North Woods

Lakeman stands before his bedroom mirror, contemplating himself in his tuxedo. The speech he gave was only a rehearsal; he won’t be allowed to deliver the address himself: “Only three days before, Morris had received final word that his ban from the annual April dinner, due to his violation of the Society’s Code for Sexual Conduct, would not be overturned” (311). Recently widowed, Lakeman’s amorous pursuit of the female members of the society resulted in his ouster.

Undeterred by this setback, Lakeman is determined to dig up the remains of the fourth body mentioned in the “Nightmaids” Letter. Although he’s elderly and has a heart condition, he goes forth optimistically. The letter describes the dead woman as wearing a silver ring and a necklace containing charms of bone and iron, so Lakeman anticipates no trouble using his metal detector to find her.

Because of the description of the yellow house in Dunne’s True Crime! article, Lakeman spots the Farnsworth property quickly. It has been abandoned for years. The owner lives in California but hasn’t put the place on the market, so Lakeman makes himself at home. The season is spring, and the weather is good. He spends days covering half an acre of land where the body is likely buried.

After a tedious search, his metal detector finally isolates a spot between two oak trees. Lakeman eagerly begins to dig, but the root system is in the way. He retrieves an adze from the house and starts chopping, but the exertion proves too much: A shooting pain runs up his left arm. Realizing that he left his nitroglycerin pills in the car, he staggers back toward it but collapses on the way. A DeLuxe Roadster pull up beside his car. Unbeknownst to him, it’s the vehicle that was stolen years earlier from the psychiatrist who visited Lillian and Robert. The driver runs to Lakeman’s aid: “‘Oh, you poor, dear man,’ said Alice Osgood, savoring the warm day, the sounds of the pigeons, the face pressed to her breast. ‘I think you fell. I do hope you aren’t hurt’” (329).

This interlude consists of a song celebrating Alice’s good fortune in finding true love at last, even if posthumously. Sister Mary must make room for one more in their grave:

Thus Cure came to our patient maid

And joy replaced the tears she’d cried.

While he joined in the common grave,

and moved Her neighbor—grumbling—aside. (334).

This interlude describes a piece of real estate for sale. It’s the renovated Osgood house:

For countless generations, “Catamount Acres” has offered peace and tranquility to its owners. Recently renovated and returned to its 18th-century footprint, this tastefully appointed house could serve as either a stylish weekend retreat or a full-time work-from-home abode (337).

It’s now the 21st century, and a woman is traveling toward the yellow house on a warm May night when she swerves to avoid a bear in the road. Her car spins out of control and ends up in a nearby creek: “She found herself tangled up in belt and fabric, thrashing in the water, as if Fate, which spared her in the crushing tumble, decided to bind and drown her in the car’s own knots” (341). After struggling to get out of her car, she salvages a soaked sleeping bag, but her phone is smashed.

The woman’s name is Nora. She’s a botanist in her second year of a postdoctoral fellowship and came to the area to study the briefly flowering plants of early spring: “Her current project on spring ephemerals had grown out of her interest in succession generally, the patterns by which one group of plant or animal species replaces another” (348). Nora reflects on her life and the depression she endured during college. Only after she stumbled across some field guides to the flora of the woodlands did her depression begin to lift. She decided to pursue the study of plants, and it became her personal salvation.

After the car wreck, Nora assesses her situation. Realizing that it’s too late in the evening to summon help, she takes her sleeping bag and finds a place to rest in the woods. The next morning, she begins the trek to the nearest town. Soon, a pickup truck passes that she flags down for a ride: “A very old man was driving, dressed in denim overalls and a dirty undershirt, can of soda in his hand. Eyes bright grey, skin pink and sun-mottled, beneath a white mane of uncombed hair” (352).

The truck logo indicates that the driver is in the tree service business. The man introduces himself as Charles Osgood and says that he’s a general caretaker for many properties in the area. He begins talking about his life and the problems he has had with his two daughters. His odd accent and vernacular speech pattern confuse Nora. She talks about her own troubles, including her struggle with depression, and her love of nature. Nora has diabetes and is alarmed when she realizes that her supplies are still in her wrecked vehicle. Charles starts driving back toward it but asks if she’d like to stay in the newly renovated yellow house. It now belongs to a movie star, but he’s rarely around. Nora finds herself wishing to remain in the area.

Charles seems to understand her confusion and asks whether she looked inside the car this morning. In a flash of insight, Nora realizes that she died in the car crash and that she and Charles are both ghosts. She doesn’t seem to mind. Suddenly, she can see the woods as they looked centuries earlier, before the chestnut and elm trees were blighted. She even meets Teale, whose art she knows. He’s working on a landscape painting.

Years later, Nora is still at the yellow house. She witnesses many changes in both the ghostly world and the real one. The house changes owners. The landscape loses more fauna and flora. Even Charles takes a bag of apple cuttings and heads further north. Centuries pass, and Nora witnesses even more extreme changes. Ultimately, hunters clear brush for game by starting a fire, and the blaze claims the yellow house. The process of its destruction is anticlimactic, and its disappearance marks the beginning of a new cycle for Nora:

Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself as Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change (368).