by E. E. Holmes
“No, they are saying that I’m mistaken. That I heard the name somewhere and somehow got confused about who I talked to in the library last night. At least, that’s the story that Finndale is telling Professor Marshall.”
“But you haven’t heard of him before, have you?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“And what about last night? I’m not trying to doubt you or anything, but I think we should at least consider all the possibilities. Do you think there’s any chance you were asleep? Could you have been dreaming?”
I knew Tia was just trying to be thorough, so I considered it. I’d had some very vivid dreams lately, it was true. But I was quite sure I had never been asleep last night until after I’d returned to the room. And I’d been walking back to my desk from the bathroom when I’d seen him. “No, I really don’t think I could have been. I remember the whole night clearly. And I was using all my usual tricks to keep myself awake.”
“The candy and the Diet Coke?”
“Yeah.”
“And anyway, even if you were asleep, that wouldn’t explain how you dreamed about him,” Tia pointed out, continuing her pacing.
“That’s true.”
“Did they tell you anything else about him? Like, how he died or anything like that?”
“No. Only that he was a freshman and that he was in Marshall’s class last year.” Now that I thought about it, it seemed odd that Dean Finndale hadn’t given me any other information. Wasn’t some sort of explanation in order? I’d been in too much shock to ask for any details.
“Here,” Tia said, grabbing my sketchbook, which she threw at me.
“What am I doing with this?”
“Draw him. Exactly how you remember him. And then jot down anything he told you about himself.”
“What for? What good will that do?”
“We need a record of what you saw. It’s the only way we can prove whether or not the boy you saw really was Evan Corbett.” Tia looked resolved, like she had formulated some kind of plan. Thank goodness for her organized, sensible mind. I looked around for a pencil and something in my open bag caught my eye. My copy of Hamlet.
“My book!” I cried, diving for my bag.
“What? What?” Tia yelled.
“He wrote in my book! He picked it up and wrote his phone number in there! He told me to call him sometime!” I started to flip through the book from back to front, my eyes flying over the pages.
“JESS! Why didn’t you tell me? That could prove everything!” Tia said, dropping to her knees next to me as I searched feverishly.
“I forgot,” I said, wondering simultaneously how the hell I could have forgotten such a thing. My shaking fingers searched for the page. “Here it … no,”
Tia looked over my shoulder and then waved her hand dismissively. “No, that’s not it. You said it’s a phone number.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t write this,” I whispered, my heart speeding up.
“Are you sure it wasn’t already there? Is this a used book?” Tia asked, cocking her head to the side so she could look at the back cover.
“Yeah, by me. This is my copy of the book, Ti. I didn’t get this in the bookstore; I’ve had it for years. I know every page of this book. I’ve read it about twenty times and this wasn’t here!”
I let the book fall all the way open so that Tia could see it more clearly. In the top corner of the page, in the margin, there were visible words. They did not look as though they had been written with a pen, as I had seen Evan do. Instead, they looked as though they had been burned onto the page, the edges blurring from black to brown. It was not what I had been looking for, and though I didn’t understand what they meant, the words sent a spasm of vague emotion through my body. I read them over again and again.
Help me. Find Hannah.
6
ELUSIVE
THIS WAS WHAT EVAN HAD WRITTEN TO ME. It wasn’t a pick up line; it was a cry for help. But why did he need me to help him? And who in the world was Hannah? I turned my gaze wordlessly on Tia. She was mouthing the words over and over again, as though willing them to make sense.
“Do you know who—”
“—No idea. I don’t even know anyone named Hannah.”
“No one back in New York? Or any of the other cities you lived in?”
“Nope. Definitely not anyone who could be that important.”
“Then it must be someone connected to Evan. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Maybe we’ll find something about her in the library.” Tia stood up.
“Wait, the library? We’re going back to the library?”
“Of course,” she said, then saw the look on my face and quickly sat down again beside me. “Calm down, we’re not going to bring a Ouija board or anything. But the library is the best place for research, and we’ve got to find out what we can about Evan. And now we’ve got someone else to search for, too,” she added, tapping the cover of Hamlet.
“Thanks, Tia.”
“What for?”
“For believing me. For helping me. Thank you,” I said quietly.
She smiled gently at me. “Of course, Jess.” Then she winked and added, “You are way more interesting than any of my other friends.” “Interesting. There’s a euphemism if ever I’ve heard one.”
As I bent to put my copy of Hamlet back in my bag, I noticed for the first time the text on the page that Evan had chosen. He said it was his favorite page. A shiver ran down my spine as I realized I was looking at a page of Act I scene v, in which Hamlet speaks to the ghost of his father. And beside Evan’s cryptic scrawl was one of the play’s most memorable lines: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I never understood the line better than I did in that moment.
I was still tired, confused, terrified, and a bit nauseous, but at least we had a plan. I was doing something; it beat sitting around and torturing myself with questions I couldn’t answer. I flipped open my sketchbook and started drawing Evan, while Tia compiled a list of resources we could access in the library. I always drew best when I had the subject right in front of me, but Evan’s face was burned very clearly in my mind. All I had to do was close my eyes and he was waiting for me behind my eyelids, holding perfectly still while I worked on his likeness.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding. He really is good-looking,” Tia said when I had finished.
Sketch and notes in hand, we set out for the library. It felt surreal to be back in the reading room under such different circumstances, but I found, to my surprise, that I wasn’t afraid. Tia, on the other hand, looked oddly pale under her olive complexion. Her face was set and determined, though her eyes kept darting around the room at every little sound. Something inside me told me that Evan wasn’t there. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I was sure I would sense it when he was around. I realized that I wasn’t dreading seeing him again at all. The feeling in my stomach that I had taken for dread was actually excited anticipation, which drained quickly when my instincts told me there would be no encounter. Not today, anyway.
Tia began an internet search while I dragged out the previous year’s yearbook from a glass case near the circulation desk. Tia had already had luck by the time I returned to our table.
“I found his obituary.” It sounded like an apology.
“Oh, right,” I said, pulling my chair over to read it. Of course if he died, he would have had an obituary. Still, I felt very strange sitting down to read it. Tia had pulled up the Boston Globe. The listing of the obituary looked so impersonal, like a help wanted ad.
CORBETT, Evan, 19, freshman at St. Matthew’s College in Worcester, MA. Lacrosse player and award-winning musician, Evan graduated the top of his class from St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, MA. Evan is survived by his loving parents, William and Rebecca Corbett; his grandparents, Verna Corbett and Thomas and Gladys Shaw; and his beloved younger sister Jessica. Wake will be held at Kendall Family Funeral Home on Tuesday, N
ovember 15th from 3-8pm and funeral at Our Lady of Nazareth Church in Lexington, MA on Wednesday November 16th at 10 AM. Private burial to follow. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Scholar Athlete Scholarship Fund at St. Matthew’s College, which is designating a special scholarship in Evan’s name.
“Are you okay, Jess?”
I turned to look at her. She was watching me with an anxious expression.
“His funeral was a year ago today.”
“Oh, goodness. This is terrible.”
“It doesn’t say how he died.”
“It usually doesn’t,” Tia scrolled back up through the other obituaries on the page. “None of these list cause of death at all. Sometimes they’ll ask for donations to certain kinds of hospitals or disease research funds; you can usually get a clue that way, but otherwise they spare those kinds of details.”
Well, that was understandable. We’d certainly spared the details in my mom’s obituary, and not only because there were so many unanswered questions; the thought of anyone reading about her death, looking for tidbits to satisfy some kind of twisted, morbid curiosity, was more than I could handle.
“But did you see this?” Tia continued, pointing at the name “Jessica”. “You were right about his sister’s name.”
“And the musician thing,” I added. “See, it says he was an award-winning musician. He told me that he played the piano, that his mom made him practice all the time.”
Tia looked at the paper I’d scribbled my notes on. “And lacrosse too. You said he was here on a lacrosse scholarship.” She started shaking her head in disbelief. “Wow, Jess, there is a lot of confirmation here. Let’s keep looking.”
Tia went back to her internet search and I started scanning the freshman class photos. I’d only been at it a minute or so when I gasped out loud. Several people sitting near me looked around in annoyance.
There he was, staring up at me with that easy, friendly smile, the smile of someone who wasn’t embarrassed to be photographed. His face was clean shaven and angular. His hair had the same messy elegance. I stared down at him with an odd feeling, like I was waiting for his image to come to life and start talking to me. Apparently that was the kind of thing that happened to me now.
“Here he is.” I ran my finger gently over his face.
“Jess, he looks exactly like your sketch. You weren’t exaggerating, he really is gorgeous.”
“Was gorgeous.”
I thought about Evan at the moment that picture was taken, not an inkling that his life had drawn so precariously near its end. Did he have any sense that his time was limited? Did the time slip fluidly by him as my time with my mother had flashed past me, with no warning about how precious it had become? His contented smile suddenly disturbed me. I slammed the book shut.
After another hour of digging, Tia tracked down an article from the Boston Globe and printed it out for me to read.
“This is how he died,” she whispered.
WORCESTER, MA. Authorities were called to St. Matthew’s College early Thursday morning around 5AM responding to a 911 call. The caller, a groundskeeper at the college, reported that he had found an unconscious student on the grass outside MacCleary Hall on the south side of the campus. Paramedics and police arrived to find the body of nineteen-year-old freshman Evan Corbett at the base of a stone wall. It appears that the victim fell off of the wall and rendered himself unconscious. The apparent cause of death was hypothermia, and it is believed that the victim, who could not get back into his dorm, succumbed to the sub-zero temperatures. An investigation is currently underway and police are looking for any witnesses that can corroborate or dispute the apparent circumstances of this death, which is currently being ruled accidental.
So that was it. He had frozen to death. It didn’t seem like it could be true; did people really freeze to death nowadays, on modern college campuses? How was that possible? My mind wouldn’t absorb the information on any level but the hypothetical and I was thankful for that.
We scoured the library and internet for any other information we could muster the rest of that evening and whenever we could find the time between classes. Our search of the yearbook and student directory had yielded three Hannahs. Two of them were freshman and therefore had probably never even met Evan. Tia, bolder than I would have imagined, cornered the third after finding her room assignment in the campus phone book.
“She’d heard of him, but had never actually met him,” she reported glumly the following Friday afternoon.
“How did you manage to bring that topic up?”
Tia shrugged. “I told her that I had been appointed as a liaison to the Student-Athlete Scholarship Committee and that we were starting a scholarship in Evan’s name. I told her we were looking for students who knew him, to take a quick questionnaire.”
“And how the hell did you come up with that?” I asked, stunned.
“Well, I had to tell her something.”
“And what if she’d said yes? What would you have done then?”
“I would have given her the questionnaire,” she said, as though it were obvious.
“You actually made up a…” I shook my head. Of course she’d made the questionnaire. She was Tia. She’d probably established a real scholarship committee, just in case.
“Not that we would have gotten much further after that. How could we even start to explain what we really wanted even if we found the right Hannah?” she said.
“Seriously. I mean, does he have to be all cryptic about it just because he’s a ghost? Couldn’t he have told me why he wants me to find this Hannah person in the first place?”
Tia sighed and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Are you sure that you don’t want to come to class? I’m sure it would be okay if you did.”
I shook my head and tried to smile. “Not today. I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“You don’t think you could handle it?”
“I think I could handle it just fine, actually. It’s Professor Marshall I’m worried about. I think Dean Finndale was thinking more of her than she was of me.”
Dean Finndale had “suggested” that I take two weeks off from classes. She claimed concern for my nerves and well-being. I refused to miss my other classes, but in the case of Professor Marshall’s class, I had agreed, though not because I thought I needed some sort of mental health sabbatical. I couldn’t face Professor Marshall again quite so soon. It was too late in the semester to be switched out of her class so, since I couldn’t spare her my presence entirely, I thought giving her a short break to recover herself was the least I could do. Tia, of course, thought that any solution that threatened my academic well-being was a poor one.
“You said that Dean Finndale had explained to her that it was just a mistake,” she said.
“Getting an explanation and accepting it are two different things. I think I’d like to give her some time to accept the lie, since I can hardly tell her the truth.”
“Oh, alright then. You can copy my notes again.”
“Y’know this is a dangerous pattern we’re getting into, Ti. Pretty soon I’m going to be too spoiled to attend any of my classes. It’s just so much more convenient when you do all the work for me.” I yawned and stretched out on my bed.
“Oh, shut up!” Tia huffed, rolling her eyes. She swung around and bounced out the door.
Trying to be good, I extracted my copy of Othello from my teetering stack of Shakespeare paperbacks and attempted to read Act I; there was no reason to be completely behind on class material. It was hard to concentrate, and I’d barely read three pages when there was a knock on the door.
I hopped up and opened it. “I told you Tia, I’m not going to—”
Karen stood in the hallway, her expression an odd combination of grim determination and fear.
“Karen! What are you doing here?”
“Your dean called me this morning,” she said quietly.
I felt goosebumps
rise on my forearms and my heart start to race. I should have known this was coming. I was absolutely not ready to have this conversation, but it looked like I was having it, so I stepped aside and gestured into the room.
“Come in.”
Karen nodded and walked briskly into the room. She set a large cardboard box down on my desk. “I was going to mail this, but under the circumstances, I figured I’d just bring it with me. I thought you could use some snacks.”
“Thanks,” I replied as I shut the door. I’d never been less hungry in my entire life. “Sam will be thrilled.”
Karen sat on the bed and stared at the wall for a moment. I sat down opposite her and tried to catch her eye, but she seemed determined not to look at me.
I finally broke the silence. “I suppose you’d like an explanation.”
Karen continued looking at the wall as though it had spoken instead of me. “Jess, I don’t even know what to say. Are you alright?”
“I’m okay, although I’m pretty sure several people are questioning my sanity.”
“Are you … can you tell me what happened?”
She still wasn’t looking at me. Oh, God, she thinks I’m nuts. She thinks she’s invited a lunatic into her house. I could barely keep my voice from shaking. “I can only tell you what I told Dean Finndale. Did she tell you my side of the story?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you, other than that. I can’t explain it and I can’t force it to make sense. Dean Finndale wants it all to be a misunderstanding, and quite frankly, so do I, but unfortunately I’m not lying and I’m not exaggerating. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I don’t really know what else to say.”
“I don’t think you’re lying. I’m just trying to think. I just don’t know what to do,” Karen told the wall.
I took a deep breath. I had to give her an out. She wasn’t going to take it herself, so I had to give it to her. I spoke as quickly as I could, to get it over with. “Look, Karen, we’re only just getting to know each other. You aren’t obligated to deal with this. When the term is over, I’ll come back to your place and get my stuff. I’m sure I can find a place to stay during the break until the spring term starts and then I’ll work on finding an apartment for the summer. I’ll just need a few days to ….”