“Of course I know what an expression is!”
“Right. Good, then – so you know that what I meant was that I wanted to tell Nim something. You know, ‘let the cat out of the bag.’”
He rolled his eyes in a well-feigned ridicule of Sanders’ logic. Sanders, however, didn’t look convinced.
“I think I ought to check your bag, just to make sure,” he said.
“That’s definitely not necessary, but thanks anyhow, Sanders.”
“I think it is – for the safety of everyone on this floor.”
“Safety? What’s unsafe about a figure of speech?”
“Nothing – but if you actually have a cat in your bag –”
“Why would I have a cat in my bag?”
“Don’t ask me, Hadler! I’m not the one who has a sick fascination with dead animals! Who knows what you and Lund are doing inside that room?”
Jack smirked mischievously.
“All sorts of things – but not with dead animals.”
As Sanders made a face, I quickly unlocked the door to the dorm room and pulled Jack inside.
“Bye, Sanders.”
“Wait a minute – I want to check your bag!”
“You’ll have to get a teacher’s permission first.”
The door swung shut on his face. We waited a few moments until his irritated mumbling and stomping footsteps had receded down the hallway, and then Jack set his bag down and opened it to let Dictionary out. She bolted twice around the room and settled underneath the dresser.
Jack peered at her anxiously.
“Hope she’s okay – she’s been in there all morning,” he said. “I was afraid she’d suffocate.”
“Too bad she didn’t,” I murmured. As he gave me a withering glare, I quickly added, “Just kidding. Your grandmother didn’t notice you got a cat?”
“Her eyesight’s about as drained and pitiful as her heart, thank God.”
“Hear, hear.” I sat back on my bed and observed him as he pulled a stack of papers from his bag. “What’s all that?”
“Research. Evidence. The works.” His eyes lit up maniacally and he ran a hand through his hair feverishly as he began to sort through them. “I’ve been dying to tell you about the list. You’ll never believe –”
He had barely begun to speak when the door reopened and Sanders stepped into the room importantly. My eyes shifted to the dark space beneath his dresser: Dictionary’s eyes glowered faintly from the depths.
“Did you really get a warrant to search my bag?” Jack asked, looking up from the mess of papers in front of him.
“Not yet. I’m supposed to tell Lund to go to dinner.”
He looked at me pointedly and my jaw clenched.
“Right. Thanks Sanders. I’ll go down now,” I said.
He fidgeted as though he had expected relaying the command to be a larger role, but then nodded and backed from the room again. When the door shut, Jack turned to look at me.
“What’s that all about?”
“Karl. He’s ... he wants to make sure I follow his schedule.”
“What? He’s having you watched? Great Christmas present.”
“You’re telling me.”
“I knew he was a control freak, but really – is he going to have someone escort you to classes, too? What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said too quickly. “He’s worried because of the academic probation. He wants to make sure I stay out of trouble.”
“What? Did he finally get tired of writing checks to Barker?”
“I guess so.”
Jack continued to complain about Karl as we headed to dinner. I could only catch snippets of what he was saying: the wind had picked up again and was sending a clattering of noises through the dead trees all around. By the time we had ducked into the dining hall, my hands were raw from the intense chill and my teeth were chattering too loudly to hear him at all.
We stepped over to the line and I hastily poured myself a cup of coffee to warm my hands. No sooner had I cupped it between my frozen fingers, however, than a voice sounded to my left.
“You’re going to need more than that, dear.”
I glanced up at the owner of the voice with a wary expression. It was one of the kitchen-personnel who generally never spoke to students. Her face was an ugly pout as she looked at me, and the expression was only made more reproachful by how tightly her hair was pulled back to hide beneath a hairnet. I moved the coffee back down from my lips and looked up at her.
“Okay,” I said.
I stepped back down the line to retrieve a tray. As I did so, she mirrored my movements behind the counter.
“You’ll need to take a main dish and two sides, at least,” she told me.
I eyed her guardedly as she dictated the new rules and quickly took the first three choices before anyone could overhear the conversation.
“You weren’t kidding,” Jack said as I sat down. “Big Brother is watching.”
“He certainly is.”
“Or, in this case, little brother.” He took a bite of his food and raised his eyebrows at me. “The kitchen staff looks delighted – this is more power than they’ve had over students in years.”
A faculty member who was circling the hall had come over to stand a few feet from our table. I picked up my fork and looked down at the hastily chosen meal, which appeared to be some sort of casserole. My stomach turned unpleasantly, but I speared a few pieces of pasta and raised the fork to my mouth to nibble it idly: the taste was acrid on my tongue.
“What do you suppose happens if you don’t eat anything?” Jack asked after a moment. “Karl sends the secret police in after you?”
“More than likely.”
“It’s just weird that he’d finally start paying attention after all this time,” he said. He eyed me carefully. “Did ... I mean, were the holidays alright for you?”
The food in my mouth turned to lead at the question. As I struggled to choke it down, the hand holding my fork began to shake for no reason. I pressed it into the table to still it.
“It was fine.”
I feigned indifference as I took another bite, all too aware that Jack was watching me closely. He took another few bites of his dinner and chewed it slowly as he considered something.
“Put it in your milk carton,” he said.
“What?”
“The food.” He swallowed a mouthful of potato and indicated to my tray. “Quick, before O’Brien comes back. Spoon it into your milk carton – they won’t know.”
I threw him a grateful look and did as he suggested. The food sank heavily into the white liquid and disappeared from sight.
“This really is awful; it’s almost too bad for me to eat,” Jack said. He took another bite and gave me an impish smirk. “Almost.”
He finished eating and scooped the remains of the dish into a napkin for Dictionary. Upon returning to the dorm room, he locked the door and shoved the desk chair in front of it. When he was certain that Sanders couldn’t easily get in, he took out the papers he had hidden about Miss Mercier and began to sort through them. As I moved forward to see what they were, though, he shooed me away.
“Wait – you can’t look at it yet. I have to set it up.”
He waved me back to my bed and set about laying the papers in their intended order. As I sat down to wait for him to finish, Dictionary began to paw at the scraps of dinner with an offended expression on her face. I felt the slightest bit of fondness for her as she did so: if nothing else, she had some sense.
“Jack,” I said after a half-hour had passed and he stepped back again to examine his papers, “I’m sure I’ll get the point regardless of the layout …”
“Shh, I’m thinking.”
I rolled my eyes at his back and shook my head. With the amount of time that he had taken, I could have read a chapter of Jane Eyre for Doyle’s class. Just as I reached for it, though, he stood back and spoke.
“All right – done.”
&
nbsp; “Finally.”
I stood and went to his bed to peer at the papers, which were a combination of maps, newspaper clippings, printouts, and what appeared to be the portraits of several girls.
“What is all this …?”
“Hold on, you can’t look at it yet,” he said, catching my arm and steering me away again.
“What? I waited all that time for you to lay it out only to not be able to look at it?”
“You’ll look at it soon enough,” he said. “But you won’t understand it until I fill you in on the backstory.”
“How long will that take?”
Jack gave me a look and I muttered in agreement. When I had returned to my bed and sat down, he moved to stand in front of me with the same feverish look of excitement on his face that he had whenever he was up to something or introducing one of his wild theories.
“All right, so I spent the last two weeks going over everything,” he began, “and I was right.”
“About?”
“About this being bigger than what they told us – way bigger.”
He came forward to sit on the bed next to me; his expression was one of uninhibited fervor.
“Alright, so Miss Mercier died on October fourteenth,” he said. “Now, here’s where it gets interesting: she was killed in the middle of the woods, halfway between where she lives and Bickerby.”
“There’s nothing interesting about that. She was walking home from work.”
“But she wasn’t. The newspapers say that she died on the fourteenth, which was a Friday, but she never made it to class that day. That means that she was killed sometime after midnight. What was she doing walking around after dark, in the woods, and all alone?”
“Taking a walk? Clearing her head?”
“Women don’t take walks at night to clear their heads, Nim. They’re not men – if something’s bothering them they call their friends and talk about it. And they definitely know better than to walk around after dark.”
“Well, maybe she didn’t. It’s a small town, after all, and …”
“Stop interrupting – there’s more to it than that,” Jack said. “So she was killed halfway between her house and Bickerby, what does that tell you?”
“That she was walking home,” I said. “Really, really late at night.”
“But she wasn’t,” Jack said. “She had already been home – her dinner was on the table, her bag was hanging by the door. Even her shoes were there.”
“So ... she was walking back to Bickerby?”
“No – I just said that she was halfway through making dinner when she left the house again. She went out without anything – even her shoes.”
“Why would someone run out without their shoes?”
“You just said it: she was running.”
As I thought of the shoes that we had seen toppled over in her bedroom and how painful it would be to cross the woods with the amount of pine needles on the ground, my teeth began to grind.
“But …” I began, “what happened between the time school ended and when she got home? I can’t imagine she normally ate dinner so late at night.”
“No, she had a meeting that ran over,” Jack said. “So she got home late and went to make dinner when something happened that drove her back out of the house.”
“And do you know what that something was?”
“Not specifically, no. But there was definitely something going on.”
He sprung up from the bed and went over to his own. I waited to see if he wanted me to follow or not.
“You know that list of names we found at her house?” he asked. “Well, I looked up all of them. And do you know what I found?”
“No.”
“Do you want to guess?”
“Not really.”
“Fine. A pattern.”
I blinked, looking at him with raised eyebrows, and said, “A pattern? What’s that mean, they were all part of a quilting circle?”
An image of a group of elderly women swapping fabric crossed my mind, and I was prepared for him to tell me that Miss Mercier was part of a local quilting club that he believed was involved in her murder. I smiled to myself as I realized how much I had missed his conspiracies.
“Of course not, Nim,” he said. “A pattern – as in, a bunch of things that all have something in common. The names all belonged to girls in town.”
“Unsurprisingly.”
“They were all girls, aged fifteen to eighteen – who disappeared.”
My expression faltered and I stared at him curiously.
“Disappeared and what?”
“What do you mean, ‘and what?’ They disappeared and they were never seen again.”
“But Jack,” I said reasonably, “that doesn’t make sense. Girls just don’t disappear. People would wonder. Their parents would do something –”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Only when I looked all of them up, I found the same story: ‘local girl runs away from home, police confident she’ll return by Tuesday …’” He turned to his bed and picked up one of the sheets of paper with a girl’s photo printed on it. “Let’s see, this one disappeared last March. There’s a two-line blurb about her in the weekly, then nothing more is said. This one went in September – her parents at least sounded worried – this one was in June, this one was –”
“Wait a minute, how many names were on that list?”
Jack scanned the bed and counted them out.
“Eight.”
“Eight?” I said outrageously. “Eight girls went missing from the same town, and no one thought there was anything weird going on?”
“No one but Miss Mercier, apparently,” he said. “The newspaper labels it as – wait, let me get the quote – ‘an epidemic of girls running away from home.’ They’re putting it down to the explanation that the girls left to chase some unknown and unspoken-of dreams.”
“But Jack,” I said again as the feeling of unsettlement rose, “it just doesn’t make sense. A bunch of girls’ disappearances doesn’t go unnoticed.”
“Why not?”
“Because – somebody can’t just disappear: people would notice!”
A slow smile stretched across his face despite the fact that there was nothing amusing about what he was saying.
“That’s just it, Nim,” he said. “Somebody can’t disappear. But nobody ... nobodies can disappear.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just what I said. Important people can’t fall off the face of the earth – numerous people would wonder where they’d gone. Hell, you can’t even skip breakfast without Karl sending someone looking for you. But the same doesn’t go for the rest of us. There are plenty of people in the world who are as good as nobody – who have little existence and even less importance as far as anyone else is concerned. Who’s going to notice if they’re not on their couch one afternoon watching their favorite sitcom, or not putting a frozen meal into a microwave? Who really cares?”
I bit my lip; Jack gave me a knowing look.
“Come on, Nim,” he said. “You don’t get it – it’s a foreign concept to you to think that somebody might actually be able to disappear and not be missed. But for a lot of people – and especially a lot of people around here – it’s not.”
“Yeah, but we’re not talking about sixty-something-year-old hermits, here, we’re talking about teenagers. Ones who live with their parents and go to school with plenty of people who would miss them.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Just because someone is surrounded by people doesn’t mean that they’ll be missed. Look at me: I could get up and leave right now, and who do you think would care? Barker? Sanders? My lab partner? They wouldn’t give me a second thought, and they certainly wouldn’t go out looking for me. No one would.”
“I would,” I said.
“Yeah, but one person’s not going to compel a search party. In all the time we’ve been here – while these disappearances took place – there’s only
been one search party. And that was for Miss Mercier.”
We fell silent. As I thought of the search party that we had watched with interest from the dorm room window, it felt very far away. The holidays had severed a breach between the two semesters impossible to bridge.
“So a bunch of girls go missing and Miss Mercier’s the only one who thinks something might have happened to them,” I said. “And then she gets killed.”
“Yep. Seemingly for no reason, as far as the police are concerned. And then ...”
He trailed off and waved me over to his bed to look at the expanse of papers that he had collected. There were a few maps of the area, several photos, and dozens of newspaper articles. My eyes scanned over the pictures of the missing girls’ faces: they smiled up at the camera happily.
I turned to look over the newspaper clippings that he had gathered on Miss Mercier. There was more information on her than all the other girls combined. He had researched and compiled every event from her entire time at Bickerby and set them up in chronological order, even though most of them were undoubtedly not related to her death in any way.
My eyes paused on one of the pictures of the girls who had been separated from the rest of the group and who had a few extra newspaper clippings attached to her.
“That’s Sarah Hayes, the one from October.”
The girl smiled up at me with a flushed, enthused look on her face. She was holding a ribbon that she had won at a sporting event, and there was an arm around her shoulder that belonged to a proud coach or parent.
“She went missing like the rest of them, only her father refused to believe that she’d run away,” Jack said. “Apparently she was really excited about placing in a state track meet and was hoping to get a scholarship. Anyway, he said that she’d gone for a run after school and never returned. He thought that maybe she’d gotten hurt and wanted a search party sent out.”
“But?”
“But the police didn’t take him very seriously, so he went out looking for her with some of his friends and other fathers in the area. They didn’t find her, but a few days later she washed up on the Bickerby shore.” He paused and looked at me. “I wouldn’t read their statement if I were you. It’s pretty detailed.”
I felt a knot twisting in my stomach and put the photograph back down.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 20