Waking the Moon (24 page)

“Oliver,” I repeated, rubbing my eyes. “You’re up so early.”

“Didn’t go to sleep.” He bounced past me into the dorm, squeezing my shoulder and grinning. “Went back and had a little taste from Wild Bill’s terrarium.” I shuddered and pulled the door closed after him.

In the hall he paused to read one of Balthazar Warnick’s flyers. “Well!” he said cheerfully, “It’s the day after tomorrow, so I guess we still have time to pack.”

I yawned. “Pack?”

Oliver nodded. Carefully he detached the flyer, rolling it into a little cylinder and sticking it in a pocket. “There’s only a limited amount of space for these things, we should sign up now.” He turned and began walking back to the front door.

“Oliver, it’s 5:00
A.M.
! And the retreat’s not till Friday—”

He stopped and regarded me thoughtfully. I had on another pair of ripped jeans, but I hadn’t washed off my makeup, and I was wearing the same T-shirt I’d had on for three days now. “Then perhaps you’ll have time to do your laundry,” he said mildly, and grabbed my arm.
“Come
on—”

The nightmarish thought of a weekend under Professor Warnick’s tutelage was eased by the notion that I might finally have some time alone, really alone, with Oliver. We found a sign-up sheet in the empty foyer of Thaddeus College, and he was right—only a few spaces were left, and my heart jumped to see that Angelica’s name was not there. But after fastidiously writing his name and mine in spidery letters, Oliver added
Angelica de Rienzi
to one of the remaining lines.

“Wait,” I said, and wrote
Anne Harmon.
“There—”

Two days later, Annie and Angelica and I were in the parking lot of Thaddeus College. I was wearing one of Oliver’s shirts, too big for me and infused with the musty marijuana scent of his room. Annie had on a red flannel shirt and beat-up tweed jacket that Baby Joe had given her. She was so small and compact that her guitar case looked incongruously large, like a cello carried by an earnest mouse. Angelica wore yet another gauzy flowered dress under a light woolen cape, her hair tied back with a green velvet ribbon.

“A weekend in the country
…” she sang. Annie rolled her eyes.

A small crowd milled outside Thaddeus College. Beside a battered Volvo wagon Balthazar Warnick stood and read aloud from a list of names. I slunk behind Angelica and Annie and did my best to avoid catching his eye. Angelica checked us in and we waited for instructions. I dropped my knapsack and peered into the Volvo. Mounds of boxes and coolers rose from its back compartment, and I was relieved to see a number of gallon jugs of red wine. Several other vehicles arrived and were poised for flight, motors running, drivers cranking up tape players and radios. I saw Baby Joe and his friend Hasel Bright leaning on Hasel’s ancient Volkswagen bug. When they saw us, Hasel saluted Angelica with a Jack Daniels bottle.

“Avanti, Angelica! I want you to have my love child—”

Angelica smiled indulgently and blew him a kiss. People began tossing last bits of luggage into trunks and clambering into cars. The caravan was ready to go, but there was still no sign of Oliver. Angelica walked over to Balthazar Warnick, Annie and I trailing reluctantly behind her.

“Professor Warnick, someone else is coming,” said Angelica. “Oliver Crawford—”

Balthazar Warnick lifted his head to regard her coolly.

“Mr. Crawford seems to be carrying on a family tradition of holding everyone up,” he began, when Oliver came loping across the parking lot.

“Oliver!” cried Angelica. “We almost left without you!”

Oliver shoved his hands into his pockets. “Oh surely not.” He bowed, then draped his arm over Angelica’s shoulder. “Here I am.”

“All right. That’s everyone, then—” Professor Warnick folded his list and stuck it into his jacket. “Mr. Crawford, perhaps you would give me the great honor of riding with me—I want to hear how your brothers are doing, and how you have been spending your time away from my class—”

Oliver smoothed his hair back and tugged at his shirt collar.

“Yes, Professor,” he said, bowing. He was so loose-limbed, his pupils so dilated, that he looked like an Oliver rag doll with black-button eyes. “I’ll give a—uh—full report.”

“Come on, then.” Professor Warnick opened the front door of the Volvo and shooed Oliver inside. “You too, my dear—” He gestured for Angelica to follow.

“Don’t forget our bags!” Angelica called to Annie. I watched in chagrined disbelief as Oliver kissed her cheek.

Annie nodded in disgust. “Yes, Mistress! Igor obeys—” She turned to me and cocked a thumb at Angelica’s bags. “Mind giving me a hand?”

I sighed. “Yeah, sure.” With a sick feeling I watched Balthazar Warnick climb into the car with Oliver and Angelica. Then I hefted one of Angelica’s leather suitcases, grunting.

“Jeez, what’s
in
here? The True Cross?”

“Books on witchcraft,” said Annie, “and the entire fall line of Mary Quant makeup.”

I stared at the bag despairingly, “Why are we
doing
this, Annie? I mean, there’s Warnick, and—”

Annie actually went white. “Why are we
doing
this? We are doing this because for some
insane
reason you and Oliver
signed us up
—”

“I signed
me
up! I wanted to be
alone
with him for once, without—”

“Last train for Debarksville, girls,” someone shouted.

“Forget it,” fumed Annie. “Let’s go.”

We found two empty seats in the back of a Dodge Dart piloted by a dour young seminarian. I slumped in my seat and stared disconsolately out to where Oliver and Angelica sat laughing in the front of the lead car. Behind them Hasel’s VW rocked dangerously back and forth. Then there was a break in the traffic, and the two cars careened out of sight in a cloud of exhaust and dust.

“Hey, get over it, Sweeney, okay?” Annie looked at me and shook her head. “I’ve been wanting to ask you—did something really
special
happen the first time you put on that shirt? Or are you just waiting for Oliver to notice you’ve been wearing his clothes for three days?”

“Oliver and I are just friends,” I said loftily.

“Hey, don’t think I’m, like,
jealous.
I don’t
like
icky boys. Although I personally think your friend Oliver may be a member of the He-Man Women-Haters Club.
Uno amigo de Dorothy,
if you take my meaning.”

She dropped her voice. “I tell you, Sweeney, you oughta be selling time-shares in that boy. I mean if
you’re
not sleeping with him. ‘Cause I know that Angelica—”

I turned to her, furious, but Annie backed off. “Ex-cu-use me!”

We sat in silence as the car inched through rush hour traffic. Outside, all the sultry glamour of the city had vanished. The Washington Monument looked smudged and worn against the dirty white sky, the distant shape of the Jefferson Memorial like a great cracked egg hidden among dusty trees. Above Haines Point an endless line of aircraft roared into National Airport. Between the noise and exhaust fumes, the Lysol stench of Brother John’s car deodorizer and all the beer I’d drunk, I felt distinctly queasy.

“You know where we’re going, don’t you?”

Annie nudged me, but I refused to look at her. “You know what this is, right?” she persisted. “This Orphic Lodge?”

I waited a long moment before shaking my head. “No.”

“It’s their headquarters. Summer camp for your boy Balthazar and all the rest of them. Home base. Ground Zero. Your retreat business is a trap, Sweeney—”

Her words were like a window slamming shut behind me.

“—a fucking trap, and we’ve walked right into it.”

If the retreat house
was
a trap, it was a very nice one.

It took us nearly three hours to get there. I dozed, an achy hung-over nap that brought little in the way of real repose and gave me uneasy dreams of pursuit and flight. When I woke it was just past nightfall. Outside all was dim and softly moving, painted in shades of green and black and violet. The little car wheezed and bucked as it made one hairpin turn after another, climbing higher and higher. Suddenly we made a sharp turn, veering onto an even narrower road. The car jounced over stones and fallen branches, abruptly came out into a wide space where the trees fell back and the sky opened above us, black and studded with stars.

“Well, we’re here,” said Brother John, and we piled out.

The Orphic Lodge was the sort of place where you spend one enchanted August as a child, and devote all of your adult life to finding again. A sprawling Craftsman-style mansion, its pillared verandas and balconies and gabled windows thrusting out in bewildering profusion. When we stepped onto the front porch the wooden flooring boomed and creaked beneath our feet, as though we were walking on ice. Upside-down Adirondack chairs and wicker sofas were pushed against the walls. There was an air of genteel desolation about it all—the grey limbs of an espaliered pear tree; drifts of dead leaves everywhere; the echoing of ghostly voices from upstairs rooms where windows had been flung open to the chill night air.

But inside, the Lodge looked more like the first day of vacation. Students running up and down steps, back and forth between cars and the kitchen, carrying duffel bags and knapsacks and boom boxes, cartons and bags of food, paper towels, beer, wine. A fat, friendly-looking grey cat sat on a windowsill and regarded us all with mild yellow eyes. On a wider windowsill in the main foyer Balthazar Warnick did the same, though with a more feral gaze. Beside him stood a tall stern-featured woman, with black hair and very black straight eyebrows, wearing a paisley dress and old-fashioned chef’s apron.

“… said thirteen and I have made dinner for thirteen.
Gravadlaks
and
salat,
and the
gravadlaks,
the salmon, will not keep well. And those boys are spilling something on the stairs.”

“Thirty, Kirsten, I said there would be
thirty.
Mr. Bright, would you please assist Mr. Malabar with the cooler?” Balthazar looked distractedly at the tall woman. “We brought spaghetti for dinner tonight, Kirsten. We
always
have spaghetti the first night of retreat. You know, lots of water boiling, many eager hands at work. A sort of icebreaker.”

The housekeeper gazed suspiciously at the many eager hands now reaching for the cooler Hasel Bright had opened in the middle of the floor.

“Good night, Professor Warnick, they deserve their spaghetti,” she announced. “I am going to bed.”

“Our housekeeper does not approve of undergraduates drinking in the lodge.” Professor Warnick frowned at Hasel, who sheepishly replaced his bottle and closed the cooler. “Let’s get unpacked and get dinner going before she changes her mind and comes back to supervise the kitchen, eh Mr. Bright?”

Warnick turned to where Annie and I were standing, somewhat at a loss, by the front door. He regarded me measuredly before saying, “The girls’ rooms are in the east wing on the second floor. To the right.”

We straggled upstairs, yelling greetings back to the others, who’d already unpacked or were still arriving below.

“Where do you think Angelica is?” I panted. “She’s got to be here; they were in the lead car with Warnick.”

Annie shrugged, pausing red-faced to swing her guitar and one of Angelica’s bags to the other arm. “Who knows? She and Oliver are probably settled in the honeymoon suite already.”

The rooms in the east wing all seemed pretty much the same. A few simple camp-style beds lined up against the pine walls, unmatched curtains at the windows, maybe a worn rag rug on the floor. Annie stopped wearily in front of an open door.

“The view from this room is
really terrific,
Sweeney, I read about it in the promotional literature downstairs; this is like the
best room
in the whole place, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and then Angelica appeared in the dim hallway.

“Sweeney! Annie! I got a room for us—down here, the third door on the left.”

“Hooray,” said Annie. She dumped Angelica’s stuff on the floor and took off down the hall with her guitar.

Angelica picked up her bags and smiled. “Thanks for bringing my bags, Sweeney.”

“Sure.” I rubbed my shoulder. “Where’s Oliver?”

“Oh, he’s around.” She smiled, a secretive delighted smile, and started after Annie. “I helped him get settled upstairs. I think he went down to help with dinner. Okay, this is it—isn’t it great?”

It actually didn’t look much different from any of the other rooms—bigger, maybe, with four beds extending from the far wall, and it did have its own bathroom with shower stall and ancient rust-stained pedestal sink where Annie was already noisily washing up. But the long far wall was filled with windows, and even in the darkness I could make out the shadowed hump of the mountains and the velvety star-filled sky.

“Yeah. Yeah, really, it’s nice.” I dropped my knapsack on one of the beds and flopped onto it. “Yow. Nice mattresses, too.”

“Mine is stuffed with corncobs,” announced Annie from the bathroom. “I sure do hope Oliver’s not sleeping in that other bed, Angelica.”

Angelica shook her head. “No, he’s not.
Cornhusks,
Annie; I don’t think anyone ever stuffed a mattress with corncobs. Come on, Sweeney, I told Oliver we’d help them out downstairs. We’ll see you later, Annie.”

Annie watched us go, nonplussed. In the hall Angelica took my hand. “God, this is so great here! Isn’t this great?”

I shrugged and tried to smile. We still hadn’t talked about what happened that night after the Molyneux reception, but obviously Angelica wasn’t the type to discuss such things. And I was burning to hear about Oliver, and to find out what room he was staying in.

But Angelica only laughed, pausing to pull her hair back into its loose ponytail. “Oliver says from his room you can lie in bed and watch Orion progress across the western horizon.”

I smiled ruefully “Progress, huh? How does he know? He hasn’t been here before—”

“No.” Angelica started down the corridor. “He’s never been here, but his brothers have. I guess they told him which room was the best one …” Her voice trailed off.