Dead Beautiful

  She looked us up and down and then walked us to a table at the other end of the restaurant.

  “Actually,” I said, “can we sit over there?” I pointed to the booth on the other side of the wood paneling from Brandon Bell, who was sitting with the rest of the Board of Monitors.

  “Fine,” the waitress said with a sigh. She tossed our menus on the table and read out the daily specials in a monotone that was too fast for us to understand, then disappeared behind the double doors of the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?!” hissed Nathaniel. “Stalking the Board of Monitors?”

  “If Cassandra is dead—”

  “Which she might not be,” Nathaniel added.

  “—and if the school knows, and is covering it up by saying she transferred, then the Board of Monitors might know.”

  “And you think they’re going to talk about it out of nowhere, right here at Beatrice’s?”

  “Well, we’re not going to hear anything by sitting on the other side of the room.”

  The booth was sticky with syrup and grease, its upholstery cracked down the middle, revealing a spongy yellow interior. I took off my jacket and mittens, and sat down. A wood panel was the only thing that stood between our table and the Monitors’.

  Their voices were muffled through the wood. I leaned over and pressed my ear against it. Nathaniel did the same, but to no avail.

  “I can’t hear anything,” he mumbled. “What are they saying?”

  I put a finger to my lips. Nathaniel gulped down his water, held the empty glass against the panel, and listened through it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t make it out.”

  “Oh, give it to me,” I said, grabbing the glass from him.

  A junior named Max Platkin was talking. “I would kill,” he said, “to get out of that class. It’s so boring. The prof is practically dead anyway. She can barely sit up straight.”

  The table laughed. I gave Nathaniel a shocked look, until I processed the rest of his sentence, and then rolled my eyes.

  “Well, next year you’ll be a senior and you can finally opt out of Latin,” Ingrid said. I imagined her tossing her silky black hair over one shoulder.

  “Yeah, plus, the headmistress wouldn’t like that,” Schuyler joked. “Killing professors isn’t exactly on the menu.” But just as Schuyler finished his sentence, our waitress approached and pulled a skinny green pad out of her apron. We sat up straight and looked at our menus.

  “What do you want?” she said, chewing a piece of gum and not seeming to notice or care that we were eavesdropping on the booth next to us.

  I scanned the menu, eager for her to leave. “I’ll have an omelet with sausage and cheese. And an orange juice.”

  She scribbled down my order and looked at Nathaniel.

  “Just water. And granola.”

  “No granola,” she said. “Just pancakes, eggs, hash, or tuna.” She waited with her hand on her hip while Nathaniel flipped through the menu.

  “White toast?”

  Cindy nodded. After she left, we resumed our positions by the wood paneling.

  “She keeps talking about Renée Winters,” Genevieve said, with a hint of disgust. “Asking me to keep an eye on her and her boyfriend.”

  I almost gasped when I heard my name. Nathaniel gave me a questioning look, but I ignored it. “Who is she?” asked Schuyler.

  “She’s a sophomore,” Genevieve continued. “Apparently she’s the best in her Horticulture class.”

  “She’s my sister’s roommate,” Brandon added.

  “I spent some time with her in October. She seems nice, but forgettable,” Genevieve said. I glared at her through the wall. “Other than that she’s close with Dante Berlin. The headmistress is highly interested in them.”

  Brandon interjected. “Well, obviously. He was friends with Vivian, Gideon, and Yago. He was probably in love with Cassandra too, just like Benjamin.”

  “Was friends with,” Schuyler emphasized.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Brandon, cutting him off. “My point is that we don’t know what he’s capable of. Just like Cassie. Just like the rest of them. If Renée were smart, she’d stay away from him.”

  Genevieve laughed. “That’s the problem. When it comes to Dante, no one can think straight. Don’t worry, though. If the headmistress is right about her skills, I’m sure Renée can take care of herself.”

  The waitress came with our food. She slid our plates across the table and left us with a handful of minijams and a bottle of ketchup, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. Why was the headmistress asking about me and Dante, and what did Genevieve mean by my “skills”? She must have meant in Horticulture, because it was the only class that everyone seemed to compliment me on.

  Brandon stood up. The rest of them followed. As he walked by our booth to the door, he gave me a sideward glance. I quickly stuffed a piece of omelet into my mouth.

  “What just happened?” Nathaniel asked, tucking his napkin into the top of his shirt like a bib, and I remembered that he hadn’t heard any of it. When I was sure no one was listening, I recounted everything.

  “What did they mean about Cassandra and the rest of them?” I asked. “And why should I stay away from Dante? What is he capable of?”

  Nathaniel looked troubled, though admittedly he almost always looked troubled. “I don’t know,” he said. “And neither do they. That’s the point.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re a genius. Have I ever told you that?”

  “No, really,” he said. “If they don’t know what Dante is capable of, it means he hasn’t done anything yet. And neither have the rest of them. It’s Cassandra that’s the problem, because clearly she did something.”

  “But what?”

  He shrugged. We finished eating, and the waitress came back with our bill. I watched her impatiently as she counted out the change. “Thanks,” I said when she was done, and grabbed Nathaniel by the arm. “Come on. We’ve got to find them.”

  But when we got outside, the Board of Monitors had disappeared. “Why is the headmistress interested in me?” I said. “And Dante?”

  Nathaniel said nothing. “Maybe,” I said while we walked, “the headmistress also thinks something weird happened to Benjamin and Cassandra. She probably thinks Dante knows something since he used to be friends with them and was the one who found Ben. And she’s interested in me because she thinks we’re dating.” I had to be more careful, I told myself.

  “Are you dating him? Like, it’s official?” Nathaniel asked, staring at me, his blue eyes magnified through his thick glasses.

  “I...well, we haven’t really talked about it. But I think so. I mean, we spend a lot of time together.”

  “Why isn’t he here today? Doesn’t he live here?” Nathaniel asked earnestly.

  I didn’t know why we weren’t meeting until five. “Oh, he has studying to do,” I said quickly.

  We walked down the street, toward a small row of stores, when I bumped directly into Brandon Bell.

  “Renée,” he said.

  I looked up at him, his sandy hair a short, military version of Eleanor’s. “Oh, hi.”

  “Have you seen my sister?” he asked. Eleanor had introduced us a few times, but the encounters had been brief and unpleasant. Brandon had a way of making every conversation sound like an interrogation.

  “I...uh...no, she went to the library instead.”

  He gave me a suspicious look. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah...sorry, I’m just...well, I have to... We have to go,” I said. “See you later!” Grabbing Nathaniel by the shirt, I pulled him into the alley. A rickety wooden sign with chipped blue paint bore the name lazarus books. I pushed open the door, and we both stumbled inside.

  “Well, that went well,” Nathaniel said. “Not conspicuous at all.”

  The bell over the door chimed as it slammed shut, and an old man emerged from a room behind the counter. He had a round face with a ruddy nose and a salt-and-pepper bear
d. He propped his elbows up on the counter. “Schoolbooks are in the back.”

  “That’s Conrad Porley,” Nathaniel told me as we walked to the back of the store. “People say that he won’t sell a book to you if you rub him the wrong way. And I don’t know about your theory that the headmistress and Board of Monitors are hiding something about Cassandra or Benjamin,” Nathaniel added. “Why would the school cover up a death? They didn’t cover up Ben’s death.”

  “But what about what Minnie Roberts said?”

  Nathaniel stopped walking. “She said that the headmistress and the Board of Monitors killed Cassandra. Come on, even you have to admit it’s a crazy idea.”

  “Do you have a better one?”

  “Benjamin died of a heart attack, Cassandra transferred, and Minnie Roberts is crazy.”

  “What fifteen-year-old dies of a heart attack in the woods? And what about what Eleanor saw in the séance?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “I thought we already went over this.”

  I sighed. I guess he had a point. “But that still doesn’t explain why the headmistress is so interested in me and Dante.”

  “Well, you did get into some trouble, didn’t you?”

  “Just once,” I said, thinking of getting caught with Dante after the séance. And then I remembered the dress-code incident on the first day of class. “Okay, twice. Maybe you’re right,” I conceded, and turned to the check out the store.

  Unlike normal bookstores, each section was categorized not only by genre, but by subject matter. One shelf read Puberty. The one across from it read Pet Saves Owner and Dies, and beside that were sections titled: Superhero Origin Stories, Babies, Death in the Family, and Girlfriend in the Refrigerator.

  I scanned the walls and walked toward Nathaniel. He was a few rows away, looking at a book in the section on Vampires and Zombies. But before I got to him, a section title caught my eye. Boarding School. I crouched down to read the titles. There were a lot of novels and a few nonfiction books on prestigious prep schools, but there wasn’t anything on Gottfried Academy.

  I approached Nathaniel, who was flipping through a teenage romance about vampires. I wasn’t really interested in zombies or vampires, but with nothing else to do, I knelt beside him and looked at the titles, pulling one out every so often. Most of them were horror stories with fangs and gravestones and bandaged, faceless monsters on the cover. I was growing bored, my eyes going in and out of focus, when I spotted a book that stood out from the rest. It had a plain ivory binding, with letters so faded they were barely legible.

  I pulled it out and cradled it in my lap. It was thick and dusty. The cover read: Attica Falls. I opened it, my excitement mounting as I flipped through the pages. It had a full chapter on Gottfried Academy, which was more information than I had ever seen on the school, and it had pictures. It must have been shelved in the wrong section accidentally. Satisfied, I tucked it under my arm and brought it to the register.

  Mr. Porley coughed into his arm. “Interesting choice,” he said in a gruff smoker’s voice.

  “I’m new to the East Coast.”

  “Up at the Academy, I’m guessing?” he asked, taking me in. He had large hairy hands and wore suspenders, as if he had been either a fisherman or lumberjack in some former life.

  I nodded.

  He opened the book cover and charged me ten dollars, half of the price asked. “Seems you have some luck about you. This one’s out of print,” he said, before putting it in a paper bag.

  I thanked him and left with Nathaniel at my heels.

  With nothing better to do, we walked to the end of the street until we reached an abandoned house. It was white and crooked, with a wraparound porch and pillars that looked half eaten by termites. I tested the steps with my foot to make sure they wouldn’t collapse before Nathaniel and I sat down. A few groups of students ambled past us, chatting and sipping cups of something hot and steaming. Down the street, Professor Bliss was smoking a cigarette outside the general store. I opened the book and flipped through it, skipping over the chapters on the history of Maine, the founding of Attica Falls, and the natural wonders of the White Mountains, until I found what I was looking for. Chapter 7: Gottfried Academy.

  I began to read while Nathaniel looked over my shoulder. Some of it I already knew—the Academy’s role in the Revolutionary War, its transformation from a religious to a secular school...but just when I was beginning to accept that there was nothing more to Gottfried than a superficial history, one page caught my eye. On the bottom right was a photograph, a normal black-and-white image of Gottfried Academy, and one that I normally wouldn’t have glanced at twice if it hadn’t been for the familiar face staring back at me.

  “That’s...that’s my grandfather,” I said in awe.

  Nathaniel pushed his glasses closer to his face and squinted. “Which one?”

  I pointed to a tall broad-faced man in a suit and vest. His hair was darker then, his glasses thinner. He was standing in front of the Gottfried gates with a school scarf draped around his neck, smiling and looking almost nothing like the dry curmudgeon I’d encountered last summer. The caption read: Headmaster Brownell Winters, 1974. Below it was a newspaper article, reprinted in the book from The Portland Herald.

  The Gottfried Curse

  July 7, 1989

  By Jacqueline Brookmeyer

  After nearly one hundred calamity-free years, a fire ravaged the forest surrounding Gottfried Academy, the preparatory school located near Attica Falls. The school is known not only for its stringent classical academics, but for its proclivity for disaster. Since its founding in 1735, Gottfried Academy has been plagued by a horrific and unexplainable chain of tragedies, including disease, natural catastrophe, and a string of accidents of the most perverse and bizarre nature. These recurring events have brought attention to Gottfried Academy, attracting a series of enigmatologists who have attempted to understand the causes and patterns behind the disasters. All of them died under suspicious circumstances, until 1789, when the disasters stopped. But has this phenomenon, coined locally as “the Gottfried Curse,” truly been buried?

  It began in 1736 with an outbreak of the measles and mumps. The school was originally founded as a children’s hospital by Doctor Bertrand Gottfried, who attempted to ward off the epidemic. Despite his efforts, more than one hundred children perished. Rumor has it that the doctor built catacombs beneath the hospital grounds to bury the children and contain the infection. Three years later, Bertrand Gottfried mysteriously died. His body was found in the lake by a groundskeeper, his death apparently caused by heart failure.

  I paused and stared at the words. Heart failure. “It can’t be,” I murmured. “What?” Nathaniel asked over my shoulder.

  “Bertrand Gottfried died of a heart attack. Just like my parents.”

  “He was old,” Nathaniel said. “It’s not the most bizarre way to die.”

  “It is if they find you in a lake.”

  “Maybe he was swimming when he had the heart attack,” Nathaniel offered.

  “Or maybe it wasn’t a heart attack.”

  “Turn the page.”

  Though none of the catacombs were ever discovered, they are purported to have been the beginnings of the subterranean tunnels that still run beneath the premises. All previous headmasters, including the newly incumbent Headmistress Calysta Von Laark, have refused to comment on this matter.

  After the death of Bertrand Gottfried, the hospital stopped accepting new patients and closed its doors to the outside world. For a decade, no one came in or out, save for a weekly groundskeeper, who delivered groceries and supplies from the local general store. Yet, just as suddenly as the hospital closed, it reopened. This time, as a school. The head nurse at the time, Ophelia Hart, ascended as the first headmistress. She named it “Gottfried Academy,” after its founder.

  Over time, the infirmary’s tragic history was forgotten, and students began to filter in. The disasters continued like clockwork. The unexpecte
d collapse of the building that is now the theater, in 1751; the nor’easter of 1754; the tuberculosis epidemic of 1759; and the food-poisoning incident in 1767. Ten years later, the school was partially destroyed during the Revolutionary War, which was followed by a series of disasters culminating in the chemistry lab accident of 1789.

  But what was origin of the curse, and is it really over? Some believe that it’s the area itself. Others believe it was Bertrand Gottfried. “Everything started to happen after he died,” local Esther Bancroft said. “He wasn’t a doctor, he was a sinner. Lord knows what he did to those children. And then they killed him, and his soul is trying to tell people to stay away. Stay away.” But others blame the curse on Gottfried’s first headmistress.

  “It was that woman,” local Hazel Bamberger, 84, claims. “That nurse that started the whole god-damn school. Ophelia. She was with that Doctor Bertrand, not like normal doctors and nurses are, but closer. After he died, she became the first headmistress, and that’s when everything started. That’s why it’s always couples that die. She’s seeking her revenge on people in love.”

  Although some might not believe Bamberger’s theory, there is one more disturbing coincidence that even the townspeople aren’t aware of, and that is the manner in which many of the people died. According to confidential police files, which were leaked by an ex-Gottfried professor who wishes to remain anonymous, more than half of the deaths at Gottfried were deemed heart attacks.

  I put the book down and turned to Nathaniel. “This is it,” I said, gripping the page because I didn’t know what else to do with it. “This is the proof that connects my parents to Gottfried. To Benjamin. To everything.”

  Nathaniel said nothing, allowing me my moment.