“It sounds like she stumbled on some kind of cult,” Dan replied. A few orange leaves drifted down from the branches above them, joining the stacks of research on the table. Jordan brushed them away impatiently.
“You think the person you saw at Aunt Lucy’s was in the same cult? These letters are old, Dan,” Abby said. “What are the odds these Scarlets or whatever are still a thing?”
“The description matches,” Jordan replied, scratching his chin. “Skull, red robe . . . Maybe it’s not a cult. She said it was supposed to be about academics, right? What if it’s like the Skull and Bones or the Sevens?”
“If it is,” Dan began slowly, “I doubt anyone will want to talk to us about it. Isn’t the whole point of those societies to remain top secret?”
He looked between his two friends, who hesitated. Jordan scratched the side of his stubbled cheek with a pencil eraser, and Abby fiddled with the zipper on her book bag.
“Let’s not go asking any fishy questions just yet. I think the archives would be our best bet,” she said finally. “We can spend the afternoon there, and then we have the carnival tonight. That will be a good opportunity to get away and check the next address. I don’t think we should be breaking into any houses in broad daylight.”
“I wonder if that bright burning star is something we can cross-reference or LexisNexis or whatever,” Jordan mused, pushing up from the picnic table. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
“If it’s tied to this secret cult society, I doubt we’ll find any general information,” Abby replied. They mustered under the big barren tree and then crossed from the green of the quad to the paths. The library wasn’t far, just beyond a shallow hill, a half block from the chapel.
Dan tried to go over what he had dreamed one more time, before all the details slipped away entirely. The warden had been in that house with that man, going through the stolen mailbags. Could that man really have been part of a secret society? He certainly didn’t fit the profile of what Dan pictured when he heard “Skull and Bones.” On that note . . . could Warden Crawford?
Dan shuddered to think of the warden joining—or worse, forming—a secret society, extending his reach beyond the walls of Brookline. As Caroline had said in her letter, societies like that were about power and influence. Those were two things the warden definitely didn’t need.
“Right, Dan?”
Starting, Dan glanced up to find both his friends watching him. He hadn’t heard even the beginnings of what they were asking.
“Sorry, what was the question?”
“You were lost in thought, weren’t you?” Abby smiled faintly as they reached the tall doors to the library. A few students were clustered outside, chatting over steaming coffee cups. “What’s up?”
“I was just thinking . . .” His dreams had certainly become vivid, but were they evidence or just his imagination? “We know the warden was using Brookline as his personal research playground, but what if it wasn’t just him? What if he was mixed up with these Scarlets?”
“He did have a hard-on for the best and the brightest,” Jordan agreed.
“That’s . . . a scary thought,” Abby admitted.
For all the people who’d been milling about outside, the inside of the library was virtually empty. A bored desk worker wandered over, glanced at their weekend prospie badges, and waved them through the security sensors on either side of the doors.
Since Jordan had been here before, Dan and Abby followed him to a spot near the stairs leading down to the AV archives. They set up at a row of computer terminals with a small, round table close by for their papers and bags. “It would explain how he got away with so much. . . . I mean, if he had influential people watching his back, covering up his experiments at the asylum . . .”
“Oh!” Jordan slid into a computer chair, bouncing excitedly. “That’s something we can check, too. Asylums must have been subject to inspections and things, right?”
“They were, yeah.” This was Dan’s area of expertise, and he was glad to contribute something of value to the discussion. “Usually nurses inside the facilities secretly reported on the higher-ups, tipping off outsiders to what was going on inside the hospitals. Even then, wardens would do their best to downplay whatever horrible stuff was going on, and they’d usually get away with it, too.”
“Jesus, and here I thought Brookline was an isolated incident,” Jordan muttered.
“I don’t know if it got as bad as Brookline anywhere else,” Dan said. “I’m just saying, if there were cover-ups going on elsewhere and the warden here had the ear of the dean or the president of the college? It’s no wonder he got away with it for so long.”
“That’s good,” Jordan said, typing furiously. “Well . . . not good, obviously, but it’s another angle to check. We can easily find out who was running the college when the warden was at Brookline, then we can start digging on this alleged secret society.”
He tapped the enter key and then they heard a soft bew as the monitor turned off.
“What the . . .” Jordan smacked his palm against the computer monitor. “It turned off!”
“These are old,” Abby said, turning to the next keyboard over and typing. “It’s probably just a surge. I’ll check for . . . you . . .” She frowned, hitting the enter key about sixteen times.
“The hell?” Jordan said, hitting the side of her monitor, too. “No way that was a surge. It froze. Control-alt-delete, asshole. Wake up!”
He said those last two words just a little too loudly, and three different students whipped around in their seats to give him a death glare. Jordan sank down sheepishly.
Dan shifted to face his own computer, but he didn’t really have a doubt what would happen. Warden Daniel Crawford. AND. Scarlets. He hit enter, his cursor stopped blinking, and next to him Jordan swore viciously, all exactly as he’d predicted.
“How hard would it be to make this happen?” Dan asked, frowning.
“Hard.” Jordan glanced around the periphery of the AV room. “You would need to install an actual program on every single computer with whatever keywords and combinations you wanted to trigger the freeze. I’m not sure I could even program something like that.”
“Well, it’s a pain but maybe it will only slow us down.” Abby spun around once completely in her desk chair and then said, “We can use our own laptops, right? They would be clean.”
“Sure, but we won’t have access to the college’s digital archives from our own computers,” Jordan said. “They would require a student ID for that kind of thing.”
“I can use my phone for internet,” Dan pointed out. “We all can.”
“And as far as the archives go, we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.” Abby slid out of her chair, going to collect her bag from the round table. “Jordan, show me where you found those newspapers. We can start there and try to find that article of Caroline’s. That letter she wrote was October 1968. If she went ahead and published the article, it might have been soon after.”
Dan nodded and followed Jordan up to the second level, which was even more deserted, quiet, and dark, with only every other row of lights turned on to conserve energy. The book stacks formed narrow aisles, broken up every dozen or so shelves with small areas to sit and study. Cubbies with computers ran along the stout wall overlooking the first floor.
At the top of the stairs, Jordan took a sharp left, bringing them through the maze of stacks. He and Abby chatted softly ahead, and Dan hung back, letting his eyes roam over the shelves and books, which all seemed to blur into one another. Shelf, aisle, shelf, aisle, over and over again, all of them abandoned. Shelf, aisle, shelf, boy, shelf, aisle . . . Dan stopped abruptly, then took two small steps back to look down the darkened lane formed by the two tall bookshelves.
The boy in the striped sweater and cutoff pants. Dan’s mouth dried up, his tongue lying limp and numb in his mouth. He could feel a buzzing sensation starting in his lips, adrenaline hitting his system, making his wh
ole body seize with sudden tremors. The boy in the shadows was drained of color, as if he were living in black and white, though his eyes seemed to glow faintly like coals. Blood dripped down through his hair and onto his forehead, into his eyes. . . .
Abby’s and Jordan’s quiet voices died away.
Dan blinked, expecting the boy to disappear, but he was still there, watching. Then he turned and walked down the aisle, away from Dan, only just visible in the darkness between the stacks. Without another thought, Dan followed.
Aisle after aisle, Dan chased the little apparition. He sped up, then decided to keep his distance, until the boy turned a sharp corner and Dan had to jog to make sure he didn’t lose him. His heart pounded in his chest, that buzzy adrenaline numbness flooding through his veins faster now. Dan took the corner hard and fast and shouted, slamming chest first into Jordan. Dan stumbled back, the wind knocked clear out of his lungs.
“Dan! Where the hell did you come from?” Jordan spun, checking over his shoulder. “I thought you were right behind us.”
“I was.” He raced to think of an excuse other than I followed a ghost child. “I just took a shortcut.”
“Scared me half to death.”
“Are you okay? You guys hit each other pretty hard.” Abby reached up to touch Dan’s chest where he’d run into Jordan.
“I’m fine.” I’m not at all fine. I’m losing it. “No, I’m not fine. . . . It’s that little boy again. I just saw him.” Dan glanced in every direction, but the boy was gone again. He turned to see where they had stopped, and a steep wall of shelves rose up to the ceiling. Binders upon binders were lined up in neat rows, the spines labeled with spans of years. Winter 1961–Winter 1963, Spring 1963–Spring 1964, and so on.
Right away, Dan noticed a gap, a clean, dust-free space where two binders obviously belonged.
And the boy led me right to this spot.
“You see things you shouldn’t be able to see. You know things you shouldn’t be able to know.”
Damn it, Felix, stop being right about me.
“The years the warden ran Brookline,” he murmured, fitting his hand into the empty space. “They’re missing. The little kid led me right to it.”
He heard Jordan whisper a barely audible “Creepy, Dan.”
“But not everything is missing,” Abby said excitedly. She pushed her arm into the gap left by the missing archive binders. He heard her fingernails scratch along the surface of the shelf, then she grunted softly, batting a slim, dusty binder toward them. The last swat was a little too rough, and the folder tumbled off the shelf. Dan managed to catch it before it could hit the carpet.
“They missed one. Fall 1968,” Abby said, leaning over to read the spine. “It’s something, at least. Let’s hope Caroline published her article right after sending that letter.”
“And this, too. . . .” Jordan palmed something out of the dusty shelf space and handed it to Dan. He could guess what it would be even before his hands closed over the musty card stock.
A photograph, but this one was less composed than the others. Dan recognized the birdcage from the last picture, the one their follower had left on the ground outside Lucy’s house. But the cage wasn’t empty anymore. In this photograph there was a bird inside, but it was broken and bleeding, its eyes staring, red and white feathers torn and littering the floor under its claws.
Dan’s phone chirped in his pocket, surprising him enough that he dropped his fork. It clattered noisily onto his tray, but that wasn’t enough to interrupt Abby’s host, who was in the middle of monologuing about her senior installation and the breakthrough she had made that afternoon.
“My brother finished his pre-med here,” Lara was saying, “but even that wasn’t good enough for my parents. They thought he would get into Berkeley, Princeton. . . . But the scholarship here was too good to pass up. Full ride.”
He groped blindly for his fork, glancing down at his phone to find a new text message. It was from Jordan, who apparently felt it necessary to text him from about two feet away.
Does she ever shut up?
Dan smirked, glancing down the cafeteria bench at Jordan, who kept a cool outward facade.
Dan’s smile didn’t last long. He could feel the weight of the photographs in his pocket. Who would be morbid enough to take a picture of a dead bird? He could see the parrot’s broken body whenever he lost focus and let his eyes close for a little too long.
“I think I might actually pass Psych 200 this semester,” Micah said, interrupting Lara’s story. He waited until Dan looked up to say, “Everything okay? I’ve hardly seen hide nor hair of you three today. Not sure you’re getting the full prospie experience . . .”
“We saw the library,” Dan deflected, picking at his mashed potatoes. The buzz of the dining hall rose around them, a constant blur of clanking silverware and laughter. “And the Commons . . . We got to wander quite a bit of the campus today, actually.”
“And Lara took me to her installation this morning,” Abby chimed in. “It’s exciting work.”
“You three coming to the carnival tonight?” Cal asked. He looked, in Dan’s opinion, exhausted, with dark bags under his eyes and a sickly cast to his skin. Jordan glanced everywhere in the cafeteria except in Cal’s direction, and Cal appeared to be doing the same, addressing every word specifically to Dan. “Probably going to be packed with drunk kids. Who knows what they’ll get up to.”
“Rowdy drunk kids aren’t exactly a rousing endorsement, Cal,” Micah said with another laugh. “But you’re coming, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jordan mumbled, swapping out his phone for his sudoku book and completely checking out of the conversation.
“Y’all are going to, uh, stick around this time, yeah?” Micah asked. Dan could hear the shift in tone, and shrank under the way he stared at each of them in turn.
“What are you talking about?” Lara reached across Micah for the pepper, then doused her food in it.
“They just . . . had an adventure on top of the party, that’s all.”
“Can’t blame ’em,” Cal said, shrugging. “That party was too packed. The carnival will be, too, I guess, but at least it will be outside. Let me know if you guys need anything to help keep you warm.” He stuck his thumb out and mimed drinking from it like a bottle.
Dan could see Micah’s face turning darker shades of red by the minute.
“A lot of students worked hard on this, Cal,” he said sternly. “The least you could do is show up sober. Anyway, there’ll be plenty to do. Midway games, food, a maze . . . The dance and theater kids have cooked up some skits.”
“The idiots in Student Affairs made me repaint the signs.” Lara tossed Abby a sarcastic glance. “Apparently my design was too macabre. Philistines.”
“Little kids come to this thing,” Micah replied. “I can kind of see their point.”
Dan’s eyes landed on Jordan’s sudoku puzzle, now half-hidden under his dinner tray, and he saw that he wasn’t even solving the thing, but simply coloring in the empty squares.
When their plates were empty, they followed Micah and Lara to the garbage line. Cal had already left, muttering something about pregaming, whatever that was.
“Well, us volunteers have to get on over to the carnival,” Micah said as they shuffled out of the cafeteria. “But you guys can wander by whenever you feel like it. Might want to get there early, before the lines get long.”
“We’ll be there,” Dan assured him.
They stepped outside into the cold, each pulling on a different combination of hats and scarves and gloves.
“Catch you later,” Lara said, waving to them, but primarily to Abby.
“Someone’s been busy,” Jordan observed, nodding to the path leading away from the cafeteria. The paved lanes crisscrossing the quad were lined with orange paper bags. A glowing votive sat in the bottom of each bag, throwing flickering, long shadows across the paths. Purple and black streamers decorated the dorms now, and plastic
bats hung from the pillars and overhangs.
A few Halloween touches had been added to every building. Every building except Brookline. Dan stamped his feet, trying to coax warmth back into his legs. Behind him, he could feel Brookline there. He had to look, giving the asylum one quick glance over his shoulder. Just that was enough to send his legs wobbling.
“I’m wondering if we should ask Micah or Lara about the Scarlets thing. If it’s like a local legend or rumor, they might know something about it.” They ambled to the side of the stoop, avoiding the steady stream of students leaving the cafeteria. “Caroline’s article was pretty vague. . . .”
Dan had taken the copy from the Fall 1968 binder, but it was hardly worth reading again. Caroline Martin must have edited the article sometime after writing her letter—or someone else had. Anything seemed possible.
Abby stuck her hands deep into her coat pockets and gazed out at the flickering lights along the paths. “If the Scarlets went to the trouble of going through the town’s mail, I’m sure their tracks are probably covered.”
“We have to find out where those archive binders about the warden went,” Dan said. He shivered, thinking of the boy leading him through the library. “Not just for what’s in them, but for who took them.” And who left the dead bird behind.
“Maybe it’s our mystery computer programmer,” Jordan suggested. “If searches about the warden are locked, then it figures that those records would go missing, too.”
“I hate to point this out,” Abby said softly, sniffling from the cold, “but Professor Reyes is running that seminar on Brookline. The archives might just be checked out. It’s almost midterms, kids could be doing some extra studying, or the professor could be making copies for class handouts.”
“I know,” Dan replied. “It’s not much to go on. None of this is. We should keep following Felix’s map, otherwise we’re still at square one.”
A cold spike of anxiety lanced through Dan’s chest as they crossed to the academic side. The green in front of Wilfurd Commons had been transformed into a black-and-purple carnival. More tents had sprung up, filling the empty spaces between buildings. Students in costumes, reeking of cheap alcohol, pushed by them, stumbling and shrieking with laughter. The townie families stuck together, herding their costumed children away from the loud college students.