Lost Girls

for it. Bringing the Lincoln to a stop in the squishing mud that has blurred the pattern of boot prints and car treads clearly visible just days ago.

But I'm not here to take the same route down to the water as before. Instead, there's a path that begins where the road ends and heads around the far side of the lake. Rain turns to mist as it bounces off the cover of pine needles and black ash boughs above. The air is quiet, and the turning leaves around me--yellow and red and an almost unbelievable gold--are uninterrupted for long stretches by any building, signpost, or litter. In fact I have to walk a full twenty minutes around the far end before spotting the first cottage, a shabby clapboard box that wouldn't pass for a garden shed in certain Toronto backyards. Look in its windows expecting abandonment but instead finding definite signs of life: a loaf of bread beside a knife on the tiny kitchen's cutting board, the embers of a fire in the brick hearth, an unfinished mug of coffee holding down the sun-yellowed page of a crossword-puzzle magazine. Beyond this I can see straight through and out the window at the front, which takes in a view of the water and the few road-accessible cottages on the far shore.

''You make a habit of putting your nose up against other people's glass?''

An old woman's voice behind me. Not a day under eighty, judging from the wrinkled erosions mapped into her skin, shoulders collapsed at her sides. There, standing at the top of the slope next to a woodpile I hadn't noticed on the way in. Her tone is disapproving, pitched up through the grinding sand in her chest. But she takes me in with a squint that softens her a little, adds a scornful humor to her face, blotched and fuzzy as a bruised peach. The accent is the same as the others up here--clipped and tight--but beneath it there is also the slight rise at the end that I've heard before in those who've grown up in Scotland, the north of Ireland, or one of those damp, peaty places.

''I'm not a snoop by vocation,'' I answer. ''But I do apologize for--''

''Names first. I'm Helen Arthurs. Widow of Duncan James Arthurs.''

I wonder for a second if I'm supposed to recognize the dead husband's name, but seeing as I don't, I make no mention of it.

''I'm Bartholomew Crane. Just to explain, Mrs. Arthurs, I was walking along this side of the lake for the purposes of an investigation of sorts--''

''Bartholomew Crane, you say?''

''Call me Barth.''

Shifts a little inside her bundled layers of knit sweater, windbreaker, and scarf. Then she slowly pulls the folds of her neck out of the encasement of her clothes, a turtle's head emerging from its shell.

''But tell me now, Mr. Crane, what are you really doing up here at a quarter to eight on a rainy bugger of a morning?''

''You know something? I'm not quite sure myself.''

I smile up at her as charmingly as I can, hoping she'll simply stand aside and let me go. But she does nothing of the sort.

''I'm here on business.''

Nothing.

''I've been hired as Thomas Tripp's defense attorney, if you'd like to know the truth.''

''Oh, I always like to know the truth, Mr. Crane.'' She laughs now, though her stance is unchanging. ''Now, speaking of the truth, there are some things about that whole business you may not know.''

''Oh, yes?''

The squint returns. Puts one hand on a tree trunk next to her and the other on her hip, gives me a good looking-over, lingering on the mud-caked dress shoes and loosened silk tie of black and emerald stripes.

''I'm sure of it,'' she says. ''But if you ask around here you won't get much help. They all think the teacher's the one. If you ask me, though, I'd say it isn't exactly so.''

''That's encouraging. But you know, I really should be heading back.''

Neither of us moves. Odds are the old lady's clueless, her brain softened by too many years spent alone in the empty woods, or maybe just by too many years, period. But you can never be sure. There's always the possibility that she had her bird-watching binoculars on the day in question and saw something that may be of help to old Thom Tripp. Nothing for me to do but try to grease her wheels by stepping forward to rest my foot on a protruding root halfway up the incline.

''Mrs. Arthurs, it's been informative, truly, but I must--''

''Don't you want to hear?''

''Hear what?''

''What I think happened to your missing girls.''

''They're not mine. In fact--''

''I think they're in that lake there.''

She sticks the hand on her hip out in the direction of the water, but her fingers are too crooked with arthritis to indicate any point in particular and their wayward pointings take in everything before her at once.

''Well, that would seem the most likely suggestion,'' I say, now a little closer to her than I would like. ''But the police have conducted extensive searches--scuba divers, underwater sensors, and the rest. And nothing, I'm afraid.''

''I didn't say they're ever going to find them.''

She holds up her chin in a gesture of triumph and the loose folds of skin that enwrap her neck are drawn tight enough to show the bulging pipe of her throat.

''You beg the question, Mrs. Arthurs, so I'll ask it. How do you know that's where they are?''

''Because it weren't your man that took those young girls away, although God knows he may have had some hand in the business somehow.'' She flicks her hand dismissively through the air before her. ''No, it weren't him, if you ask me. It was the Lady.''

''The Lady?''

''That weren't her real name, of course. It's only because nobody had a bloody clue what to call the wretched thing that we all got to speaking of her as the Lady, or the Lady in the Lake, though there's not many alive today who'd remember her as she was then.''

She's setting me up. Without even an invitation inside for a cup of coffee and lump of bread she's going to go ahead with this tale of hers no matter what evasions I might attempt. And the tough old bird has got me stuck here, nodding at her to continue.

''She was barren, you see,'' she says now, voice lowered as though there was a risk of being overheard. ''At least they made her barren, so she couldn't have no more.''

''I'm sorry?''

''Gave her a hysterectomy, is what they did. But that was only salt in the wound, because they did that after they made her childless. Had her little ones taken from her, on account of a mental hospital not being a fit place for a mother to bring up children. So the doctors or the government or whatever--they took her kids away, and were never seen by their blood mother again. At the time there were some who said it was the taking the kids away that made her go strange. Some others say it was the operation they went ahead and did on her. But I say she was damn crazy to begin with.''

''So where is she now?''

''Oh, she's of no use to you, Mr. Crane. She's been good and dead for fifty years now.''

The old lady juts her chin out at the lake and I involuntarily turn, as though she's got something right there in her sights before her. But there's only the gray surface of the water, pocked by rain.

''Nobody knew what her real name was, you see, because back then all the crazy people were just put away and nobody much cared about why or where they came from. It was 1945, the war not long over and all the boys back home, and she just showed up in town one day, a bag o' bones with her hungry kids holding her hands, like they'd just come back from the war themselves. Christ knows, they probably had.''

A swipe of a knuckle under her nose wipes away a dried stalactite hanging from one of her nostrils. Her face now gone pale--was always pale--except for the splatter of liver spots the color of tea stains on linen.

''Now, people tried to do her a good turn at first, you understand. Got her to do housekeeping work if they could afford to pay her, but it never worked out for one reason or another. Mostly, I suppose, because she didn't talk proper English to nobody. And she never told a soul her name nor those of her wee ones. Like she knew and