The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page B

out of time, preservationists having seen that it slipped through the cracks while progress steamrolled so much of the city into sleek modernity. Today, the Athenaeum isn’t so very different than in the days when Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman courted among the stacks. Built in the manner of the Greek Revival, the library’s present edifice was finished in 1838 (sixty years before Saltonstall painted
The Drowning Girl
), though the Athenaeum was founded in 1753. (Note the repetition of
eight—
at
eight
een or twenty-two I would have been helpless to do otherwise—1 + 7 equaling 8; 5 + 3 equaling 8; 8 + 8 equaling 16, which divided by 2 equals 8; full circle.) I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hours I’ve spent wandering between those tall shelves and narrow aisles, or lost in some volume or another in the reading room on the lowermost floor. Housed there within its protective shell of pale stone, the library seems as precious and frail as a nonagenarian. Its smell is the musty commingling fragrance of yellowing pages and dust and ancient wood. To me, the smells of comfort and safety. It smells sacred.
    On a rainy day in the eighth month of 2002, on the twenty-eighth day of August, I pulled from the shelves in the Athenaeum a book published in 1958, written by an art historian named Dolores Evelyn Smithfield—
A Concise History of New England Painters and Illustrators
(1958 + a name with eight syllables + I was 16 = 2 × 8).Somehow, I’d never before noticed the book. I took it back to one of the long tables, and was only flipping casually through the pages when I happened across eight paragraphs about Saltonstall and a black-and-white reproduction of
The Drowning Girl
. I sat and stared at it for a very long time, listening to the rain against the roof and windows, to thunder far away, the footsteps overhead. I noted that the painting appeared on page 88. I used to carry loose-leaf notebooks with me everywhere I went, and an assortment of pens and pencils in a pink plastic box, and that afternoon I wrote down everything Smithfield had written about
The Drowning Girl
. It doesn’t amount to much. Here’s the most interesting part:
    Though best remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his landscapes, one of Saltonstall’s best-known works is
The Drowning Girl
(1898), which may have been inspired by a certain piece of folklore encountered in northwestern Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts, along a short stretch of the Black Stone [
sic
] River. A common local yarn involves the murder of a mill owner’s daughter at the hands of a jealous fiancé, who then attempted to dispose of her body by tying stones about the corpse and sinking it in the narrow granite channel of the old Millville Lock. Some accounts have the murderer dropping the dead girl from the Triad Bridge, where the river is especially deep and wide. Tradition has it that the girl’s ghost haunts the river from Millville to Uxbridge, and possibly as far south as Woonsocket, Rhode Island. She is said to have been heard singing to herself along the banks and in the neighboring woods, and some claim she’s responsible for a number of drownings.
    We can be quite certain that the artist was well enough aware of the legend, as he notes in a letter to Mary Farnum, “Perhaps I will catch sight of her myself on some evening, asI sit sketching my studies. Sadly, I’ve not yet encountered anything more exciting than a deer and a blacksnake.” While this is hardly irrefutable evidence that he named his painting for the grisly tale, it appears too much to dismiss as coincidence. Could it be that Saltonstall meant to capture a careless swimmer moments before a fateful encounter with the ghost of “the drowning girl”? It seems a reasonable enough conclusion, and one that settles the question for this author.
     
    That same day…well, that night, I managed (much to my surprise!) to find the envelope that Rosemary Anne had made notes on all