It only stood to reason. Dragon’s Head was almost a half century younger than Rose & Grave, and though generally well respected (hey, anything we deign to consider a “rival” is okay by us), it boasted fewer alumni gifts, a smaller trust, and, perhaps as a consequence of both, a lesser cachet in the campus pecking order.
Or at least, it had until this year. The scandals that had rocked Rose & Grave during the last two semesters had tarnished our reputation somewhat. I’m sure the Dragon’s Head’s (or Book & Key’s, or Serpent’s) sales pitch to potential taps this spring would sound something like, “Rose & Grave is going to pot. Look at how many times they’ve been in the tabloids this year. You sure you want to hitch your wagon to that falling star?” Which made tonight’s expedition all the more important. Pull off a good crook, and we’d prove our mettle once again.
Unfortunately, our chances of departing without a police escort, never mind scoring any booty, looked slimmer than the cut of Angel’s jeans.
“Bet it’s heavy,” said Thorndike, leaning a bit on the beast’s long, lithe body. The pedestal base barely jiggled. “But what a coup, huh?”
“Really puts the ‘grand’ in grand larceny.” I shook my head. “There’s no way we can take this with us. Are you sure you can’t open the safe?” I directed the beam of my headlamp toward the enormous safe set into a recess in the far wall.
“Nope,” said Thorndike. “I’ve never even seen a lock like that before. Sorry to let you all down.” Apparently, our safecracker hadn’t spent as much time studying with her grandmother as she had preparing for her SATs. Couldn’t blame her, to tell the truth.
“Great,” said Puck. “All this trouble for nothing.”
“At least you can afford a good lawyer when we get caught,” I said. “I doubt these charges will look good on my graduate school applications.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Angel scoffed. “New Haven cops never take these pranks too seriously.”
Poe, as usual, was standing somewhat away from the rest of the group, studying the peeling wallpaper in the bluish ray from his headlamp. Suddenly, he stiffened. “Someone’s inside. Quick, we’ve got to hide!”
We all froze, straining in an attempt to hear whatever clue Poe had that we weren’t the building’s only occupants. I looked around. Where would we hide? This room was cluttered with various knickknacks and furniture, but nothing that would conceal six college kids (no matter how petite certain starlets were).
But Poe was straining to lift the upright piano in the corner by the safe as quietly as possible. “Someone help him,” I whispered, though I really had no idea what he was trying to do.
So I asked him. “Um, if we’re trying to steal something heavy, I think it’s best we go with the dragon.”
In response, he grabbed my arm and shoved me behind the piano. “Get in.”
There was a thigh-high hole in the wall, and from the cobweb-covered opening came a distinctive draft. Great. Spiders and cold air and blackness. I reeled back against him, standing up. “No way!”
“Now,” he hissed, pushing me back down.
“Crawl space” is a generous term for the damp, grimy cavity my companions and I presently found ourselves crowded into. Poe squished himself inside and began tugging the piano back into place. “It won’t budge,” he said, a note of real fear entering his voice at last.
Angel, who was closest, began pulling on it with him, and as the back of the upright snapped against the wall, the two of them tumbled across the unfinished floorboards and hit the wall opposite with a crack.
We all stopped breathing. Could whoever was downstairs hear that?
“The lights!” Thorndike’s warning came on a breath, and around me, LED headlamps extinguished one by one. And then, from a distance, we heard a rhythmic pounding. Footsteps on the stairs. We lay completely still, heedless of our awkward positions and the way we were all jumbled together in a heap.
“Did they get anything? Search all the rooms.”
A chorus of voices began to ring out from all around us. “All clear here.” “Nothing here.” “I don’t think they even made it up here.” And then, one voice, louder and clearer than all the others. “I’m in the treasure room. They took the cover off the dragon.” A sliver of light sliced into our hole from the crack between the piano and the wall. In its blaze, I saw Poe’s eyes, wide and almost silvery inside the eyeholes of his mask. They met mine and we simply stared at each other for several long moments, not blinking, willing in unison for the light to vanish before it gave away our location.
More voices joined the first. “Did they open the safe?” I heard the rapid-fire clicks of the lock spinning. “They didn’t get it,” a voice said, and someone sighed loudly with relief.
Inside the wall, we were still a long way from that point. I glanced away from Poe, and then, after a decent interval, looked back. He was still staring at me.
“I think they set off the alarm and ran,” said one at last. “They didn’t have the chance to steal anything.”
“We’ll get them back, though,” another cut in, his voice low and threatening. “We can’t let this kind of affront stand without a counterattack.”
Puck jerked in place, and several pairs of arms clamped down on him before he could rally to the Diggers’ defense.
“Yes,” said the third voice. “But how? We can’t get into their Inner Temple. We’ve tried.”
They had? That was news. I could feel, in the infinitesimal shifts of my companions, how they were taking this information, and predicted a sudden increase in our tomb’s security. If we had any say in the matter, they’d continue to fail at breaching our sacred spaces.
Another voice joined in. “They aren’t here. We’ve checked all the rooms.”
“Even the back stairs?” said the scary voice. “You know they know where all of our secret places are. Damn frat boys.”
Poe’s eyes glinted slightly, and I fought to keep from giggling.
It seemed like hours later that the Dragon’s Head members finally left the room in darkness, and hours more before any of us felt comfortable enough to move. I spent the time trying not to think about spiderwebs or rats’ nests or how many creepy crawlies were sharing this space with me. I think Thorndike fell asleep. Puck did something that made Angel knee him in the balls. Lil’ Demon almost had a heart attack when her two-way radio beeped on, but she shut if off before anyone could transmit.
Finally, Poe broke the silence. “We should make a break for it…soon.”
“How did you know about this place?” I whispered back.
He shrugged, a move I could feel in the close quarters. “Didn’t. But the safe was in a recess. Stood to reason there’d be a space, and I thought I could feel a draft from behind the piano. My main worry was that they knew it was here, too.”
Thorndike roused herself from slumber. “You’re the go-to guy when it comes to secret rooms on campus, man.”
Poe fell silent, and I didn’t blame him. When last he’d commandeered a secret room, it had almost torn our society apart at the seams. Of course, Poe was only one of the men who’d been involved in the society-within-a-society of Elysion last semester, and, as a group, we’d risen up and nipped the experiment in the bud well before Winter Break. Still, I swallowed the impulse to respond on his behalf. If Thorndike was still pissed off, she wasn’t alone, and she was well within her rights.
Also, I wanted to defend Poe like I wanted to make this hole my new summer home.
Slowly, we pushed the piano away from the wall and squeezed out, stretching our cramped limbs and breathing deeply at last. After our long confinement, even the dim glow filtering in around the edges of the window seemed enough to define every detail of the room. We’d spread out, relieved to finally be able to have some space to ourselves. Lil’ Demon was doing lunges, Thorndike had gone back to examining the dragon, and Poe leaned against the wall, his hands pillowed behind his head. Angel once again checked the status of the hal
lway. “I think they’re still here,” she whispered. “I can hear a television on downstairs.”
Crap. So we were still stuck, and still without a prize for all our trouble. I stared back at the hole behind the piano, and suddenly got a great idea. “Let’s steal the dragon.”
“What?” said Puck. “No. Trying to go forward anyway is what got us into this mess.”
“No, you jumping before the signal is what got us into this mess,” Poe offered from against the wall.
“Forget it, Bugaboo,” said Thorndike. “There’s no way we can get it out of here.”
“So we don’t get it out,” I replied, feeling a grin tugging at the corners of my mask. “Hidden is as good as gone for our purposes. We pull a Thomas Crown Affair.”
“The original or the remake?” asked Lil’ Demon.
I furrowed my brow. “There’s an original?”
Poe chuckled softly. “Children.”
Hollywood history aside, my plan was quickly ratified and, with no little difficulty and a good deal more noise than we hoped, we got the giant golden dragon hidden inside the crawl space we’d so recently vacated.
“Doesn’t have the same sense of victory as if we actually took the item we’re supposedly stealing,” Angel whispered, when at last we had the piano pushed back in place and the entire area dusted to ensure that our tampering wouldn’t be detected.
“It works, though,” said Thorndike. “When they notice it’s missing, they’ll know it was us. We can still bargain with them to get our little statue back.”
“Don’t celebrate yet,” said Lil’ Demon. “We still need to escape, or did anyone fancy spending the rest of the semester in the Dragon’s Head tomb?”
In the ensuing silence, we all tried not to look at the one patriarch in the room. Poe was, after all, the go-to guy when it came to finding secret passages. We stood in silence for a full ten seconds before his sigh floated over from the position he’d returned to, holding up the wall.
“Okay. I’ll help you guys out, just this once.”
“Did he have to be so holier-than-thou about it?” Angel asked me five minutes later, as we sneaked down the back stairs into the kitchen. “Every time I start to think he might be okay, he turns around and acts like a complete jerk.”
And every time I decided he was a complete jerk, he turned around and did something decent. Poe kept his sheet pretty well balanced.
We broke out into the yard and sprinted quickly for the nearest wall. This time, I made my leap on the first try, but it took three attempts for Poe to reach the ledge. We hauled him over the top and into the safety of the alleyway beyond.
Thorndike pumped her fist in the air. “Success!”
We hurried back to the street, and Lil’ Demon pulled out her walkie-talkie. “I’ll see if they’re still waiting up for us. This calls for pizza and beers, I think.”
“I think they’re paying,” Puck said. He whipped off his ski mask and let out a primal shout to the sky. His hair was plastered to his face and wet with sweat. “Man, what a rush!”
I pulled off my own mask and fluffed my hair. I’m sure I looked just as gross, but I felt just as exhilarated. I wanted to dance, to run, to scream. Angel and Thorndike were tangoing in the snow, and Lil’ Demon laughed and snapped pictures with her cell phone to send to the knights who’d missed out on the adventure. I turned to Poe, grinning. He’d removed his own mask, and ran his fingers through his wet, dark hair, then lifted them into the light. I saw a flash of red before he caught me staring and whipped his hand behind his back.
Euphoria leaching into the air, I rushed over. “You’re hurt. What happened?” I reached for his head and he wrenched it away. “When you cracked your head against the wall in the crawl space…”
“Presence of real genius, Bug’boo.”
I shook my head. He’d been hurt all that time, and hadn’t said anything. “If you’re still bleeding…My God, Poe. Let’s call Lucky and get her to give us a ride to the hospital.”
He moved another few steps back. “’m fine. Go get your…pizza.” He waved vaguely at the retreating group.
“You’re not fine,” I argued. He was slurring his words. He’d been leaning against the wall while we’d been in the treasure room. He hadn’t been able to jump over the ledge. “You’re still bleeding. You could have a concussion. Probably have one.”
“Yo, guys!” Puck called. “Let’s get a move on! There’s a pitcher of beer at Sicily’s with my name on it.”
I looked at the others, then turned back to Poe, holding out my hand. “Come on. Stop being so difficult.”
“Right, ’cause the perfect ending to me tagging along, again, is ruining your vict’ry cel’bration with a trip to the ER.”
I laughed in disbelief, hoping it would set him at ease. “Please. You’re talking crazy. We only made it out tonight because of you.”
He wadded up his ski mask and held it against his head, then turned south, which was not, thankfully, in the direction of his apartment, but rather of Eli–New Haven Hospital. Still, it was a half hour walk, a hike I had no intention of letting him take alone. Or at all.
“Poe, wait up already!” I hurried after him.
“Where are you guys going?” I heard Angel call.
“Check out Bugaboo, hooking up with the freaks,” Puck said. But I barely noticed. In the golden glow of the sodium lights, I could now see that the back of Poe’s black sweater was soaked with a dark liquid I doubted was sweat.
I skidded to a stop on the icy walk before him. “Stop. Now. You’re in no condition to walk.”
He looked at me with unfocused eyes. “Christ, Amy, you’re such a bossy bitch.”
And then he collapsed.
2.
Mistakes
THINGS THAT HAPPENED IMMEDIATELY AFTER
1) Clarissa screamed.
2) Odile rushed to the nearest blue emergency phone and called campus security, the irony of which was not completely lost on us.
3) Poe woke up as we packed snow and ski masks against his head wound, and mumbled incoherently about “Discretion” and how I couldn’t fine him for using my real name, since, officially, our society mission was over. (Or, for the purists, Jamie woke up…)
4) Demetria concocted some cock-and-bull story for the paramedics about how Poe slipped on the ice.
5) I got blood all over my favorite pair of Converse sneakers.
6) George hit on the ambulance driver.
Poe flatly refused to let any of us accompany him to the hospital (though I think George would have loved to log some time with the cute paramedic) and the ambulance left us standing in the snow, kicking slush over the circle of fresh blood on the walk beneath the street lamp.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” I asked.
“More to the point,” said Clarissa, “do you think, in his state of mind, he’ll give us up?”
Demetria put her hand on my shoulder. “Head wounds bleed a lot, but I bet he’ll be fine. My biggest concern is that there aren’t any pieces of wood embedded in his skull—”
“Gross,” said Odile.
“—which will show the doctors we were lying about how it happened.”
“Screw the doctors. We’d better hope Dragon’s Head’s forensic capabilities aren’t top-notch,” I added in self-recrimination. “I bet Poe bled all over the house.” How could I have been so dense? I’d been so intent on getting that statue hidden, I hadn’t even noticed he was bleeding out where he stood.
I called the hospital the next day, and they told me that Mr. James Orcutt had checked out. I left him a voice mail, but he never called back. And he didn’t show up at the Rose & Grave tomb as usual in time for our first society dinner of the semester, leaving me to wonder if he’d
a) finally gotten a life outside of Rose & Grave
b) realized that no one in my club wanted him around
c) was lying unconscious and concussed, alone, in his shabby apartment.
Unf
ortunately, something else did show up at the tomb that night, and it shot to hell all my fantasies of a happy-go-lucky last semester at Eli. We’d spent most of the evening congratulating ourselves on a raid well done and regaling one another with stories of our Winter Break adventures. Toward the end of the evening, there was a soft knock at the door of the Inner Temple. Soze stepped outside to speak to Hale, the tomb’s cook and caretaker, then returned, a somber expression on his face, and held up a large manila envelope. “We have a problem.”
Immediately, the chatter and backslapping stopped.
“The following was delivered to Hale by the caretaker of Dragon’s Head.” He slipped two sheets of paper out of the envelope and laid them on the conference table. One was a grainy, shadowed photo of black-clad figures in ski masks climbing the wall around the Dragon’s Head tomb. The other was a page from our class’s Freshman Facebook. My photo was circled in red.
My heart sank into my sneakers and I pressed closer, trying to get a better look. “How did they know?” I whispered. Very few barbarians were aware of my involvement with Rose & Grave. There was Brandon Weare, my ex-boyfriend, but he’d have no cause to share the information with anyone. Lydia, my roommate, but she’d never do that to me—or to my fellow knight Soze, who’d been her boyfriend since the start of the school year. And finally, there was Genevieve Grady, the old Eli Daily News editor, whose place in Rose & Grave I’d inadvertently swiped last year. Could she have let it slip?
Soze pointed again to the photo, and I noticed a faint red pen circle around one of the figures’ footwear.
“How many seniors have yellow Chuck Taylors, Bugaboo?”
Oh, crap.
Everyone now leaned in to look.
“You gotta be kidding me,” said Puck. “How can they even tell the color in the dark?”
Rites of Spring (Break) Page 2