The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  And then we walked right into Claudia, who was adjusting a notice on the board in the front hall.

  “Going to bed?” she asked.

  “Yup,” I said.

  Jazza started hurrying up the steps, but I pinched the back of her fleece to slow her. Casual. Innocent. That’s how we had to look. We said nothing until we were safely in our room. We both went right for our beds without switching on the lights, as if light made you louder.

  “I think . . . it’s okay,” I said, sticking my legs straight up in the air and creating a teepee out of my blanket.

  Silence from Jazza’s side of the room, then a pillow made contact with my legs, knocking down my teepee. Jazza had a strong throwing arm. Then I heard a smothered giggle and what sounded like some kicking feet. I threw the pillow back and heard a little high-pitched squeal as it made contact.

  “Why did I go up on that roof?” she whispered happily. “I hope Charlotte finds out. I really do. I hope she hears, and I hope she swallows her own tongue.”

  Even through the dark, I knew she was smiling. I pulled out my phone and sent Jerome a text.

  The eagle has landed, I wrote. Operation successful.

  His reply came a moment later: Understood.

  Then a moment after that: Still no body.

  Then a moment after that: He’s hidden this one well.

  Then: See you tomorrow.

  Which was completely unnecessary, because of course he was going to see me tomorrow. He saw me every day. It was the kind of thing you said when you wanted to say something and that was the best you could do just to keep talking, keep the conversation going.

  I decided to do what they always say in romance columns—I didn’t reply. I grinned stupidly at my own suavity.

  “Who were you talking to when you were out there?” Jazza asked.

  “That guy,” I said.

  “What guy?”

  Jazza was instantly on the alert, sitting bolt upright.

  “The one who said good night to us.”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” Jazza said.

  This made no sense. There was no way Jazza could have missed him.

  “Who was it?” she asked urgently. “Someone from school?”

  “No,” I said. “Just some guy on the street.”

  “Are you joking? Because it’s not funny.”

  “I’m not,” I assured her. “He was just some random guy.”

  She slowly relaxed and settled back down.

  “So,” she said. “You and Jerome?”

  “What about us?” I asked as I looked up at the long rectangles of light coming in through the window and stretching along the wall. We hadn’t bothered to shut the curtains.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Do you like him?” she asked.

  “He hasn’t done anything,” I said.

  “But do you like him?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I replied.

  “Well, don’t think too hard.” Then I heard the giggling again, and another pillow made contact with the wall above my head and landed on my face.

  “No danger of that,” I said.

  13

  THE NEXT MORNING STARTED WAY TOO EARLY, WITH someone pounding wildly at our door.

  “You get it,” I mumbled into my pillow. “My legs fell off.”

  Grumbling and confusion from Jaz as she fell out of her bed and shuffled to the door. Charlotte was there, wrapped up in a fuzzy blue robe, looking shockingly awake.

  “There’s a school meeting in the dining hall at six,” she said. “Twenty minutes.”

  “School meeting?” I repeated.

  “You don’t have to put on your uniform. Just be over there.”

  Meeting in twenty minutes, at six A.M., that meant it was . . . morning math, morning math, morning math . . . five forty. The sun wasn’t even up. We had only gone to bed about three or four hours before.

  “What is this?” I asked as I fumbled around, looking for my shoes.

  “I have no idea,” Jazza said. She didn’t have time to mess around with her contacts, so she slapped on her glasses.

  “Are they really going to have some assembly at six in the morning?” I asked. “Isn’t that a crime against humanity?”

  “We have to be in trouble. Someone did something. We did something.”

  “They’re not having an assembly at six in the morning to yell at us, Jaz.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  It looked like the zombie apocalypse in the hall, everyone shambling toward the steps, looking confused, blank, deadeyed. One or two people had put on their uniforms, but mostly people wore sweatpants or pajamas. Jazza and I were of the pajama variety, with our PE fleeces on top for warmth and snuggle factor. Outside, it was one of those drizzly, it’s-rainingeven-though-it’s-not-raining English days I’d been getting used to. The cold and wet woke me up a little, but it was mostly the sight of the police . . . that, and the small white tent and work lights that had been erected in the middle of the green, and the people in the sterile suits that were coming in and out of it.

  “Oh, my God,” Jazza said, grabbing my arm. “Oh, my God, Rory, that’s . . .”

  It was one of those forensic tents, is what it was, like you saw in crime shows and news bulletins. Everyone processed this fact at the exact same moment. There was one large intake of breath, then a teetering hysteria that Claudia tried to shortcircuit by waving us into the dining hall with huge, semaphorelike motions.

  “Come on,” she said. “Come on, girls, come on, come on.”

  We allowed Claudia to herd us into the dining hall, which was full of people who had all just received this jolt of adrenaline. There was a lot of noise, people running from table to table, a lot of phone checking. All the faculty who lived nearby were there as well, sitting up on the dais, looking as surprised as the rest of us. When everyone had been shoved inside, the door was slammed shut loudly, and Mount Everest gave us an “all right, all right, quiet down,” which had very limited effect.

  “This is Detective Chief Inspector Simon Cole,” he yelled over the noise, “and he needs to speak with you. You will give him your full attention.”

  There was the man from the news, the suited and seriousfaced chief inspector, flanked by two uniformed officers. This was the real thing. That brought the silence down.

  “At two fifteen this morning,” the inspector began soberly, “a body was found in your school green. We believe this relates to an ongoing investigation, which you are probably aware of . . .”

  He didn’t say “Ripper.” He didn’t need to. A shock wave passed over the room—waves of people inhaling all at once, then a buzzing murmur and a scraping of benches as people turned around to look at each other.

  “Was it someone from Wexford?” a guy shouted.

  “No,” the inspector said. “It was not someone from your school. But this area is now a crime scene. You will not be permitted to cross the square while our forensic team is working. There will be a police presence here for several days. Today, several detectives will be stationed in the library, ready to take statements from any of you who saw anything out of the ordinary last night. We want to know if you saw or heard anything at all, no matter how unimportant it seems. Any people you saw. Any strange noises. Nothing is too trivial.”

  Mount Everest jumped in again.

  “Any of you who might be afraid of coming forward to the police because you were violating a school policy at the time . . . you will not be punished. Come forward and tell the police everything you know. There will be no repercussions from the school if you aid the police. Everyone will stay on school grounds today. We will arrange for breakfast items to be brought to your houses, so there will be no breakfast in the refectory today, in order to limit the amount of traffic through the green this morning. Lunch will go on as normal. If you have something to tell the police, step forward. And
remember, there is no reason for alarm.”

  We were dismissed. We’d only been there for a few minutes, but everything had changed. Everyone was awake and unsure. There was a lot of low, confused mumbling. But unlike every other time the entire school was assembled, no one was snickering or talking too loudly. Several more police were already by the refectory door, eyeing us all as we passed out of the building.

  I realized I was shaking when I stepped back inside Hawthorne. At first I thought I was cold, but it didn’t stop, even after I sat on the radiator for five minutes. Jazza was acting the same way, sitting on the heater on her side of the room. We sat there, in the half dark, perched awkwardly for several minutes.

  “What about the guy?” I finally asked her.

  Jazza looked at me, judging whether or not I was being serious.

  “Jaz, he was right behind me. He said good night. You’re sure you didn’t see or hear him?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I swear.”

  I bit my lip and ran through the memory again. It still didn’t make any sense, Jazza not seeing or hearing the guy. I knew I hadn’t imagined it.

  “I suppose I just wasn’t paying attention,” she said after a moment. “I was only looking at you. I was nervous. If you feel you have to . . .”

  She trailed off as the implication of this hit her.

  “If you feel you have to say something, you should,” she said, more firmly. “Even if it means . . .”

  “They said we wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  “Even if it did,” she said.

  It took me about ten minutes to get up the courage to go downstairs. Before I could leave the building, I had to check in with Call Me Claudia. She was in her office on the phone, roaring away to some equally loud friend of hers about what had happened the night before.

  “Yes, Aurora?”

  “I . . . saw something.”

  Claudia considered me for a moment.

  “Last night?” she asked.

  “Last night,” I repeated. I left the rest of the sentence alone while she considered this.

  “Well, then,” Claudia said. “You’d better go over to the library.”

  The activity outside had already increased. Police officers in fluorescent green jackets with reflective stripes were all over the place, putting up even more blue and white crime scene tape, marking off paths around the grounds. I continued past them, taking the long way around to the library. Two uniformed officers were stationed outside the doors. They admitted me. Another officer talked to me when I entered and escorted me to one of the worktables, where various people—I assumed more police officers—had already set up shop. These people were in normal clothes, suits and business wear. I was placed at a table, and a tall black woman with closely cropped hair and rimless glasses sat down across from me. She looked like she was in her twenties, but she wore a no-nonsense navy blue suit with a white blouse that made her seem older and more serious. She set down a few forms and a pen.

  “I’m DI Young,” she said politely. “What’s your name?”

  I told her my name.

  “American or Canadian?” she asked.

  “American.”

  “And you saw or heard something last night?”

  “I saw a man,” I said.

  She pulled out one of the forms and put it on a clipboard, so I couldn’t see what she was writing.

  “A man,” she said. “Where and when was this?”

  “I think it was two . . . just after two. It was right when everyone was looking for the fourth body. The fourth murder was supposed to be at one forty-five, right? Because we waited for a few minutes before we came back . . .”

  “Came back from where?”

  “We snuck out. Just to go over to Aldshot. Just for a little while.”

  “Who is we? Who was with you?”

  “My roommate,” I said.

  “And her name is?”

  “Julianne Benton.”

  DI Young wrote something else on her form.

  “So you and your roommate snuck out of your building . . .”

  I wanted to tell her to keep it down, but you can’t tell the police not to broadcast your business so you don’t get in trouble.

  “. . . and you saw a man just after two in the morning. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  She made another note.

  “And you’re sure of the time?”

  “Well,” I said, “the news kept saying that the fourth victim in 1888 was found at one forty-five. We were on the roof watching the news on Jerome’s computer—”

  “Jerome?” she asked.

  Now I’d gotten Jerome into it.

  “Jerome,” I repeated. “He lives in Aldshot.”

  “Exactly how many of you were there?”

  “Three,” I said. “Me, Jazza, and Jerome. We went to see Jerome in his building, and then the two of us came back.”

  More writing.

  “And you were watching the news at one forty-five.”

  “Right. And they . . . I mean, I guess, you . . . didn’t find a body. So we waited for a while, about ten minutes or so, then Jazza wanted to go home, because it was creepy. So we ran across the square—”

  “You crossed the square at two in the morning?”

  “Yes,” I said, shrinking in my chair.

  Detective Young pulled her chair in a little closer, and her expression grew a bit more serious. She nodded for me to go on.

  “We had just gotten to the back window of Hawthorne and were climbing in, and this guy walked around the corner of the building. And he asked if we were supposed to be doing that—climbing back in the window. And I said it was okay, because we went there. He was creepy.”

  “Creepy how?”

  The more I thought about it, the less I could explain why the guy was so creepy, aside from the fact that he was hanging around the school. There was just something about him that made my brain twitch and gave me the very strong feeling that he shouldn’t be there. The guy was just wrong in every way . . . but that is not an explanation.

  There’s something witnesses do that my parents had explained to me many times. Once witnesses find out that what they’ve seen might be important—that it might have something to do with a crime—their brains get out the crayons and start coloring things in, making things seem moody and suspicious and full of meaning when it’s entirely possible that nothing was going on. The noise in the night that you thought was a car backfiring is now clearly a gunshot. That guy you saw at the store at two in the morning buying lots of trash bags? At the time, you thought little of him. But now that he’s on trial for killing someone and chopping up the body in the tub, you remember that he was nervous and sweaty and shifty and maybe even splattered with blood. And you won’t be lying, either. The mind does this. It constantly rewrites our memories to accommodate new facts. This is why police and lawyers break people down to make sure witnesses report the facts and nothing but the facts.

  In short, I felt I should have been better at being questioned by the police. I’d practically been trained for this. What I’d seen was a guy walking past our window. He could have been completely innocent. But still, all I had was “creepy.” If pushed, I could add “icky.” Out of place. Incorrect.

  “Just . . . creepy.”

  “Then what happened?” she asked.

  “He said something about how we shouldn’t be out, and then Jazza came to the window and helped me inside.”

  “And what happened to the man?”

  “He walked away.”

  “What did he look like?” she asked.

  “He was, I don’t know . . .”

  What did people look like? Suddenly I didn’t know how to describe anything.

  “He was in a suit. A gray suit. And it was kind of weird . . .”

  “In what way?”

  “It just looked . . . weird. Old—”

>   “He was an old man?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “His suit looked kind of old . . . ish.”

  “In what way? Was it very worn?”

  “No,” I said. “It looked new, but old. Just . . . I . . . I don’t know much about suits. Not super old. Not, like, historic. Kind of like . . . something on Frasier? Or Seinfeld or something? You know, the show? It was like a suit out of a nineties sitcom. The jacket was kind of long and big.”

  She hesitated, then wrote this down.

  “Right, then,” she said patiently. “How old would you say he was?”

  I imagined Uncle Bick, without his beard, maybe forty pounds lighter, in a suit. That was about right. Uncle Bick was thirty-eight or thirty-nine.

  “Thirties, maybe? Forty?”

  “All right. Hair color?”

  “No hair,” I said quickly. “Bald.”

  We ran through every option—tall, short, fat, thin, glasses, facial hair. In the end, I painted a portrait of a man of average height and weight, with no facial hair or distinguishing characteristics, who was bald and wore a suit that seemed to me a little out of date. And since it was dark and “crazy” isn’t an accepted eye color, I couldn’t help much on that front either.

  “Stay here for just a moment,” she said.

  She went away. I shivered and looked around. A few of the officers who were working in the library glanced over at me as I sat alone at the table. No one else, it seemed, had come in to report anything. It was just me. When she returned, she was wearing a tan raincoat and she had Inspector Cole with her. Up on the dais, Inspector Cole looked much younger. Up close, I could see fine wrinkles around his eyes. He had a steady, unwavering stare.

  “We’d like you to show us exactly where you saw this man,” she said.

  Two minutes later, we were on the sidewalk outside Hawthorne, staring up at the bathroom window. The screws were still on the ground. It was only now that I realized that we’d left our entire building vulnerable. A sloshy, queasy feeling came over me.

  “So,” DI Young said, “show us exactly where you were.”

  I positioned myself right under the window.

  “And where was the man?” she asked.