“I’ll make it up to you,” he said.
“I doubt that.”
I pulled my coat further around me as a chill came through the glass of the window. Jack could keep the cat so long as we left the house before anymore unexpected visitors popped up.
“Can we get out of here now?” I said. “There’s nothing to find.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He tucked the cat beneath his sweatshirt to keep it warm before stepping out into the hallway. I followed him quickly, glad to be getting out of the house. The horrid weather outside was far more inviting than any of the rooms inside the dead woman’s residence. When we stepped out onto the front steps and shut the door behind us, I instinctively reached for my keys to lock it as though we were leaving our dorm room. When my hand slipped into my pocket, however, there was nothing there.
“What?” Jack asked me, turning back to face me when I didn’t follow him down the steps.
“I don’t have my keys,” I said.
He shook his head.
“You’re getting as bad as me,” he commented.
I patted down my pockets even though I knew that they had been in the right side of my pants. Swearing into the cold, I looked back at Jack imploringly.
“Do you still have yours?”
“Yeah, on my bedside table.”
“Jack! Why’d you leave them there?”
He shrugged guiltlessly.
“I figured you had yours,” he said. “How was I supposed to know you’d lose them?”
I sighed and searched my pockets again, but the keys were gone.
“Well, you had them when you left, right?” Jack said, noticing the distress on my face. “So you must have dropped them somewhere between here and Bickerby. We’ll just take the same path back.”
“We’ll never find them in the snow.”
“We might.” He sighed and patted the cat’s head absentmindedly. “It’s not like you to lose things.”
“I know. I don’t know how I could’ve ...”
I stopped midsentence as it occurred to me that I would have noticed if I had dropped the keys on our walk into town because I had had my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. The cat stared at me with its pale eyes and I narrowed my own at it. I must have dropped them up in Miss Mercier’s room when I had jumped back and crashed into the table.
I turned back to the door and went inside. Jack followed me, and together we went back up the creaking wooden stairs and into the delicately decorated bedroom. Crouching on the floor, I began to pick up the picture frames that had toppled over and replaced them in the general order that they had been on the table. A few of the frames had cracked, and one had completely shattered. I carefully swept the glass shards into a pile, feeling guilty at the destruction even though Miss Mercier would never know that it had happened.
“Find them?” Jack asked from behind me.
“Yeah, they’re right ...”
I reached out to grab the key ring that was near the back leg of the table when something else caught my eye. Frowning, I stopped and picked it up instead.
“Is this yours?”
“No. What is it?”
He stooped next to me and peered at what I was holding. It was a folded piece of standard printer paper that appeared to have something written on it. It must have been tucked behind the photograph that’s frame had broken.
“I’ll just put it back, then,” I said, but Jack reached forward and grabbed my wrist.
“No, what if it’s something important?”
“What if it’s something private?” I countered. “You know, seeing as it was hidden and all.”
“I don’t think she’d mind,” Jack said. “Just take a look. If it looks private, we’ll put it back.”
I sighed and looked down at the paper, grinding my teeth subconsciously as I did so. It didn’t sit well with me to go through Miss Mercier’s things, but Jack was looking at me expectantly and I was reminded of the reason that we had come all the way out to the house in the first place, so I gently unfolded it. I wasn’t quite sure what I had expected – perhaps something as provoking as an old letter or as dull as receipt for the frame – but I was surprised when I saw what was written inside. It was a list, neatly printed in dark ink, of names.
“What …?” I murmured as I read through them. Looking sideways at Jack, I raised my eyebrow. “What is this? Friends of hers?”
“Why would she keep a list of her friends’ names hidden?” Jack said.
“I don’t know,” I said. I held the paper up to his face. “Do you recognize any of them?”
He shook his head slowly.
“Could they be students of hers?”
“No,” Jack said. “Look – they’re all girls’ names.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well … could it be …” I didn’t finish, for my train of thought ended. I couldn’t think of any plausible explanation as to why Miss Mercier would hide a list of names – or why anyone would, for that matter. “Why would someone hide something like this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe … I mean, a guy might have a list of girlfriends, but not a woman.”
“It doesn’t really make sense for her to have it, then,” I said.
“Unless it’s not her list.”
I looked up at him warily.
“What are you saying?” I said. “That Miss Mercier was blackmailing someone?”
Jack’s gaze shifted. Staring at the wall, he became engrossed in his thoughts. The cat mewed and wriggled under his jacket, but he appeared not to notice.
“Maybe she was,” he said.
Even without knowing Miss Mercier, I could hardly believe that she would do anything of the sort.
“Come on, why would she do that? I mean, apart from wanting money.”
“She must’ve had a reason … I mean, a good reason.”
“Such as?”
He hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he said, scratching the back of his head uneasily. “But, I mean, it makes some sense, doesn’t it?”
“Not really.”
“Think about it, Nim: obviously someone killed her, right? What we have to figure out is why.”
“Maybe she was mugged, or raped, or ...”
“But she wasn’t. She was hacked to pieces.”
“All right, so someone really hated her.”
“But this was Miss Mercier,” he protested. “Everyone loved her. Everyone.”
I ran a hand through my hair as I debated what to think. On the one hand, what he was suggesting made sense with what we knew; yet on the other, his explanation was even ludicrous compared with some of the other theories he had invented over the years.
“So what do you think?” I asked. “That she was singled out? For what reason?”
He plucked the paper from my hand and waved it in the air between us.
“I think it has to do with this.”
“We don’t even know what that is,” I protested.
“Not yet, but we will.”
“But ...”
My voice petered out; the sound was overtaken by the crashing of wind against the windows. It had begun to snow again.
We wandered back out of the house and through the town beneath the snow. The sky was white above us and echoed the sound of the cat’s mews from Jack’s arms. The strained sound of it was horrible to listen to: the desperation cut through the air worse than the cold did.
When we had returned to the room, Jack laid it gently upon his bed. It blinked slowly at the wall and turned away from us. Jack sat beside it and pulled out the list of girls’ names again.
“Amy Davis,” he said aloud, “Rebecca King. Megan Cook. Take a look at this again, Nim: any of them sound familiar?”
“They all sound familiar,” I said, glancing down at the list as he held it out to me. “They’re generic enough names. Well, except maybe Katie DuPont.”
“DuPont, Nim.”
“Right.”
“Allison Hall,” he murmured. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“There was an Alan Hall who graduated last year. He lived in our building.”
I sat down on my bed and pulled my loafers off gingerly; my feet were caked with ice from the walk to town and throbbed from the cold. I reminded myself to ask Karl for another pair of boat shoes before remembering how angry I was with him; I resigned to wait out the winter in discomfort.
“No, Allison Hall sounds familiar, I’m positive,” Jack said. “I just read it somewhere.”
“Maybe in a book.”
“A book? When was the last time I read a book?”
I glanced up at him and shook my head. It was a wonder that I was the one on academic probation.
“Alright, a newspaper article, then,” I said, eyeing the ones that he had clipped and pinned up next to his bed distastefully. “It’s a common name – it’s bound to sound familiar. You’ve probably heard of someone called Allison Hall before.”
“Where? At my grandmother’s bridge game? It’s not like there’s a surplus of women around here.”
“But that’s here,” I said. “Miss Mercier didn’t spend all her time at Bickerby; she must’ve known people in town – and they were probably women.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“But she did spend all her time here,” he said. “It’s not like she had a knitting circle or something that she went to weekly, or a bunch of friends in town. All her friends were back home.”
“She must have had some friends here,” I protested. “This was Miss Mercier – she got along with everyone.”
“Getting along with people is different than having friends. She wasn’t close to anyone here – she was lonely.”
I eyed him carefully, wondering how he knew something so private, before deciding to let it go.
“Well, maybe that’s a list of people one of her colleagues gave her of people she might like to hang out with.”
“And she hid it behind a picture of her family?”
“Maybe she was embarrassed ... She couldn’t have wanted everyone to know that she was lonely.”
Jack wasn’t convinced. Admittedly, I wasn’t either, but I was anxious to go over the questions that Volkov had shown us in class the other day that would be on the exam. Looking down at them, I realized that I should have taken Cabail’s advice and paid attention to how they were solved. I half-wished that I could find him so that he could show me how to do them, but he was never in library and I didn’t know which residence building was his.
“I know I’ve heard it before,” Jack repeated.
He continued to mutter to himself for the next hour. Realizing that I would never get any studying done as long as he was awake, I set my book down and decided to get some coffee while the dining hall was still open.
“Want to go to dinner?”
“You go. I’m not hungry.”
“Really?” I asked in disbelief. “That’s a first.”
I gingerly shuffled over to the door in the soaked loafers.
“Hey, Nim – can you bring back some fish?”
“I thought you weren’t hungry,” I said.
“Not for me, for Dictionary.”
“For what?”
“For Dictionary,” he repeated, pointing to the cat.
I eyed it warily before looking back at him.
“Jack, you can’t name the cat Dictionary,” I said.
“Why not? This way whenever we’re talking about her, no one will think anything of it.”
“Yes, they will,” I argued, wondering what Sanders would think if he heard me say that I was getting food for a reference book. “And you can’t name it, because we’re not keeping it.”
“Chicken’s fine, too,” he said. “Whatever looks best.”
I sighed and shut the door with the realization that he wouldn’t change his mind and made my way to the dining hall alone. The selection of food looked worse than ever, and I carefully wrapped what I could only assume was meat in a napkin before slipping it in my pocket and going to get my coffee.
I hovered beneath one of the lights outside of a building and took a sip, afraid that I would spill it if I tried to walk all the way back to the residence building. The light on the building went off after a moment of inactivity and I had to wave my arm to get it to turn on again. The darkness made me all the more aware of the sound of the ocean in the distance. It sounded like death.
“You shouldn’t think about it.”
A movement in the corner of my eye made me jump and I dropped the styrofoam cup: the hot coffee hit the icy path and melted a thin circle away.
Cabail Ibbot watched me carelessly from the other side of the path, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had startled me.
“What are you doing?” I said irritably, shaking my hand where the liquid had burned it.
“Nothing.”
He was even odder there than he was in Physics. He peered over at me through his huge round glasses, and I felt rather like a specimen stuck in a slide under his microscope. It was a wonder that I had ever considered studying with him.
“You and Jack are up to no good,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He could have been referring to a number of things, though I had the sinking suspicion that he, at least, had noticed us sneaking into town that morning. I glanced around us cautiously to ensure that we were alone.
“You should really leave it alone,” he said.
“Leave what alone?”
He turned his head slowly to the side.
“What you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “But maybe you should leave me alone, Cabail – you shouldn’t sneak up on people in the dark.”
I turned and hurried back to my residence building before he could get the chance to outright accuse me of breaking Bickerby rules. Though I didn’t think that he was after the answers to exams, his warning disconcerted me just as much as Thomas’ threat had.
I fumbled with the keys as I tried to get back inside the residence building. Apart from being cold to the point of frostbite, one of my hands was now scalded from the hot coffee as well. As I stood trying to open the door, the sound of piano music was just audible over the howling wind. I banged on the door as it grew louder in the distance, and Josh Brody hurried over to let me in.
“Thanks,” I said, rushing past him to the stairwell before he could ask me what my hurry was. The music faded away halfway up the staircase, but my unease stayed put. It wasn’t until I was back in the room that I realized I was shaking all over. Edging towards the bed, I leaned against the mattress as my legs went numb beneath me.
“You know, you might be right: I could have read the name in the paper,” Jack was saying from across the room, “though I can’t figure out why I would’ve been reading local news before this happened ...”
My stomach heaved and I dropped to the floor, retching onto the carpet before I could think to run down the hallway to the bathroom. The room was spinning hazily about me and my head was incomprehensibly heavy. As it fell forward from the weight, Jack hopped up from his bed to grab my shoulders and keep me from slumping forward into the vomit.
“Are you all right?” he asked as I leaned my head against the edge of the mattress instead. It was pounding harder than ever and my vision was blotched with black. I couldn’t think to answer him.
He heaved me up onto the bed and I flopped across it sideways. As a chill came over the room, I tucked my legs up and shivered against the cold comforter. Jack pulled the one from his own bed over to lay across me. It was thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and heavily wrinkled, but substantially warmer than mine was. I pulled it further around me and waited for the room to stop moving.
“Want me to run down to the Health Center?
” he asked.
I jerked my head to the side in a reply. Though it was much too early, he flicked off the lights to let me sleep, though the cat’s yellow eyes glowered at me through the darkness. I pulled the comforter over my head to shield them from view.
When the chill finally lifted from my skin and my breathing became calmer, I relaxed a bit beneath the covers. My jaw was sore from how harshly my teeth had been chattering, but the headache had dulled enough to allow me to think again. I exhaled against the mattress and let my eyes flicker shut.
I awoke the next morning when Jack came back into the room. He set a cup of coffee and a bagel down on the bedside table before crouching down to see if I was awake.
“Rise and shine, Nim,” he said cheerfully. I looked at the clock and saw that it was well past ten. “Sleep well?”
I slurred a response as I sat up, careful to do so slowly so as to keep myself from being sick again.
“Thanks,” I mumbled out at last.
“No problem. I figure I owe you, and all, seeing as you’ve been cleaning up after me puking for five or so years ...”
I reached for the coffee with a heavy, clumsy hand and managed to wrap my fingers around it after a moment or so. When I brought it to my mouth to take a sip, however, I saw that he had brought me tea instead.
I groaned.
“Trust me, Nim: you don’t want to drink a cup of coffee on an empty stomach. You’ll just puke again.” When I only stared down into the cup with distaste, he added, “Just drink it: it’s caffeinated.”
I knew that it wasn’t. The tea was the familiar smell of sweet-peppermint that my mother used to drink. She had put her mug on the top of the piano to cool so often that there had been a permanent ring on the polished black. I took a sip of it as I thought of her, but the taste was acrid on my tongue. I put the cup back on the bedside table.
“Feeling any better from last night?” Jack asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “It’s probably just ... something I ate.”
“Could be. I was going to see if I could figure this list out some more,” he said, waving the paper in his hands. “I thought I’d run down to Miss Mercier’s office – she might have something in there, too.”
I nodded without registering what he had said.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 14