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,” Mr. 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 candlelit 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.
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.
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.