Dead Beautiful

  “Wait, no,” I said. “I don’t want you to pretend you didn’t see us.”

  Both Miss LaBarge and Dante gave me confused looks.

  “Send us to the headmistress’s office.”

  “Renée,” Miss LaBarge said, “you don’t want this.”

  “Yes I do.”

  Miss LaBarge looked behind her shoulder. “You realize you could be expelled.”

  At that point I didn’t care. What I cared about was Eleanor. My parents. The Gottfried Curse.

  “Go,” Miss LaBarge ordered, pushing us away from her.

  Dante tried to pull me with him. “Renée, what are you doing?”

  “Getting us information,” I said, and coughed.

  From the bushes, I heard people fumbling around. “What was that?” Professor Lumbar said loudly as she pushed through the brush and ran toward us. Miss LaBarge shined her flashlight on us just as the professors emerged through the trees, their faces shrouded in darkness, their eyes gleaming at us through the glare. Mrs. Lynch stepped forward. “Good work, Annette,” she said while staring at me with a pleased grin. “Got you.”

  “We have to distract her,” I said to Dante as Mrs. Lynch dragged us to the headmistress’s office. “I need to get to the filing cabinet.”

  Dante studied me, then nodded. “I’ll try.”

  The headmistress met us outside her office, emerging out of the shadows in the hall.

  “Renée, Dante,” she said. “Come.”

  Once inside, she walked past the wall of bookshelves, running her fingers along the bindings as she sat in the leather chair behind her desk. She didn’t speak for a long time. Dante and I stood in front of her, trying to think of a plan. Finally she spoke, her tone firm and rather agitated.

  “Be seated,” she said, picking up a Siamese and dropping it into her lap. She rapped her fingers on the desk. “You look cold. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, please,” Dante and I said at the same time, almost too quickly.

  Headmistress Von Laark glanced between the two of us, and smiled as she unlocked the china hutch on the far wall. “If my memory serves me correctly, this is the second time you’ve both been here this semester,” she said, her back to us as she poured our tea. “Sugar?”

  “No thanks,” Dante and I said simultaneously.

  Just before the headmistress closed the doors of the hutch, I noticed two filing drawers at the bottom. I watched them disappear behind lock and key. In order to get into the files I had to get her out of the office, a task that seemed more and more impossible the longer I thought about it. It would only take an emergency for her to leave us here unsupervised, and considering that we were already in the middle of an emergency, our chances were slim.

  One of the cats emerged from behind her desk and walked toward Dante. Curling around his legs, it began to meow and paw at his pants. As he tried to shoo it away, the other Siamese leaped down from where it was sitting on the bookshelf, and after sniffing around Dante’s chair, also began to claw at his pants.

  “Romulus! Remus! Behave yourselves,” Headmistress Von Laark barked, and reluctantly the cats retreated behind her desk. I gave Dante a questioning look, but he avoided my gaze.

  “Miss Winters and Mr. Berlin, found together outside, after dark by the lake. How very romantic,” she said with no hint of a smile. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

  “It was my fault,” Dante and I blurted out at the exact same time.

  “I asked him to meet me so we could try to find Eleanor,” I said, just as Dante said, “I asked her to meet me so we could join the search.”

  The headmistress pondered our situation for a moment. “Since it seems I cannot deem who is more in the wrong, and since I can’t have you wandering the school grounds anymore tonight while the search is going on, and since I don’t want to let you out of my sight while I get my work done, I’m going to have you alphabetize my library.” She turned over the hourglass on her desk. “Now.”

  There must have been hundreds of books, all out of order, some so old and tattered that it was difficult to read the words on the binding. “I’ll find all of the A’s,” Dante said. “You work on the B’s.” I nodded, and we set off while the headmistress sat behind her desk, glancing up at us every so often as we worked. The hutch with the filing cabinet was just a few steps away; the two cats walked around it, backs arched, as if reading my thoughts.

  I could go to the bathroom, I thought. I could cause a commotion, which would draw the headmistress out. Then I could return and check the files. It was a flawed plan, but it was a plan nonetheless.

  Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, I walked past Dante. “Find the key while I’m gone.”

  He grabbed my elbow. “What are you doing?” Ignoring his question, I turned to the headmistress, but before I could speak, there was a knock on the door.

  “Enter,” the headmistress commanded.

  The door swung open, and Mrs. Lynch stepped inside, pulling Gideon DuPont by the arm. “I found him trying to sneak into the girls’ dormitory. Meeting a girl,” Mrs. Lynch added.

  Gideon gave her a cold, heartless glare filled with spite, which transformed into amusement when he rested his eyes on Dante. How could Dante have ever been friends with such a hateful person, I wondered.

  The two cats sauntered toward Gideon and clawed at his pants. Gideon didn’t seem to notice; his eyes were trained on Dante.

  “Have him wait outside,” the headmistress said. “And watch him.” Mrs. Lynch nodded, while Gideon kicked Romulus and Remus off his legs as he backed out the door. The headmistress tsk-tsked, but the cats didn’t respond. Frustrated, she stood up and made the sound again, but they were intent on Gideon. “Close the door behind you, please,” she called out to him, betraying the slightest hint of anxiety. “Don’t let them out.” Gideon looked up and smiled. With deliberation, he slipped out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and the cats followed, their tails disappearing into the hallway.

  Trying to hide her anger, the headmistress threw open her desk drawer and pulled out a string and two tiny muzzles. Turning to us, she said, “Keep working. I’ll return shortly.” And with that she was gone.

  Without hesitating, I ran to her desk and grabbed her keys, trying each until I found the one that fit the hutch. Throwing the drawers open, I flipped through the files. I checked under M for Millet, but Cassandra’s file wasn’t there. I checked again, and then under C, but it wasn’t there either. Confused, I tried G for Gallow and then B for Benjamin, but his file was missing too.

  Frantically, I went through the rest of the files, looking for anything. Minnie Roberts’s file was gone too, as was Dante’s and Eleanor’s. And to my surprise, so was my own. From the door, Dante coughed loudly, looking at me and then the door. Swiftly, I closed the file cabinet and locked it, returning the key to the desk. Nothing. There was nothing.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Stolen Files

  THE SEARCH FOR ELEANOR CONTINUED FOR A week, but they found nothing. Her bag, her books, and all of her things were in our dorm room. The beams of their flashlights occasionally flickered through my window, and I watched them dance across the walls as if they were looking for Eleanor in her bed. It was coincidental that the flood in the basement had occurred around the same time as her disappearance, though no one thought the two events were related, since I had told everyone that Eleanor had been safely in our room that night. Besides, the water level was still too high for anyone to access the basement. So instead they taped up posters around campus and Attica Falls, plastering the entire area with Eleanor’s face. Underneath it read one word: missing.

  Her parents flew in separately, her mother a tall, elegant blonde in riding boots and a slim black jacket; her father a suited corporate lawyer who talked to everyone as if he were interrogating them. They bickered like children, blaming each other for Eleanor’s disappearance; though they were surprisingly kind to me. “Eleanor spoke highly of you,” M
r. Bell said. “She said you were one of her closest friends. Am I correct to believe that you helped her with her grades in Horticulture?”

  I gazed at him, confused. “I, um...no, I only gave her a few pointers. She didn’t need much help.”

  “Modest, too,” he said, looking me up and down. “If you were leading the search, where would you look?”

  “The basement,” I blurted out.

  He didn’t speak for a long time, until he put his hat back on and buttoned his coat. “They said she couldn’t be in the basement.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just a hunch.”

  “Eleanor was right about you.”

  I gave him a questioning look.

  “You speak your mind.”

  But I seemed to be one of the few people he didn’t despise. He marched around campus, his son, Brandon, beside him, his ex-wife, Cindy, and his two assistants trailing behind, ordering the rangers, the townspeople, the professors, even the headmistress around, all of whom he accused of being incompetent and lazy. Yet even with more people, the search yielded nothing. Slowly the parties disbanded.

  Campus affairs seemed to go back to normal, or as normal as they could have been with a sixteen-year-old girl missing. Everyone was scared, and even though there was no proof, it was hard not to project Benjamin’s fate onto Eleanor. Mrs. Lynch seemed almost excited. She patrolled the halls and conducted random room searches with the kind of enthusiasm born from years of putting up with children who deserved to be disciplined, but rarely were. A scandal like this would merit a punishment she could only have dreamed of.

  I sat through my classes, hardly paying attention as I tried to smother my imagination. Somewhere out there, Eleanor was in trouble. I felt useless, and Professor Lumbar’s lecture about ancient forms of declensions was hardly enthralling enough to take my mind off of it.

  “What can Latin tell us about ourselves?” she asked, her giant body housed beneath a tent dress. She wrote a word on the board in large, slanted cursive: Vivus eram.

  “There is a form of ancient Latin called Latinum Mortuorum, which can only be spoken in the past tense. It doesn’t have any other tenses. You couldn’t say, ‘I am alive’; only ‘I was alive.’ It was spoken by children, often orphans. For them, the present, the future—these realms of time didn’t exist. Instead they spent their lives looking backward. In essence, living in the past.”

  I stared at the board, copying down the phrase. It was difficult to leave the past behind. First the death of my parents, and now Eleanor’s disappearance. Maybe it was my way of trying to relieve the guilt I felt about my parents, that finding Eleanor would somehow make them come back.

  How could I not be haunted by the past when death was looming so close to me? I was alive.

  That night I called Annie, and told her about Eleanor.

  “Why don’t you go to the police?” she asked.

  “They were here. Plus, what would I say? That someone is killing people by giving them heart attacks, and that Eleanor was probably the next victim?”

  “It does sound pretty ridiculous.”

  “I know. And I have no proof.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  “Just Nathaniel and Dante.”

  “You’re still talking to that guy?” she said.

  “Dante? Of course I am,” I said defensively. “Why wouldn’t I be talking to him?”

  “The last time we talked you thought he was some sort of mutant.”

  “Oh, right …” Thinking back to our previous phone conversation, I was almost embarrassed at how angry I had gotten at Annie. “I’m sorry, An,” I said. “All these things were happening that I didn’t understand, and nothing seemed fair.”

  “And now everything makes sense?” She sounded skeptical.

  I laughed. “Definitely not. I think I just changed. I like Dante. I like him a lot.” I wanted to tell her everything about him; I wanted to describe the way he looked at me, the way his voice sounded when he spoke in class, each word like a tiny piece of a sprawling love letter written only for me. But I knew she wouldn’t understand.

  After we hung up, I sat in my room and listened to the muffled sound of girls laughing through the walls. How could they laugh when one of their friends was missing? With nothing else to do, I decided to clean my room. The recesses beneath my bed were treacherous at best. Large stacks of papers and books crowded the floor, surrounded by dust bunnies. I began to sift through them, when I saw the book I’d bought from Lazarus Books. It was lying on its side beneath a pile of notebooks and folders. I wedged it out and wiped off its cover. Attica Falls. Its woven ivory binding was slowly unraveling along the edges. “The Gottfried Curse,” I thought. I had spent so much time worrying about how the curse related to my parents and Benjamin and Eleanor, that I had totally forgotten about the only part of the article that related to me. Literally. I stood up and paced the room until I found myself picking up the phone and dialing my grandfather’s number. Dustin answered.

  “Winters residence,” he said stoutly.

  “Hi, Dustin,” I said softly, feeling suddenly very much like a little girl. “Is my—”

  Upon hearing my voice, Dustin interrupted me. “Miss Winters?” he exclaimed warmly. “I’ve been wondering when we were going to hear from you. Calling about your winter travel arrangements?”

  “Um, no, I actually wanted to talk to my grandfather. Is he there?”

  “I’m afraid he’s away,” Dustin said. I imagined his forehead wrinkling as he said it. “Until next week, I’m afraid. Is it an emergency? Maybe I can be of service.”

  I hesitated. “No, it’s fine—it can wait. Thanks, though.”

  “But we’ll see you for the holidays, yes?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Excellent. I’ll be picking you up next Friday. And you can talk to Mr. Winters when you get home. He wouldn’t want me saying it, but he’s very much looking forward to seeing you again. As am I, of course. It will be such a joy to have a young person around the estate again. I fear we have all become statues.”

  I laughed. “Okay,” I said slowly, not sure how to respond. “See you next Friday, then.”

  I was about to blow out the candle and go to sleep, when I heard something hit my window. I got out of bed and looked outside, only to find Dante standing in the path below. I opened the window and leaned out.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Come down,” he said.

  I looked behind me again. “I can’t! I’ll get caught.”

  “Mrs. Lynch is gone. I saw her leave for the headmistress’s office ten minutes ago.”

  I threw on a pleated skirt and sweater, and checked my appearance in the mirror, clipping my hair to the side with a barrette.

  Dante was waiting for me by the path in just a shirt and tie, no jacket. He was leaning on a lamppost, his hair swept back from his face, save for a few loose strands that blew in the wind. Without saying a word, he wrapped his hand around mine and led me through the green. The night was gray and foggy, the moon barely visible beneath the clouds.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, trying to keep up with his long stride.

  Slowing down, he looked at me and smiled. “Trust me.”

  We stopped in front of the chapel, its massive stone buttresses leaning beneath the weight of the steeples. I let my hand slip from his as he walked ahead of me. Along the archway over the door, dozens of white flowers were blooming from gnarled vines. I gazed at them in awe. I had never seen them during the day.

  “Moonflowers,” I said, remembering them from the night-blooming plants class in Horticulture.

  Dante smiled and held open the riveted doors, which, surprisingly, were unlocked. With delicate footsteps, I stepped inside.

  The chapel was lit by dozens of candles all arranged in a line between the two aisles of pews. I picked one up and cradled it in my palm, glancing back at Dante with a surprised smile. He nudged me forward, and I followed the can
dlelit path into the belly of the chapel.

  It was dark and shadowy, with the faint smell of musk and rosewater. The candlelight reflected off the stained-glass windows, covering the floor in a dark mosaic of blue and purple light. The ceilings were vaulted and covered in peeling frescoes of clouds and angels and beautiful women with long, flowing hair.

  The candles led to the back of the chapel, behind the altar, and up into a narrow spiral staircase. The wind rattled the windows, and I looked back at Dante, who was just steps behind me. His fingers grazed the ends of my hair as I climbed, watching our shadows dance across the stone.

  We emerged at the top of the steeple, where a ring of candles wrapped around a giant bell in the middle. I stepped outside, the cold air refreshing on my cheeks. In front of me was the entire campus, now small, and behind it the forest and the rocky peaks of the White Mountains disappearing into the clouds.

  “It’s beautiful,” I uttered, though it hardly described what I felt.

  “You like it?”

  I turned to face him. “I love it.”

  Dante studied me, his face almost sad as he gently ran his fingers down my arm. “Renée, I—”

  I looked up at him expectantly, curling my hands into the sleeves of my coat.

  Dante’s eyes searched mine. “I can’t lose you.”

  My voice trembled as I stepped closer to him. “Why would you lose me?” I said with a faint smile.

  He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. We sank to the ground, surrounded by candles, and listened to the wind.

  “If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?” Dante asked as I rested my head against his chest.

  “To have my parents back.”

  “If I could give that to you, I would,” Dante said, kissing the inside of my arm, making it feel like dozens of white flowers were blooming across it.