There was some chatter about local legends, including stories concerning the Witch’s Thicket. A teenage girl had gone missing near the college, more than fifty years before. For a few weeks all the women at Joyce House spoke in whispers, nervously, about these old ghost stories and a few more realistic fears. A madman might have taken Ginny. Who knew if he might take another girl? Or else perhaps it was the Devil, who was said to dwell in that patch of trees, Briar’s Commons, the Witch’s Thicket.
The students walked in pairs at night and keenly observed any outsider who might park his car and knock on the door of a dorm. But the winter continued quiet and ordinary, and soon enough the students breathed a sigh of relief.
By March, the house mother had boxed up Ginny’s belongings and shipped them to her family and returned her books to the library. I had a new roommate. Joyce House buzzed with preparations for the spring cotillion and Ginny had been forgotten.
—
I graduated from Stoneridgewith honors and headed west. I secured a job, traveled a little, fell in love, fell out of it, metIrene, made a home in Arizona, returned to the East Coast, loved again, lived alone.
I wrote short stories in my spare time. Strange, ghoulish narratives that appeared in small magazines. Eventually, I penned a novella, a novel, kept writing. Tired of it. My hair turned gray and the seasons changed.
Periodically, I thought about her. She seeped into the lines of a manuscript, infected the keys of my typewriter, her mystery lingering and tantalizing me decade after decade. Where did she go? What happened to her? Who hurt her?
There were never any satisfactory answers, or there were, perhaps, too many to be able to glimpse the truth. A mystery is the most seductive of poisons; it intoxicates the soul.
Irene never comprehended this. Carolyn didn’t, either. Benjamin empathized. Most people thought it was madness to dredge up the past as I did. Let it go.
Edgar alone understood. We were stricken with the same malady. When the leaves changed color and a chill descended upon Temperance Landing, I made my way to his house to share gloomy ghost tales and to paste the stories we’d carefully clipped out of newspapers into our black scrapbook.
But we never inched closer to the truth. Ginny’s disappearance remained unsolved. Unlike other people who went missing, she never had her face decorating any posters, she was not listed in any database, her story did not show up on a cheap TV show. Ours was a private pain. Perhaps some people might think this was a kinder fate, but it isolated us. It made us the lone receptacles of her memory.
It made us morbid, that was what Carolyn said. She was correct. We swapped our newspaper clippings and told each other ghost tales to ease our pain.
Why return to that moment, why return to her?
It was not a choice we made. We were afflicted with a disease and it sprouted anew, like mushrooms that rise from the damp black earth, their long yellow filaments seeping into dead matter and decayed wood.
Once, while shopping for a new coat at Filene’s Basement, Isaw a red scarf that reminded me of the exact shade of that drop of blood upon the snow. Red on white. So stark was the memory that my hands shook.
On another occasion, while riding the Green Line, I saw a girl standing by the doors who reminded me of her. From behind her hair was the same as Ginny’s, long and dark. When she got off the subway, I followed her up into the Back Bay for a couple of blocks before I regained my senses and turned around, for the girl was sleek and young and Ginny would have grown old like me by then.
And there was an evening when, upon walking in front of a store displaying used clothes, I wept at the sight of a mannequin wrapped in an ancient green coat that looked like something she might have worn.
—
Stories have a rhythmto them. A beginning, a middle, an end. Mysteries beg for answers, narratives demand conclusions. Perhaps this is why Ginny made such a powerful impression on me: her story had no proper finale.
It was a never-ending loop, a perfect circle.
Open one door and Ginny has eloped, heedless, into the arms of a secret lover.
Open another door and Ginny has walked into the snow, mad, her mind finally cleaved by a secret malady.
Open another door and Ginny is the victim of a terrible crime. A stranger glides down the snowy road, drags her into a car, murders her.
Open another door and it is not a stranger. A stalker, concealed by shadows, walks into the dorm, forces her out of the house, kidnaps her.
Open another door and a monster, a devil, a supernatural fiend spirits her off into the depths of the earth.
But which door to pick?
None and all.
—
There once was alarge boulder in the vicinity of Dighton that caught the attention of early colonists with its petroglyphs, andthough now it sits in a museum instead of a riverbed, no one can tell what its figures and lines mean. The Native American tribe that carved Dighton Rock—perhaps the Mashpee Wampanoag—left us a story, but we cannot interpret it properly, for we lack an understanding of its symbols, its metaphors. Nevertheless, such markings upon rocks indicate a place of importance, a place of power, and a place of memory.
It is like this with me and Ginny. Although she is long gone, and although I cannot comprehend the ending to her story, I return to it because it has power and must be remembered for that reason. Therefore, I have set it down as best I can, with the frail implements of paper and a typewriter, that it may preserve a fraction of Virginia Somerset’s memory, as I knew her in 1934.
