TWENTY-NINE
A Search for the Missing
DARIA CAUGHT UP WITH ME BEFORE I COULD EVEN GET OUT of Bedford after my English class. As I was rushing down the hall, she pulled me over by my jacket sleeve, hissing in my ear.
“I have to talk to you,” she whispered. “It’s all over the school.”
I wondered how everyone else could have known about Moll. Before I could say anything she pulled me into an empty classroom and shut the door.
“Someone ratted,” she hissed. “Some squeaky, little, pathetic rat who has no life. Now they’re searching for anything they can find. It’s like some police state. We’re all in trouble. The whole junior and senior classes. Pretty soon they’ll be making us rat out each other to save our own skins right when everyone’s applying to colleges.”
It was dumbfounding. For a minute I couldn’t find any words.
“Did you hear me?” Daria shook my arm. “They’re after all of us. That means you, too. Don’t you get it?”
“Not really,” I told her. “Where is she anyway?”
“Where’s who?”
“Moll.”
“What are you talking about?” Daria stepped back and glared at me as if she thought I must be an idiot.
“About Moll. About where she is.”
“Who cares about her?”
“I do. After what happened last night, she must be terrified to face anyone.”
“Don’t you get it? They’re determined to find out who’s been using the mattress room. They’re after all of us.”
“I never used it.”
“But you knew about it and they’re going after anyone and everyone. It’s really bad. Tim’s been called in for three this afternoon.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you know all of this? Maybe he’s being called in for something else. I mean, where is all this information coming from?”
“Some rat. I told you. Someone ratted.”
“Maybe it’s not someone. Do you know who ratted? I mean, maybe one of the little men went down there and saw some stuff left by someone and just changed the lock and handed in the stuff he found. Maybe it’s as simple as that and the deans are just asking around. Did you ever leave anything down there?”
The little men were everywhere at Foxhall. There was no telling how many of them there were but they all seemed to be short and bowlegged. So the students called them the little men. Maybe they were all from the same family because they were indistinguishable from each other. They fixed things and tended the grounds, unplugged toilets and changed bulbs and were often seen carrying ladders or toolboxes.
“Everyone leaves stuff in there. You know, like, oh I don’t know. Just stuff.”
“Well that’s not too bright. Sometimes the little men must have to go in there to actually get a mattress for some-one’s room.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I wouldn’t get so upset until you know the whole story. And anyway, Tim or anyone else can just say they don’t know anything. If nobody admits anything, they can’t prove it. And they’ll never find a key. Never. If anyone asked me anything, I’d say I didn’t know there was a mattress room or anything else in the basement of Fox except the laundry.”
“I hope you’re right,” she sounded skeptical but calmer. “What if they find Stocky’s phone tool? Or they’ve heard about the pigpen?”
“If they knew about the pigpen they would have come after us a long time ago.”
“Yes, you’re probably right. They wouldn’t have let it go on so long. So what’s the thing about your little friend, Moll?”
“I think she’s missing.”
“That is just ridiculous. She can’t be missing. I mean where is there in this place to go missing? She’ll turn up for dinner. Maybe she’s in the infirmary.”
“I checked. She’s not. I’m going to nose around the dean’s office now before the lunch bell rings, so I’ve got to go.”
“Maybe her body will turn up in the mattress room.”
It was a lame joke but at least she still had some sense of humor. We left the classroom together but Daria peeled away from me when she saw Faith at the top of the stairs. Before I turned toward the opposite end of the hall, she ran back and whispered, “Be careful in the dean’s office. They can be very snoopy without seeming to be, especially when they’re trying to get something on you.”
It should have been clear to me at that point that Daria was completely paranoid, but I was thinking about what I could say without making the deans suspicious. Daria’s concerns seemed remote, at least as far as they connected to me personally. On the other hand, it would be awful if all my upper class friends were summarily tossed out of school in the first semester. I couldn’t imagine the school doing that. I was too young to realize the economic consequences to the school of such a move. Of course, there were stories of kids who’d been expelled from other schools and ended up at Foxhall. It had the reputation of being tolerant of past misbehavior, open to giving a kid a second chance in a supportive environment where personal responsibility was lauded and held as a virtue. Of course if the misbehavior began at Foxhall, it was a different matter, especially for a girl. So if I’d thought about it, I’d have understood why Daria was so worried. But then I’d also have reasoned that no one who’d used the mattress room, or the wire, or gone to the pigpen, or done anything else they weren’t allowed to do, would rat out anyone else because that would only get them all in trouble. Co-conspirators have a stake in keeping quiet, at least until they were offered some immunity.
There was a fine art to getting information without giving any away in the process. As I crossed the path leading back to Fox Building, I came up with what seemed a reasonable strategy. Moll and I were in Quaker Life class together. I needed to discuss a paper I was working on with her but I didn’t know her whole schedule and I needed to talk with her right away. Could anyone in the dean’s office tell me what classes she had and where she’d be after lunch? If she was missing, and they knew about it, they’d tell me. If she wasn’t, there was no reason they wouldn’t tell me where she was. Maybe she’d gotten sick and her mother had come to pick her up. Or there’d been a death in her family and she had to leave suddenly without telling anyone. It could be anything, I was thinking as I pushed at the heavy old door and walked straight down the hall toward the dean’s office.
THIRTY
Gone
THE SYSTEM OF STUDENT CHECKS AT FOXHALL BEGAN WITH the roll takers. This first semester they happened to be Brady and Jan, which meant I was lucky. When I reached the dean’s office there they were, poring over the pre-lunch lists of what students had been marked in at which classes, at study halls, the free period lists, the infirmary list, the attendance list from breakfast, and the list of any approved absences.
The door to the dean’s office was always open. Right away, I noticed papers strewn all over the big desk. With a black pen, Jan marked off student names on a long list laid out flat on the desk.
“Hi.” I said it to let them know I was there.
At the same time, Brady was saying to Jan, “So you got Miller and Clausen?”
“Yes, got them both.”
They looked up at me.
“What’s going on?” I asked. This did not look like the usual pre-meal check.
“Miss Alderton told us to double check the lists before we go in to take roll,” Jan said. She wasn’t smiling or joking the way she usually did. In fact, she looked grim.
“Is this because of the . . .” I stopped and looked around but didn’t see any of the deans. “You know, the key search?” I whispered it.
Brady shook her head. “No.” she looked down at Jan’s big list again. “Did you get Marston and DeSalvo?”
“Yes,” Jan answered. “And that is it. We’ve accounted for everyone except . . .” She stopped and looked up at me again. “We’re not supposed to say anything,” she told me.
“About the key?”
&
nbsp; “No. It’s not about the key. But I can’t say anything else.”
“Is it about Moll?”
They both looked at me like, where did she hear that, but they still stayed silent.
“I’ve been looking for her all morning. I couldn’t find her at breakfast and I checked the infirmary and her roommate. I can’t find her anywhere. I don’t know her class schedule. What’s going on? Did she miss her classes?”
“The deans are in a big meeting with Bleaker. That’s all we can say,” Brady whispered. “And you’d better keep a lid on this. Bleaker’s a wreck I heard.”
“She ought to be, after what she did to Moll last night at the dance.” At that moment, I was thinking that if only I hadn’t been so focused on Wes, maybe I could have followed Moll out and talked her down. Anyone would have been upset but apparently her little chat with Bleaker had sent Moll into hiding. “You saw it,” I said to Brady.
“Yeah. It was pretty bad. It would have put me under a bed somewhere. I do feel for Moll, even though what she was trying to do with that get up and makeup is a mystery.”
“She just doesn’t know anything about that stuff,” I said. “She’s all up here,” I pointed to my head. “Do you guys think Moll is okay?”
“I have no idea,” Jan said. The lunch bell rang and she stood up. “But we have to get to the dining hall.”
“Right,” Brady echoed.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked.
They both gave me a ‘who knows?’ look and left with their clipboards and pencils and student lists.
Arriving in the dining hall late, after the moment of silence had already been observed, I looked over to the head table where Bleaker always sat. No Bleaker there. Then I wandered down one row to Brady’s table, where Miss Alderton was the assigned teacher. No Miss Alderton. That meant the deans were still in their meeting. From there I could see Daria’s table, two rows over. She was also surveying the hall. She caught my eye by raising her eyebrows, which signaled me to come over her way. When I got there, she stood up.
“Let’s get some drinks at the pitchers.”
Meals were set up in bowls and platters on each table by the slop workers. Slop was a chore every student had to take on at least once during their time at Foxhall. It was handled in three shifts. Set up, which meant setting the tables with tablecloths, silverware, plates, glasses and napkins. First shift had to show up early, making first shift breakfast slop the school’s most hated chore. Second slop shift filled bowls and platters with food—except for dessert—and set it on all the tables. Third slop shift was the worst, though. Everyone carried their plates and glasses to a long ledge where they scraped their debris and leftovers into bins and then stacked their plates and glasses on rotating metal wheel things that the kitchen slop workers spun around to the kitchen side and unloaded them, sprayed them down, and stacked them onto a conveyor belt that fed the dirty dishes through a giant dishwasher, tray after tray, after which they were fed into giant dryers, then unloaded and stacked on shelves.
On one side of this ledge, along the wall there was a table with an assortment of pitchers with milk, juices, and water. This was long before the salad bar became a staple at institutions. When everyone at a table had finished eating and scraped their plates, one person from each table was designated to pick up whatever the dessert was that meal and bring it back to the table. There was a dessert wheel rotating out the bowls of dessert with new ones as they were picked up. There was also a bread wheel with freshly sliced loaves on trays. If your table ran out of bread, there was always more. Rice pudding was a common dessert. As was rhubarb floating in some clear, slimy, pink stuff. Sometimes we had bread pudding or brown betty. And at dinner once a week we got bricks of vanilla ice cream wrapped in thick paper—one to a student—open at both ends, so that you had to slip a knife under the paper to unwrap the ice cream brick before it thawed and turned into ice cream soup. With this, the school always included a bowl of thawed strawberries in syrup. On ice cream nights, there was a lot of fast maneuvering to get extra bricks other kids didn’t want.
At lunch that day they’d served up Welsh Rarebit, a soupy cheese concoction that you ladled over slices of bread the school cooks baked fresh on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the pre-dawn dark. On those days, the sweet, musky scent of fresh bread permeated Fox building and wafted over the campus. The bread wheel was a popular destination on bake days. Also on the tables that day, next to the bowls of Rarebit I saw bowls of pale green lima beans and uncut apples one platter to a table. When I met Daria at the pitcher table, she leaned over to whisper so no one else could hear.
“They’re going to start grilling people after lunch, one at a time. They’re leaving notes at our tables. Tim got one. So did Stocky and two other boys. No girls so far. Stocky thinks they know a boy had the key so they’re starting with the boys.”
I nodded and smiled so no one would suspect what we were talking about. “Did he say anything about the wire?”
“He didn’t say. I don’t think they know about that.”
“What about the pigpen?” I was thinking about the train trestle. What if someone had seen Wes and me there?
“Nothing. I think it’s all about the key. I don’t know what someone left in the mattress room. Whatever it was must have been pretty bad to stir all this up.”
“Yeah. Kind of stupid to leave anything behind.”
“I’d better get back to my table or Tomlinson will have a fit.”
Mrs. Tomlinson was Daria’s table head. She taught Spanish and first year French and was known as a stickler for the rules. Daria would be taking roll after Christmas break. She and Faith were the next team, so until then they had to stick it out at tables like the rest of us. I grabbed her wrist before she left.
“What have you heard about Moll?”
“What about her? Except that Bleaker stripped her naked at the dance. God that woman is a bitch.”
“Then you haven’t heard anything?”
“No. Hey, I have to get back.”
With that, she grabbed a milk pitcher and left me standing at the table wondering what to do next.
THIRTY-ONE
The Note
BEING THE LAST ONE TO ARRIVE AT MY ASSIGNED TABLE FOR lunch, there was only one place to sit. I arrived carrying the milk pitcher, thinking that made my late arrival at least look legitimate but it didn’t mask what was surely a look of panic when I saw a sealed white envelope at my place. My hand was so shaky some of the milk slopped over the lip when I leaned down to try to see if there was any clue about what was inside the envelope.
“The dean’s office left that for you,” Mr. Fenstermacher told me.
Everyone stared my way and for a second I felt the panic a criminal caught in the act must feel.
“What is it?” That was Amy Gould, a junior who I knew hated Daria with a passion and, by association, me. My take on it? Pure jealousy. Amy was one of those sweater-set girls from a rich New York family. She had more shoes at Foxhall than anyone else. So many they didn’t all fit in her closet so her mother had a special shoe closet constructed for her. It fit under her bed, was on little wheels, and when she pulled it out the top opened automatically and all her extra shoes were neatly arranged by color.
“I’ll open it later,” I mumbled and reached for an apple. Suddenly my appetite was gone and that Welsh Rarebit looked like crayons that had melted in the sun.
“Scared?” she sneered.
“That’s enough,” said Mr. Fenstermacher. “I wonder what you students think about the issue of Laos.”
Laos was one his favorite topics. Every morning a variety of daily newspapers were laid out on the benches outside the dining hall. Anyone could sit and read them after breakfast and one day before Thanksgiving break, I’d heard one of the senior boys reading an article in the Times about how our government was sending advisors into Laos presumably to spy on Vietnam. A couple of the boys got all heated about it saying advisors meant
soldiers or CIA and we were getting embroiled in a war we couldn’t win and that Laos was in turmoil. That the French had pulled out of Indo China and we were taking over for them.
“What about Berlin and Khrushchev? Don’t you see that situation as more dangerous?” Mr. Fenstermacher asked of anyone who would join in.
“I don’t think the Soviets want to start another war,” one of the boys offered.
“But you think there might be a war in Vietnam?”
“I think the Soviet Union will use proxies to keep nip-ping at our heels is all. Vietnam. Laos. Cambodia, Berlin. I think it’s all part of their strategy to keep us occupied.”
“Maybe all they want is assurance that Germany won’t attack them again,” one of the other boys said.
I was glad Mr. Fenstermacher had brought it up. While they talked, it gave me a chance to slip the envelope onto my lap and surreptitiously try to open it, but the seal was impossible to break without making noise so I sat through the meal, toyed with a piece of bread and some apple, until finally the end of meal bell rang, announcements were made from the head table by a teacher—still no dean in sight—and we could leave.
When dismissed, we rose like a flock of geese from a field that we’d depleted of seeds. I practically ran out the door and headed for the girls’ room at the far end of the hall. Once inside, I tore open the envelope and pulled out the paper inside. The note was typed. Unsigned. Plain as starch.
Miss Greenwood, please come to Miss Bleaker’s office directly after lunch.
That was it. No explanation. No subject. No rebuke or question or discussion. I had no choice. That was clear. So Daria was wrong and they were rounding up girls, too. I turned and stared at myself in the mirror, practiced my ‘I have no idea’ look, well perfected after years of interrogations from my mother, squared my shoulders, ruffled my hair and tore up the note. I could handle this. I would know nothing. I would say nothing. I would reveal nothing by word or attitude. I would be stone.
The Other New Girl Page 18