The Ghost Orchid Read Online Free PDF

made a bit of a pet out of her and my husband spent a great deal of his early life in the north woods of New York State—a noble wilderness from which Mr. Latham wrested the origins of his fortune, but not, I’m afraid, an environment conducive to refinement and culture.”
    Aurora lifts a long pale hand and twirls it over her shoulder to indicate the land north of the house—the thousands of acres of woods and lakes of the Adirondacks that stretch from here to the Canadian border. The house sits with its back to the woods, the terraced gardens sloping down, southward to the Hudson River and, by implication, toward the city and civilization. One can feel, though, the deep shadow of all those woods encroaching on the sunlit terrace, and Corinth, even though she sits with her back to the glass doors, has a sudden unbidden vision of the garden overgrown—the statues destroyed, the marble terraces crumbling, the hedges in the maze breaking free of their orderly, clipped shapes and transforming into great shaggy beasts like the one in young Alice’s picture.
    She takes a deep breath and, willing the vision to vanish, remarks, “Yes, I understand that Mr. Latham is in the lumber business.”
    “It’s where he made his fortune, in logging and in the glove factories west of here in Fulton County and in many other investments, which I cannot pretend to follow. His interests are . . . eclectic. He’s compelled to spend more and more time attending to business in the city, but he still likes to attend the log drive in the spring and watch his logs come into the Big Boom at Glens Falls. He used to take the boys up to the camp on hunting trips . . .”
    “So will he be joining the party here this summer?” Corinth asks, even though she knows she might be risking too much by asking such a direct question. But Aurora’s description of Latham’s lumber interests has only intensified her vision of a devastated garden—only now she pictures a river choked with logs bursting over the rim of the northern ridge and laying waste to the smiling nymphs and gape-mouthed satyrs. “I ask because I like to know who will be present in the circle.”
    “I’m afraid my husband is not a believer, Miss Blackwell. He agreed to ask you here as an indulgence to me.” Aurora closes her eyes briefly, as if modest of such an uxorious husband. “He has declared that he will not attend your séances, but he will join us tonight at dinner. I’m afraid he’s been delayed in the city . . . ah . . .”
    Aurora lifts her head just as Corinth hears the latch turn in the doors behind her. A breeze, smelling of pine and sawdust, touches the nape of her neck and chills the pockets of sweat still drying beneath the buttons down the back of her dress. She can feel the cool surface of the bone buttons like a set of fingers drumming into her spine and she cannot, for a moment, force herself to turn around. What if the vision inside her head—the ruined garden, the broken dam, the deluge of splintered wood—isn’t just inside her head?
    When she turns to follow her hostess’s gaze, though, she sees that beyond the darkened figure silhouetted in the doorway the garden lies placid and calm beneath the receding light of a summer afternoon. Corinth prepares her face to meet her host, but as the man steps into the room she sees he’s much too young and slim to be Milo Latham. It takes her only a moment longer to recognize who he is.

 
    Chapter Three
    “Corinth looked up, surprised to see her old friend Tom Quinn silhouetted in the French doors.”
    I say the line out loud for the third time, and then push back my chair, put my feet up on the desk, and stare out the window. This is where I’ve gotten stuck each draft. The problem is that I can’t decide whether Corinth Blackwell would have been surprised to see Tom Quinn at Bosco or if she knew very well that he would be there.
    The anonymous writer of the pamphlet I found at my mother’s house reported