Ahead.
Someone had turned on lights not far from where the Letter Girls stood.
Neither girl moved, not even to the wall.
In the light they saw a partition, a glass divider, separating this side of the tunnel from the other.
K knew that if B hadn’t heard what she’d heard, if B hadn’t come, K might’ve been all the way to that glass wall by now. She might have been feeling her way along that divider when the lights came on.
And the unfathomable woman on the other side of the glass would have seen her.
The girls gripped hands.
The woman wore all red. Red gloves and a red jacket, red pants and boots. The hair on her face was much darker than that of the Inspector they’d seen in the first-floor hall of the second Turret. So was the hair on her head. Her features were so sharp, so harsh, K couldn’t help but imagine drawing a face so unreal, as if by re-creating it exactly as it was she might rise to a new level of artistry. But whoever this was, K didn’t want to get any closer.
The woman slid open a glass drawer on her side of the transparent divider. She placed a stack of papers inside it.
K and B thought of Judith Nancy’s The Hut, in which a young girl, Miranda, discovers a witch living in the Orchard behind the Turret.
The witch slipped secret notes to the Letter Girls in their sleep. Was this woman slipping secret notes, too? Pages and pages of them?
She was tall. So tall. Wide at the shoulders. K had never seen a woman exude such physical strength before. As if, here in the Glasgow Tunnel, lived a woman strong enough to crush a girl.
Was this what lived in the Corner?
It got out, M.O.M. once said. And it took everything we had to get it back inside again.
The woman grunted, slid the partition drawer closed, scratched the hair on her face, reached for a knob on the wall, and the lights went out.
The Letter Girls didn’t move. Not even as the sound of the woman’s red boots echoed into the dark distance of the tunnel’s other side.
“Those pages,” K said.
“Back,” B said. “Now.”
K turned on the flashlight and, without waiting to debate it with B, rushed to the glass partition. She opened the drawer from her side and took out the pages.
As she hurried back, it struck her that, if someone were to catch them now, the papers would crush any already-thin excuse they had.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
B didn’t argue. They moved fast toward the light at the open end of the tunnel. They stuck to the wall, they held hands, they hurried.
A few feet shy of the entrance, B pulled hard on K’s wrist, stopping her.
“Are we okay?” B asked.
K thought of Rotts. Of Vees. They both did.
“I don’t know.”
Out the entrance, they scurried back the way they’d come. One hall, then another. The hall with many doors.
The girls had taken two steps when one of those doors opened.
B froze. K quickly set the pages on the ground, stood up straight again.
A face peered out of the doorway, turned fully toward them.
It was a woman with large glasses, curly gray hair high upon her head. Smoke rose from a cigarette between her fingers, obscuring the collared off-white blouse she wore. K thought of the match she’d heard struck on the way to the Glasgow Tunnel. Despite seeing her out of context, the girls knew who this woman was.
This was Judith Nancy.
“Well, holy shit,” Nancy said, her voice hoarse and wise. “Holy shit.”
The girls had seen Judith Nancy many times before. She always entered the cafeteria with a smile, her wrinkled hands cutting the air as if made of the same silk as the handkerchiefs around her neck. She’d always looked regal to K. Unapproachable. And like someone who had possibly been crying, but who had come to a hopeful conclusion just prior to stepping out in public.
To K and B, Judith Nancy was exactly what a writer looked like.
The only one they knew of.
“Please don’t tell,” B said. The words blurted out of her mouth like she’d thrown up. K wanted to grab those words before they reached Judith Nancy. They made the moment real, proving that, yes, they’d been caught in the basement, doing something they shouldn’t.
“Tell?” Judith Nancy said. She stepped out full into the hall. She wore a long skirt that almost reached scuffed heels. She had a bottle in her other hand.
B looked at K, K who had gotten her into this, K who started the snooping.
“M.O.M.,” K finally said. “Please don’t tell her.”
Nancy leaned a shoulder against the wall. She lifted the bottle to her lips, took a drink, puckered her face, and lowered it again.
“You two,” she said. “I’m so drunk, come tomorrow morning I’ll question whether or not this happened at all.”
The girls didn’t know what to say. So they said nothing.
“Come in?” Nancy asked, stepping aside, making room at her office door.
“Into your office?” K asked.
Nancy smiled. “And why not? We’ll want to be quiet, of course.” She looked up. “But I think we could all use a good expunging talk.”
Still a Place You’ve Never Seen
“Why tonight?” Nancy asked. Her now-shoeless feet were up on the desk beside what both girls recognized as a typewriter. Beside the old machine was a stack of pages. The ink on top looked fresh. Dark black.
“What do you mean?” B asked. Her voice continued to betray her horror at having been caught, invited in or not. But K knew what Nancy meant.
“I learned that the basement door was in the staff bathroom,” K said. “And we wanted to see it.”
“Ah,” Nancy said. The way she eyed K suggested she believed some of what K said but not all of it. Still, it was enough, it seemed. Or, rather, it seemed she believed the right parts. “That’s the way to be. You have an idea to do something, you do it.”
Judith Nancy took another drink from the bottle. The Letter Girls could smell it from across the desk. The matching chairs they sat in creaked as they leaned forward, together, to read the label.
“It’s called bourbon, girls, and it’s one of life’s many pleasures.”
“Does it taste good?” K asked.
Nancy laughed. “Absolutely not. But aren’t some things more about how they feel than how they taste?” She waved a dismissive hand at the two blank stares that followed. “The answer to that is yes. Always yes. Life must be about the three Ss. Do you know what they are? Can you guess?”
K and B exchanged glances. They were in Judith Nancy’s office. Judith Nancy just asked them a question. How to answer? K tried.
“Study, sacrifice, and…stamina?”
Nancy removed her feet from the desk. Leaned toward them.
“No,” she said. “Jesus. No.” She lit a second cigarette, pointed it at the two Letter Girls. “Sensation. Suspension. Spirit. Sensation because you must savor every meal, every syllable of laughter, every second you smile. Suspension because you must be able to suspend your disbelief in all walks of life. And spirit because…well…your spirit drives the whole car, now, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” K said. “It does.”
“If I can teach you girls one thing, if I can reveal one tiny aspect of this life that you might not already know…” K spotted distance in the woman’s eyes. Nancy wanted to say more than she was. She wanted to talk all day. K was struck by an image of the author crawling across the desk, gripping the girls by their wrists, leading them out into the pines. Let me show you something, girls. Let me show you another…tower. “It’s that you must question authority. You must trust your instincts. And you must do the very thing you’re doing right now.”
“What are we doing righ
t now?” B asked.
Nancy laughed. But K heard deep sorrow in it. “You’re questioning everything.”
K felt something like an electric current inside. Leave it to Judith Nancy to articulate what she could not.
“We found a—” B started to say, but K elbowed her. Nancy looked from one girl to the other. Then she looked to the door.
“Whatever it is, don’t tell me,” Nancy said. “The point of bringing you two in here was most decidedly not to unearth what you’ve learned but to play the role of a character you meet along your journey throughout life, and certainly over the course of your sojourn down here to the basement. Think of me as—”
“As Rosalyn from Over and Over,” K said. Her voice betrayed her sudden excitement. She was talking Judith Nancy with Judith Nancy.
“Yes,” Nancy said. She half lit up, half went into shadow. As if her own book was something to be both proud and ashamed of. “Like Rosalyn, indeed. What purpose would you say she served for little Candace P?” Nancy raised her eyebrows, waiting for a response. Then her eyebrows dropped back to the level of her large glasses. “Forget I asked that. I also do not plan to give you a pop quiz. Certainly not on the books I write.”
“We love the books you write,” B said.
Nancy brought a hand to her mouth. Both Letter Girls saw the bottoms of the author’s eyes well up wet. Nancy looked down. It took her several seconds to regain her composure. “I suppose I should thank you,” she said. “And so…K and B, thank you.”
“You know our names?” K asked.
“Of course I know your names. It’s the writer’s job to observe, is it not? And there are only so many of us in this tower to begin with. How hard is it to commit so few to memory?”
K and B exchanged a glance. Was Nancy alluding to the second tower? Other people?
A sound out in the hall and K turned so fast it hurt her neck. When she looked back at Nancy, she saw that the writer looked as frightened as B. Worse: Judith Nancy looked like she’d seen her own death, just like little Candace P in Over and Over.
“If they enter this room,” Nancy whispered, her magnified eyes on the doorknob, “I will lie. I will tell them you entered on your own. That you forced me to speak.”
“What?” B asked.
Another sound in the hall. Nancy held up a hand swiftly.
They waited. All six eyes on the office door, here in the last place in the world Judith Nancy should tell a story.
“A mouse,” Nancy said.
“A mouse?” B asked. “In here? In the Parenthood?”
Nancy took a drink from her bottle. “This is the basement, girls. Where the shadows play.” She paused. “But I suppose they play everywhere in this place.”
“Do they?” K asked.
The writer studied K close. “You,” she said. “You started all this, didn’t you.”
B nodded. “It was her.”
“It was my idea to come down here,” K said. “Yes.”
“But not just that,” Nancy said. “Again, I have no interest in scolding you. My God, even I refuse to sink that low.”
“Your God?” K asked.
Nancy’s face changed abruptly again. She looked to the bottle. “My goodness,” she corrected herself. “Tell me, girls. Do you know what misinformation is?” Then, “Of course you do. I’m writing books for postgrad reading levels.”
“Postgrad?” K asked.
Nancy shook her head. “My, you are sharp, aren’t you?”
“We know what misinformation means,” K said, not wanting to let the thread go.
“It’s when someone tells you something that just isn’t true,” Nancy said anyway. She looked to the door again. “With the intention of you believing it.”
K felt the hair on her arms rise. Was Nancy about to reveal something? Tell a secret?
“Like a lie,” B said.
“Oh, much worse than that,” Nancy said. “A lie might be used to get yourself out of trouble. A lie can make somebody feel good. A lie can even be fun. But misinformation—there’s no fun in that one.”
K thought of the frightening woman in the Glasgow Tunnel. She thought of the papers she’d left outside in the hall. Was the mouse eating them? Was it a mouse?
“You’re doing the right thing,” Nancy said. She leaned back in her chair, slurred certain words. Smoke rose to a vent above her. Her skin looked especially pale, off-white, close to the color of her blouse. She attempted to lift her feet up onto the desk but fell short. She leaned forward suddenly, recovering from the mistake, and sat with her legs apart, her elbows on the arms of the chair. K noticed that most of the liquid in the bottle was gone. When Nancy spoke again, it was with more enthusiasm. But of a dark variety. “You are doing the right thing with your suspicions.”
“We’re inspired by your books,” K said. She did not say, Suspicions? She did not want Nancy to stop talking.
Nancy looked at her and it seemed, to K, that she was looking over her shoulder, then her other shoulder, then vaguely in her eye. “Don’t say that to me,” she said. “Don’t you ever say that again. I have nothing to do with the fact that you’re seeking answers…looking for justice…engaging your…your…”
The girls waited for her to finish what she’d started to say.
“Are you okay, Judith Nancy?” B asked.
Nancy looked quick to B.
“This is why I asked you in,” she said. “This…” She fanned both occupied hands to the greater part of the office. “You’ve never been in a basement like this before. And you’ve never been in an office like this, either. And while it’s not much to look at, I’d like you to look at it all the same.” She paused, giving the Letter Girls a chance to look around. They did. “Because, even if the barren walls elicit no excitement, even if the dank air momentarily suffocates you, even if the space itself feels something like a casket built too small, this is still a place you’ve never seen. And, girls, those places are the most important places to see in all the world.”
“In all the world,” B echoed.
“Now,” Nancy said, “scram.”
“Scram?” K asked.
Nancy nodded. “Let’s be grateful that was only a mouse.”
K and B were slow to rise, but they rose. Nancy was lighting another cigarette as they reached the door. Taking another drink from her bottle.
“Thank you, Judith,” K said. She wanted to say so much more. Ask so much more.
“It’s Vivian,” Nancy said, “Vivian Kleinplotz. But who would read a book written by her?”
K and B smiled awkwardly, not understanding what the author meant.
They left then and shut the door quietly behind them. The typewriter erupted to life beyond the wood.
K went quick to the pile of pages on the hall floor. Still there.
The girls took the same halls back. But how different they looked this time.
“I can’t tell if I feel better or worse,” B said at the foot of the stairs that led to the staff bathroom above.
“About what?”
“About lying.”
“B, I think we can agree there’s more going on here than—”
“I mean, here I was, so worried about lying to M.O.M., the Parenthood, everybody. But did you hear her? Judith Nancy? She said she would lie, too. Told us right to our faces. Said she’d lie to the Parenthood, tell them we forced her to talk.”
K looked up the stairs.
“I guess we’re not the only ones with secrets.”
“No,” B said. “We’re not. And if Judith Nancy would lie…who else would?”
The girls climbed the stone steps. At the top, K put Q’s third ear back in place. She listened.
It felt, to her, like she’d answered B’s question without speaking.
Everybody, she h
adn’t said. Everybody would lie.
Over and Over
K returned to the second tower every night for two weeks. By now, thanks to the pages she’d stolen from the Glasgow Tunnel, she knew it was referred to as the boys’ tower. She had no idea what the word boys meant, but she had an idea it had something to do with the variety of women who lived there. Some had hairy faces. All had flat chests. Some were abnormally strong or overweight. All spoke in a different timbre, a tone she’d never heard around her own. She didn’t ask B to come with her, because she didn’t want to force that on her friend. B had flip-flopped many times on whether or not to tell the Parenthood, but it’d been days since she’d said they should, and K wanted to keep it that way.
Q helped with the super glasses, just as she’d helped with the third ear. By way of a series of lenses (some of them upside down), K was able to easily observe the girls in the second tower from under cover of the pines at the edge of the second Yard. She took notes. She made lists.
She drew.
She drew J a lot. And while she no longer thought this J was the same J that had been taken from home, her fascination with this short-haired, flat-chested girl seemed to have no bounds. By the end of the first week of spying, she had ten drawings of J, photographic quality, most of them by the view through Q’s super glasses.
But one or two came from much closer.
As summer became autumn, K had begun sneaking into the second tower.
The similarities between the two Turrets would’ve occupied more of her thinking had not the horror of being inside a place she did not belong occupy so much space. The second tower smelled different. Start there. Smelled…deeper, if such a thing were possible. Smelled darker, too. Not in a moody way…but in a physical assault to the senses. K found herself on high alert the first time she entered the building. Not just because she was justifiably concerned with getting caught, but because the actual smell of the place scared her. It smelled more…violent. As if the women who walked these halls, took these stairs, entered these rooms, were partial to different methods from the Letter Girls back home.
She learned a lot from the pages she’d stolen. Boys wasn’t the only word. Lengthy descriptions of the girls in the second tower always included the gibberish words she’d heard in the second Yard: his and he. More than once the girls were referred to as the Alphabet Boys, and K was intelligent enough to note the similarity between that appellation and the Letter Girls at home.
Inspection Page 25