CHAPTER 9

THE FLOOD

I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING to a different world. Outside, everything was dusted in white. It was the first snowfall of the season; the unexpected kind of snow that drapes itself over the ground like a blanket, covering street signs and burying cars. I blinked. Last night couldn’t have been real. But it must have been, because there was Dante, lying beside me. His eyes were closed. Asleep, he looked statuesque, as though his features had been carved out of stone. I held out my hand, my fingers quivering as they grazed his cheek. Suddenly, his eyes opened. I gasped and pulled back my hand.

He smiled. “Did you sleep?”

I nodded and stretched my legs like a cat. “Did you?”

He propped himself up on an elbow and played with a lock of my hair. “I never sleep.”

I rolled my eyes. “You must’ve slept at least a little.”

He traced his finger around my elbow. “Let’s get you back to campus before they realize you’re gone.”

Instead of going through the main gate, Dante walked me to a street on the edge of town. Because he was a day student, he was allowed to go on and off campus as he pleased. I, on the other hand, had to be more careful.

“How do I get back?”

“There are two ways. You can try to sneak past the guards at the gate, but they practically sleep with their eyes open, and there’s a good chance you’ll get caught.”

“What’s the other option?”

Dante hesitated. “It isn’t pleasant.”

I looked up at him expectantly. “That’s okay.”

Dante didn’t look particularly excited about it, but he nodded and took my hand.

We stopped in front of a run-down house with a dirt driveway lined with overgrown shrubs, now covered in snow. We kept to the edge of the yard, crouching low behind the bushes. Behind the house, the yard expanded into a white field surrounded by a circle of naked trees.

“Where are we going?”

But just as the words left my mouth, we stopped. In front of us, shrouded by a crab apple tree, was a stone well. Its narrow mouth was covered by a wooden board. Dante wiped off the snow and tossed the board on the ground.

“Remember those tunnels from the article?” he asked.

I nodded, my cheeks growing red from the cold.

“This is one of them. It leads to campus, beneath the pulpit of the chapel. I found it by accident when I was wandering around out here last summer. Supposedly there are dozens of others, but this is the only one I know of.”

I peered into the well. The hole was dark and narrow, just large enough for a body to fit through. A warm draught emanated from somewhere inside its recesses. I couldn’t see to the bottom. “Is there still water in it?”

“It was never a well,” he said, wiping his hands together. “It doesn’t even run deep. You just have to climb a couple of metres down and then it curves and opens into a tunnel.”

It looked like it could crumble at any minute, and the fact that it had been built in the 1700s merely affirmed my doubts. I kicked the ground with my shoe until I found a pebble beneath the snow. Picking it up, I threw it into the well. It didn’t make any sound.

Frowning, Dante gazed at me, deep in thought. “You’d better climb in or you’ll be late for class.”

I looked up at him with surprise. “You’re not coming?”

Dante shook his head. “I don’t go underground.”

I gave him a strange look. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a childhood thing. Bad experience.”

I hesitated, wanting specifics, but then nodded. After all, it was just a tunnel, right?

Dante rummaged around in his bag. “Take this.” He handed me a candle and a box of matches. “You might need it. When you’re down there, just walk straight. Don’t take any turns.”

I pushed a lock of hair behind my ear. “I’ll see you in class, then?”

“Yeah. But in case we don’t get a chance to talk, meet me in front of the chapel tonight? Eleven o’clock?”

“Why wouldn’t we have a chance to talk?” I asked, trying to hide my bewilderment.

“Just meet me in front of the chapel. I have something to tell you.”

I nodded, and Dante helped me into the well.

A makeshift ladder was made out of bits of stone sticking out of the well’s interior. “Bye,” I said, and began climbing down. With a worried look, he watched until I disappeared into the darkness.

The well was murky and constricting. I couldn’t see anything, and I barely had enough space to bend my knees. I climbed slowly, unsure of what would meet me at the bottom. A few rungs down, my foot hit dirt. I struck a match.

In front of me was a cavernous tunnel, big enough to stand in. The walls were made of caked dirt, which crumbled off under my fingers like chalk. It smelled faintly of mulch. Feeling around in the darkness, I struck another match and lit the candle. Every so often I felt a cool breeze coming from the opposite wall, where the tunnel forked off to the left. I pressed myself closer to the wall, trying not to think about what would happen if I got lost. Finally, it sloped upwards, and I came to a dead end. Blowing out the candle, I pulled myself into the damp air of the chapel.

I emerged below the pulpit, through a corrugated grate. The chapel groaned and wheezed as the winter wind blew around its steeples, and I could hear bats chirping from the stairwell. Light filtered through the stained-glass windows, casting red shadows across the floor. Not wanting to linger any longer than necessary, I snuck through the pews, my footsteps echoing off the vaulted ceilings as I unlocked the deadbolts and stepped out into the November morning.

In the snow, the Gottfried campus was transformed into a sprawling, pristine landscape. Each tree, each cobblestone, each blade of grass was frosted in a delicate layer of white. A group of boys passed me on the way to the dining hall, and I checked my watch. It was almost 8 a.m., and I still had to shower and get through all of my classes before I could see Dante again. Buttoning my coat, I ran across campus, replaying the events of last night over and over in my head.

When I got to the dorm, I opened the door only to step into a big puddle of water. Startled, I jumped back to discover that the entire ground-floor foyer was flooded. I ran upstairs, where I found girls crowding the hallways. Everyone looked sleepy and irritated, the freshmen complaining about the wet carpets in their rooms. I wandered through the crowd, looking for Eleanor, pushing past throngs of girls wearing robes and slippers, nightgowns, flip-flops and oversized T-shirts. Finally I spotted Rebecca. She was standing in the corner with Charlotte, Greta, Maggie and Bonnie.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s no running water,” Rebecca said.

“What happened? The entire ground floor is flooded!”

“We don’t know,” said Maggie. “Lynch is on her way up now to tell us, I think.”

“Have you seen Eleanor?”

Maggie shook her head. She hadn’t put her contacts in yet, and seemed self-conscious in her glasses. “We figured she was with you.”

“Oh,” I said nonchalantly, not wanting to let on that I wasn’t in my room last night. “Maybe she’s still in the room.”

“Or maybe she’s with Genevieve,” Charlotte said. Her hair was pinned around her head in rollers. She was clutching a loofah and shower caddy with dozens of shampoo and cosmetic bottles inside. “She wasn’t in our room this morning when I woke up.”

“She probably had an early Board of Monitors meeting,” said Maggie, almost bitterly. “She’s never around any more.”

Charlotte shrugged and started talking about her plans for winter break, when the door to the hallway swung open. Mrs. Lynch bounded down the hall, her heels clicking on the wood floors.

“Girls,” she shouted.

Everyone quieted down.

“It seems there’s been a plumbing malfunction in the bathroom. It’s likely that one of the pipes froze overnight and burst. Maintenance should be here within the hour to fix it and drain the water from the ground floor. In the meantime, Professor Bliss has generously offered us the bathroom in the boys’ dormitory. He’s in the process of evacuating them as we speak.” Professor Bliss was their dorm parent.

A murmur ran through hall.

“So get dressed and gather your toiletries. We’re heading over in fifteen minutes.”

Stepping into the boys’ dorm was like walking into a parallel universe. The layout of the building was exactly the same, but the walls were painted a deep shade of maroon, and the sunlight seemed to dodge the windows, creating a shadowy atmosphere that would have been more fitting in a cigar shop. Everything smelled faintly of leather. A pair of dirty gym shorts dangled over the banister.

The boys’ bathroom was in the western wing of the first floor, just like our dorm. The door to the showers was propped open, and steam billowed into the hallway. Eleanor hadn’t been in our room when I’d gone back to get my towel and soap. Her bed was completely undisturbed, the pillows puffed and the covers folded and tucked. So where was she? I walked through the rows of showers, listening for her, but all of the voices belonged to other people: first years, second years, third years, but no Eleanor.

After I showered and got changed, I dawdled outside the bathroom door, waiting to see if she’d come out, but after the last girl left, I gave up and went downstairs, out into the white, wintery morning.

When I got back to the girls’ dorm, Mrs. Lynch was standing on the stoop with four maintenance workers. They all towered over her, and were dressed in overalls that were soaked from the waist down.

I slowed as I passed them.

“Something went really wrong with the pipes down there,” one of the men said in a gruff voice, wiping the sweat off his temples. Grey stubble climbed up his neck, and a grease-stained rag hung out of his pocket. “It’s impossible to tell where the leak is coming from. We’ll have to shut off the water in the building and drain it. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with space heaters and the fireplaces. We’ll work on getting enough wood.”

I lingered on the top step to wait for Lynch’s reply, but she must have noticed I was listening, because she glanced up at me and glared. Not wanting to get into any more trouble, I hurried through the doors and went back to my room, unable to shake the three words that kept running through my mind: The Gottfried Curse.

I didn’t tell anyone else about the curse or my night with Dante. I would have told Eleanor, but she never showed up for Latin. Or Philosophy. In fact, she didn’t go to any classes at all. I sat taking notes while Miss LaBarge scribbled something about Descartes on the board. Every so often I forgot that Eleanor wasn’t there, and leaned over to whisper to her, only to be met with an empty chair. But I didn’t think much of it. Finals were coming up in a few weeks, and Eleanor’s grades were terrible. She’d been skipping meals all semester to go to the library.

Without her, classes dragged by, and I grew frustrated with her for being gone when I had so many important things to talk to her about. Eleanor would surely have a theory about the heart attacks. “Radiation below the school grounds,” she might say. “Or a mass murderer equipped with a new kind of weapon that induces heart failure.” And the cloth in both my parents’ mouths and Benjamin’s were used as gags. Maybe they were electrocuted. Maybe someone was out to get Gottfried students. But why them in particular? Nathaniel was right: there was no such thing as curses. Only people and science. So that’s what I focused on, watching the clock, counting down the minutes until the last period, when I would see Dante in Crude Sciences. Last night seemed like a dream, except I could remember every detail – the way my stomach fluttered when he kissed my neck; the way the books fell at our feet, making us stumble around them; the way our bodies left a crescent-shaped crease on his bed. I unwrapped each memory like a gift, letting Dante’s velvety voice envelop me while I drifted off in class or waited in line in the dining hall. It didn’t matter that Professor Lumbar was in a particularly bad mood or that Professor Chortle made us solve proofs for an hour and a half.

When fifth period rolled around, I walked to class anxiously, inspecting my reflection in the windows before opening the door to the Observatory.

Professor Starking bustled in behind me just as the bell rang, carrying a box of films and a messy pile of papers. Dante was already sitting at our bench, his tie crisp around his neck and his blazer slung around the back of his chair. I approached slowly, watching him from a distance. A lock of hair dangled in front of his face as he wrote something in his notebook.

I walked up the side of the aisle until I was just behind him, and looked over his shoulder. He was writing notes in Latin. Suddenly I felt nervous, as if everything I’d ever wanted in my life was on the verge of happening and I only had to reach out and take it. But just as I lifted my hand, Dante grabbed it without looking away from his notes. I gasped. He turned to me, and with the beginnings of a smile, he brought my palm to his lips and almost imperceptibly kissed it.

We barely spoke during class. The sky was overcast, and Professor Starking switched off the lights and turned on a projector. Suddenly an image appeared on the wall. It was a photograph of outer space, of a rust-coloured cloud of dust cresting upwards like fingers.

“The Pillars of Creation,” Professor Starking said. “This is what stars look like before they’re formed. They’re called celestial nebulas.”

He flipped to the next slide, and then the next – each of different nebulas, their otherworldly forms projecting onto the darkened wall of the Observatory.

“What did you want to tell me?” I whispered to Dante.

“I can’t tell you here,” he replied, studying the images. “It’s too important.” In the blue light of the projector, his face emerged out of the darkness like a ghost. I tried to imagine what it was he wanted to say to me. He’d profess his undying love. Renée, he would say, I love you. Run away with me. We’ll go north into the wilderness and live desperately, dangerously. And I would say yes. Or maybe that’s not what he had planned at all. If it was, why couldn’t he just say it here, in the darkness of the Observatory? Things said in private were usually bad things: things that were too shameful, too embarrassing to declare in the light of day, in front of other people. If he loved me, wouldn’t he want to tell me as quickly as possible? I self-consciously adjusted my skirt. Maybe he’d changed his mind. It had been dark in his room last night; maybe now he could see flaws he hadn’t noticed before – blemishes, the scar under my chin, the way my ears always seemed too large.

Professor Starking stepped back to admire the nebula projected on the wall. “At first glance, they may seem strange and alien,” he said. “But all of us are made of the elements you see here. Their beauty lies in confusion. It gives them a kind of energy that fully formed stars don’t have.”

While the slides were shifting, Dante inched closer to me and slipped his hand into mine. I trembled at his touch, his palms cool and dry.

Neither of us dared to look at the other. Instead, we remained stoic, keeping our eyes trained on the pictures. I shifted closer to him, pressing my leg against his. To the rest of the class we looked like a boy and girl sitting side by side. But beneath the surface, everything within me was trying to burst out into a swirling cloud of particles, ephemeral and constantly changing, like stardust.

By curfew Eleanor still wasn’t back. It was unusual: she always came back before lights-out, but I was too excited about meeting Dante to dwell on her absence. She was probably in the library, asleep in one of her books, or out working on the school play for the Humanities department. I would see her when I got back tonight, and then I could tell her everything.

I sat on my bed, hovering over my books but not looking at them. Instead, I was gazing impatiently at the clock, counting down the minutes until I would see Dante. When the hands finally reached 10:45, I opened the flue, pulled myself into the chimney, and began to climb down to the basement. I was still wearing my school clothes – a herringbone skirt, black tights and an oxford shirt with an overcoat on top to keep me from getting sooty.

The climb didn’t seem so bad now that I had something to look forward to at the end. I was so anxious to see Dante that I barely noticed the cobwebs and dust and crumbling brick. But when I reached the bottom of the chute, something wasn’t right.

The flue was only partially open, just enough for me to squeeze my body through. Instead of the normal hissing sounds that the furnace gave off, it was completely silent. In the distance, I could hear water trickling. And then drips, like a tap leaking into a bathtub full of water.

I climbed down a rung, and then another, until I was almost completely out of the chimney. But as I lowered my foot to the last rung, my leg became submerged in water. I pulled it back and leaned out the bottom of the chute to see what was going on.

The entire basement was flooded with water, which had risen to just a little way below the ceiling. I sighed, only now remembering what the maintenance workers had said to Mrs. Lynch outside the girls’ dormitory. The water was dark and placid, barely rippling from the disturbance of my foot. The hanging lights reflected dim yellow orbs in its surface, like beams of flashlights shining up from beneath.

For some reason I felt pulled to the room, as though an invisible force were towing me down. I scanned the basement, searching for some way to get outside, but it was useless. Reluctantly, I climbed back into the chimney. My left shoe was soaked, and squeaked as I ascended, each step taking me further and further away from Dante. When I got back to my room I called his landline, but the phone rang and rang and rang, and I went to bed imagining him waiting for me in front of the chapel, leaning against the stone beneath the gargoyles, his face slipping into the shadows.

It took ten days to drain all of the water from the basement. The Maine winter crept up on us early, preserving the entire campus in a thin layer of ice. It was early December and the ground outside was hard and impenetrable, so they pumped the excess water into the lake, using long floppy hoses that trailed across the pathways like the arms of a jellyfish. Every morning I stepped over them as I walked to class, unaware that the water inside was freezing, preventing them from emptying the basement sooner. If it had been eight days, or even nine, things might have turned out differently. But numbers are strange and uncontrollable; they operate under their own set of rules. And as I would soon discover, ten was an entire rule unto itself.

In the meantime, we used the boys’ bathroom every morning at 8 a.m., and every evening at 8 p.m. But the problem in the basement was more than just an inconvenience. It meant that I could only see Dante in class. The basement was the only way out of the dorms at night, or at least the only way that I knew of.

But let me start from the beginning. On the night that I discovered the flood, I had trouble getting to sleep. I paced around my room, staring at the fireplace, waiting for Eleanor to climb through it, but she never did. Eventually I gave up and collapsed in my bed. Pulling the covers over my head, I fell asleep, dreaming about Dante and our night together, and hoping that he was dreaming of me too.

But the flood was just the beginning of a strange chain of events that was taking place at Gottfried.

Eleanor didn’t come back the next morning. I woke up from a dream only to be sobered by the sight of her unruffled bed. I immediately went next door to Maggie and Greta’s room. Maggie opened the door with a yawn. She hadn’t seen Eleanor since Grub Day, which was already two days ago. I went to see Bonnie and then Rebecca, and finally Genevieve. They hadn’t seen her either.

The last door I went to was on the ground floor of the girls’ dorm. It was my last resort, and I lingered in front of it for a moment before building up the gumption to knock. But just as I raised my fist, the door swung open. I gasped and jumped back.

Mrs. Lynch’s squat figure greeted me, her short hair making her look more like a man than a dorm mother. She looked me up and down. I checked my outfit, making sure all of my buttons were buttoned and buckles snapped, worried she was going to reprimand me for being out of dress code.

“Yes?” she said, eyeing me with a quiet distaste.

In a low murmur, I informed her of Eleanor’s disappearance.

“What do you mean she’s missing?” she said sharply when I was finished.

“She wasn’t here last night or this morning.”

Upon hearing this news, Mrs. Lynch threw on a scarf and coat. “Why didn’t you report it sooner?”

“I…I thought she was at the library.” Which was the truth.

Mrs. Lynch slammed the door. “Come,” she said, already four steps ahead of me.

I trailed behind her as she walked to Archebald Hall, asking me questions the entire way. When was she last seen? Did she have any reason to run away?

I didn’t know. Maybe yesterday? And as for running away, she hadn’t packed up any of her things, and even if she had tried to leave, there was nothing beyond Attica Falls for kilometres.

Our destination was the headmistress’s office, but she was exiting the building just as we were entering. The headmistress was dressed in a long luxurious coat, plush and blue with a deep hood. Her snowy hair fluttered in the wind, making her look like an aged nymph. “Headmistress Von Laark,” Mrs. Lynch called out. “This young lady has something to tell you.”

After I finished, the headmistress addressed Mrs. Lynch. “Inform her parents immediately, and make a call to the ranger’s office. In the meantime, I’ll dispatch a search party.”

The headmistress then inspected me, her blue eyes icy and unreadable.

“I can help,” I said, verging on pleading. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Eleanor’s disappearance was somehow my fault. If I hadn’t stayed with Dante, if I had gone home that night or reported her missing earlier, maybe it would have been different. “I want to join the search.”

“Certainly not. You are to go to class and focus on your studies.”

“But she’s my room-ma—” I tried to protest before the headmistress cut me off.

“You are dismissed.”

“Where were you?” said Dante, appearing out of nowhere in the hallway and pulling me beneath the stairwell. “I waited.”

“I tried calling but you didn’t pick up,” I said softly. “The basement in the girls’ dorm is flooded. There’s no other way out after curfew.”

Dante frowned. “I was worried something had happened. When you didn’t show up I waited outside the dorm trying to find your window, but they were all dark. By the time I got back to my room, it was so late that I didn’t want to call, in case Mrs. Lynch heard.”

I meant to apologize to him, to explain how I had tried to meet him last night, but instead I blurted out, “Eleanor’s gone.”

“What do you mean?” Dante asked, leaning over me against the brick, his brow furrowed in confusion.

“She never came back last night. I don’t think she was there the night before, either. I…I don’t know if she ran away or if she was kidnapped, or I don’t know what. I mean, where could she go?”

“You’d be surprised. There are a lot of places to go in this school if you don’t want to be found.”

“But what if she does want to be found?” The thought made me feel sick.

“Then she’ll be found,” he said pensively, though his mind was clearly somewhere else. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Just before Grub Day. She said she was going to skip it and go to the library to study.”

Dante raised his eyes to mine as he pulled his bag over his shoulder. “I have to go.”

“What? Where? Do you know something? Do you know where she is?”

Dante shook his head. “If I did, I would find her for you.”

“I know,” I said softly.

“When can I see you again?”

“We have class together in three periods,” I said, confused.

“Alone, I mean.”

I bit my lip. “With the basement off-limits, meeting after curfew is basically impossible. Maybe during study hall? I can meet you outside the Megaron after dinner.” His tie dangled in front of me, and I twirled it around my fingers.

The bell rang, signalling the start of class, and the sound of footsteps pounded on the stairway above us. “I’ll be waiting,” Dante said, and smiled.

During lunch, Mrs. Lynch and Professor Lumbar searched our room. When they found nothing, they searched it again. It felt odd watching them going through my underwear drawer, tossing around Eleanor’s things. They even confiscated Eleanor’s notebooks, though after reading them they found nothing of interest except illegible scribbles and pages and pages of love notes written to Professor Bliss.

Mrs. Lynch confronted him about it just before fourth period. I was walking down the hall when I saw them in his classroom through the window in the door. I crouched outside and watched as Mrs. Lynch handed him Eleanor’s History notebook and crossed her arms.

Mr. B. flipped through it, reading the notes slowly. Suddenly he dropped the notebook and stood up, gesticulating wildly with his hands. They got into an argument. I pressed my ear against the door and listened.

“If you have an explanation, now’s the time,” Mrs. Lynch threatened.

Professor Bliss claimed he had no idea the love notes existed. “Eleanor was my student. Nothing more. It isn’t abnormal for a teenage girl to have a crush on her teacher. These things happen all the time. It doesn’t mean I abducted her.”

Unexpectedly, the knob on the door turned and the door swung open. I threw myself out of the way just before Mrs. Lynch stormed into the hallway with so much force that she didn’t even notice me pressed against the wall behind her.

I met up with Nathaniel and told him about Eleanor and what I saw as we walked to Philosophy.

“So the last time you saw her was after Grub Day?” he asked.

I hesitated. I had lied to everyone in order to hide the fact that I’d spent the night at Dante’s. But someone had to know the truth. I needed Nathaniel’s help. “No. It was actually the morning of Grub Day.”

Nathaniel looked confused. “What? But why did you tell everyone that—”

I cut him off. “I spent the night with Dante,” I said quickly. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

Nathaniel went silent. “So you don’t know when she disappeared?”

I shook my head.

“This is bad, Renée. Really bad.”

I swallowed. “I know.”

“Well, if we assume that whatever happened to her happened on Grub Day, then it couldn’t have been Professor Bliss. I even saw him later that night patrolling the boys’ dorms, so either way, he’s safe.”

“Why do you think it happened on Grub Day?”

“I mean, think about it. It’s perfect. Everyone is in town, including most of the professors and the Board of Monitors. So the real question is, who wasn’t in Attica Falls that day?” But the question was impossible to answer. There were far too many people, and besides, we hadn’t been keeping track.

“Do you think it could be…” My voice trailed off.

“The Gottfried Curse?” Nathaniel said, finishing my sentence. “Maybe.”

When we walked into class, Annette LaBarge was sitting on her desk, her legs dangling freely like a child on a swing. A glass of water sat by her side. Unlike my other professors, she taught everything as if it were a story.

“A long time ago, we used to believe that people were made of two things – the body and the soul. When the body died, the soul lived on and was cleansed and reborn into someone new. The idea was explored by many, though namely in Western culture by Plato, and then René Descartes.

“Descartes was a famous philosopher in his time. He was obsessed with death – he wrote about it incessantly. He even claimed to have discovered the path to immortality. He was going to reveal his secret in an essay he claimed would be his lifetime achievement, and which he worked on up until his death. He called it his Seventh Meditation. When he died, people believed that his death was a hoax, an experiment. They thought he had found a way to cheat death and become reborn.

“That, of course, was never proven, and Descartes was never heard from again. All that remained were his papers. People combed through them, searching for the Seventh Meditation, but they only found six, none of which contained anything about the key to immortality.

“After everyone had given up hope, rumours began to surface that they had found something buried beneath the foundation of his house. Descartes’ Seventh Meditation. But the book was banned just before it was released. According to rumour, all copies were immediately burned, as were the men who had printed it. And before it could even be read, the book was gone, along with all of its secrets.”

While she spoke, I looked out the window, and watched the branches of the trees sway in the wind. A boy ran into Horace Hall holding a messy stack of papers, clearly late for class. A maintenance worker shovelled snow along the edge of the green. The flood, followed by Eleanor’s disappearance, seemed to fit with all of the other “accidents” that had been reported on in the article from The Portland Herald. And if Eleanor’s disappearance was related to Benjamin’s, then there was a good chance she would soon be found dead of a heart attack.

“We do, however, have glimpses into what his final work contained, facts that scholars have gleaned from other books published back then. In the Seventh Meditation, Descartes stated that children couldn’t die. He said that, unlike adults, the bodies of children only appear to be dead. After ten days, they wake up and live again, soulless. According to Descartes, children stop rising from the dead at the age of twenty-one. Some philosophers speculate that this is why the age of twenty-one now embodies the idea of adulthood.”

If I had only found a way to get to those files in the headmistress’s office, I might have found some piece of information that would have helped prevent whatever had happened to Eleanor. Quietly, I tore out a piece of paper from my notebook.

We have to find a way into the headmistress’s office.

I folded the note, and when Miss LaBarge wasn’t watching, I passed it to Nathaniel. He gave me a cautionary look, as if he knew what I was planning to do and didn’t approve. Nonetheless, he scribbled down a response and passed it back to me.

I don’t think you need my help doing that.

I immediately felt stupid. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I didn’t have to break into the headmistress’s office; I just had to get into trouble and be sent there. I had no idea how I would get to the files once I was inside, but I would deal with that later. Satisfied, I crumpled up the note and slipped it into my pocket.

After classes, the investigation for Eleanor began. One by one, we were called in for questioning. Solemnly, we watched each girl walk downstairs to Mrs. Lynch’s quarters. A door slammed. After fifteen minutes it reopened. And then the next name was called. No one spoke after their interview. With Eleanor missing and Mrs. Lynch arousing suspicions among the student body, the atmosphere in the dorm was grim.

Finally it was my turn.

“Winters!” Mrs. Lynch’s voice echoed from downstairs. On the way down I passed Minnie Roberts, who had gone in before me. I tried to say hello, but she kept her head bowed.

Mrs. Lynch’s quarters were strategically positioned right next to the entrance so she could hear anyone sneaking in or out. When I got there, the door was slightly ajar. I knocked. When no one answered, I pushed it open.

Mrs. Lynch was sitting in an overstuffed plaid armchair, her stubby feet resting on a matching ottoman. She was scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.

“Shut the door,” she said without looking up.

The room looked like something a grandmother might live in. It had a low ceiling, dingy floral curtains and a shag carpet. It smelled like potpourri and mothballs. The walls were decorated with pictures of lighthouses, which, upon closer examination, were not paintings, but needlepoint.

Finally Mrs. Lynch stopped writing and looked at me. “Miss Winters.”

There was nowhere to sit, so I stood in the middle of the room.

“Eleanor Bell has been missing for what seems to be two days now. You are her room-mate, correct?”

I nodded.

“Eleanor never went to Attica Falls on Grub Day.”

“She said she was going to the library.”

“And did she return to the room that night?”

“No,” I said. “Wait, yes. Yes she did.”

Mrs. Lynch gave me a suspicious look. “In your short time here at the Academy, you have garnered quite the reputation for troublemaking.”

I gave her a confused look. “What?”

“Called to the headmistress’s office three times.”

“But the first time I hadn’t done anything—” I tried to say, but she continued.

“Caught severely out of dress code; breaking curfew with a boy; blatantly disobeying the authority of professors…”

“But that was all really just one time—”

“Talking out of line,” she said with contempt. “Where were you on Grub Day?”

“I was in Attica Falls. People saw me there; you can ask Nathaniel Welch. I was with him.”

“Where were you that evening?”

I hesitated. “I was in my dorm room, studying.”

“And what were you studying?”

“Latin,” I said quickly.

“And Eleanor was there that night?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“And you can produce no other witnesses of your whereabouts that night?”

“It was after curfew. We were alone in our room.”

She put down her pencil and clasped her hands together on her lap.

“Miss Winters, where is Eleanor Bell?”

“I…I don’t know.”

She sighed and then jotted something down on her pad. “I think you do.”

“But I don—” But she cut me off before I had a chance to respond.

“And you said that she wasn’t –” she picked up her pad, referring to her notes – “no, forgive me, that she was in your room that night?”

I swallowed and nodded.

“Yet conveniently, no one else saw her. Or you.”

I shifted uncomfortably, staring at a Persian cat that had sauntered into the room and was glaring at me from the windowsill.

“So really you have no alibi for the night after Grub Day.”

“I do, but—”

“And you didn’t report her disappearance until today because you weren’t sure she was gone.”

“I would have, but—”

She jotted down one last note and shut her pad. “That will be all.”

By twilight, the search parties came. Professors and school administrators flocked to the green with flashlights and flares. They looked odd outside the context of class. Their casual clothes, boots and raincoats made them look puttering and old, exposing the fact that they were vastly outnumbered by a campus full of teenagers.

The Board of Monitors was supposed to regulate the students, watching the dorms and making sure that everyone was in by curfew, but did so half-heartedly. After dinner, I lingered outside the dining hall until everyone else filed outside. When the path was clear, I started to walk back to the girls’ dorm, but then quickly changed routes and jogged towards the green.

Students weren’t allowed to participate in the search. “Too dangerous,” Professor Lumbar had said. They didn’t care that Eleanor was our friend, and that we cared about finding her just as much as they did. It seemed like everyone was gathering on the lawn except for the people who were closest to her. Even a few people from town had been recruited for the search. I crouched behind a tree and watched. Together they huddled beneath the evergreens as the sun set on Gottfried Academy, until all that could be seen of them were the yellow beams of their flashlights reflecting off the fog rising from the lake.

The search was led by the headmistress herself. She wore a long overcoat and carried a lantern, a two-way radio and a bag of flares.

“Friends,” she bellowed. The crowd grew silent.

“Thank you for leaving your families to help us here tonight. It’s a tragic day for everyone when a child goes missing, especially when it’s a member of our own small community. If anyone hears any information regarding Eleanor Bell’s whereabouts or the manner of her disappearance, please alert me or one of the professors immediately.

“To make the most of our time, we will break into groups. Each group will search a different area. Miriam, Edith and Annette will take Horace Hall. Lesley and I will search Archebald. William, Marcus and Conrad will search the edge of the forest…”

As she called out the names, each party broke off and began to comb the campus grounds looking for Eleanor. When the lawn had emptied out, I slunk out from behind the tree and jogged towards the lake. Dante was exactly where he said he’d be, leaning against one of the spruces, his hands in his pockets. He was perfectly preppy, crisp yet rough around the edges in a shirt and tie, a Gottfried scarf draped over his blazer, and his hair pulled into a messy knot.

We sat by the lake, against the back of a large rock. I hugged my knees. The calm water reflected the night clouds.

“What do you do when you don’t know what to do?” I asked, staring into the darkness.

Dante followed my eyes to the outskirts of school, where we could see dim flashes of light bouncing off the trees and buildings. “I follow my instincts,” he said, touching my shoulder.

I tossed a pebble in and watched the ripples dilate until they reached the shore. What were my instincts telling me? “I think Benjamin and my parents were murdered. I think Cassandra was too.” I said it quickly, in case it sounded ridiculous. I told Dante about the séance, about how I had tried to summon my parents but only found him, Gideon and Vivian on the lawn; about how Eleanor had tried to summon Benjamin but got Cassandra, too. “And I think the same person got to Eleanor. I don’t know why or how, and I don’t have any reason to think any of these things other than a feeling. A really bad feeling.”

Looking at my feet, I waited for him to react, but instead he stretched out his legs and leaned back on his elbows. “Do you really believe in that stuff? Séances?”

I looked up at him, my eyes watering in the wind. “I want to.”

“You want to believe in ghosts? In monsters?”

“I want to believe that things don’t have to end,” I said, looking away, but Dante didn’t let me.

“I want to believe that too,” he said.

“Do you think Cassandra is dead?”

Dante hesitated. “Yes.”

His frank answer somehow disturbed me, and a series of questions escaped my mouth before I could process them. “What? How? Why? Who do you think—?”

“Slow down,” he said. “One at a time.”

I paused to compose myself. “Do you think Benjamin was murdered?”

“Killed, yes.”

“Do you think it’s related to my parents and the deaths in the article?”

He thought about it. “Yes.”

I hadn’t expected so many affirmatives, and was at a loss for what to say. “So you believe me? Why didn’t you tell me earlier? After the séance?”

“I didn’t know you were looking for your parents when I ran into you that night,” he said, almost to himself. “You were in your pyjamas, which caught me off guard. And you looked so surprised to see me; I couldn’t tell if you were happy or upset. I remember holding your hand and running through the rain; the way the water collected in droplets on your eyelashes. I couldn’t believe you were real. I still can’t.”

“You remember that?” I whispered.

“I remember everything.”

I looked up at him, and he moved closer. I shivered. Raising my hand to Dante’s face, I coiled my fingers around the back of his neck and pulled him towards me.

We met halfway, my neck arching up to meet his. But just as our lips were about to touch, he pulled away and kissed me on the cheek.

His face was centimetres from mine. “Why won’t you kiss me?” I asked, my voice betraying more despair than I intended.

When he finally spoke, his words came out slowly. “Because I’m afraid of what might happen.”

“What could happen?”

“That’s what I’m worried about – I don’t know.”

Not knowing what I was doing, I let my hand fall down his cheek. Dante pressed his finger to my lips, as if to stop me, but instead let his hand pass over them and roam down to my collarbone, guiding me towards him. His touch tickled my skin, like dozens of snowflakes falling and melting. His eyes were trained on mine.

“Renée, wait, there’s something you need to—”

Everything happened at once. I closed my eyes, feeling his breath dance around my lips. Then voices emerged from the distance, floating towards us, followed by the sound of footsteps thumping against the frozen earth. And then light.

I pulled away from Dante and froze. A flashlight shone on us.

“Stand.”

I shielded my eyes and squinted into the glare. It was Miss LaBarge, her cheeks rosy from the cold. She shone the light in my face, and then in Dante’s.

“What was about to happen just now?” she asked him, her voice sharper than I had ever heard it.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

She shone the light in his face for a few more seconds before turning it off.

“You shouldn’t be out here tonight. Or any night, for that matter. No students are allowed outside during the search, only professors. You know that.”

I stepped forward to explain, but Dante gripped my hand, holding me back.

“I’m sorry, Professor, it was my fault. I asked her to meet me here.”

Miss LaBarge gazed at him. “Fault is a slippery thing.”

Dante nodded, and I sat very still. I could hear the footsteps of the rest of her party walking in our direction. Miss LaBarge glanced around. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t see you. Get back inside. And don’t let me catch you again.”

Dante reached for my hand, but I stopped him, remembering the note Nathaniel had written to me earlier. There was only one way to get into the headmistress’s office to find those files. I couldn’t sneak in, I had to be sent there. And what better time than now, when the headmistress was clearly distracted?

“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 towards 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 towards Dante. Curling around his legs, it began to meow and paw at his trousers. 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 trousers.

“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 any more 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 ever have been friends with such a hateful person? I wondered.

The two cats sauntered towards Gideon and clawed at his trousers. 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.