignments (pensées, as he had called them) that would be graded according to some mysterious rubric known only to him. He’d given Nina a C, which lowered her average below the minimum she had to maintain to keep her scholarship. If I gave her the withdrawal Hotch would complain that I was undermining his authority. If I didn’t—

Nina is staring out the window, as many students do when they sit on the opposite side of my desk. My office in the tower of Main has a spectacular view facing west toward the Catskill Mountains. Usually, the view seems to calm students, but on this bleak December day all that implacable stone has brought tears to Nina’s eyes.

It’s been a rough semester for everyone— I begin.

She shakes her head, splattering tears. I shouldn’t be here . . . Her eyes flick around my office as if its heavy oak furnishings, which Ruth, my executive assistant, has tried to soften with needlepoint pillows and mugs depicting my favorite authors, is a hostile war zone. I don’t understand all these weird rules and rituals.

I smile despite her tears, remembering how those traditions had seemed like a code I hadn’t been given the key to when I first came here. Briarwood is a small old college—getting smaller every day, I think, recalling a recent memo from Admissions that the enrollment had dropped below our usual two thousand—with a lot of traditions, like the Raven Society, for instance, which gave you your scholarship. If you keep up your grades and make the society senior year you may get to take the senior seminar. It can take a while to get used to, I add, but if you give it a chance you might find some of those traditions are fun. They’re meant to bring us together. Because once you are initiated into the Mysteries of Briarwood, a voice from the past intrudes into my thoughts, you’re unfit for life anywhere else. Are you going to the Luminaria tonight?

She shrugs. I’m not sure I’m in the mood to carry a candle up a mountain in the freezing cold. I don’t really see the point.

It’s supposed to honor the coming solstice, I say. The idea is we carry candles up Briarwood Mountain and light a bonfire at the foot of High Tor—I gesture toward a stone tower on the top of the nearest mountain—as a pledge that the light will return, that there’s hope even when things seem darkest. I grimace self-consciously at how corny it sounds. There’s also hot cocoa and apple cider doughnuts.

She shifts uneasily in her chair. I heard some of the older students in my dorm talking about a girl who got lost at one of these things, like a million years ago. They said she still haunts the ridge and that anyone who dies in the caves comes back to avenge their death.

I can feel my lips stretching into the shape of a smile and hope it doesn’t look as strained as it feels. A million years ago. There are a number of legends about girls going missing in the ice caves but only one about a girl who went missing during the Luminaria, and that happened twenty-five years ago, as I’d just been reminded this morning by an email from President Hotchkiss about some last-minute details for this weekend’s Commemoration. What a terrible word, I’d thought, as if we could ever share something like memory. As if remembering wasn’t always something done alone. Old colleges like Briarwood always have these stories, urban legends— I begin.

You mean like Bloody Mary and Slender Man?

Sort of.

Because they say this girl who got lost is still living up there in the ice caves and that if you get too close, she’ll drag you in and eat you alive.

The ice caves are off-limits, I tell Nina, looking down at her withdrawal form. And no one could live in them. I quickly scrawl my name across the bottom of the form. Why shouldn’t this girl get a second chance? She’s been the victim of a disaster through no fault of her own. That story of a girl haunting the ice caves was around when I was a student here. One of my professors said she was a remnant of an old tradition that we oust the old year in order to welcome in the new year. Slaughter, my professor, Hugo Moss, had said, not oust. And goodness knows there have been some years lately that I’ve been only too glad to see the back of. I try a smile on again as I hand Nina her signed form. Think of this as an opportunity to get back on track and make a fresh start.

As if it’s ever possible to walk away from the past.

This voice from the past is borne on a gust of cold air that rattles the loose windowpanes and prickles the back of my neck. It feels like it’s come directly from those mountains, from the caves hidden in their folds where ice remains even in summer. Nina snatches the withdrawal form as if I might change my mind and take it back from her. That’s all she wanted from you. Another voice from the past—Dodie this time. That’s who this girl reminds me of, with her cringing shrugs, poor hapless Dodie. It makes me want to take the paper back and rip it to shreds in front of her face.

Then Nina looks up at me and meets my eyes for the first time since she entered my office. I’m startled by how fearful she looks. There’s something else— she begins, but before she can continue there’s a knock on the door and Ruth sticks her head in.

I’m sorry to interrupt, she says, but President Hotchkiss just sent you an electronic funds request that needs to be initialed before four.

I sigh. It’s just like Hotch to leave paperwork till late Friday afternoon and then make the rest of us scramble. I’d better take care of it before he comes banging on my door, I tell Ruth.

When I turn back to Nina, I see she’s gotten up and shouldered her backpack. Wasn’t there something else?

No, it wasn’t anything, she says with a quick nervous smile that doesn’t disguise the worried look in her eyes—no, more than worried. She looks afraid. Then she smiles again and the look vanishes. Thank you for everything. I’ll try to make a new start . . . and go to your Lumin-thingy. Then she blushes and heads toward the door.

Wait, I say, getting to my feet.

She turns to me expectantly but I’m suddenly unsure what to say to her. I want to tell her that everything will work out all right but how can I possibly know that? Instead, I grab a book off my shelf and hand it to her. Here, I say. This memoir was written by one of my classmates, Lance Wiley. He had a hard time fitting in here, too. Maybe you’ll find it helpful.

She attempts a smile then takes the book and opens the door to the outer office.

If you change your mind and want to talk about what’s bothering you, Nina, I tell her, my door is always open.

Thanks, Dean Portman, she says. Then she turns and leaves quickly, as if embarrassed by my gesture.

I consider calling her to come back to find out what she’d been about to say. Was it a complaint against Hotch? It wouldn’t be the first. Hotch, who considered himself a defender of free speech, often managed to offend his students. He mocked their requests for trigger warnings, resisted efforts to diversify his reading list, and refused to use gender-neutral pronouns. Even as president, he would have been sacked years ago if he didn’t also have a knack for fundraising. His crowning achievement has been to expand and promote the Wilder Writers House, which will reopen in the spring. Using an existing endowment earmarked for the creative writing program, Hotch has overseen the restoration of Wilder Hall, which will house students and a writer-in-residence each year and host writing conferences during the summer. His hope is that it will evolve into a high-profile writing institution that will attract prestigious authors, boost our sagging admissions, and drive donations for the college.

As a cotrustee of the endowment, I’ve approved the project because it provides scholarships for underserved students and will bring dynamic and diverse writers to the campus. But I’ve been against this weekend’s event—which Hotch decided on having only a month ago—to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Hugo Moss, our first writer-in-residence, and our last. All of Moss’s former students, as well as wealthy alums and trustees, have been invited for a reception Saturday night—tomorrow night, I think with a shudder of nerves—and a ceremony in the chapel Sunday afternoon. In addition, Moss’s last class of students have been invited to stay at Wilder House for the weekend. It’s meant rushing the last renovations of Wilder Hall and tackling a host of eleventh-hour details, which have largely fallen to me and to Ruth. Hotch bulldozed through my objections, claiming we need the fundraising push to cover some extra expenses that have cropped up during the renovation. I suspect he simply enjoys hobnobbing with the rich and famous—he’s always dashing off to Manhattan to attend galas and fancy lunches and traveling to exclusive locales where the wealthy gather—and is oblivious to the extra work his last-minute whims have entailed for the rest of us . . . which reminds me to review that funds request.

Still troubled by Nina’s quick exit, I open the electronic funds request. It’s made out to a local catering company, Mes Amis, one of the town’s fanciest restaurants and one of the lucky ones to survive the last few years. The amount is rather surprising. I imagine Hotch is trying to impress the potential donors attending this weekend’s event.

I spend the next hour answering emails—students wanting last-minute incompletes, the financial office wanting more data for the coming January audit of the Wilder Writers House endowment, and then one from Kendra Martin, the head of the creative writing program, asking me again if I’ve reviewed her recommendations for the writer-in-residence position. I open the orange folder she left for me earlier in the week and read over the CVs—there’s a Vietnamese memoirist whose scheduled campus visit was cancelled last year when the pandemic hit, an African American mystery writer who’s won multiple awards, and a sixty-something nature writer. They’re all excellent candidates, but when I sent their CVs to Hotch earlier in the week, he’d said he wanted an alum to fill the position. I’ve procrastinated telling Kendra that but it’s not fair to let her go to the reception tomorrow without knowing, so I write and tell her.

She immediately emails me with the subject line Why?

I sigh and write back that Hotch wants an alum to honor Hugo Moss and while according to the endowment we have equal authority over hiring, it would be difficult to overrule him. Hotch is counting on getting contributions from alums who will see themselves in the running for the job while the alum he really wants, Laine Bishop, will never take the job. But I can’t put any of that in writing. See you at the reception tomorrow! I end with false cheer.

I move on to reply to a few late RSVPs declining the invitation to this weekend’s Commemoration. Some cite the weather—I check the forecast and see that the temperature is supposed to drop overnight and snow might develop late tomorrow—and some cite ongoing concerns about gathering in crowds even vaccinated. Most send a contribution to the Wilder Writers House, which is the purpose of the event anyway. I thank them and express a hope they’ll come in the spring when the house will be officially open, secretly grateful that only a few dozen people are coming. Maybe it will snow and the whole thing will be cancelled.

When I close my laptop and look out the window, the mountains have grown dark against the purpling sky. It makes them look closer, as if they have been creeping forward while I wasn’t paying attention. I shiver at the thought and get up to close the window, making a mental note to follow up with Nina after the break and refer her to the counseling center if she’s still having trouble coping. I was probably reading into her affect, recalling the bad things that happened to me when I was her age. At least, though, I’d tried to use what I had learned to help someone not suffer the same consequences.

And what use is art, Hugo Moss had asked on our first day of the senior writing seminar (I knew he’d show up sooner rather than later for the Commemoration I’m holding in my head), if not to take the horrible things that have happened to us and make something beautiful out of them?

I’m not an artist, I think as I straighten the papers on my desk and add a colorful silk scarf Ruth had given me for my last birthday to brighten my drab winter coat, but I can still make something good from the horrible.

There’s no amount of good you can do that will ever make up for what you did.

This time it’s my own voice I hear, only it sounds distant, as if it’s coming from the bottom of one of those ice caves within the folds of the mountains. From the past? Or maybe, I think, feeling suddenly very cold, from the future, to warn me that not all my mistakes are safely behind me.

Chapter Two

Now

As I come out of my office into the anteroom between my and Hotch’s offices where Ruth has her desk, she lifts the steel-grey helmet of her head and gazes at me through thick, teal-framed eyeglasses. I sometimes think that the owlish glasses, stiff grey hair, and heavy pasty makeup are armor against the world. When she interviewed for the executive assistant’s job five years ago, she was reticent about her personal history. Hotch, newly appointed president, said he thought a woman in her mid-fifties was too old for the job. I’d told him that was ageism and that she came with excellent recommendations from a state college in Maine and had scored exceptionally high in her civil service clerical exams. She’s a stellar assistant—efficient, tireless, and meticulous—and goes out of her way to help students, especially ones from underprivileged backgrounds and ones who have been victims of trauma.

Now she tells me she’s processed Nina Lawson’s withdrawal form.

I suppose I should go tell Hotch, I say, grimacing.

Too late, she says, shaking her head. He left soon after Nina did to go to the Luminaria.

I thought he wanted to confirm the details about this weekend.

Ruth’s eyebrows lift above the rims of her glasses before vanishing beneath her bangs—her patented Don’t waste my time look. "I have confirmed all the details, she says. Wilder House is cleaned and stocked with food and fresh linens; transportation from the airport and train station has been arranged for tomorrow. Everyone has RSVP’d except for—"

The famous Laine Bishop, I say before she has to. President Hotchkiss keeps asking me if she’s coming.

Does he think you can do anything to change her mind? Ruth asks as she snaps open a dustcover and fits it over her computer. The woman’s been a recluse for twenty-five years.

I think Hotch is frustrated that the college’s most well-known alum writer and biggest potential donor remains outside the orbit of his personal charms. And even with the endowment for the writing program, the center still needs more funding and he’s nervous it will be cut from the college budget given our financial difficulties since the pandemic.

He should be nervous, Ruth says, straightening already straight papers on her desk and getting to her feet. Do you know that they’ve cancelled the repair contracts for our copy machine? I had to fix it myself today.

How . . . ?

She gives me a satisfied smile. I watched a YouTube, just like the young people do. There’s really nothing you can’t figure out how to do on the internet if needs be.

I laugh, feeling lighter. Too bad you can’t watch a YouTube on how to balance an overstretched college budget, I say.

Ruth tsks as she wraps a red cashmere shawl—my Christmas present to her last year—over her head. I wouldn’t have squandered the endowment on fripperies, like waffle stations in the cafeteria and Jacuzzis in the gym, she says, taking me literally. She continues to list expenses that she considers extraneous as we go down the wide marble staircase, our footsteps echoing in the empty building. It’s the last day of the semester so many of the students and faculty have already gone home for winter break and those remaining will be at the Luminaria already. And I wouldn’t have wasted all this money on a Commemoration for a dead professor while the college is in financial straits, Ruth concludes as she pushes open the heavy door at the bottom of the stairs.

Absolutely, I concur as we set off briskly on a paved path beneath bare sycamore trees, their spotted white limbs bright in the last rays of the setting sun. I agree a hundred percent, but Hotch wants a fancy writers center that attracts famous authors and for the trustees to see what he’s done.

Ruth snorts. If you ask me, those writers are more trouble than they’re worth. This one we’re commemorating—you were in his class, weren’t you? Was he worth all the fuss?

Hugo Moss? I ask, feeling that chill again, like a shard of ancient ice from the caves has lodged under my coat collar. He was certainly . . . charismatic. And he made Laine Bishop’s career. But . . . The man’s a monster, I hear Truman saying, his eyes wide with fear. The same look, I realize now, that I’d seen for a second in Nina’s face when I’d joked about Hotch bursting into my office. Was she afraid of Hotch? Maybe I should have made her stay—

He was a bully, wasn’t he? Ruth finishes my thought for me. We’ve reached the edge of Mirror Lake, now a perfect circle of ice that reflects our namesake mountain, Briarwood. The lawn is full of students, faculty, staff, and locals from town, bundled in coats and scarves and clutching cups full of cider and cocoa and candles in paper cones. Many of the students—and some of the faculty and townspeople—are wearing long green robes and crowns woven of holly and ivy, traditional Luminaria garb. Where do these students even dig up these old practices, I wonder, or come up with stories like the lost girl in the cave?

I look up at the mountain and see a bright gold snake made by the procession of students bearing candles to the top. Each year since I came back to Briarwood fifteen years ago, I’ve watched this procession thinking that it won’t just be the light that returns. They say that anyone who dies in the caves comes back to avenge their death. Even now, as the ribbon of light reaches the summit and flares from the battlements of High Tor, I feel an answering kindling in my heart, as if something is at last coming—

Something’s wrong, Ruth says. They’ve set off a flare.

Of course, I realize, the light couldn’t have come from the top of High Tor; no one’s been allowed in the tower for twenty-five years. The crowds on the Great Lawn ooh and aah as if watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. But the flare is a message. For a moment I think it’s a message from the past.

It’s a distress signal, Ruth says as another flare streaks across the sky. Something must have happened.

She spots a security guard and pushes people out of the way to get to him. When I catch up, I hear the words student and accident come through the static of the guard’s walkie-talkie.

What’s happened? I ask.

A student’s fallen in one of the caves, the guard says.

Do we know which student? I ask, my skin prickling.

I hear the word body coming through the static but I can’t make out the rest. Ruth says something but it’s drowned out by a blast from the walkie-talkie.

What did you say? I ask Ruth, sure I must have misheard the name she said.

They’ve brought up a student from the caves, Ruth says. It’s Nina Lawson.

The ice shard that has been lodged in my spine since Nina left my office spreads down my back and through my chest, crystallizing my blood. That look in her eyes—she’d been afraid of something.

Why didn’t you make her stay? Why didn’t you stop her?

All the voices that have been clamoring for attention today are talking at once, merging into a siren. It is a siren. Ruth turns to watch a police car drive onto the lawn, her glasses reflecting the blue and white lights as if she’s the one who’s been pulled out of the subterranean fissure sheathed in ice. That image of a woman sheathed in ice has haunted my nightmares for twenty-five years.

Is she hurt? I ask.

Ruth turns to me, her face unreadable behind her thick glasses. No, thank God, she says, she’s okay. But they brought something up with her. Human remains. They’re saying they’ve found bones in one of the caves. I turn away from her and push blindly through the crowd, which is buzzing now with conjecture and rumor, to the foot of the mountain, but I’m stopped there by campus security. We’re asking that no one else goes up, the young man says. We’re trying to evacuate the path so we can bring down the injured student.

I know her, I say. I should be with her.

The guard, hardly older than a student, looks unsure, but then Ruth catches up with me and barks at him, This is Dean Portman. The administration will need to determine how this happened.

I understand, ma’am, he says, but the path is mobbed with people coming down the mountain.

He turns and points upward. The snake of light has doubled back on itself, as if eating its own tail, and is writhing downhill. As those returning get closer I see that most are still holding their candles, making their faces look ghoulish. EMTs have arrived with a stretcher and are regarding the crowd impatiently.

There’s another way up, Ruth whispers to me. Behind Wilder Hall.

I nod and follow her through a grove of pine trees to a Tudor stone and half-timber building that looks like an old English manor out of a Gothic novel. It was originally a private home, then the dean’s house, then a lecture hall, and then, when I was a student here, a residence house for a select group of seniors. It’s had many other incarnations until five years ago when it was closed for renovations to turn it back into a writing center. Although I’ve signed off on all the renovations and preparations for its opening weekend, it still unnerves me to see two of its lead-glass windows glowing amber, like the eyes of an animal in its lair that’s just woken up.

Ruth leads the way past the arched doorway and flagged terrace and the wrought iron gate that leads into the woods, her red shawl giving her the appearance of Little Red Riding Hood setting off through the woods to Grandmother’s house. The path is steep, practically carved out of the rockface, the stone steps crumbling in places, but Ruth, despite being in her late fifties, navigates it like a mountain goat. I can barely keep up with her. I know she swims regularly at the campus pool, but I’m still impressed by her endurance. I imagine she’s as eager as I am to make sure Nina’s all right and to find out what she’d been doing near the caves, which were clearly off-limits. I keep thinking of how Nina talked about the story of the girl who’d been lost in the caves as if Nina were drawn to another girl who didn’t fit in and went missing. Maybe she’d gone looking for her.

Maybe she had found her.

Ruth vanishes suddenly from the path up ahead and I am seized by the crazy, irrational fear that she’s been swallowed by the mountain. But, of course, it’s just that she’s reached the top. The path ends so abruptly that it’s like stepping out of a tunnel straight into the sky.

Like being born, Laine had said the first time we came up this path together.

Even now, with the light fading on the western ridges, the sight takes my breath away. As far as the eye can see, wild grasses and dwarf pines glow purple in the twilight. The pine barrens, they’re called, an alpine habitat sustained by the cold air that seeps out of the ice caves, hidden within the folds of the ridge along ancient fault lines. When people hear cave they think of something scooped out of a hill, but the ice caves are actually fissures in the rock—dozens of them folded into the ridge—some shallow, but others long and deep and leading to caverns that go on for miles beneath the earth. Like the entrance to the Roman underworld, I remember Laine saying when she looked down into one of the deeper caves. I turn toward the group gathered around High Tor and see that several are wearing robes and wreaths and antlers and medieval masks. They might be a band of ancient priests gathered to observe a pagan rite. One figure is lying on a stone slab as if she has been laid out for sacrifice.

My heartbeat quickens, and I pick up my pace. As I get closer, I see that the figure on the stone slab, who has been given a blanket by a druid, is Nina. The other druids resolve into students wearing blankets cinched with belts, ivy wreaths, and papier-mâché raven masks.

Dean Portman! Nina sits up and cries as I approach.

Oh, Nina, I say, kneeling beside her. I’m so sorry! What happened?

I took your advice and went to the Luminaria. I saw some people gathered by the caves and was thinking about that girl who got lost . . . Her voice falters and I realize she’s shivering despite the blanket around her shoulders. Recalling how cold the caves are, I begin to shiver, too. "But when I got there, they were gone. I thought maybe they’d gone down