Dead Beautiful

  I turned to him. “Then a kiss. A real kiss.”

  Dante ran a melancholy hand down my cheek. “I can’t.”

  “Why?” I asked, my face inches from his as I drew him closer. He leaned in, unable to help himself. I felt his hand on the back of my neck, pulling me toward him until our lips were nearly touching. The air fluttered in my lungs, and I closed my eyes, letting my body go soft in his arms. I couldn’t think or feel anything except his arms knotting themselves in my hair, grasping at my neck as if it were clay. And then suddenly he pulled away. “I can’t—” he said. “I can’t trust myself around you. I can’t help myself.”

  “I trust you,” I said softly.

  “Renée, what if I hurt you? I would never forgive myself.”

  “You won’t hurt me, I know you won’t,” I said, raising my hand to his face. He pressed it against his cheek.

  “You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’m capable of. I’m afraid to touch you, in case I break you; I’m afraid to talk to you, afraid you’ll realize that I’m a monster. But every day you’re still here.” He gazed at me. “I can barely control myself when I’m around you. I have to have you. I have to keep you.”

  “You do have me.”

  He spoke slowly. “Renée, I need to tell you—”

  But before he could finish his sentence, I saw a person walking down the pathway toward the chapel below us, carrying a lantern.

  “Mrs. Lynch,” I said frantically. We ran downstairs and snuck out the back entrance into the cemetery. With barely enough time to say good-bye, I ran to the dormitory.

  By the next morning, the magic of the night in the chapel seemed like nothing more than a dream, and the reality of Eleanor having been gone for over a week made me so nauseated that I barely had an appetite. I was stuffing books into my bag after Philosophy when Miss LaBarge approached me. “How do you feel about tea?” she asked.

  I hesitated. Mrs. Lynch had already questioned me three times about Eleanor, and I wasn’t up for it anymore. “I... I—”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said with a smile, and held the door for me as we walked to her office. It was on the third floor of Horace, in the east wing. I wiped my feet on a mat outside of her door that read, welcome friends, and entered. The room was covered in books. They were stacked on shelves, lying in piles on the floor, propped up against the windowsill, tucked behind the door. I sat in a Victorian armchair as Miss LaBarge busied herself over a platter with dishes, cups, saucers, and a teapot.

  “I don’t know where she is,” I blurted out before she could say anything.

  “Madeleine?” she said, her back to me.

  I stared at her, confused. “No. Eleanor. She’s in our class.. ..”

  Miss LaBarge turned around and smiled, holding out a plate of tea biscuits. “Of course she is. Madeleine, as in the cookie.”

  “Oh...right. Thanks,” I said, turning red.

  She held up a creamer. “Milk?”

  I nodded, and she poured it in my cup and sat in the armchair across from me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It seems like every time someone talks to me these days, all they ask about is Eleanor.”

  She frowned. “I’m not interested in your involvement with Eleanor’s disappearance, which I assume you had nothing to do with,” she said, sipping her tea, “but in your involvement with a certain someone else, who also has a proclivity for making himself scarce.”

  She had a confusing way of speaking, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what she was asking me. “Who?” I asked, confused.

  “The boy from the lake.”

  I stopped chewing. “Oh...he’s just a friend.”

  She picked up her saucer. “Ah, boys. Always problematic.”

  “There’s no problem,” I said quickly. “There’s nothing going on.”

  “It didn’t seem that way,” she said, clasping her hands over her knee. “But you needn’t tell me that. I am a professor, you are a student, and I understand that we have to operate under the contrivance that nothing romantic is going on with you and this boy, as the Code of Discipline decrees it.”

  I swallowed.

  “However, if there were something going on, say, as more than friends, I want you to feel comfortable coming to me if there are any...complications.”

  Was Miss LaBarge telling me that if I wanted to talk about Dante with her, I could? “There aren’t any complications,” I said. “With our...friendship.”

  Miss LaBarge gave me an earnest look. “Good,” she said. “Good. Just making sure.” She nibbled on a cookie. “So tell me what it is that you wanted to talk to me about.”

  I wanted to remind her that she was the one who had brought me here, not the other way around, but instead I blurted out “The Gottfried Curse” before I realized the words were leaving my mouth.

  Miss LaBarge coughed and set down her cup of tea, the china clattering against the saucer. “Sorry,” she said, wiping at her blouse with a handkerchief. “You caught me off guard.”

  “So you know about it?”

  “The deaths, yes.”

  “The heart attacks, you mean.”

  Miss LaBarge narrowed her eyes. “I presume you’re implying that they were somehow unnatural and that Eleanor is part of the pattern.”

  I gazed at her in awe. “Yes.”

  “Renée, I know it’s a comforting idea to think that when someone dies, it’s for a reason, or that someone is responsible, but sometimes these things just happen. After all, we are just humans. We can’t control life and death.”

  It was supposed to make me feel better, but even the thought of Eleanor being dead made me feel queasy.

  “However,” she said as I looked away, “we can control the way we react.”

  I gave her a confused look.

  “Descartes once said that instinct trumps all. Follow yours,” she said, and winked.

  I set down my tea. She was right.

  The next morning in the boys’ dorm, I lingered in the shower, letting the water pound against my back as I tried to figure out what I should do. Instinct, I repeated to myself. What did my instinct tell me to do? But I couldn’t think of anything that might help me find Eleanor or figure out what was behind the heart attacks. By the time I turned off the water, all of the girls had cleared out. Clutching my towel and shower caddy, I stepped into the hall.

  The boys’ dormitory was eerily still. I glanced down the stairway. There was no one there. Without thinking, I ventured into the hallway. It was lined with doors, all wooden and perforated with slanted shingles, like in a psychiatric hospital. I walked past, running my fingers along them until I found myself standing in front of one door in particular. It looked the same as the rest: no one else would have been able to perceive its irregularity, yet for some reason I couldn’t walk past it.

  66F.

  I glanced around me. If the boys’ dorm was the same as the girls’, there wouldn’t be any locks. I knocked lightly, and when no one answered, I turned the knob.

  The room was immaculate, the kind of clean you only find in an expensive hotel room. Or at least one side was. The bed was tucked and made, with no creases or lumps; the books in the shelf were arranged in alphabetical order, and when I opened the closet, it was full of suits. Antique suits, all hung, starched, and color coded in varying shades of gray, black, and brown. Gideon DuPont. I poked one, as if to make sure he wasn’t hiding inside, then jumped back when the hangers jangled on the bar. There were no photographs, no paintings or prints, no mirrors. The room had four windows, two overlooking the lake, two overlooking Horace Hall. Light streamed in, casting hazy beams across the wooden floor like invisible dividers, cutting the room in half. The other side of the room was the complete opposite of Gideon’s. I didn’t know who his roommate was, but I imagined that they didn’t get along. Dirty clothes were piled in wrinkled clumps; ties hung on the bedposts, crumpled papers surrounded the base of the trash bin. I approached Gideon’s desk.
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  I didn’t know what I was looking for when I opened the drawer, but I assumed I would know when I found it.

  I went through everything: his books, his notebooks, even his Code of Discipline. If there was anything that implicated him in Eleanor’s disappearance, I couldn’t find it, because all of his class notes were written in long, sweeping Latin. After I went through all the drawers in his desk, shuffled through all of the books on his shelf, and crawled under his bed, which was strangely free of dust or bugs, I gave up. All the girls had probably left by now, which meant that the boys would be returning to the dorm soon.

  I quickly tried to rearrange his things, hoping he wouldn’t realize anyone had tampered with them, when I accidentally knocked over the bottles of fancy colognes that sat on his dresser. Getting down on all fours, I started picking them up, smelling each as I went. They were strong and pungent, and I winced and held the bottles away from my face. Why did he have so much cologne anyway? I bent down to pick up the last of them when I saw something brown sticking out from Gideon’s pillowcase.

  Forgetting about the cologne, I pulled it out, only to discover that it was a file folder. And not just any file folder. On the cover it said: Eleanor Bell.

  I blinked, unable to believe what I was seeing, but when I opened my eyes it was still there. I opened the folder and flipped through. It was her personal file. I glanced back at the door. I could hear voices floating up from the open window. The boys were coming back. Without wasting any time, I reached into Gideon’s pillowcase to see if anything else was inside, and to my surprise, there were two more files, both brown, both with names printed on the front:

  Benjamin Gallow

  Cassandra Millet

  I stuffed them into the bundle of my wet towel and replaced the pillow and the last of the cologne. Shutting the door behind me, I scurried downstairs, trying as best as I could to conceal the folders.

  The boys were pouring into the foyer as I left. They stared at me and whistled while I pushed through them, my wet hair dripping onto my collared shirt. Yet just when I thought I had made it out without getting caught, I bumped directly into Gideon as we walked through the double doors. I froze, clutching my towel and the folders to my chest. Gideon glared at me and brushed off his shoulder where my hair had left a wet mark. The doors swung together, bumping me out and him in. Thankful for the act of fate, I ran back to my room to dry my hair before class.

  When I got back, I slammed the door and sank to the ground. Unable to contain my curiosity, I dumped out the contents of each file and flipped through the pages, skimming for anything of interest. Each file was embossed with a giant Gottfried crest in blue and gold ink, and began the same way:

  ELEANOR BELL

  Height: 5’5”

  Weight: 115 lbs

  Hair Color: Blond

  Date of Birth: June 5, 1994

  Origin: Maryland

  Parents: Cindy Louise Bell, no occupation; Gareth Aaron Bell, lawyer; DIVORCED

  Siblings: Brandon Bell, Monitor

  Status: MONITOR

  Attached were Eleanor’s transcripts, letters of recommendation, records of detention and work details, and her admissions application package, which included a personal statement about her parents’ divorce and some sort of scorecard, which I assumed was from an admissions test. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except for her status, which read “Monitor.” It must have been a typo; Eleanor wasn’t on the Board of Monitors. Otherwise, there were no notes on the margins, no plans hatched on the back in Gideon’s handwriting. Disappointed, I flipped through the rest of the files.

  Cassandra’s was much thicker than Eleanor’s, stuffed with documents regarding the death of her family in an avalanche. I skimmed through them until I found her official Gottfried records.

  CASSANDRA MILLET

  Height: 5’4”

  Weight: 110 lbs

  Hair Color: Blond

  Date of Birth: November 21, 1990

  Origin: Colorado

  Parents: Colette Millet, ballet teacher; Bernard Millet, hotelier; DECEASED

  Siblings: George Millet, Pauline Millet; DECEASED

  Status: NON MORTUUS, DECEASED

  Primary Date of Death: February 14, 2005

  Secondary Date of Death: May 15, 2009

  Primary Cause of Death: Skiing accident

  Secondary Cause of Death: Sepultura

  I read her status again, my mind racing. NON MORTUUS, DECEASED. What did it mean? Non Mortuus translated to “Not Dead.” But if she wasn’t dead, why would they list it, and why would she have two causes of death, the second of which translated to “Burial,” each on different dates and in different years?

  I turned the page. Suddenly I was face-to-face with Headmistress Von Laark. It was a drawing sketched in charcoal, and showed her standing in the woods, at the head of a deep hole. The Board of Monitors stood solemnly beside her, all staring at Brandon Bell, who was holding the limp body of Cassandra Millet in his arms as he lowered her into the pit. The edges were darkened with the night sky. In the corner, the sketch was signed: Minnie Roberts. I shuddered. Even in pencil, the scene was haunting.

  Finally I opened Benjamin’s folder.

  BENJAMIN GALLOW

  Height: 5’11”

  Weight: 165 lbs

  Hair Color: Brown

  Date of Birth: September 18, 1994

  Origin: Pennsylvania

  Parents: Karen Gallow, school teacher; Bruce Gallow, dentist; MARRIED

  Siblings: None

  Status: PLEBEIAN, DECEASED

  Date of Death: May 12, 2009

  Cause of Death: Basium Mortis

  I had to read the last line once, twice, before I could figure out what it said. Basium Mortis. I let the words roll off my tongue like a curse. “Death Kiss,” I translated from the Latin. Or maybe it was “Kiss of Death.” My mind raced with possible explanations as to why such a cryptic phrase was on an official school document, but none made sense. I must have translated it wrong: maybe it was a medical phrase like rigor mortis. I shuffled through the pages that followed: his transcripts, information about his parents and friends, until finally I found the hospital’s death certificate. It was dated May 12, 2009. Approximate Time of Death:

  7:12 p.m. Cause of Death: Heart Attack. Which was definitely not the same as Basium Mortis. Behind it was an envelope marked GALLOW, held closed with a paper clip. My heart beat faster as I opened it.

  Inside was a collection of photographs, all taken at different angles of the same subject. Benjamin Gallow’s body, dead and pale, splayed out in the woods. The first was a distant shot, the lighting so dark I could barely see anything except for the startling whiteness of his skin and the yellow caution tape wrapped around the trees in the background. I flipped to the next, and then the next, each closer and more detailed than the one before, until I could finally see his body in detail.

  My heart beat faster as I stared down at a surprisingly familiar scene. Benjamin was still in dress code, his red tie unknotted, one end hanging loose across his shoulder, the other stuffed violently in his mouth. I knew where I had seen this before. His skin looked old and somehow ravaged; not at all the bright, knavish face that everyone had described to me. His brown hair was unexpectedly speckled with gray along the temples. His eyes were closed, purpling bags hanging beneath. The more I looked at it, the more the image blurred until I was looking at my parents, dead in the woods, white cloth stuffed in their mouths.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Incident Last Spring

  IT’S FUNNY HOW THE THINGS YOU WANT SOMETIMES turn out to be things you wish you had never laid eyes on. I had barely managed to push the gruesome details of my parents’ deaths out of my mind before Benjamin’s files plunged me back into that hot summer night. I sat on the floor, hugging my knees and willing myself not to cry, before I was able to compose myself enough to go to class. I walked briskly to Horace Hall, stopping by the library on the way, where I hid the files between
two oversized books on the third floor, glad to be rid of them for the moment. If the files proved anything, it was this: both Benjamin and Cassandra had been murdered, and their deaths were somehow connected to the murders of my parents. But who was behind it? I thought back to what Eleanor had said about Gottfried the first day we met. The secrets that aren’t found out are buried well. And probably for a reason. The only problem was that this secret now had to do with me.

  Plus, I had to worry about Mrs. Lynch. I didn’t dare risk keeping the files in my room—not with the possibility of her searching it. That would only give Lynch further evidence that I was to blame for Eleanor’s disappearance. After jotting down the titles Toads of New England and Amphibious Past Lives, along with their Dewey decimal numbers, I set off for class.

  “Gideon has something to do with it,” I told Nathaniel, pulling him aside before lunch.

  “And what drew you to this conclusion? Wait, let me guess: you snuck into his room and found Eleanor’s body.”

  “Actually, that’s not far off. Come with me.”

  I dragged him to the library, which was now crowded with students studying frantically for finals. I led Nathaniel up three flights of stairs and through the maze of bookshelves until I found the oversized book section, which, to my relief, was empty, probably because it was dark and musty, which wasn’t the best condition for studying.