by E. E. Holmes
Pucey Library, part of the vast network of library resources on campus, was home to the Harvard Archives, and it was here Lizzy and I hoped to find the identity of our tormented spirit stalker by searching digital copies of local newspapers. We had very little to go on, but based on the style of the spirit’s clothing, we narrowed the window of time down to the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. We didn’t have a name, of course, but the emotions that radiated from the spirit every time we entered her presence left no doubt as to how she died.
We were searching for a murder victim.
Over the course of our first few weeks of classes, whenever we weren’t in class or tackling massive homework assignments, we were to be found in Pucey Library, poring over old newspaper headlines, desperate for a clue that might help us identify the spirit and ease her suffering.
On one such night, my eyes were drooping and itching with tiredness, and I was just about to suggest to Lizzy that we call it a night when my gaze fell, finally, on an eerily familiar face.
“Lizzy! It’s her! I found her!”
“Thank God,” Lizzy muttered, sliding her chair noisily across the floor so that she could read over my shoulder.
It was a miracle I was even able to recognize her, so carefree and joyful was the expression that graced her features. Her dark hair, parted down the middle of her head, hung in two straight curtains on either side of a luminous smile, a lightly freckled nose, and wide, dark eyes fringed with thick lashes. The caption beneath her photo read, “Lesley College student Janine Saunders, missing since Thursday.”
As my lips formed the name, something indefinable clicked into place, a surety that the face staring up at me and the spirit haunting our steps were one and the same. And as I met Lizzy’s gaze, I knew she felt it, too. We leaned our heads together to read the article.
The body of missing Lesley College student Janine Saunders has been found, according to Cambridge Police. Miss Saunders, a junior at Lesley College majoring in education, had been missing for nearly a week when her body was discovered in a dumpster near the outskirts of the Harvard University campus in the early hours of Monday by a restaurant employee. Miss Saunders disappeared after leaving a friend’s apartment to walk back to the subway.
It is clear that Janine Saunders was a victim of foul play, but we are not releasing the details of her death to the public at this time. If anyone has any information regarding her death, we urge them to contact the Cambridge Police Department as soon as possible.
“Not making the details of her death public at this time? How the hell is that supposed to help us?” Lizzy asked in an exasperated hiss.
“It’s not supposed to help us,” I reminded her. “It was supposed to help them. Her death would have been a big deal—a big story. I’m sure they didn’t want to release too many details so that they could tell the fake leads apart from the real ones.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Lizzy said grudgingly. “This kind of crime always brings the crazies out of the woodwork. I bet they were flooded with fake tips.”
“So, we’ve got a name. Janine Saunders. That ought to be enough to give us a little Casting help in keeping her at bay, at least until we can get her to communicate.”
“Hey, it’s Elizabeth, right?”
Startled, we both spun around to find a young man smiling down at us, a backpack slung over his shoulder and a stack of books tucked under one arm.
“Uh, yeah,” Lizzy said warily. “Do I know you?”
“Sort of,” the boy admitted, holding out a hand. “My name is Dave Miller. We’re in British Lit seminar together.”
“Oh,” Lizzy replied, stalling for time as she closed the cover on the newspapers we were looking at before taking the boy’s hand a bit reluctantly. “Nice to meet you, Dave.”
“I thought you might have recognized me from The Country Club. My family has been members there for three generations now. We also took a sailing lesson on the Charles together once when we were like ten,” Dave went on.
“Oh, for God’s sake here we go,” Lizzy muttered faintly under her breath as she bent down to retrieve her own backpack from the floor.
The Country Club in Brookline was so elite that it literally just called itself “The Country Club,” as though daring other country clubs in the area to justify their very existence. The power, prestige, and money that circulated like lifeblood within its walls was a who’s who of East Coast royalty, and the criteria for acceptance was so nebulous that objectively rich and famous people frequently found the doors being shut in their faces. But of course, The Country Club—and clubs like it all over the world—were simply crawling with Durupinen. It was our mother’s favorite place to wield her social and financial influence—and as a result, Lizzy and I had avoided the place whenever humanly possible.
“So, um, how’ve you been?” Dave went on, rather bravely, I thought, given the way Lizzy had begun to scowl.
“Busy,” Lizzy said bluntly. “It’s Harvard, after all.”
Dave laughed as though she’d just cracked a hilarious joke. He paused for a moment, as though giving her the chance to help him out and move the conversation forward. When she just sat in silence, he plowed on, unperturbed. “Look, I heard through the grapevine that you’ll be attending the fall homecoming gala at The Country Club next weekend. Any chance you’d like to meet up? Maybe save me a few dances?”
His face looked so bright, so optimistic. It was almost a pity Lizzy was about to snuff every spark of hope within his being.
“What grapevine?” Lizzy asked.
Dave’s smile slipped. “Huh?”
“You said you heard through the grapevine that we would be attending. What grapevine would that be?”
“Oh, uh…” Dave looked a little sheepish. “Well, to be honest, my mother is on the social functions committee with—”
“Let me guess: my mother. And she just happened to mention to your mother that I was at Harvard and also inexplicably wanting for a boyfriend at the present time.”
“I… well, yeah…”
“And then, when you couldn’t catch me on my own after class, because I always bolt out of there to make it to a seminar across campus, my mother told your mother where you might be able to find me in the evenings,” Lizzy went on.
Dave gave a nervous chuckle. “Did… did your mom tell you that?”
“Oh, no,” Lizzy replied, smiling. “My mother never warns me when she’s about to interfere in my personal life. But believe me, I’m used to it.”
“So… is that a no?” Dave asked, his face falling comically.
“Decidedly,” Lizzy said. “But be a chum and don’t tell my mother, all right? I do so love to see the look of seething disappointment she gets when I’ve disrupted one of her well-planned bouts of meddling, and I’d like to break the news to her face.”
Dave just sort of stood there, his mouth opening and closing uselessly as he tried to figure out how to respond. We gathered our things and walked past him. I sort of patted him on the shoulder on the way out.
“Chin up,” I whispered. “It’s not your fault, really.”
Hardly missing a beat, Dave turned hopefully to me. I raised my eyebrows and he seemed to think better of it.
“Okay, well… I’ll see you around, then,” he mumbled before turning tail and fleeing between the stacks.
“You didn’t have to be so hard on him, Lizzy,” I said as I caught up to her.
She turned on me, incredulous. “Me? Hark who’s talking! Was there anything left of Mike Chandler, M.D. when you were finished with him?”
I waved my hand dismissively. “That was different, he was a jerk. Dave was just… well, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Wherever our mother is, is always the wrong place at the wrong time,” Lizzy replied, tossing her hair and resuming her walk across the library reading room. “The sooner Dave and the rest of the eligible Country Club bachelors learn that, the better off we’ll all be.”
“Maybe we should post a warning notice in the men’s locker room at the Club,” I suggested.
Lizzy laughed too loudly, earning a reproving look from the student manning the circulation desk as we passed.
“Let’s forget about Mum, for the moment,” she said, when she had recovered herself. “We’ve got a name for our ghostly stalker now. Let’s do some more research and see if we can’t put this spirit to rest properly, huh?”
But forgetting about our mother’s romantic machinations would be easier said than done, as we were leaving the next morning to go home for the weekend. I should have known something wasn’t right from the moment the car picked us up. It did not drop us at the Club, where we were meant to have lunch with Mum while Dad golfed. Instead, our chauffeur told us there had been a change of plans, and that our mother had instructed him to take us home instead. When we arrived home, the house was empty except for the housekeeper, Mrs. Bryant, who set out lunch for us on the back patio and said in a nervous voice that our father had been called into work and that she didn’t know where our mother was, or what time she’d be home.
The emptiness in the house deepened as the afternoon went on. I wandered from room to room, flicking around on the television but unable to settle on something to watch, then trying to do some homework, but unable to focus my brain, reading the same sentences over and over again without absorbing any information at all. Giving up entirely on studying, I fell instead to researching Janine Saunders on the internet. We were in luck: her name was all we needed to unlock the secret of what had happened to her. I read article after article about her disappearance, the discovery of her body (in the very alley in which we had first spotted her), the arrest of her killer after a second attack, and his eventual conviction and imprisonment. I printed out the information and brought it down the hall to Lizzy’s room, so that she could read through it as well.
“I wonder how much of this she knows,” Lizzy said, flipping through the pages and shaking her head.
“I’m betting not much of it,” I replied. “She appears very locked in the moment of her attack, don’t you think?”
“Definitely,” Lizzy replied with a delicate shudder. “Everything she’s projecting is visceral pain and confusion and fear. I’d be surprised if she even realizes she’s dead. She drags me into the very heart of the experience the second she approaches. I don’t think she’s probably ever managed to climb out of that abyss since it happened. She just pulls people in with her instead.”
The thought of it made me want to cry. Decades spent in a spiral of horror and pain and confusion. This girl had suffered more than any one soul should ever have to suffer.
“When we get back to school, we’ll have to find a way to tell her all of this,” I said. “Once she knows that her killer was caught and that justice was served, she may finally stop projecting long enough for us to Cross her.”
“Let’s hope so,” Lizzy replied. “I don’t want to spend the rest of the semester worried about her stalking us across campus and ambushing me with emotions I can’t handle.”
Darkness fell and still, the house remained empty, which felt like an ominous sign. By the time the dinner bell rang, the knot of tension balled up in my stomach had erased all desire for food. Even Lizzy looked grim as she met me in the hall and we began our descent to the dining room.
Our family’s dining room contained one of those long, polished tables that seated about thirty people, the kind that people sitting at the opposite ends of would have to shout to hear each other. And there sat our mother at the head of it, her back poker-straight, her face impassive as she dissected her chicken into tiny pieces. She did not speak as we entered the room.
I threw a nervous glance to Lizzy, who gave a minute shake of her head that I understood to mean, “Don’t rise to it. Make her speak first.” Then she lifted her chin, walked to her seat, and placed her napkin in her lap. Feeling like I’d much prefer to slip straight through the floor into the basement than endure an entire meal in this silence, I reluctantly did the same.
It was a battle of wills, that much was clear. Mum seemed determined not to acknowledge us, and Lizzy would rather die than give her exactly what she wanted—for one of us to dare to ask her what was wrong. But as determined as our mother could be, this was one battle she would undoubtedly lose. Lizzy would have been pleased as punch to eat her food in peace and vanish upstairs again without ever giving Mum the satisfaction of a single word. Mum, on the other hand, would not allow this meeting to pass without asserting her authority. I knew it was only a matter of time and, about twenty minutes into dinner, she finally reached her breaking point.
“You’ve really nothing to say for yourselves?” she asked at last, her voice sounding like a gong-strike in the silent room, though she spoke quite softly. I jumped, my fork clattering to my plate. Lizzy gave me a quelling look before turning to reply.
“You set the tone, Mother. We’ve simply been following suit,” she said calmly.
“After everything I’ve done for you, after everything I’ve given you both, I little expected this kind of ingratitude.”
“Ingratitude?” Lizzie repeated. “For trying to manipulate our lives?”
“INGRATITUDE!” Mum’s voice rang out, echoing off the walls. Somewhere outside the room, the servants were running for cover in anticipation of the storm that was about to hit.
“How do you expect me,” Mum went on, “to show my face at the Club after you’ve humiliated me in this manner?”
“Humiliated you?” Lizzy cried with a blast of incredulous laughter. “Humiliated you?! Oh, this is rich, Mother, even for you.”
“Are you suggesting that I’ve humiliated you by setting you up on a date with a handsome young man?” Mum asked, her tone dripping with condescension. “Oh, you poor, poor thing, however shall you cope?”
“It was humiliating, mother,” I replied, finding my voice for the first time.
Mum turned and looked daggers at me. “Yes, I’ve already heard how you turned down Michael Chandler. Such a handsome, successful boy, and you treated him like some riffraff at a fraternity party.”
“And do you care at all about how he treated me?” I asked, firing up. “About how he could have cared less which of us actually went out with him? About how he didn’t even bother to ask me out, assuming already that I’d be so flattered by the invitation that my accepting it was a foregone conclusion? About how he preened and bragged and strutted about like a peacock while showing not the slightest interest in me other than who my mother is?”
Mum laid down her fork. “It is my duty as your mother and the matriarch of our Durupinen bloodline to see that you are properly matched with a young man whose connections and pedigree advance our standing and expand our influence.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Lizzy had already jumped in. “And it’s our duty to… what, exactly? Accept it? Smile and nod at every bloviating egomaniac you throw across our path? Marry someone simply because he’s ticked all the boxes on your wealth and privilege checklist?”
“Yes, you foolish girl. Where is your sense of duty, both of you? How could daughters of my own flesh and blood be so completely lacking in self-preservation and pride? For Aether’s sake, how do you think this family, this clan, was built? Certainly not on the sentimental daydreams of schoolgirls or the petty hormone-driven rebellions of youth. It was built on our ability to adapt, thrive, and climb, higher and further and more successfully than those around us. It has taken generations to shore up our position and our power, and I will not stand by and watch it leveled because you feel the need to engage in some juvenile teenage temper tantrum.”
“Power isn’t everything, Mum,” I said.
“The only people who believe that are the powerless.” She flung the words at me, then flung her napkin on the table. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve quite lost my appetite.”
Lizzy and I continued sitting at the table, our food going cold in front of us, saying
nothing. What was there to say? She was our mother and she was never going to change. Ever. What was the point of trying to make her see reason? She had no use for reason when she had control.
“Well, hey, there, you two!”
We looked up to see our father standing in the doorway, an expression of mild surprise on his face. His briefcase was clutched in his right hand, his hat held in his left.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, attempting to hitch a smile onto my face with less than successful results.
“Welcome home!” he replied, looking back and forth between us. “I’m sorry I missed our lunch today—and dinner tonight. There was a crisis at the office, and I had to…” He glanced at his watch. “Dinner was over an hour ago, wasn’t it? Did Mrs. Bryant serve you late? Where’s your mother?”
“No, everything was fine,” Lizzy said. “It was just Mum being… Mum.”
“Uh-oh,” Dad replied, setting down his briefcase and hat with a resigned sigh before taking Mum’s seat at the table. “All right. Let’s hear the worst of it.”
And so, we told him the whole messy story, glossing over absolutely nothing, especially our own role in it. There was no point in being anything other than completely straightforward with my father—after all, we were keeping such a huge secret from him regarding the Durupinen that maintaining our sanity required total and complete honesty in all other aspects of our lives. Stacking secrets upon a foundation of secrets was a recipe for disaster. This way, the teetering tower of falsehoods never got too high, never exceeded our ability to manage it. It was my mother’s cardinal rule and, unlike her other rules, we never broke it.
Dad listened with an expression that grew stonier and stonier with every word we spoke. By the time I had finished, he might have been carved from marble, so set was the grim anger on his face. I braced myself for the coming lecture.
“Dad? I… look, I’m sorry we weren’t more… polite to those boys, but…”
But Dad raised a hand to silence me. “Stop apologizing. You’ve nothing to be sorry about. It’s your mother who should be apologizing,” he said, sighing deeply. “How many times? How many times is she going to try to sabotage your education with this marriage nonsense?”