by Lis Wiehl
She showed them the long list of students, then clicked on the shorter list she’d compiled from her Google searches—William H. Druitt, class of 1863; Karl Francis von Königsberg, class of 1842; Albert Gitchell, class of 1917; and the others. Each name came with a story, until it became clear to everyone what the school had been teaching for over a century.
“I was thinking that at some point, not now, but at some point we might want to pass this list on to someone like my friend Ed Stanley,” Dani said. “The recent graduates are still out there.”
“How many kids have they graduated since the school started?” Tommy said.
“This list has 662 names,” Dani said, “but I couldn’t find out how many they’ve graduated overall. And I was surprised by how little is really known about the school’s history. I Googled it and came up with almost nothing. Ruth, do you know much about it?”
“I know it was a fort during the Revolutionary War,” Ruth said. “Congress consolidated its military training facilities at West Point prior to the War of 1812, and the garrisons were converted into a private school after that. I’m pretty sure they graduate over a hundred boys a year today. Enrollment was much smaller when the school started.”
“Whoever sent us this list picked these names for a reason,” Dani said. “Or copied a list of selected names. It can’t be true that every graduate of St. Adrian’s went on to mentor a mass murderer or a serial killer. I’m thinking these men are a subgroup, like the Skull and Bones Club at Yale. All private schools have secret clubs.”
“Mine didn’t,” Quinn said. “Or if it did, no one told me about it.”
“Which proves how secret it was,” Dani said, smiling.
Tommy found his old resentments rising, having grown up a townie with an elite private school nearby. His jock friends had called the St. Adrian boys Addies and took pleasure in spray-painting taunts and curse words on the private school’s high stone walls. He also realized he resented that Dani was making jokes with Quinn but not with him.
“But how is any of this related to Abbie Gardener?” Carl said.
“Wait here,” Tommy said. “I might be able to answer that.”
He went to the den and opened the safe behind the mirror. Abbie’s box was right where he’d left it. He brought it into the kitchen and set it on the food island, and the others gathered around.
“We found this in a secret compartment in the desk Abbie was using up in the library archives,” Tommy said.
“It wasn’t a secret compartment,” Ruth said. “It was where secretaries used to keep their typewriters.”
“What’s a typewriter?” Tommy said.
“It’s beautiful,” Carl said, reaching his hand out toward the box, but reluctant to touch it.
“The problem is, we can’t figure out how to open it.”
“It may be a Himitsu-Bako box,” Ruth said.
Tommy looked at her with surprise.
“Well, I am a research librarian,” she said. “I’m going to need to do more than just sit around making sandwiches. They were popular in nineteenth-century Japan for keeping personal secrets. They open with a sequence of twists and turns and squeezes. Some take two moves, but others can take up to three hundred. In Europe in the eighteenth century they were called burr puzzles because the interlocking pieces were thought to resemble a seed burr.”
“Or Lemarchand’s boxes,” Quinn said, taking the box in his hands and turning it over. “Believed to be portals to other planes of existence.”
“You believe in that?” Dani said.
“No,” Quinn said. “I read it in a horror novel.”
“The inlay may be a version of yosegi-zaiku,” Ruth said. “Japanese parquetry from the Edo period. Himitsu-Bako boxes were decorated with it, but the mosaic tiles were sometimes used as a key to open the box. Like those plastic puzzles where you slide the pieces around to make a picture.”
“I saw Bobby Fischer on the Tonight Show once, and he unscrambled one of those in about ten seconds,” Carl said.
“The chess master could do it,” Dani said. “Quinn, you wanna give it a shot?”
Tommy felt insulted again, even though he saw the logic of asking Quinn and not him. Quinn pressed on various pieces of the inlay for no more than thirty seconds, then set the box down.
“I don’t see how the pieces move if there’s not a free space to move the first one into,” he said.
“You wanna try, Carl?” Tommy said.
Carl shied away. “If Quinn can’t figure it out, I’m sure I can’t,” he said. “Why don’t you give it a try?”
“I have,” Tommy said, puzzled by Carl’s reluctance—it was the kind of challenge he would ordinarily be drawn to. “No luck.”
“Try again,” Dani said, the hostility in her voice cutting. “You’re good with secrets.”
Tommy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and counted to ten, or tried, getting as far as three.
“Excuse us for a second,” he said. “Dani, can I talk to you for a minute in the study?”
26.
“What’s going on, Dani? You’re furious at me and I have no idea why.”
He leaned against his desk. She stood at the window, staring out into the darkness. She tried to collect her thoughts, to breathe deeply, to calm down and tell herself that the task at hand was more important than their relationship. For a moment she wondered if she could convince Tommy to postpone this conversation, but when she turned and saw the look on his face, she knew it couldn’t wait.
“When were you planning to tell me Cassandra Morton was here?” she said.
“The second you walked in the door,” he said. “When were you going to tell me you intended to bring Quinn into the circle? That decision should have been discussed first.”
“There are a lot of things that should have been discussed first,” she said. “Things that should have been discussed before you and I ever decided to . . . get involved.”
“Getting involved with you wasn’t something I ‘decided,’” he told her. “I won’t speak for you, but for me, it wasn’t something I could have either planned or prevented. An army couldn’t have stopped me from falling in love with you.”
“Don’t say another word,” she said. “You’re just digging the hole deeper.” “What hole?” he said, lowering his voice so that the people in the other room wouldn’t hear him. “What hole are you talking about?”
“The hole of distrust,” Dani said. “All right, I’ll give you a chance. Tell me why Cassandra Morton is here.”
“I don’t know why she’s here,” Tommy said. “She just broke up with some Brazilian soccer dude and she needed a friend. I guess that’s why.”
“You didn’t call her?”
“No,” Tommy said. “As far as I knew, she was still in Los Angeles.”
Dani moved toward the door.
“Wait,” Tommy said. “Did you talk to her?”
“I ran into her in the parking lot at the inn,” Dani said. “She couldn’t find her rental car. Which was about twenty feet away in plain sight, by the way.”
“She thinks I called her,” Tommy said. “Apparently I pocket-dialed or something. She thought I was reaching out to her. I wouldn’t do that.”
“You never told her, ‘You have a home in me’?” Dani asked. “And by the way, it’s not ‘You’ve Got a Home in Me.’ It’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’”
“I know,” Tommy said. “It was a reference to something she said once. Her parents had just sold the house she grew up in, so she said to me, ‘You’re my home now.’ And when we broke up, I told her she’d always have a home in me. It was just one of those things you say to soften the blow.”
“You’re saying you didn’t invite her here,” Dani said. “That you pocketdialed her?”
“Apparently.”
Dani was too hurt to laugh. “Let me see your phone.”
“My phone?”
“Let. Me. See. Your. Phone.”
&nb
sp; He handed it to her. She scrolled through his text messages and found the one she’d seen earlier. She showed it to him.
He looked at it, stunned.
“That’s one heckuva pocket-dial,” she said.
He read the message three times, then checked the time it was sent.
“I was asleep when this was sent,” Tommy said.
“You were asleep? Now you’re trying to say you sleep-texted? No, wait—you sleep-pocket-texted?”
“Dani—”
“I was told you were going to betray me,” she said. “That’s why I’m kicking myself. Got it from a highly reliable source.”
Tommy’s eyes opened wide as he recalled that the angel had told him exactly the same thing.
“Someone you trust will betray you. How you handle it will make all the difference,” he said. “Charlie told me the same thing.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m not sure. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought . . . Were you worried that I’d betray you?”
Tommy thought about it. “I think so,” he said, “and it made me afraid. There’s nothing I’m more afraid of than losing you.”
“Then why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t lie to you. I’m not lying to you now.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then said, “Well, when Cassandra gets here, we can ask her what happened.”
“What do you mean, when Cassandra gets here? You invited her?”
“I borrowed your phone while you were out looking for Carl.”
“You read my private texts and sent her a message from my phone, pretending to be me?”
“I did,” she said. She felt deeply ashamed. At the time, she’d thought what she was doing fell under the rubric of “All’s fair in love and war.” She was fighting back, striking a blow against all the pretty little flirts who’d ever batted their phony eyelashes and stolen guys away from the smart girls who didn’t know how to play that game. She now felt ashamed for a number of reasons, but chief among them was allowing herself to be reduced to an insecure fourteen-year-old again. “It was wrong, but I did it.”
“When can we expect her to show up?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said. “Any minute. Unless she has trouble finding her car again.”
“She’s not stupid,” Tommy said. He stepped closer to her. He wanted to take her hands in his, put his arms around her, kiss her, but he didn’t know what was allowed anymore, and he didn’t know what she wanted anymore.
“What’s happening to us?” Dani said, tears welling.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I truly do not know.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the door to the study. When Tommy answered it, his aunt was at the door, announcing that they had a visitor—a woman had buzzed the intercom at the gate.
“It’s Cassandra,” Ruth said. “Should I tell her you’re not home?”
“No,” Tommy said. “No lying. Open the gates and let her in. I’ll be right out.”
27.
When the silver Nissan Maxima eased to a stop in the courtyard, Tommy was surprised to see that Cassandra wasn’t alone. She’d brought Julian Villanegre and Ben Whitehorse with her.
“What the heck did you tell her?” Tommy said.
“I said we were having a party,” Dani said. “Or that you were, since she thought I was you.”
“Cass tends to believe what people tell her,” Tommy said.
“Cassandra Morton? The actress?” Quinn said, joining them at the window. “She’s here?”
“I didn’t know you were impressed by celebrities,” Dani said.
“I’m not,” Quinn said. “How do I look? Do I have anything stuck in my teeth?”
Tommy picked up the wooden box. There wasn’t time to put it in the safe, so he hid it in the oven just as Cassandra knocked on his back door.
“Hello,” she sang out with a bright smile as she entered. “Hello, everybody. I’d say let me introduce you to my new friends, but you already know—”
She stopped where she stood when she saw Dani.
“You’re the woman from the parking lot,” she said.
“I am,” Dani said. “Or I was.”
Cassandra smiled. “Well, I found someone to have dinner with at the pub you recommended.”
“We saw her eating all by herself,” Ben said. “Seeing people eating alone makes me sad. First I saw Professor Villanegre eating alone and then her, so I suggested we all eat together. It turned out we all know you, Tommy.”
“Small town,” Tommy said.
Cassandra looked cheerfully around the room. “So where’s the party?”
“This is it,” Tommy said. “Can I get you anything?”
“I would love a root beer float,” Ben said. “Why do you have a Himitsu-Bako box in your oven?”
“I do?” Tommy said, unable to come up with anything better.
“Yes. It’s right there,” Ben said, pointing.
“Oh, that Himitsu-Bako box,” Tommy said, while Ruth just looked at Quinn, who shrugged in reply.
“Is it like the bento boxes you get at sushi restaurants?” Cassandra said.
“No,” Tommy said. “It’s—”
“May I see it?” Villanegre said. “The young lady at the inn gave me your message that you’d found something of Abigail’s. I got a later flight when I heard—may I?”
Tommy took the box from the oven and placed it once more on the food island where the art historian examined it from every angle before speaking.
“Napoleon had one of these,” the Englishman said. “He used it to hold his war plans. They say it required an exact sequence of over one hundred moves to open it.” He ran his fingers along the edges and traced the inlays, pressing and prodding gently, like a pediatrician examining a child with a stomachache. “You’ve obviously tried to open it.”
“Many times,” Tommy said.
“I thought we might bring it to the hospital and X-ray it,” Dani said. “We were worried that it could be booby-trapped.”
“Yes,” Villanegre said. “That is a possibility. Have you shown it to anyone else?”
“No,” Tommy said. “We just found it yesterday, in the desk Abbie Gardener was using in the library archives.”
“Ah,” Villanegre said. “I strongly suspected that this was part of the Gardener collection. I have something here that we might be able to use to open it.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a brass cross, six inches by three, holding it out in front of him like a shield. He tucked the box under his arm and said, “Qui faceret opera Diaboli—ut ejiciant vos invoco Angeli ex domo! Abire iubeo!”
Tommy and Dani and the others looked at each other. Carl, who was standing behind the Englishman, took a step for the door, as if Villanegre had brandished a hand grenade.
“Gesundheit,” Tommy said. “What do you think we are—vampires or something?”
Villanegre lowered his hand. “Oh, dear Lord,” he said. “You don’t know. You genuinely don’t know, do you? It appears we are all on the same side.” He lowered the cross.
“All on the same side of what?” Cassandra said frantically. “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on here? Oh, wait a minute—I get it. This is one of those practical joke shows, isn’t it? Where are the hidden cameras? Are you punking me, Tommy?”
Nobody moved or spoke.
“You’re not, are you?” she said, now frightened.
Tommy shook his head.
“This is the worst party I’ve ever been to,” Cassandra said as she plopped down on one of the high chairs beside the food island. “And I’ve been to some really bad ones.”
“If you let me,” Villanegre said, “I can explain.”
“I think we’ll all be more comfortable in the living room,” Tommy said. “I’ll throw a few logs in the fireplace.”
28.
Villanegre promised to tell them wh
at he knew about the box, but first he wanted to hear what they had to say. He’d produced the cross, he told them, because it was known that demons were discomforted by sacred icons, and in the obverse, his wielding it proved he himself could be trusted.
“I believe him,” Tommy said. “I think he could be helpful to us.”
“I certainly hope so,” Villanegre said. “The fact that you have the box is testament to the gravity of the situation.”
They took turns telling their story one more time for the benefit of Ben and Villanegre and Cassandra, Tommy filling in the details Dani left out and Dani doing the same when Tommy spoke. Quinn laid out the medical questions raised by the pill Dani had gotten from the Starbucks source and the “Doomsday Molecule”; two separate compounds, but they had to be related somehow. Dani ran through the list of names she’d received, and Ben recited what was understood about Hiawatha and the ancient demons that had somehow reappeared in America a thousand years ago. Tommy finished by noting that the murder of Julie Leonard had presented them with a mystery that opened into greater and greater mysteries, but each step of the way they’d been given signs to help them along the path, torches to light the way through a labyrinth where nothing was familiar and forms and “facts” constantly shifted.
Two important questions remained—what was Abbie Gardener trying to say to them, and what was the evil entity at St. Adrian’s Academy planning? Given what the school’s graduates had already accomplished, Tommy pointed out that there was a third question: how could they stop it?
“I believe I can help with the second question,” Villanegre said. “You’re quite right, young man, about the smaller mysteries opening doors to the larger ones. You know, Dr. Harris, it was no accident when I ran into you at Starbucks. I knew there was something about you when I looked into your eyes at the opening. I sensed our missions might converge, but I had to find out where your allegiances were. It is not accidental, either, that I’ve arrived in your town at this date and hour. This is something I’ve been pursuing for a long time.”