The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman Read Free Book Online Page A

statue’s pedestal. Carved in the marble is the name Jacynta.
    “Jacynta?”
    “Aurora Latham made it up. It’s an amalgamation of the names of the three lost children.”
    “Before they lost Alice, you mean.”
    “Yes . . . there was James and Cynthia and . . .”
    “And Tam . . . short for Thaddeus.”
    “You’ve done your homework, I see.”
    I smile, pleased to finally receive a compliment here at Bosco, even if it’s from a landscape architect and not another writer. “But I couldn’t tell you who this is supposed to be,” I say, walking back to the statue of the crouching girl.
    “Jacynta’s beautiful Indian girlfriend, Ne’Moss-i-Ne,” David says, coming to stand beside me.
    “Ne’Moss-i-Ne? It sounds . . . well . . . it doesn’t sound like a real Indian name, but like something a camp owner in the Catskills would make up.”
    David laughs. “You’re close. There was a real Iroquois girl who led a band of French explorers to this spring. The local legend goes that she fell in love with a French missionary who later betrayed her village to an Abenaki raiding party. She was taken captive, but she managed to escape and run west to a cliff above the Sacandaga River, where she jumped to her death. Her name was probably something that sounded like Ne’Moss-i-Ne and that was as close as the early settlers could get. Until the Lathams bought this land, the locals called the spring Mossy Spring. But then Aurora heard the story and claimed that she heard the girl was called Ne’Moss-i-Ne. She might have made it up, because the name is really too close to be coincidental.”
    “Too close to what?”
    “Its Greek equivalent. Think about it. It’s not an uncommon practice in New York place names. Seneca was originally named Otsinika, which is Algonquin for ‘Stone,’ and then through transliteration and folk etymology it became the classical ‘Seneca.’ ”
    “So Ne’Moss-i-ne . . . Ne’Moss-i-ne . . .”
    I repeat the name until it begins to sound vaguely familiar . . . a name tickling at the edges of memory . . . and then I recognize it . . . of course, memory itself.
    “Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory.”
    “And mother of the Muses. The statues of the Muses on the terraces are her children,” David says, gesturing toward the hill and walking toward a path in that direction.
    We come out of the maze into the sunshine at the foot of the hill and walk toward one of the ruined fountains. I feel better out in the open space and better since my apparition turned out to be a harmless plant and the only ghost on the premises has been categorized as the orchid kind, placed into its proper genus and species. I can tell, too, that David likes me, and I feel inclined to let myself like him back even though I swore that I wouldn’t get involved with anyone until I finished the book.
    “Who are these guys?” I ask, pointing at the two nude males who lounge on either side of an oval basin that must have once held water but now is overgrown with weeds and ivy.
    “This is the Fountain of the Two Rivers. The one on the left represents the Sacandaga and the one on the right is the Hudson. This was Milo Latham getting a little of his own program into the iconography. The Latham lumber would have been carried down from the Adirondacks on the Sacandaga River—before it was dammed and turned into a reservoir in the thirties—and then carried on the Hudson to his mill.”
    While the Hudson is depicted as a mature man, the Sacandaga is a muscular young Indian brave, his head shaved into a Mohawk, with an expression so fierce that even though his face is split by a crack that runs from the top of his skull to his feet, I can feel some hostile animus emanating from the statue.
    “What about the horse?” I ask, turning away from the angry river god—maybe having his river turned into a reservoir is what has turned him sour—and walking up the stairs. “What does a horse have to do with the