League of American Traitors

by Matthew Landis

  “I never thought of it that way.” Jasper threw a snowball, but missed his tree. “You’re not afraid of what happens if you win? The regret?”

  “Dude, I’m not looking for a fight. I’m just sticking around for one that I know is coming.”

  They stomped in silence until they hit the soccer fields.

  “So, you’re her boyfriend, huh?” Sheldon asked.

  “That’s not what it is.”

  “If you start wearing eyeliner, I am taking back all of my sweatpants.”

  “I was actually thinking of going the tattoo route,” Jasper said. “Get a giant spider on my face.”

  “Like the body in the middle and the legs spreading out across your cheeks?”

  “Exactly.”

  “She’ll probably want to make out with you all day if you do that.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “I just tasted my own bile.”

  ****

  Snow fell for a week. Drifts on the soccer field came up to their knees. Jasper swore to never complain about Pennsylvania winters again.

  “It looks like a breakout of leprosy on her neck,” Nora said as they trudged to the range. “Eliza keeps telling people it’s a hickey. No one believes her.”

  “I still can’t believe I hit her,” Jasper said.

  “We’re all surprised.”

  Ahead, some kids huddled outside the gym door. Colton pulled on the handle but it didn’t budge.

  “What’s going on?” Sheldon asked.

  “Gym’s locked.” Colton radioed the same into his walkie. A minute later, it crackled back, “Headmistress called an assembly. Y’all have to head back.”

  Students plodded down the path to the auditorium in the west wing. The stage was full of old TVs on carts and extra chairs. Jasper and crew stood in the back as kids hunted for fold-down seats that weren’t broken. Kingsley stalked into the room and stood against the stage, arms folded, staring murder. Jasper had never seen him this angry. Chillingsworth joined him a minute later and everybody quieted down.

  “You have been called here because of an outrageous occurrence,” she said. Shrill. On edge. “A handgun has gone missing from the range armory.”

  “Not missing,” Kingsley said. “Stolen.”

  Jasper’s neck prickled.

  “Never in my twenty-two years at this school has a weapon gone missing—”

  “Stolen.”

  “Yes, stolen.” Students squirmed in their seats as Chillingsworth performed a wall-to-wall scan of the room. “As we speak, campus security is searching your rooms and you will stay here until they are finished.” She waved off the protests. “You do not have a right to privacy in this school—consult the Supreme Court if you disagree. Until the weapon is found, the range will be closed. And the dueling tournament is canceled.”

  Students booed. Somebody threw an empty water bottle at the stage. Kingsley marched up the aisle, dragged out the offending student, and barked in his face.

  “This is a problem,” Nora said.

  “Maybe Kingsley miscounted,” Jasper offered.

  “He doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to his guns.”

  “Then, what do we do?”

  “Hope they find it.”

  An hour later, Rufus came in and talked with Chillingsworth in hushed tones. There was a lot of head-shaking and scowling on her part. Twice, she jabbed a finger at him.

  He shrugged and walked up the aisle toward Jasper. “Gonna have to ask for your keys to the study room. Headmistress wants it searched. I’ll need the combination to the safe, too.”

  “Not a chance,” Nora said coldly.

  “Are you gonna make us?” Jasper asked. There wasn’t much they could do to stop Rufus or the Donelsons.

  “I take my orders from the Counselor,” Rufus said. “He don’t tell me much, but he did tell me that what happens in that room ain’t my business. But the headmistress, she’s threatenin’ to close the library unless she gets in there.”

  “Can you do the search for her?” Jasper asked.

  Rufus shook his head. “Afraid not. She don’t exactly trust my judgment these days.”

  “She’s pissed that Cyrus keeps going over her head,” Lacy said, yanking one of her curls.

  “We cannot let her in,” Nora hissed.

  “We have to,” Jasper said evenly.

  “What?”

  “What if Cyrus is right, and that cook was like an agent of the Libertines or something? Maybe they could get to a student, too.”

  “He’s just paranoid,” Sheldon said. “That’s his thing.”

  “Maybe it should be our thing.” Jasper watched the assembled students, wondering who among them might have the weapon. Wondering if he was their target. “Either way, we can’t wait out this power grab. I’ll open the safe, let Chillingsworth see there’s no gun, then she’ll leave us alone.”

  “And what if she sees something?” Sheldon asked.

  “What’s there for her to see? We’re reading about Benedict Arnold? We’ve been staring at my dad’s research for months, and still don’t even really know what we’re looking for.”

  “This is a bad idea,” Tucker said.

  “Agreed,” Sheldon and Nora chimed in at the same time.

  “Right, but it’s my stuff, so it’s my call. I’ll deal with the fallout.”

  ****

  In the library, Chillingsworth stood on the catwalk, arms folded. “This is not your private locker room,” she said as they climbed the steps. “You are guests in my school. Now open this door.”

  Jasper unlocked it.

  “Stay where you are.” She pushed her way in and turned on the light. Starting in the near corner, she worked her way around, sifting and poking things that apparently might be hiding guns. She looked under couch cushions, in the fridge, and behind every book on the shelves.

  Then she turned to the safe.

  “Open it.”

  Jasper blocked the combination with his body so she couldn’t see as he twisted the dial.

  Chillingsworth made neat stacks as the folders and books came out. Jasper flinched when a bunch of documents came loose, but she didn’t seem to care. When it was empty, she stuck her head in and looked around, knocking on the sides. Then she knocked on the bottom. She turned to face Jasper, and held the gaze for a few seconds, then grabbed a pair of scissors and pried up the false bottom.

  The mobile. The letter from Reed with “The Big Question” written across the back. He’d been putting them there for a while now.

  Chillingsworth looked the documents over, then left them on the nearest pile.

  “Like I said, Headmistress”—Jasper cleared his throat—“none of us took the gun.”

  She straightened the bottom of her suit jacket, and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  But what,” Sheldon said, “was he looking for?”

  “Sheldon, if you ask that one more time, I’m going to murder you,” Lacy snapped.

  Jasper had spread out all the pieces of the Boswell family tree in a grid on the floor. Sheldon was pacing up and down the row of papers to reach one, and cross-referencing it with the Ancestry.com version. Without the shooting range to fill their afternoons, the team had been pretty much living in the study room. Jasper actually missed it—not the guns or their cursing Irish instructor, but the mechanical repetitiveness. Every choreographed move and step and breath and the single purpose of getting a piece of lead in the center of a target thirty feet away. He’d recently started to “not totally suck,” as Nora put it.

  “All of these people are direct descendants of Ira?” Jasper asked.

  “Affirmative,” Sheldon said.

  “And we know my dad visited the ones who are still living and looked through their family heirlooms—papers and documents. Looking for something inherited.”

  Sheldon nodded. “That is correct, Detective Chesterton.”

  “And he checked into a hotel near thi
s family in Virginia,” said Jasper, tapping the names Milford and Anna Boswell. “So that’s probably who he was planning to meet with next.”

  “Yes. We’ve said that forty times,” Lacy groaned.

  “He was on a trail,” Jasper continued, “but to what?”

  He dragged a chair over and stood on it. He blurred his eyes and let the papers fade to a white blob and then slowly focused. He was right on top of it—he could actually feel it bubbling under the surface.

  And then the solution broke through.

  “Something to answer the Big Question,” he said.

  He jumped off the chair and grabbed the Miscellaneous folder. He found the Baltimore Sun article from 1932 and started scanning it, reading fast enough so he could filter out the irrelevant details. He jabbed at the page and started shout-reading:

  “‘Councilman Charles Boswell’s personal library is rumored to contain a number of first editions and a host of unpublished family papers dating back to the American Revolution. A bidding war drove the price to nearly one hundred dollars before the councilman, seeing the crowd descend upon his family history like scavengers on a carcass, ran to the podium and declared the auction over, claiming that he would rather starve than sell his century-old lineage to a seething mob.’”

  Sheldon was already scanning the Ancestry.com tree. “Holy. Balls.”

  “Tell me Charles is a direct descendant of Ira,” Jasper said.

  Sheldon nodded.

  “And all the people my dad visited … They’re direct descendants of Charles.”

  “Yup.”

  Jasper’s fingers tingled. He bounced on his heels. “We need to get inside that house my dad never made it to. Look for the thing that might have been passed down by Boswell.”

  He was met with dead silence.

  “Tuck, headphones.” Sheldon waited until Tucker pulled them on. “Bro, that’s deep Libertine territory. We’re talking the Jefferson clan’s backyard. We get caught there, and we won’t be taken prisoner.”

  “We could ask the Directors to submit a travel request to the Libertines like normal,” Lacy suggested.

  “Which the Libertines would reject…. Or accept so they can ambush us,” Sheldon said.

  “Okay, then we can’t get caught,” Jasper said. “It’ll be just us and a few Donelsons. We get in and out.”

  “It’s not that simple, dude.”

  “Right, but since my other option is to wait around here and maybe get shot, I’m up for it. I mean what are we even doing here if we’re not going to act on what we find out?”

  “He’s right.”

  Everyone looked at Nora, who had stopped bringing her poetry book altogether. She said about as much as Tucker during their sessions, but was now definitely more than just a bodyguard.

  “Oh, because you’re going to carry a gun and have our backs,” Sheldon said.

  Nora raised an eyebrow at him. “I thought you wanted to die with honor. Change your mind?”

  “This isn’t a duel. They have machine guns.”

  “You’re scared. The mighty Sheldon Burr is afraid.”

  He took a step toward her, fists clenched. Tucker saw something was going down and pulled his headphones off.

  “Some of us still have things to live for,” Sheldon said, close to a growl.

  “Like a duel? You’re pathetic.”

  “That’s enough,” Lacy said. “Nora, shut up. Sheldon, get some air.”

  He was already out the door.

  Tucker got up and hovered awkwardly close to Nora. Jasper didn’t even see him reach for the knife—he must have had it in his hand before Sheldon stormed out.

  “Tuck,” Jasper said. “Tuck—whoa.”

  Tucker held the knife a couple inches from Nora’s face. She froze.

  “Aaron Clark,” he said. His robotic voice sounded colder than normal. Subzero. “Do you remember him?”

  Nora stared the blade down. “What about him?”

  “Do. You. Remember. Him?”

  Jasper looked to Lacy for help, but she was as wide-eyed as him—terror all around.

  “That psycho who got expelled for fighting,” Nora said through gritted teeth. “With Sheldon.”

  “Sheldon caught him messing with me. Told him to stop.” Tucker rotated the blade. An inch closer and it would’ve grazed her cheek. “Aaron pulled this on him, but Sheldon didn’t back down. I wasn’t even his friend, but he stood up to that animal. For me.”

  Nora’s scowl was disappearing. She leaned away from the blade. Jasper could tell she was getting it—they were all getting it now.

  “Sheldon is not pathetic,” Tucker said. It was almost a whisper. “He’s brave.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say it.”

  Nora looked at her hands, then cleared her throat. “He’s brave.”

  Tucker nodded. With a flick, he folded the knife back in its sheath and walked out.

  The three of them just sat there for a couple minutes before packing everything back into the safe. Nora helped, which was a giant tell: she felt awful.

  “Would the Directors even let us make the trip?” Jasper asked.

  “Cyrus has pulled a lot of strings already, so who knows,” Lacy replied. “We’d have to make a solid case. And get the Donelsons on board.”

  “Think you could talk to Colton? Feel him out?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a joke there, but Jasper let it go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  That night, Jasper dreamed that somebody was yelling in his face. It was weird because the shouting was pretty loud for a dream.

  “Get up! Get up! Get up!”

  Somebody lifted him from the mattress, and dragged him out of his room and down the hall.

  It was freezing cold—and he only had sweatpants on. Definitely not a dream, then.

  “On our way,” another guard yelled into a walkie.

  Jasper found his legs on the stairs. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wall sensor went off.”

  “Where’s Nora?”

  “Colton’s going to the girl’s dorm now.”

  More Donelsons met them in the hallway. They raced to the boiler room and down the steps, sprinting across the bomb shelter, before shoving Jasper into the small room. He locked the door from the inside and stood against the wall, panting in the dark. Shivering, he decided to start sleeping in sweatshirts.

  The room was so quiet that Jasper was sure he could hear something. At first, he thought it was the blood pounding in his ears. But the sound was lighter. Softer.

  Another person.

  Breathing.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry.” It was half whisper, half cry.

  Then a flashlight beam blinded him.

  He shielded his eyes, and saw the gun first.

  Then the face.

  “If you open the door, I’ll have to shoot them, too,” Adele whispered. “I can’t look at you when I do it. Turn around. Kneel down.”

  “Please.”

  She stepped forward, and put the gun to his temple. Her hands shook. She was crying. Jasper got why Sheldon liked her. She was unbelievably gorgeous. Even now.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s the only way. They know where my family lives.”

  Was it possible this was one of those layered dreams? Maybe he’d wake up for real when she pulled the trigger and be in his bed and tell Sheldon about it and they’d laugh about how messed up it was. About how he’d dreamed that his roommate’s crush had murdered him.

  He turned around and knelt on the cold floor. The weird part was, he wasn’t scared at all. He couldn’t really understand that it was the end. That a bullet was about to enter his brain and he would stop existing. That he would be no more and life would go on after him and without him and that it had all been meaningless until now.

  “I’m sorry.” She sniffled, then put the muzzle on the nape of his neck and turned off the flashlight. “It won’t hurt.”<
br />
  He recognized her breathing routine.

  In.

  Out.

  He heard bare feet on the cement floor—tiny strides heading his way, hard and fast.

  Nora.

  But she wouldn’t make it in time. She’d see him dead, and it would ruin her.

  Half-in.

  Hold.

  Jasper went prone as Adele fired. He thought maybe he was dead and this was hell because it felt like grenades were going off in his ear canals. He dove for the door and screamed for help, but couldn’t hear himself. Only the gun vibrating as Adele shot wildly in the dark.

  Bangbangbangbang.

  He felt for the lock and turned it. Click.

  The door swung open and Adele fired at the light. A body fell. Jasper saw a shadow dive through and tackle Adele, then wrestle the gun away and start punching. Methodic and vicious. Thud thud thud thud. The sound was far away like he had headphones on. Adele went limp but Nora kept hitting her.

  “She’s gonna kill her,” Colton yelled. “Get her off.” He shook Jasper’s shoulder. “You hit?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He looked for the body. “But that guy—”

  “Don’t know if she meant to help me, or just get in first. Saved me from a bullet, either way.”

  Nora threw herself at Jasper, running her hands over his chest, checking for wounds. When she was satisfied he was okay, she turned to Colton. “We’re leaving.”

  “You crazy? It ain’t safe.”

  “Safe?” she yelled. “She was waiting in this room, Colton. This. Fucking. Room. Somebody told her where to go.”

  Colton’s walkie crackled. “I’m coming with you, then.”

  Nora led them to the Civil War study room. They barricaded the door with a bookshelf and a busted recliner. Jasper found a sweatshirt that smelled like mildew, but at least he’d be warmer.

  As Nora paced, she picked blood off her knuckles. She looked out of place in shorts and a T-shirt that hung off one shoulder.

  “She kept saying she was sorry,” Jasper said. “That they—they, Nora—knew where her parents lived.” Jasper grabbed Colton’s arm. “Cyrus wasn’t paranoid at all. He was dead right.”

  “Obviously.” Nora tested the barricade with a shove. “But the Libertines didn’t tell her where to go. We did that.”