The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  Jerome, I noticed, was a careful note taker. He sat far back in his chair, his arm extended, writing quickly in a loose, relaxed hand, his eyes flicking between the slide and the page. I started to copy his style. He took about twenty notes on each painting, just a few words each. Every once in a while, his elbow would make contact with my arm, and he’d glance over. When class was over, we fell in step beside each other as we walked to the refectory. Jerome picked up right where he left off.

  “The Flowers and Archers isn’t far from here,” he said. “We should go.”

  “We . . . should?”

  Again, I knew many students at Wexford could legally drink, because you only had to be eighteen. I knew that pubs would be a part of life here somehow. But I hadn’t expected someone, especially a prefect, to invite me to one. Also, was he asking me out? Did you ask people to crime scenes on dates? My pulse did a little leap, but it was quickly regulated by his follow-up.

  “You, me, Jazza,” he said. “You should get Jazza to come, otherwise she’ll start stressing from day one. You’re her keeper now.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “Right.”

  “I have desk duty at the library until dinner, but we could go right after. What do you think?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I . . . I mean, I don’t have plans.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and took a few steps backward.

  “Have to go,” he said. “Don’t tell Jazza where we’re going. Just say the pub, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Jerome gave a slouchy, full upper body nod and walked off to the library.

  9

  IT DIDN’T TAKE A GREAT DEAL OF INSIGHT TO KNOW that Jazza was not going to want to go to a crime scene that evening. She was, to use the vernacular, a normal person. She was at her desk eating a sandwich when I returned.

  “Sorry,” she said, turning as I came in. “My cello practice ran late, and I didn’t feel like going over to the refectory. On Saturdays I sometimes treat myself to a sandwich and a cake.”

  “Treat myself ” was a little Jazza-ism I loved. Everything was a tiny celebration with her. A treat was a single cookie or a cup of hot chocolate. She made these things special. Even my Cheez Whiz had become a little treat. It was more precious now.

  Something was beeping on my bed. I still wasn’t used to the unfamiliar ring and alerts of my English phone. I hadn’t even gotten into the habit of carrying it with me because there was no one likely to call me, except my parents. They had been scheduled to arrive in Bristol that morning. That’s who the message was from. I noticed an alarmed frequency in my mother’s voice.

  “We think you should spend the weekends up here, in Bristol,” she said, once we’d gotten the basic hellos out of the way. “At least until this Ripper business is over.”

  Alarming though Wexford could be at times, I had no desire to leave it. In fact, I was certain that if I did, I would miss crucial things—all the things that would allow me to adapt and last the entire year.

  “Well, I have class on Saturday morning,” I said, “then we eat lunch. And doesn’t it take, like, hours to get there? So I wouldn’t even get there until Saturday night, and then I’d have to leave in the middle of Sunday . . . and I need all that time to do work. Plus, I have to play hockey every day, and since I don’t know how to play, I have to do extra practice . . .”

  Jazza didn’t look up, but I could tell she was listening to every word of this. After ten minutes, I had convinced them that it wasn’t a good idea to leave, but I had to swear up, down, and sideways to be careful and to never, ever, ever do anything on my own. They moved on to describing their house in Bristol. I was scheduled to see it for the first time during a long weekend break in mid-November.

  “Your parents are alarmed?” Jazza asked when I hung up.

  I nodded and sat down on the floor.

  “Mine are as well,” she said. “I think they want me to come home too, but they aren’t saying. The trip to Cornwall would be too long, anyway. And Bristol is just as bad. You’re right.”

  This confirmation made me feel a bit better. I hadn’t just been making things up.

  “What are you doing tonight?” I asked her.

  “I thought I’d stay in and work on this German essay. And then I really need to put in a few hours of cello practice. I was in terrible shape this morning.”

  “Or,” I said, “we could go out. To . . . a pub. With Jerome.”

  Jazza chewed a strand of hair for a moment.

  “To a pub? With Jerome?”

  “He just asked me to ask you.”

  “Jerome asked you to ask me to go to a pub?”

  “He said it was my job to convince you,” I explained.

  Jazza spun around in her chair and smiled broadly.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  Jazza and Jerome, I supposed, had had an ongoing flirtation, and now they had me to bring their love to life. If that was going to be my role, it was better if I accepted it. Or, at least, looked fake cheerful about it.

  “So,” I said. “You and Jerome? What’s the story?”

  Jazza cocked her head to the side in a decidedly birdlike fashion.

  “No,” she said, laughing. “Don’t be disgusting. Me and Jerome? I mean . . . I love Jerome, but we’re friends. No. He’s asking you out.”

  “He’s asking me out by asking me to ask you?”

  “Correct,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ask me?”

  “You don’t know Jerome,” Jazza said. “He doesn’t do things the easy way.”

  My spirits perked right up again.

  “So,” I said, “do you want to go, or . . .”

  “Well, I should,” she said. “Because if I don’t, he might get nervous and not go. He needs me there for support.”

  “This is complicated,” I said. “Are all English people like you guys?”

  “No,” she said. “Oh, I knew it! This is perfect.”

  I loved the way she said perfect. Pahh-fect. It was pahhfect.

  In order to go out, Jazza worked without pause the entire afternoon. I sat at my desk pretending to do the same, but my mind was wandering too much. I spent about two hours online quietly trying to look up what you were supposed to wear to a pub, but the Internet is useless for things like that. I got a terrible range of advice, from American travel sites (who advocated a wardrobe of non-wrinkle travel basics and a raincoat) to a bunch of English sites about how all girls at all pubs wore skirts that were too short or heels that were too high and how they all fell over drunk in the street—which prompted another half hour of angry searching about misogyny and feminism, because that kind of thing drives me nuts.

  My problem sets, sadly, did not do themselves during this time. Nor did my reading read itself. I tried to tell myself that I was learning about culture, but even I wasn’t going to be fooled by that. It was five o’clock before I knew it, and Jazza stirred and said something about getting dressed. On Saturday nights, you could wear whatever you wanted to dinner. This would be the first time I would greet Wexford as a whole in some Actual Clothes.

  Since I still didn’t know what to wear, I delayed a bit by switching on some music and watching Jazza change. She put on jeans; I put on jeans. She put on a light blouse; I put on a T-shirt. She put her hair up; I put my hair up. She skipped the makeup, but there, I diverged. I also wore a black velvet jacket. This was a present from my grandmother, one of the few things she’d ever gotten me that I wasn’t skeeved to wear in public. Since I’m pretty pale—years of excessive sunscreen and being slowly bled to death by swamp mosquitoes—the rich black looked dramatic. I added some red lipstick, which may have been a touch too far, but Jazza said I looked nice, and she seemed to mean it. I also wore a star necklace, a gift from Cousin Diane.

  The refectory was only three-quarters full, if that. Lots of people, Jazza explained,
just skipped Saturday dinner entirely and started their evenings early. I got to look at the clothing choices of those who had stayed, and was happy to see that I had been wise to copy Jazza. Nobody was wearing anything too fancy—jeans, skirts, sweaters, T-shirts. Jerome was dressed in a brown hoodie and jeans. We ate quickly and headed out. I was shivering in my jacket. They didn’t even need jackets. It was also still quite bright, even though it was after seven. We walked for several blocks, Jazza and Jerome chatting about things I neither knew nor understood, when Jazza began to look around in confusion.

  “I thought we were going to the pub,” she said.

  “We are,” Jerome replied.

  “The pub is that way,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction. “Which one are we going to?”

  “The Flowers and Archers.”

  “The Flowers and . . . oh. No. No.”

  “Come on, Jazzy,” Jerome said. “We have to show your roommate here around.”

  “But it’s a crime scene. You can’t go into a crime scene.”

  Even as she said this, we caught the first glimpse of it all. The news trucks came first, their satellites extended. There were maybe two dozen of those. There was a whole section of sidewalk filled with reporters talking at cameras. Then there were the police cars, the police vans, and the mobile crime scene units. Then there were the people, so many people. Some sort of cordon had obviously been put up, so the people grouped around it. There had to be a hundred or more, just watching and taking pictures. We made it to the back of the crowd.

  “Just let me get some pictures, and we’ll go to a real pub,” Jerome said, zipping off and squeezing through.

  I stood on my toes a little to try to catch sight of the Flowers and Archers. It was just an ordinary-looking pub—black, large windows, cheerfully painted wooden arms over the door, a blackboard sign out front advertising a special. Only the dozens of police officers swarming around it like ants gave any indication of the terror that had occurred here. I suddenly felt uncomfortable. An unpleasant chill went up my back.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s stand back.”

  I almost walked straight into a man who was standing right behind us. He was dressed in a suit with a slightly too-large jacket. He was completely and smoothly bald. His lack of hair highlighted his eyes, which were feverishly bright. When I apologized, the eyes grew wider, in what appeared to be shock.

  “Not at all,” he replied. “Not at all.”

  He stepped aside to let me pass, smiling widely.

  “People are treating this like it’s a party,” Jazza said, looking at the people standing around with bottles of beer, taking photos on their phones and holding up video cameras. “Look how happy everyone seems.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Jerome said not to tell you. And I forgot when you started explaining all of the asking-out stuff.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I should have realized.”

  Jerome jogged back, beaming.

  “I got right up to the front of the tape,” he said. “Come on. Proper drink now.”

  We went to a pub a few streets over, closer to Wexford. The pub did not disappoint. It was everything the Internet had promised—big wooden bar, a decent crowd, pint glasses. Of the three of us, only Jerome was over eighteen, plus Jazza said he owed us for taking us to the murder site—so he was put in charge of buying all the drinks. Jazza wanted a glass of wine, but I wanted a beer, because that is what I’d heard you were supposed to drink at a pub. Jerome duly went off to the bar. All the inside seats were taken, so we went outside and stood at a small table under a heat lamp. The diameter brought us face-to-face with each other, our skin glowing red under the light. Jazza made short work of her glass of wine. A pint of beer, as it turns out, is a lot of beer. But I was determined to get it down.

  Jerome had more to tell us about the events of the day. “The victim,” he said, “not only had the same last name as the victim in 1888, she was the same age, forty-seven. She worked for a bank in the City, and she lived in Hampstead. Whoever this murderer is, he went to a lot of trouble to get the details right. Somehow, he got a woman with the right name of the right age to a pub nowhere near her house, and over a mile away from her work. At five in the morning. They’re saying it doesn’t look like she was bound or brought in with any struggle.”

  “Jerome is going to be a journalist,” Jazza explained.

  “Just listen,” Jerome said, pointing at the roof, just above the door. “Look up. It’s a CCTV camera. Most pubs have them. On that stretch alone, by the Flowers and Archers? I counted five cameras there. On Durward Street? At least six on the path the victim was walking along. If they don’t have footage of the Ripper, then something is seriously wrong with the system.”

  “Jerome is going to be a journalist,” Jazza said again. She was tipsy, rocking a little to the music.

  “I’m not the only one who’s noticed this!”

  I looked up at the camera. It was a fairly large one, long and thin, its electronic eye pointed right at us. There was another one next to it pointing in the other direction, so that both halves of the pub garden were covered.

  “I’m not a prefect,” Jazza said suddenly.

  “Come on, Jazzy,” he said, tucking up under her arm.

  “She is.”

  Jazza was talking about Charlotte, obviously.

  “And what else is she?” Jerome asked.

  Jazza didn’t offer any reply, so I chimed in with, “A bitchweasel?”

  “A bitchweasel!” Jazza’s face lit up. “She’s a bitchweasel! I love my new roommate.”

  “She’s a bit of a lightweight,” Jerome explained. “And never let her have gin.”

  “Gin bad,” Jazza said. “Gin make Jazza barf.”

  Jazza sobered quickly on the way home, which was exactly when I felt the fizziness in my own head. I started to tell Jerome some of the stories I’d been telling Jazza the other night—Uncle Bick and Miss Gina, Billy Mack, Uncle Will. When he dropped us off on the steps under the large WOMEN sign over our door, he had a strange and unreadable look in his eye. Charlotte was sitting at the desk in our front lobby, a checklist and a Latin book in front of her.

  “Nice night?” she asked as we came in.

  “Wonderful,” Jazza said, a little too loudly. “And you?”

  For the first time, as I walked up the winding stairs, I felt like I was coming home for the night. I looked down the long stretch of our hallway, with its gray carpets and odd bends and multiple fire doors breaking the path, and it all seemed very familiar and right.

  The rest of the night was cozy. Jazza settled down with her German. I replied to some e-mails from my friends back home and noodled around on the Internet for a while and thought about doing French. Nothing disturbed my peace of mind until I was pulling the curtains for the night. As I did, something caught my eye. I had already yanked the curtain shut before my brain registered that it had seen something it didn’t like, but when I opened it again, there was nothing out there but some wet trees and cobblestones. It had started to rain. I stared for a moment, trying to figure out what I’d seen. Something had been right below—a person. Someone had been standing in front of the building. But that was no surprise. People stood in front of the building all the time.

  “What’s the matter?” Jazza asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, pulling the curtain shut again. “Thought I saw something.”

  “This is the problem with all of this media coverage of the Ripper. It makes people afraid.”

  She was right, of course. But I noticed she pulled the curtains on her side more tightly closed as well.

  GOULSTON STREET, EAST LONDON SEPTEMBER 8 9:20 P.M.

  VERONICA ATKINS SAT AT HER DESK IN HER TOP-FLOOR flat, overlooking the Flowers and Archers. She tucked one foot up on her chair and rotated slowly back and forth, then blindly reached around into the mess of bottles and cans and dirty mugs to put her hand on
her current cup of tea. Veronica was a freelance IT consultant and graphic designer. Her flat was her studio. The front room, the one that looked out over the Flowers and Archers, contained her worktable.

  Of course now was the deadline to get this website done, one of her biggest and most lucrative jobs of the year. The contract had no provision for lateness due to the fact that the Ripper chose to strike directly across the street, at her pub. In fact, she had installed the CCTV cameras at the pub after they had been robbed last year. Because she was friendly with the owner, she’d done it for a fraction of the normal cost. In return, he provided her with free drinks. Earlier in the day, she’d watched the police remove the recorder. They would be watching the results of her work . . .

  Didn’t matter. Nor did the sirens, the noise of the everincreasing numbers of police going in and out of the mobile lab parked outside of her building, the helicopter that flew overhead constantly, the police who came to her door to ask if she’d seen anything. Normally, she could wander out in her bleach-stained TALK NERDY TO ME T-shirt, her old tracksuit bottoms, her slippers, her pink and bleached blond hair piled into a messy knot on top of her head and secured with a plastic clamp meant to tie back computer wires. This was completely acceptable attire for grabbing a double espresso at Wakey Wakey. Today, she couldn’t even step outside because the whole area was roped off and all the world’s press was standing at the end of the road.

  Nope. No excuses. Either she finished today, or she didn’t get paid.

  As a concession to the event, she had the news on her muted television. Every once in a while, she would glance over and stare at aerial views of her own building, long shots of the front of her house. Once, she even caught a glimpse of herself in the window. She resolutely ignored the two dozen messages from friends and family, begging to know what was going on.