Under the Rose (24 page)

I’m just as shocked

as you are.

13.

Hypotheses

“I can’t believe I just did that,” Poe kept saying, over and over, as we hightailed it off Cross Campus.

I looked over my shoulder as we raced up the steps near Maya Lin’s Women-at-Eli Memorial Fountain, which bears more than a passing resemblance to her better-known Vietnam Veterans Memorial. (That lady has one schtick, but it’s a good one.) Yep, Micah was still down for the count. The three freshmen huddled around his prone form. We
so
needed to get out of town.

“I can’t believe I just did that. Why did I just do that? I can’t believe I just did that.” Poe reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. Oh, for Persephone’s sake! What was he going to do, mop his brow?

But instead he handed it to me. “Did he get you in the eye?”

Too surprised to stop myself, I took it, and wiped Micah’s spittle off my cheek. “No. Thanks.”

“What was I thinking?” Poe leaned against a bulletin board near the library and dropped his head into his hands. “I’m going to get arrested. I’m going to be suspended. If they charge me with a felony, I’ll never pass the bar.”

“I might be a bit biased,” I said, “what with the defending-of-my-honor and all, but I thought it was wicked cool.”

“I just…as soon as I heard him talking about—Rose & Grave like that…”

“Rose & Grave?” I cocked my head at him. “Don’t you mean Jenny and me?”

He slid down the wall and studied his sneakers. “Oath of fidelity. Oh, I’m in trouble.”

Okay, so maybe not so much defending my honor. At least, not any further than his oaths required. But even if the thought didn’t count, the action sure as hell did. “Come on.” I held out my hand. “Let’s keep moving.”

Poe dropped both hands to the pavement and pushed himself to his feet. “Right, because running from the scene of the crime is always the correct course of action.”

“He’s not going to report you,” I said, as we took refuge in the nearest college’s common room. “Because then he’d have to explain how he was a big pussy.”

We sat on a leather sofa hidden from the door by a grand piano, and Poe flexed his hand. “It hurts,” he said, his tone one of surprise.

“Well, you hit him pretty hard.” We sat there for a moment, neither of us speaking, as our adrenaline levels dropped and we each caught our breath. It had been a good long while since I’d seen anyone in a fistfight—if this could even be counted as a fistfight. After all, there’d only been one punch. And yet…I glanced at Poe, who was still examining the damage to his knuckles. I think I’ve made a new entry on my list of things that surprised me about Poe.

Malcolm would be so proud.

Finally, I broke the silence. “What exactly do they mean when they call us the ‘Brotherhood of Death’?”

Poe rubbed his sore fingers. “It’s a barbarian term,” he said. “It’s really popular among the conspiracy theorists who think we’re secretly Satan worshippers. Go look on that website, you’ll see it all over.”

Hmph. Right now I was pretty sure secretsofthediggers.com was experiencing a bit of a deluge. Hey, there was an idea. Keep hitting it until the bandwidth overloaded and the site went down. If we crashed it, there was no way they’d be able to post anything else. I’d have to remember to tell Josh. There was, after all, more than one way to skin a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Of course, there could be a number of other ways to stop him (or her), too. The person doing most of the heavy lifting the past few weeks had been Jenny after all. Who knew if the information she’d been feeding us about how to find this guy had been false all along? Surely there was someone else in the club with enough computer knowledge to do some damage.

“It’s because of the death and underworld imagery—all that stuff we use during the initiation,” Poe was saying, while I pictured the whole scandal ending in a whimper, not a bang. “In the Christian tradition, the underworld is always hell, always the realm of the wicked. That wasn’t the case in the Greco-Roman tradition. There was no value judgment placed on afterlife location. Heroes went there, too. Bad people were punished in Tartarus, heroes wound up in the Elysian Fields, but everyone went to the underworld.”

“Thanks. I’m not clueless on the mythology, you know.”

He shrugged. “It’s another way they try to explain away our influence. Same as those nuts who think we’re all controlled by reptiles from outer space. We’re powerful, so we must be in league with demons, see?”

I nodded. I suppose I could understand the confusion. “Jenny called us the ‘Brotherhood of Death,’” I said. “On Initiation Night.”

“Does that surprise you, knowing the company she keeps? Note that her parents called us that as well.”

“No, it doesn’t surprise me.” I leaned back on the couch and folded my feet up beneath me. “But it does make me wonder.”

“What?”

I bit my lip. If I spoke my thoughts aloud, Poe would dismiss them, the way he dismissed every one of my so-called conspiracy theories. The way all of the Diggers had. But I was used to it by now, so what did I have to lose? “Just how long she may have had this planned. I know she dislikes being a Digger, and I’ve had reasons to suspect for some time that she’s been breaking her oath of secrecy. I think she’s been telling her boyfriend back there what’s been going on at the meetings.”

Poe’s eyes widened. “Did you tell anyone about this?”

“Josh,” I said, “but he brushed me off. I’m the uninformed, hysterical one, remember?”

“Amy, if you think you’re a second-class citizen in your club, it’s only because you’re acting like it.”

“No, it’s because no one listens to me.”

“Which is because—” Poe stopped himself, and sighed. “Never mind. Go on.”

“Anyway. What if Jenny had been planning on exposing us since the moment she joined? Was that something anyone in your club feared? I don’t know what kind of deliberations went into tapping her, but you do.”

“That stuff’s a secret.”

“Apparently, a lot of things are secret, until they get out. Maybe keeping these secrets isn’t very good for us.”

“Or maybe the problem is that the info
was
leaked…to the patriarchs you seem to believe kidnapped her.”

“So it
was
a concern!” I pounced on the hint. Poe winced. “What did you debate?”

“Jenny’s big sib was a computer programmer,” he said.

“Is he around?” Maybe he could help us.

“I’ve been waiting to hear back from him since the story went live.”

Ugh. Seems all the recent patriarchs had moved on and washed their hands of us…except Poe.

“Jenny was the best option to replace him, and everyone agreed.” Poe hesitated. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.” But then he came to a decision. “Yes, we wondered if she would have difficulty dedicating herself to the society, considering her strong religious views, but you couldn’t argue with her credentials. She’s a genius. Remember, we were trying to tap a class of super-women.”

And they had. Everyone except me, of course. I was the bugaboo, tapped at the eleventh hour after Malcolm’s first choice had a) been dumped, b) gone vicious, and c) lost her shit.

The carillon one block over began to strike the hour.

Poe rose. “I have to go. I’ve got class. Can you meet this afternoon?”

“I have to see my thesis advisor at one.”

He bit his lip. “Okay, then, after that. I’ll try to get an appointment with the Edison College dean and see if we can’t get him to look in Jenny’s room—legitimately, this time. Maybe the Santoses have already called. And…” He took a deep breath. “I’ll see if I can remember anything else about Jenny’s delibs. Deal?”

“Deal…There
is
something else you can do,” I said, and met his eyes. “Maybe get a straight answer once and for all about Gehry’s involvement?”

He swallowed. “I don’t have connections there anymore.”

“You were going to be his intern!”

“Yeah,” said Poe. “And then I listened to you.”

I used to fantasize about my senior thesis, back before my brain got sidetracked into fantasizing about boys instead. In my imagination, I’d be seated in some picturesque collegiate setting—either a library stack study carrel surrounded by lead-veined windows and lousy with green-shaded table lamps, or on a carved granite bench beneath a weeping willow in a cloistered stone courtyard overlooked by gargoyles—and I’d turn a page in a musty book, read for a moment or two, then leap up, scattering foolscap and maybe even my non-existent reading glasses, pump my fist in the air, and shout, “Eureka!” Then I would rush to the office of my favorite professor (who, I’m vaguely embarrassed to admit, in my vision was always elderly, white, and male), where he would no doubt be lounging on a leather wingback chair in a spacious, bookshelf-lined office, having his secretary serve him tea in fine, translucent china. I’d be shivering with excitement to tell him all about the amazing gap in canon I’d discovered and how I—yes, I—would be the first to argue cogently that—

Well, the dream always broke before I actually got to the point of describing what I’d be writing about, though it conveniently picked up again around the time I was awarded a Fulbright and a Rhodes and published in the pre-eminent journal on the topic and was called all manner of things from
wunderkind
to “the discipline’s brightest new star.”

So much for that.

I stood in the elevator on the way up to my thesis advisor’s office, which was oh-so-inconveniently located in the top-floor attic space of the—wait for it—Physics Administration building, devoid of secretaries of any kind, and populated by a professor who wasn’t elderly and white so much as mid-forties and Middle Eastern. I quickly brainstormed.

W
HAT
T
O
S
AY
T
O
P
ROFESSOR
B
URAK

1)
An apology. This had to come first, of course, since I’d already canceled three similar meetings and been granted two extensions on the department’s unofficial deadline for formulating a topic.

2)
Ask after his wife and kids, natch.

3)
Another apology, for not being prepared with the annotated bibliography he no doubt expected at this meeting.

4)
A topic.

Number four was the tricky part of the equation. The digital readout above my head reported that I had eight more floors to think of something.

The problem was, there was only so much multitasking I could handle. The Lit Magazine hadn’t been a huge time commitment, and it paled in the face of the hours and hours I was devoting to Rose & Grave every week. (Howard had been right about that.) Add classes and my feeble attempts at a social life, and my table was groaning. I’d been promising myself that I’d dive into my thesis full time next semester, when it was an actual credit in my course load, and—with any luck—after all the Rose & Grave drama had died down.

Because, let’s face it, it was tough to think about a good paper topic when you spent your days deciphering encoded anonymous e-mails, tracking down the owner of a ludicrous nutball website, or wondering if your ersatz friend had been kidnapped by “The Brotherhood of Death.” If Persephone really was our patron goddess, it was time for her to start handing out miracles.

The elevator shuddered to a stop and a bell dinged to signify I’d reached my destination, but it barely registered. Instead, I almost squished my hand trying to keep the doors from closing again, so lost was I in my reverie.

I had found a topic, at last.

I strode into my professor’s office, ebullient.

“Miss Haskel,” he said, gesturing me to a seat. “Have we finally settled on a project?”

“Yes.” I beamed at him. “I would like to write my senior thesis on the permutations of the Persephone myth in modern literature.”

He steepled his hands on the desk and seemed to digest this information. “Interesting. Any particular modern texts in mind?”

Crap. I mentally flipped through my repertoire of possibilities. Would
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
be too obvious? Too English? Too…well,
not modern
?