Free The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

another hand and I felt something slip away, and that was as much as I knew about how Helen Chambers had ended up.
    Athena doesn’t come to class. I ask Vesta and Aphrodite if they know where she is and they both shrug. I assume they’re covering up for that early morning swim Athena took. It may be my imagination, but the advanced girls seem sullen today. Perhaps it is the weather. This spell of Indian summer we have been enjoying seems to be drawing to a close. A fitful wind rattles the windows of the classroom and I can see storm clouds massing on the eastern shore of the lake. There hasn’t been a glimmer of sun since yesterday afternoon. The thoughtjars something in my memory—a flash of white on the Point just before I saw Olivia stranded on the rock. I’d thought it was the sun glinting off the rock, but now I remember that the sky had been overcast. Could it have been a rowboat just rounding the Point? Could it have been one of my students—maybe three of my students?—who rowed Olivia out to that rock? I look at Vesta and Aphrodite, noticing the deep circles under their eyes that look real, not kohl-induced. If they’re sneaking out to the rocks at night, might they also take a boat out onto the lake? They look edgy to me, but then, so do all the girls. When called on, the girls whisper their translations, which are lost under the hiss of the steam heat. When I ask them to speak up they get nervous and seem to think they have translated their pieces wrong. They turn their sentences around and come up with unintelligible messes. When I try to unravel their syntax I can hear an irritation in my voice I hadn’t even known I was feeling. I give up and tell them to read quietly until the end of the period. Several of them put their heads on their desks and fall asleep. I let them, hoping Myra Todd doesn’t come by and peep through my door window.
    At lunchtime I commit the unpardonable sin of dining alone. I purchase peanut butter crackers and a Coke from a vending machine in the lodge basement and go down to the swimming beach. I stare out at the three sister rocks and across the lake to the south shore, where I can just make out the shape of the icehouse. The county extension agent used to keep her boat there. During Christmas break senior year, Lucy and I took the boat out and rowed it all the way across the lake almost to the Point. I’d written the whole episode down in my journal. The journal that I’d lost.
    A wind from the north is whipping the water against the three sisters. I watch a flock of Canada geese land on the lake and take off again. When I walk back to the lodge for my last class of the afternoon I think I have gotten things into perspective.
    One of the girls—one of my students—has perhaps foundmy journal and realized that I was involved in two deaths during my senior year, three if you count Matt Toller. I have to face the fact that it might very well be Athena. The “rite” I witnessed on the three sisters indicates an interest in the suicide legend. Although I can’t figure out what she hopes to gain by bombarding me with these relics of my past—the journal entry, the corniculum—and luring my daughter out onto one of the rocks, I can only assume she has some plan to blackmail me or somehow compromise my authority as a teacher. Let’s face it, my authority has already been compromised.
    I think of what Dr. Lockhart said, that sometimes a teacher has to be a little harsh.
    I decide to go to Dr. Lockhart and tell her everything. Then we’ll go to Dean Buehl. I imagine that I will be reprimanded, but I don’t think I have done anything to merit my dismissal.
    With a clear plan in my head, I feel better already. When I open my classroom door, though, my calm dissolves at the sight of Dr. Lockhart seated at my desk leafing through my homework folder.
    When she looks up and those cool blue eyes narrow on me I feel a chill gust of arctic air.
    “Bad news,” she says. “Ellen