Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  Alex hesitated, then said, “Be careful, Dawes. Keep your eyes open.”

  Dawes blinked. “Why?” she said. “I’m nobody.”

  “You’re Lethe and you’re alive. You’re somebody.”

  Dawes blinked again, like clockwork waiting for a cog to turn, for the right wheel to click so she could continue moving. Then her vision cleared and her brows knitted together. “Did you see him?” she said in a rush, staring at her feet. “On the other side?”

  Alex shook her head. “North claims he isn’t there.”

  “That’s got to be a good sign,” said Dawes. “On Wednesday we’ll call him back. We’ll bring him home. Darlington will know what to do about everything.”

  Maybe. But Alex wasn’t going to bet her life on waiting.

  “Do you know much about the Bridegroom murders?” Alex asked. Just because she knew North’s name, she didn’t have to make a habit of using it. It would only strengthen their bond.

  Dawes shrugged. “It’s on all of those Haunted Connecticut tours along with Jennie Cramer and that house in Southington.”

  “Where did it go down?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t like reading about that kind of stuff.”

  “You chose the wrong line of work, Dawes.” She cocked her head. “Or did it choose you?” She remembered Darlington’s story about waking in the hospital at age seventeen, with an IV in his arm and Dean Sandow’s card in his hand. It was something they had in common, though it had never really felt that way.

  “They approached me because of the topic for my dissertation. I was well suited to research. It was boring work until—” She broke off. Her shoulders hitched like someone had yanked on her strings. Until Darlington. Dawes brushed at her eyes with her mittened hands. “I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”

  “Dawes—” Alex began.

  But Dawes was already hurrying back toward the Hutch.

  Alex looked around, hoping to see the Bridegroom, wondering if the gluma or its master knew she had survived, if an ambush would be waiting around the next corner. She needed to get back to the dorm.

  Alex thought of the passage the Bridegroom had quoted from Idylls of the King, the sinister weight of the words. If she remembered right, that passage was about Geraint’s romance with Enid, a man driven mad by jealousy though his wife had remained faithful. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Rather die than doubt. Why had Tara chosen those lines for her tattoo? Had she related to Enid or had she just liked the sound of the words? And why would someone from Scroll and Key share them with her? Alex couldn’t imagine one of the Locksmiths saying thank you for a particularly sweet high with a tour of the tomb and an education in its mythology. And even if Alex wasn’t making something out of nothing, how had dealing weed to a few undergrads turned into murder? There had to be something more at play here.

  Alex remembered lying on her back at that intersection, seeing through Tara’s eyes in her last moments, seeing Lance’s face above her. But what if hadn’t been Lance at all? What if it had been some kind of glamour?

  She swerved down High Street toward the Hopper College dining hall. She longed for the safety of her dorm room, but answers could protect her better than any ward. Even though Turner had warned her off Tripp, it was the only name she had and the only direct connection between the societies and Tara.

  It was early yet, but sure enough, there he was, seated at a long table with a few of his buddies, all of them in loose shorts and baseball caps and fleeces, all of them rosy-cheeked and wind-buffed despite the fact she knew they must be nursing hangovers. Apparently wealth was better than vitamin injections. Darlington had been cut from the same moneyed cloth, but he’d had a real face, one with a little hardness in it.

  As she approached, she saw Tripp’s friends turn their eyes to her, assess her, discard her. She’d showered at the Hutch, changed into a pair of Lethe sweats, and combed her hair. After being shoved into traffic and drowning, it was all the effort she owed anyone.

  “Hey, Tripp,” she said easily. “You got a minute?”

  He turned her way. “You want to ask me to prom, Stern?”

  “Depends. Gonna be a good little slut for me and put out?” Tripp’s friends whooped and one of them let out a long Ohhhh shit. Now they were looking at her. “I need to talk to you about that problem set.”

  Tripp’s cheeks pinked, but then his shoulders squared and he rose. “Sure.”

  “Bring him home early,” said one of his buddies.

  “Why?” she asked. “You want seconds?”

  They whooped again and clapped their hands as if she’d landed an impressive put.

  “You’re kinda nasty, Stern,” Tripp said over his shoulder as she trailed him out of the dining hall. “I like it.”

  “Come here,” she said. She led him up the stairs, past the stained-glass windows of plantation life that had survived the name change of the college from “slavery is a positive good” Calhoun to Hopper. A few years back a black janitor had smashed one of them to bits.

  Tripp’s face changed, eager mischief pulling at his mouth. “What’s up, Stern?” he said as they entered the reading room. It was empty.

  She closed the door behind her and his grinned widened—like he actually thought she was about to make a move.

  “How do you know Tara Hutchins?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know her? I’ve seen her phone logs,” she lied. “I know just how often you were in touch.”

  He scowled and leaned on the back of a leather couch, folding his arms. The sulk didn’t suit him. It pushed his round features from boyish sweetness to angry infant. “You a cop now?”

  She walked toward him and she saw him stiffen, tell himself not to back up. His world was all about deferral, moving in sideways patterns. You didn’t step to someone directly. You didn’t look them in the eye. You were cool. You were fine with it. You could take a joke.

  “Don’t make me say I’m the law, Tripp. I’ll have trouble keeping a straight face.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What is this about?”

  “How stupid are you?” His mouth fell open. His lower lip looked wet. Had anyone ever spoken to Tripp Helmuth this way? “It’s about a dead girl. I want to know what she was to you.”

  “I already talked to the police.”

  “And now you’re talking to me. About a dead girl.”

  “I don’t have to—”

  She leaned in. “You know how this works, right? My job—the job of Lethe House—is to keep entitled little shits like you from making trouble for the administration.”

  “Why are you being such a hard-ass? I thought we were friends.”

  Because of all the beer pong we played and the summer we spent in Biarritz? Did he really not know the difference between friends and friendly?

  “We are friends, Tripp. If I wasn’t your friend I’d have taken this to Dean Sandow already, but I don’t want hassle and I don’t want to make trouble for you or for Bones if I don’t have to.”

  His big shoulders shrugged. “It was just a hookup.”

  “Tara doesn’t seem like your type.”

  “You don’t know my type.” Was he really trying to flirt his way out of this? She held his gaze and his eyes slid away. “She was fun,” he muttered.

  For the first time, Alex had the sense he was being honest.

  “I bet she was,” Alex said gently. “Always had a smile, always glad to see you.” That’s what dealing was about. Tripp probably didn’t understand that he was just a customer, that he was a pal as long as he had cash on hand.

  “She was nice.” Did he care that she was dead? Was there something more haunted than a hangover in his eyes or did Alex just want to believe he gave a damn? “I swear all we ever did was fuck around and smoke a couple of bowls.”

  “You ever meet at her place?”

  He shook his head. “She always came to me.”

  Of course figuring out her address couldn�
�t be that easy. “You ever see her with anyone from another society?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t know. Look, Lance and T were dealers; they got the best weed I’ve ever had, like the lushest, greenest shit you’ve ever seen. But I didn’t keep track of who she hung out with.”

  “I asked if you saw her with anyone.”

  He lowered his head more. “Why are you being like this?”

  “Hey,” she said softly. She squeezed his shoulder. “You know you’re not in trouble, right? You’re going to be fine.” She felt some of the tension ease out of him.

  “You’re being so mean.”

  She was torn between wanting to slap him or put him to bed with his favorite binky and a cup of warm milk.

  “I’m just trying to get some answers, Tripp. You know how it is. Just trying to do my job.”

  “I feel you, I feel you.” She doubted that, but he knew the script. Regular guy, Tripp Helmuth. Working hard or hardly working.

  She gripped his shoulder more firmly. “But you need to understand this situation. A girl died. And these people she ran with? They aren’t your friends and you aren’t going to stay hard or not rat or any of that crap you’ve seen in movies, because this isn’t a movie, this is your life, and you have a good life, and you don’t want to mess it up, yeah?”

  Tripp kept his eyes on his shoes. “Yeah, okay. Yeah.” She thought he might cry.

  “So who did you see with Tara?”

  When Tripp was done talking, Alex leaned back. “Tripp?”

  “Yeah?” He kept staring at his shoes—ridiculous plastic sandals, as if summer never stopped for Tripp Helmuth.

  “Tripp,” she repeated, and waited for him to raise his head and meet her eyes. She smiled. “That’s it. We’re done. It’s over.” You don’t ever have to think about that girl again. How you fucked her and forgot her. How you thought she might give you a good deal if you made her come. How it got you off to be with someone who felt a little dangerous. “We good?” she asked. This was the language he understood.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not going to let this go any further, I promise.”

  And then he said it and she knew he wouldn’t tell anyone about this conversation—not his friends, not the Bonesmen. “Thank you.”

  That was the trick of it: to make him believe he had more to lose than she did.

  “One last thing, Tripp,” she said as he made to scurry back toward the dining hall. “Do you have a bike?”

  * * *

  Alex pedaled across the green, past the three churches, then down to State Street and under the highway. She had about two hundred pages of reading to do if she didn’t want to fall behind this week, and possibly a monster hunting her, but right now she needed to talk to Detective Abel Turner.

  Once you were off campus, New Haven lost its pretensions in fits and starts—dollar stores and grimy sports bars shared space with gourmet markets and sleek coffee spots; cheap nail salons and cell-phone hubs sat next to upscale noodle shops and boutiques selling small, useless soaps. It left Alex uneasy, as if the city’s identity kept shifting in front of her.

  State Street was just a long stretch of nothing—parking lots, power lines, the train tracks to the east—and the police station was just as bad, an ugly, muscular building of oatmeal-colored slabs. There were dead spaces like this all over the city, entire blocks of massive concrete monoliths looming over empty plazas like a drawing of the future from the past.

  “Brutalist,” Darlington had called them, and Alex had said, “It does sort of feel like the buildings are ganging up on you.”

  “No,” he’d corrected. “It’s from the French, brut. As in raw, because they used bare concrete. But, yes, it does feel like that.”

  There had been slums here before, and then money had poured into New Haven from the Model Cities program. “It was supposed to clean everything up, but they built places no one wanted to be. And then the money ran out and New Haven just has these … gaps.”

  Wounds, Alex had thought at the time. He was about to say “wounds,” because the city is alive to him.

  Alex looked down at her phone. Turner hadn’t replied to her texts. She hadn’t worked up the nerve to call, but now she was here and there was nothing else to do. When he didn’t answer, she hung up and dialed back again, and then again. Alex hadn’t been anywhere near a police station since after Hellie died. Not only Hellie died that night. But to think of it in any other terms, to think of the blood, the pale pudding of Len’s brain clinging to the lip of the kitchen counter, set her mind rabbiting around her skull in panic.

  At last Turner answered.

  “What can I do for you, Alex?” His voice was pleasant, solicitous, as if there were no one else he’d rather speak to.

  Reply to my goddamn texts. She cleared her throat. “Hi, Detective Turner. I’d like to speak to you about Tara Hutchins.”

  Turner chuckled—there was no other word for it; it was the indulgent laugh of a seventy-year-old grandfather, though Turner couldn’t have been much over thirty. Was he always like this at the office? “Alex, you know I can’t talk about an active investigation.”

  “I’m outside the police station.”

  A pause. Turner’s voice was different when he answered, a bit of that jolly warmth gone. “Where?”

  “Right across the street.”

  Another long pause. “Train station in five.”

  Alex walked Tripp’s bike the rest of the way up the block to Union Station. The air was soft, moist with the promise of snow. She wasn’t sure if she was sweaty from the ride or because she was never going to get used to talking to cops.

  She propped the bike against a wall by the parking lot and sat down on a low concrete bench to wait. A Gray hurried past in his undershorts, checking his watch and bustling along as if afraid he was going to miss his train. You’re not going to make that one, buddy. Or any of the rest.

  She scrolled through her phone, keeping one eye on the street as she searched Bertram Boyce North’s name. She wanted a little context before she went asking the Lethe library questions.

  Luckily, there was plenty online. North and his fiancée were celebrities of a kind. In 1854, he and his betrothed, the young Daisy Fanning Whitlock, had been found dead in the offices of the North & Sons Carriage Company, long since demolished. Their portraits were the first link under New Haven on the Connecticut Haunts site. North looked handsome and serious, his hair more tidily arranged than it had been in death. The only other difference was his clean white shirt, unmarred by bloodstains. Something cold slithered up her spine. Sometimes, despite her best efforts, she forgot she was seeing the dead, even with the gore splattered all over his fancy coat and shirt. Seeing this stiff, still black-and-white photo was different. He is moldering in a grave. He is a skeleton gone to dust. She could have what was left of him dug up. They could stand by the edge of his tomb together and marvel at his bones. Alex tried to shake off the image.

  Daisy Whitlock was beautiful in that dark-haired stony-eyed way that girls of that time were. Her head was tilted slightly, only the barest hint of a smile on her lips, her curls parted in the middle and arranged in soft loops that left her neck bare. Her waist was tiny and her white shoulders emerged from a froth of ruffles, a posy of mums and roses clutched in her delicate hands.

  As for the factory where the murder had taken place, parts of it hadn’t yet been finished at the time of North’s murder and it was never completed. North & Sons moved their operations to Boston and continued to do business until the early 1900s. There were no photographs of the crime scene, only lurid descriptions of blood and horror, the gun—a pistol North had kept in his new offices in case of intruders—still gripped in his hand.

  The bodies had been discovered by Daisy’s maid, a woman named Gladys O’Donaghue, who had gone screaming into the streets. She’d been found nearly a half mile away, hysterical, at the corner of Chapel and High. Even after a calming dose of brandy, she’d had li
ttle information to offer the authorities. The crime seemed an obvious one; only the motive offered any kind of intrigue. There were theories that Daisy had been pregnant by another man but her family had hushed it up in the wake of the murders to avoid further scandal. One commenter suggested that North had been driven mad by mercury poisoning because of the time he’d spent near Danbury’s hat factories. The simplest theory was that Daisy wanted to break off the engagement and North wouldn’t have it. His family wanted an infusion of capital from the Whitlocks—and North wanted Daisy. She’d been a favorite of the local society columns and known as flirtatious, bold, and sometimes inappropriate.

  “I like you already,” murmured Alex.

  Alex scrolled past maps to both Daisy’s and North’s graves and was trying to zoom in on an old newspaper article when Turner arrived at the station.

  He hadn’t bothered with an overcoat. Apparently he didn’t intend to stay long. Even so, the man could dress. He wore a simple, staid charcoal suit, but the lines were sharp, and Alex saw the careful touches—the pocket square, the thin lavender stripe on the tie. Darlington had always looked good, but effortlessly so. Turner wasn’t afraid to look like he tried.

  His jaw was set, his mouth a pinched seam. It was only when he spotted Alex that his mask of diplomacy dropped into place. His whole bearing changed, not just his expression. His body went loose and easy, unthreatening, as if actively discharging the current of tension that animated his form.

  He sat down beside her on the bench and rested his elbows on his knees. “I need to ask you not to show up at my place of work.”

  “You didn’t answer my texts.”

  “There’s a lot going on. I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation as you know.”

  “It was that or go to your house.”

  That live-wire tension sprang back into his body, and Alex felt a jolt of gratification at being able to rile him.

  “I suppose Lethe has all of my particulars on file,” he said. Lethe most likely did know everything from Turner’s Social Security number to his tastes in porn, but no one had ever offered Alex a look at the file. She didn’t even know if Turner lived in New Haven proper. Turner checked his phone. “I have about ten minutes to give you.”