Dead Beautiful (20 page)

I swallowed and nodded. “Just a friend.”

“How did you get out?”

I couldn’t tell her about the chimneys, or they’d block them off for good. “I waited until Mrs. Lynch was on a different floor.”

The headmistress gave me a curious look. “I see. And you ran away when she saw you?”

I nodded. “But I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t thinking. It was dark and rainy. I couldn’t really see her.” I paused. “Please don’t expel me,” I said softly.

The headmistress laughed. “I would have done the same thing.” The second Siamese cat leaped onto her desk. “Have you met my darlings?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“This is Romulus.” The cat sauntered across her desk, meowed, and curled around the hourglass. “And this is Remus,” she said, stroking the cat in her lap. “Aren’t they handsome?”

I nodded. “Very.”

The headmistress leaned back in her chair. “So, tell me about this Dante Berlin.”

I must have looked puzzled, because she continued, “You two are dating, no?”

“No. We’re just friends.”

Von Laark put a finger to her lips. “Hmm,” she murmured. “Are you sure?”

I swallowed. Even if the headmistress had somehow found out about us, the best I could do was deny it. “Yes.”

She gazed at me pensively, her blue eyes fixed on mine. “Professor Mumm tells me you’re excelling in Horticulture. She says you’re the best student she’s had in at least a decade.”

I blushed. “It doesn’t feel that way. There’s still so much to learn.”

She clasped her hands on her desk. “You’re just like your mother. Very modest.”

“You knew my mother?”

The headmistress nodded. “I was a professor of Philosophy here when your mother was a student.”

Questions flooded my head. What was my mother like? What were her friends like? What did she look like? And had the headmistress also had my father as a student?

“Incredibly sharp, your mother. Your father too. And ambitious. You never would have guessed they were from wealthy backgrounds. Always so humble.”

“My father was wealthy?” I didn’t know. His parents had died when I was a baby, and I had only met my four aunts, who were each fussy, overweight, inclined to hats, and generally auntlike.

“Why, of course. You weren’t aware? The Redgrave fortune. Redgrave Architects? They specialized in custom-made foundations, cellars, enclaves, wells, and so on. Quite artful, actually. Tragic that it’s a dying form.”

“I... I didn’t know. He never told me.”

“Robert was a private boy,” she murmured. “Clearly you take after him. Professor Mumm told me that just last week you identified the only form of shrivel root in the field, and were also able to identify the appropriate soil and plot for it to be planted in.”

It was true.

“Very impressive for someone your age,” remarked the headmistress.

“Thanks.”

“Well, I suppose if you have nothing else that you want to tell me, we have nothing more to discuss today.”

She waited a moment, but when I said nothing, she smiled. “Go then, and enjoy your youth.”

Grateful for the reprieve, I stood up. Something about her demeanor was unsettling. Maybe it was her cats.

“Oh and, Renée, tell me, when is your birthday?”

I turned just as the headmistress put on a pair of reading glasses.

“August twentieth. Why?”

“A Leo,” she said, smiling. “How fitting.”

Just before I turned, a file on her desk caught my eye. It was a manila folder partially covered in papers. It was labeled
Dante Berlin.
I thought back to the day I’d met Eleanor, when she’d told me she’d asked her brother Brandon to check my file in the headmistress’s office. Quickly, I glanced around the room, looking for a filing cabinet. I didn’t see one, though I knew it had to be there somewhere.

“Is there something wrong, Renée?” the headmistress probed.

“No,” I said quickly. “Nothing.” And I stepped into the hall.

To my surprise, Dante was sitting outside on a bench, in a collared shirt, his blue tie loose around his neck. I wanted to stop and talk to him, but knew I couldn’t in front of the headmistress. We made eye contact as I passed, and Dante gave the beginnings of a smile when the headmistress poked her head out the door.

“I’m ready for you,” she said in a firm voice.

I walked by slowly, and as Dante stood up, our hands brushed against each other, his skin cold against mine. The door shut behind him, and I was left alone in the hallway. There was a folded piece of paper on the bench where Dante had been sitting. I flattened it out to find the following words written in Dante’s neat handwriting:

Meet me in front of the library at 7 p.m.

Folding the note into my pocket, I left for class.

“I talked to Minnie,” Eleanor said as she closed the door. I was sitting at my desk, trying to read the footnotes of
The Iliad
in the dim light of my candle.

I sat up straight. “And?”

She hefted her bag onto the desk. “Disaster.”

“What happened?”

“I cornered her in Art. We were working on portraits. I made sure to sit next to her so we would be partners. While I was sketching, I asked her about what happened last spring with Cassandra. That was my first mistake. She got all weird and hunched over, and her face wouldn’t stay still.... It ruined my portrait.”

“What did you say to her, exactly?”

“I just asked her, ‘So what really happened last spring with Cassandra?’”

“A little more tact, Eleanor!”

“Well, I wanted to cut to the chase. She’s not exactly easy to talk to. And besides, I thought she
wanted
to talk about it.”

“Not to us. She probably thought you were making fun of her.”

“Well, I wasn’t, obviously. But now what do we do? There’s no way I can ask her again. She practically ran away when the bell rang. She didn’t even show me the portrait she drew.”

I thought for a moment. “I saw Dante’s file when I was in the headmistress’s office. It was on her desk. She didn’t give me a detention, but she suspects that we’re a couple.”

Exasperated, Eleanor collapsed onto her bed. “Can you please pry your mind away from Dante for just a minute and focus on the problem at hand?”

Ignoring her, I continued. “Do you think everyone has a personal file?”

“I know they do,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “My brother told me.”

I looked behind me to make sure Lynch’s feet weren’t outside the door. “Even dead people?”

Eleanor gazed at me with wonder. “Ingenious! They wouldn’t just throw them away.”

Even though the validity of the séance was suspect, looking up Benjamin’s and Cassandra’s folders couldn’t hurt.

“I didn’t see a filing cabinet, but it’s got to be there. We just need to get into the office.”

Checking the clock, I put on my jacket and grabbed my bag.

“Where are you going?”

“The library,” I said, omitting the fact that I was meeting Dante there.

When I got to Copleston Library, Dante was waiting for me by the entrance, leaning against a stone pillar. A book bag was slung over his shoulder.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. He smiled and took my bag, and together we went inside. He led me upstairs to the third floor, which was relatively empty, and set our bags down on a wooden table by the window. I told him about the headmistress and how she had asked me about him.

“The headmistress didn’t mention you at all,” he murmured, gazing at me pensively. “She asked me about how I was feeling and about how my classes were going, then let me go.”

I thought fast. Should I tell him about the séance, about how Cassandra might actually be dead? What if I was wrong? Unlike Eleanor, I decided to go for the tactful route.

“Do you still talk to Cassandra?”

Dante paused and then bent over to open his bag. “Not much,” he said, his back to me.

“But you’ve talked to her since she left?”

He straightened. “Why do you ask?”

“I thought you were friends with her.”

“I was.”

“So you still talk to her?”

He hesitated. “No, not really.”

“Not really, or no?” I asked, growing frustrated.

“No,” he finally conceded. “I told you, things sort of fell apart last spring. None of us keep in touch anymore. Would it be a problem if I did? You seem disturbed by the idea.”

“I’m not jealous,” I said defensively. “If that’s what you’re implying.”

“Right,” he said.

There was a long silence. Was he being intentionally vague, or did he actually not know? Judging by the way he treated his ex-friends here, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary for him to cut off Cassandra too.

“So what do we do now?” I asked, assuming his invitation to the library had some sort of mysterious ulterior motive.

Dante gave me a confused smile. “Study, of course. What else does a person do in a library?”

I blushed. “Oh, I... I don’t know,” I said, fumbling my words in embarrassment. I pulled a book out of my bag and opened it in front of me.

“It’s upside down,” Dante said with a smile, as he tilted back in his chair and tapped my book with his pencil.

“Right,” I said, even more mortified as I flipped it around. And in the light of the oil lamps, we studied together until curfew.

What did it feel like to be dating Dante Berlin? Every time he looked at me, it was like he was seeing me for the first time. Every time I got close to him, he inhaled deeply, as if he were trying to absorb as much of me as possible.... Everyone stared when we were together on campus, pointing when our hands grazed against each other’s in class. “They’re looking at us,” I muttered to Dante as we walked through the library together, trying to block my face with my hair. “I don’t blame them,” he said, pushing the hair away from my face. I blushed. I was as much in awe of us as everyone else was. Every night Dante waited for me during study hall outside the dorm, and every night I met him. He always took me somewhere different—a walk around campus, the library, Horace Hall, the lake. And every night I sat by the window, thinking he wouldn’t come, but then there he was, his tall figure like a pale ray of light in the darkness. Every time I saw his face, it seemed even more beautiful and complex than the day before. Every time he touched me, I shuddered and felt all of my warmth, all of my sensation being pulled toward him. It no longer mattered that I didn’t understand the way I felt around him, or the way he felt around me. One touch from him and everything inside of me blossomed with emotion: excitement, nervousness, anxiety, desire. I had never been in love before. Was this what it felt like?

But Dante wasn’t the only thing on my mind. By the second week of November, almost all of the leaves from the maples and oaks around us had dropped off and were now floating on the surface of the lake like a carpet. Eleanor and I were still trying to find a way to get into the headmistress’s office to get Benjamin’s and Cassandra’s files. The possibility of Cassandra being dead too only made me more suspicious about Benjamin’s “heart attack,” and those files were the only chance I had to figure out how he really died. The only problem was that the headmistress’s office was impossible to break into, and if I got caught, I would most definitely be expelled. Usually when I didn’t know how to solve a problem, I asked my parents, but they were dead. So instead I called Annie.

“Remember what I told you about Cassandra and Benjamin?”

“The two kids from last year?” she asked, her tone skeptical. “The one who died of a heart attack?”

“Yeah. Well, supposedly a heart attack.”

Annie didn’t respond.

“There’s a possibility that Cassandra might be dead too.”

There was a pause at the end of the line. Finally, Annie said, “How do you know?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but we did this séance a couple of weeks ago, and I tried to contact my parents, and I ended up meeting Dante, but that’s an entirely different story. The point is that Eleanor tried to contact Benjamin, but actually ended up contacting Cassandra.”

I waited for her excited response, but it never came. “So…?”

“So that means if the séance was right, Cassandra might be dead too,” I said, exasperated. “And that the school is purposely covering up her death by telling everyone that she transferred. I mean, why would they do that?”

“Maybe they’re not doing it. Renée, it’s a séance. I mean, everyone knows they don’t work. It didn’t even work for you.”

“I guess, but I summoned someone that night. Or at least I heard someone. And so did Eleanor. It couldn’t hurt to check, right?”

“Are you listening to yourself?
Summoning
? What happened to the sarcastic, skeptical Renée that I knew?”

I stared at the receiver in frustration.

“Is this about you missing your parents?”

“What? No. Well, yes. But it’s not only about them. If Cassandra is dead, that probably means that there’s more to Benjamin’s death too. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they died so close together.”

“Just like your parents.”

I gripped the receiver harder, trying to restrain myself. “It’s not just about my parents. It’s about people dying. It’s about uncovering the truth.”

“Renée, it’s okay that you miss your parents and are confused about their deaths. I mean, it’s hard—”

“No, it’s not okay. Like I said, it’s not
only
about my parents. Why does everything have to be about my parents?”

I could hear Annie’s breathing on the other end of the line. “Because they died. And it’s not fair, I know. I miss them too; we all—”

“No,” I said, interrupting her. “You don’t know.” And I hung up the phone.

What do you call a secret society that’s not a secret? In Rome they were called the Illuminati. In Greece they were called the Pythagoreans. And at Gottfried they were called the Board of Monitors.

According to the
Code of Discipline,
their official duty was to “represent the voice of the student body to the faculty.” As Gottfried’s version of a student government, they were supposed to “keep the order and preserve peace among the student body.” But the most we’d ever seen of them had been at the Fall Awakening, when they were tapped. They didn’t monitor the halls or discuss school decisions with us. In fact, they never seemed to do much of anything at all.