The Madness Underneath

by Maureen Johnson

  “Good.”

  “I can get into Wexford,” Boo added. “Come for a visit, have a look around.”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  All three of them looked over. While I realized I was not a member of the squad, I certainly felt like I was entitled to be a part of whatever happened next. I think Callum was about to say something along those lines, because he nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but Stephen reached over and smoothly picked up the car keys.

  “You should probably get back,” he said. “You’ve been gone most of the day.”

  Boo and Callum exchanged a look. Stephen was already moving toward the door. I took the hint and pulled myself off of the broken-down sofa.

  “What did Callum say to you?” Stephen said when we were back in the car. “And don’t say nothing.”

  “He just…he kind of feels you try to do it all yourself.”

  “I don’t.” Stephen shifted his jaw. “I’m in charge. There’s a difference. We work in a secret department. I can’t just tell everyone everything.”

  “Not everyone. Callum and Boo. There’s only three of you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I think it does,” I said. “If you don’t talk to them, who else are you going to talk to? They’re the only other people who know what’s going on.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped. “You don’t understand my job.”

  Well, that got a reaction. Interesting. I didn’t mind the snapping, and I gave him time to work out his feelings on the car. He ground through a few gears and maneuvered around a bus a little faster than normal, gunning the engine a bit. I don’t know how to drive a manual car, so all the gear changes fascinated me. He didn’t hold the gearshift, either—he kept his fingers flat and straight and pushed on it with his palm. It was a relaxed stance, not a tense death grip.

  “You like driving,” I said.

  “It’s good for thinking,” he said in a low voice.

  “I like to sing and drive,” I said. “I only sing in the car, but I tell you, I am good. But only when I drive. I suck otherwise. Do you ever sing in the car?”

  “Generally not. But I am driving a police car.”

  “I think people would like a singing policeman. Makes life seem more like a musical. Everyone wants to live in a musical. Like Foot-tastic.”

  “You can talk for a long time about nothing.”

  “I certainly can, you charming man!”

  His arms and shoulders sagged a bit, and the car slowed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like keeping Callum and Boo in the dark about some things, but I barely know how to do my own job. It can be terrifying to tell them to do something when I don’t even have the facts. This job is dangerous. Boo’s been hurt. You’ve been hurt. I’ve been hurt. Callum was hurt before he was on the job. And if one of us was killed, would they even care? Or would they just tidy it away, like they did with the old squad? Bury our files and make it all disappear?”

  “So why do it?” I asked.

  Stephen exhaled slowly.

  “Better than banking, I suppose.”

  “Did you just make a joke?”

  “I am capable of that.”

  “You are?”

  “I’m full of surprises,” he said.

  He pulled up by Spitalfields.

  “I’ll leave you by here,” he said. “It’s best not to keep to the same places all the time. You can get back from here all right?”

  “I think I can walk two streets over.”

  “Of course. And, just so you know…the timing alone suggests that the situation is safe. The crack opened over three weeks ago. You found one person within a day, and another turned up within forty-eight hours. If more had come up, I’d like to think we would have seen some evidence by now. This could be the end of the matter. But we’ll do all we can and I’ll keep you informed. I just don’t want you to worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said, opening my door and getting out.

  He leaned over to have a better look at me.

  “You’re not,” he said, “are you?”

  And I wasn’t. I realized on some level that I definitely should be worried if there was, in fact, a raging tear of angry ghosts under my building. Perhaps being a terminus did something to the chemicals in my brain. Or maybe I was just nuts, burned out from all that had happened to me.

  “Promise me,” he said, “if you see something, anything, you’ll phone us first. Don’t try to deal with it alone.”

  “Like I’d do that,” I said, smiling.

  “I think you might. I mean it. Don’t try to do it alone.”

  “That’s been the message of today’s session,” I replied. “I’m glad you got it. I think we’ve accomplished a lot.”

  “Go.”

  But he smiled. He didn’t want me to see, but I totally saw.

  16

  JAZZA WAS KNITTING A LARGE BLUE TUBE.

  It seemed to fit in with the way my day was going. Spend the morning at a mental hospital. Blast a murderous ghost into oblivion. Come home, and the roommate is knitting some long tube. Why not?

  “You’re knitting a big tube,” I said. “You knit?”

  “When I’m nervous,” she said.

  The tube looked to be about four feet long and was pretty narrow. Jazza’s German books were scattered all over her bed, partially obscured by wool. It looked like she was trying to read and knit at the same time.

  “Is it…for a snake or something?”

  “I just learned how to do sleeves for sweaters, and I can’t stop making them. I’m going to fail German.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said automatically.

  “I’m not,” she said calmly. “Which is why I’m knitting. It’s very meditative. Where have you been? You weren’t answering your phone.”

  “Oh…” I quickly turned toward my closet and opened the door. “I was at the National Gallery. Doing research for an art history project.”

  I’d come up with that excuse when I was about three feet away from the door.

  “Oh. Right. Is…that my skirt?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I borrowed it. Is that okay?”

  “Course,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

  Jazza allowed me to borrow her clothes, although I usually asked before I did so. But being Jazza and a nice person, she didn’t grill me on why I needed to wear her black skirt to go to the museum to do research. I slipped off the skirt and hung it up in her closet. Then I went into my own closet and needlessly busied myself going through my clothes, dragging the hangers across the rail with a terrible squeak that ate away at the edges of my nerves. I smelled of mental hospital. The tang of it was in my shirt. I pulled it off and threw it into my laundry bag.

  Behind me, I heard the clickclackclickclack of Jazza’s needles gently striking together. The light clinking of the radiators kicking into life. Everything was clicking and clanking. What was I doing all day? Oh, I just solved a murder, is all. Solved a murder, took out the murderer. What was the point of that, though, if you couldn’t tell your roommate ?

  “Revision party tonight,” she said.

  I’d forgotten all about this. The revision party was just a long study session in the refractory. The school kept it open late and served snacks.

  “I may not stay,” she said. “I have to speak out loud to get ready for the German oral. Do you think you’ll stay over there?”

  “I…maybe?”

  “Are you all right?” Jazza said. “You seem a bit…”

  I guess she didn’t know what I seemed like, which was fair. Neither did I.

  “Headache,” I said. “I’m going to shower. Warm up. My blood is too thin for this weather.”

  I scoured the hospital stink from my skin with copious squirts of body wash that slicked the shower stall tiles and caused me to slip twice and bang both my elbow and head into the wall. I cranked the water up to the maximum
temperature, reveling in the great clouds of steam I created. The ghost destroyer in her robes of mist. Alone at last, warm at last. I closed my eyes and let the water pour over me, and I thought about everything that had happened in the basement. It had been so simple—I’d just reached out and destroyed. It was no more complicated than stepping on a bug.

  I allowed myself the fantasy of confronting Newman again, but as I was now. I saw him coming at me with the knife, and I just reached out and touched him with the tips of my fingers—

  Then someone opened the bathroom door and I jumped.

  “Who’s in there?” a voice called. Eloise’s, I thought.

  “Rory!”

  “It’s so steamy in here. I can’t even see where I’m going!”

  “Sorry!”

  I wrapped myself in my towel and pushed back the curtain. I really had done a job on the bathroom. All the mirrors were completely fogged, and the floor had a shiny veneer of moisture.

  I did a quick little run back to my room and got changed for dinner. Jazza had stopped muttering German and was now just knitting, waiting for me to get ready. We walked over with Gaenor and Angela, both of whom had gone deep into exam madness mode. They laughed at everything. They cackled. They may have been drunk. I wasn’t sure.

  We sat with Andrew and some other guys from Aldshot. When I asked where Jerome was, I got some not very specific replies about him being held up doing something. He finally came in during the last ten minutes of service, grabbed a plate, and sat down heavily. He made short work of a few pieces of pizza, and he didn’t have much to say.

  Mount Everest, our esteemed, massive, and always angry headmaster, took to the raised podium that used to be the altar back when the refectory was a chapel.

  “Everyone,” he began, “the dinner service will now be cleared for tonight’s revision party. Please assist by clearing your trays and putting them on the racks. The refectory will be open until midnight. Make sure to check in with your assigned prefect and let him or her know when you return to your building. While you may talk during tonight’s session, please remember to think of your neighbors and control your volume.”

  “I’m going back.” Jazza stood up. “See you at home.”

  Angela left as well, leaving Gaenor, Andrew, Jerome, and me in a group. A few people came over to ask the guys questions or tell them where they were going to be, and Charlotte came to check on me to see if I was staying. I pulled my books out from under the bench and tried to pick the subject I might have a chance of making some progress on. I decided on further maths. I could do some problems. Math problems gave me a feeling of accomplishment.

  I was quickly distracted when the kitchen staff started putting out the study snacks—bowls of potato chips, trays of cookies, pitchers of pale lemon and orange drink. I immediately got up to help myself, but then the guy in front of me sneezed into his hand and dug the same hand into the chip bowl. I returned to my seat and tried to do more problems. I was also trying to make eye contact with Jerome, who was working on Spanish. I tapped my leg against his under the table, then I rubbed my calf against his. He lifted his head partway, but kept looking down at the table.

  I pushed my notebook toward him and wrote, What’s wrong?

  He scratched his nose, then wrote, Nothing. Just trying to work.

  Which was fair. Everyone was working. I seemed to be the only one with her head on a swivel, unable to concentrate. I stayed for two hours, managing to get through about twenty problems. I poked through some pages of French as well.

  “I may go back too,” I said quietly.

  “I can take you back,” Jerome said. “I’ll let you in.”

  I assumed this was Jerome saying he was ready for a study break in the form of face-sucking. I slapped my books closed and scooped them up.

  When we stepped outside, I expected his arm to slip around my waist. That didn’t happen. He did head toward the darkness of the green, though, to a bench. It was under the shadow of a tree, which blocked the streetlight. I sat down next to him. The cold of the bench immediately attached itself to my butt and crawled its little fingers up my back. I leaned into Jerome for warmth. This is where he should have turned and put his face next to mine. Instead, he just sat there, slightly slumped forward over his knees. I reached over and pushed aside one of his longer half curls that was just brushing his ear. I would start there. Jerome liked those little kisses around the ear.

  He shifted away ever so slightly.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I just wanted some air.”

  There was no shortage of that—night offered all of the cold, wet air you could ever want.

  “Okay,” I said. “Air. We’ve got it.”

  “You missed art today,” he said. There was no particular inflection behind it, just a statement of fact.

  “I did,” I said. “I was—”

  I was about to say “not feeling well” when he cut me off.

  “You were researching at the National Gallery?”

  I hadn’t told him this particular little fib. I’d told Jazza. When had they had time to exchange that information? And why had they exchanged it? And why hadn’t I come up with something better to tell Jazza? Because I’d been busy, that’s why. Okay, better question—when was I going to shut up and explain this?

  “I…yes. I was doing my project? That Mark is having me do? Because I’m behind?”

  “You missed art history to work on art history?”

  “Well, it sounds stupid when you put it like that—”

  “What’s the project on?”

  “What?”

  “What were you doing research on?”

  This took me completely by surprise. I couldn’t think of any paintings. Any. In the entire world.

  He knew. I had never gone to the museum. In the chill and the dark, with the damp creeping into my clothes, the world was suddenly very foreign and unfriendly. And when I didn’t answer, he stood up and paced in front of the bench.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  He inhaled loudly through his nose and ground one of his heels slowly into the grass.

  “On Wednesday night,” he said, “where did you go?”

  “What?”

  “Wednesday?”

  Wednesday…what had I been doing on Wednesday?

  “You were with some guy,” he prompted me.

  Of course. On Wednesday I had gone out with Callum. Callum, he of the many muscles, who almost played professional soccer. The fact that Jerome knew who I was with made me…well, actually kind of furious.

  “Did you follow me or something?”

  “No, I didn’t follow you. A few of the year elevens saw you.”

  I handled that badly. I raised my hands in apology.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I mean…he’s a friend of mine. Just a friend. You’re being paranoid.”

  That was probably the wrong thing to say. In fact, I was 100 percent certain that was the wrong thing to say, but I said it anyway.

  “Paranoid?” he said. “You’re lying to me.”

  Well, he was right about that. But all the things he was thinking, those were wrong. Which meant that I had to do some very fast talking. Where, where, where could I have been?

  “I was at therapy!”

  And I said it loudly. Really loudly. I startled him, I startled myself, and I startled some little creature crawling around near the trash next to the bench, because I heard it scurry off.

  “Therapy?” he said.

  “Therapy,” I repeated.

  “And that guy…”

  “Is in my therapy group.”

  “So you’ve been going to therapy and you decided to…”

  “Lie?” I said. “I said that to Jazza because she asked where I was and the museum was the first thing I could think of. I never said anything to you because I didn’t want you to have the girlfriend who always talked about her therapy. I mean, I’m
already American. That would make me super American. Don’t you think we’re all in therapy or something?”

  I don’t like admitting this about myself, but I lie well. I come from a long line of people who can tell a story, who can elaborate on reality. I can sound convincing. And my words were having the right effect. Jerome was finally looking at me.

  “There’s nothing wrong with therapy,” he said.

  “I never said there was. I just don’t want to talk about it all the time. I don’t always want to be the girl who got stabbed, okay?”

  All that, perfectly true. In fact, so true that my eyes were watering a bit and my voice cracked a little.

  “You can talk to me,” he said. “You can tell me what’s going on. That’s kind of the point.”

  I hated this. I hated lies, and I hated pity. I think I hated pity more. I hated looking damaged and weird and Jerome wanting to talk about feelings. I was so sick of feelings.

  “I want to help,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry—”

  “Forget it,” I said. “The point is, there’s nothing going on. There’s nothing to tell you.”

  Oh, except that I took down a murderous ghost today. And went to a mental institution to interview a murderer. Except for that.

  “I can’t believe I did this,” he said.

  Now his voice was honeyed with guilt, and my stomach was churning slowly, like a soft-serve ice cream machine.

  That was what did it. The guilt. This emotional mess that I didn’t want and I didn’t need. I liked making out with Jerome and I liked that Jerome existed in the boyfriend sense, but I didn’t want to deal with all of his feelings about my feelings.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” I heard myself say.

  “Do what? Fight?”

  “This,” I said again, and flopped my hands around in a way that was supposed to mean us. This thing that we were.

  Amazingly, Jerome spoke hand-flop. I saw it hit him, and I saw him try to deflect it by quickly looking away, as if it didn’t hurt.

  “Break up,” he said. “That’s what you want.”

  This wasn’t his fault. I had lied to him—not because I was evil, but because I had to. My life was a disaster and I was sick of problems and he was just one more. Breaking up made things simple. For me, anyway.