Under the Rose (29 page)

“I’ve seen this,” I said. “Lucky’s got a poster of her hanging in her room.”

“Hero worship, huh?” said Angel.

“Ada Lovelace” sounded so familiar to me. I yawned again and Puck caught me. “I think I need to escort ’boo home,” he said. “I’ll make sure there are no monsters or CIA agents in her closet.”

“Maybe I should do it instead, to make sure
’boo
gets some actual sleep,” said Angel with a meaningful glance at me.

“Maybe ’boo will just stretch out here,” said I, doing so. “This couch is comfy.”

“Suit yourself.” Puck stood. “I’m going home, then, before the news trucks arrive.” He waved to us all and headed out.

A moment later, we heard his voice in the hall. “Mail’s here.”

“Is it FedEx?” said Juno. “That’s weird. But who else would deliver here? Bring it in before it gets wet.”

“I suppose,” said Angel, “the nice thing about having an unlisted address like the tomb is you don’t see a lot of junk mail.”

I fought back the waves of sleep.
Junk mail. Ada Lovelace.
That’s where I’d seen that name.

“Guys,” Puck appeared at the door to the Library, clutching an open manila envelope, his face devoid of all color. “I think Lucky’s been kidnapped.”

He held up a long black braid.

I hereby confess:

I had no problem getting people

to believe me after that.

15.

Pied à Terre

I was also not getting back to sleep.

“Oh my God,” cried Angel. “Don’t touch it! Fingerprints.”

“That envelope has been through too many hands,” said Juno. “And getting fingerprints off hair—”

“What are you,” said Angel, “
CSI?
No? Then shut up. And, George, for fuck’s sake, put that down!”

Nobody, I’m proud to report, thought of fining her at that moment.

“What should we do?” said Puck, holding the braid away from his body as if it were a live snake. “Call the cops?”

“Yes. Then call Soze,” said Juno. “And that Poe guy. You said he’d been helping, right, Bugaboo?”

I nodded dumbly. “What—what else is in there? Is there any kind of note?”

Puck shook his head. “I’m almost afraid to look.” But look he did, and to our collective relief, the envelope was devoid of any additional body parts.

“Well,” Juno reasoned, “at least it isn’t a finger.”

But this provided little comfort. I called Soze (who was still asleep) and Poe (who wasn’t—but vampires hunt at night, right?), and they both told me to wait until they arrived to phone the cops. Puck offered to call his dad, though we all thought that maybe Mr. Prescott needed to stay by his wife’s side this morning. I called Gus Kelting on the TTA board, who’d arranged my internship last summer, but his voice mail said he was away on business. We tried to brainstorm other sympathetic patriarchs, but the list was a bit thin at the moment.

“Who could have done something like this?” Angel said in a shaky voice. “Her hair was so beautiful….”

“Right, because
beauty
is the issue,” said Juno.

Puck moved from seat to seat. “I don’t believe it could have been—I can’t—it’s just a stupid society, right? A frat? I mean, shit, I don’t like her very much, but she’s a good kid, you know? They wouldn’t…”

We all spent a lot of time looking at the braid, which Puck had finally dropped on the coffee table.

It seemed to take Poe and Soze forever to arrive, but in actuality, it was probably closer to twenty minutes. Considering Poe’s apartment was a good twenty-minute walk from campus, I was impressed.

“How did you find it?” Soze asked.

Puck gestured to the envelope. “It was on the porch. Like, in the mail.”

Poe picked it up and studied the address label. “It was mailed? Here? How odd. The postmark says Manhattan. Thursday.”

“Well,” said Bond, “that narrows it down.”

I raised my hand. “Guys, the other day, when I took Jenny’s phone, there were some phone numbers in New York City. I called them, but there was no answer.”

“Again, not so helpful,” said Angel. “When are we calling the police? I think we’ve got evidence here.”

“But evidence of what?” asked Poe. “If it was the patriarchs, why leave the trophy on the stoop? Shouldn’t they be sending it to the guy running the website? Or even to Bugaboo or me, because we were the ones tracking them?”

“Evidence of
what
?” Juno asked incredulously. “Of a kidnapping, that’s what!”

“Okay.” I tried again. “Before we were interrupted with the Locks of Not-so-much Love, I was thinking about Ada Lovelace—”

“’Boo, what does that have to do with anything?” Puck asked.

I ignored him. “And I remembered that in Lucky’s room she had some mail addressed to Ada Lovelace. I thought it was junk mail, but now…”

“She probably used a fake name on some Internet site,” said Puck. “I do that.”

“Porn sites?” Angel asked. Puck shot her a look.

“You wouldn’t put a fake name and a real address, though,” said Poe, and turned back to me. “Do you remember what kind of mail it was?”

I shrugged. “I thought it was junk mail. It was still there on her desk when we were in her room yesterday. It’s probably nothing, but it’s weird. We should tell the cops—”

“Let’s go check it out,” said Poe.

“How?” I said. “You want me to break in again?”

Poe smiled. “Won’t be necessary.”

Soze stepped in. “What does this have to do with anything? We need to call the cops, right now. Lucky could be in trouble.”

“I called them last night,” said Poe, avoiding my eyes. “I was getting worried. But they backed up the dean.”

“But now…” Soze pointed at the hair.

Poe shrugged. “Try it again, see what happens. But I’m sorry to admit they may be mildly accustomed to lunatic phone calls about the Diggers. I don’t know if a hank of hair is going to convince them of much.” He looked at me. “Coming?”

I sighed. “Yeah.”

Angel picked up the envelope. “I’m going to look up this zip code, see what neighborhood it comes from.”

Soze shook his head. “If someone checks our Internet search records, don’t you think it will look suspicious that before we called the police, we checked up on the evidence?”

Poe laughed mirthlessly. “We’re Rose & Grave, junior. Everything we do looks suspicious.”

Poe was a man of mysterious talents. Unbeknownst to either the dean or me, he’d sabotaged Jenny’s lock yesterday while we were up there visiting. A small piece of tape held the catch in place. Now we slipped inside and collected the Ada Lovelace mail.

“This isn’t addressed to an Eli P.O. Box,” I said. “It’s all been sent to someplace in New York City.” And it was weird stuff, too. An electric bill, a cable notice…not your usual college loan consolidation crap. Of course, Jenny being a millionaire and all, she probably didn’t have any loans.

Clarissa called. “The zip code 10002 is for Union Square and the Lower East Side.”

“Thanks,” I said. I looked at the envelope. “Hey, where is Ludlow Street in Manhattan?”

I could practically hear her wrinkle her nose. “The Lower East Side.”

What were the chances? I hung up and looked at Poe. “What does this mean?”

“It means that Miss Goody-Goody’s got a secret crib.”

I considered this for a moment. “Is it possible that everyone was right all along? That Jenny did just go away for the weekend, but now maybe she’s run into trouble down in New York?”

Poe gave a determined nod. “I’m going down there.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He looked at me. “Amy, you haven’t slept and you look like hell.”

“So? I’ll sleep on the train.”

“And…it could be dangerous.”

“Right, because you’re the badass who freaks out when he punches someone?”

Poe took a deep breath. “You are very difficult.”

“You set the curve.”

Sleeping on the Metro North commuter train takes talent. Sleeping on the Metro North commuter train in the middle of a (possible) kidnapping investigation while your partner-né-nemesis sits across from you and marks up pages of his law textbook with a squeaky highlighter takes the kind of talent usually reserved for deaf, blind, and comatose Zen monks. I gave up before we hit Stamford.

According to Poe’s curt update when I stopped pretending to sleep, Josh had called the police, who’d berated him for not contacting campus security when Lydia had caught an intruder in my room. If anything was stolen, we were to file a report—with
campus security.
But nothing had been stolen, and the second Josh dropped the words “Rose & Grave” in the mix, the cops clammed up. Either they thought we were Eli pranksters, or they didn’t want to get involved. Either way, we were on our own.

I stared out the window for a while, and then, for a while longer, I stared at Poe. He was back in his usual attire today: wool pants slightly shiny at the knees, and a pilled gray sweater under a black wool overcoat in dire need of a good lint brushing. But really, who was I to talk? I was wearing yesterday’s clothes for my glamorous trip into the city. Maybe later we could catch dinner and a show.

You know, after we did our
Remington Steele
act.

Poe caught me staring. “Can I help you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking—sorry, spacing out.” I looked out the window. “This isn’t what I imagine when I think about going to the city for the weekend.”

He returned to his textbook. “I wouldn’t know. I never went into the city for the weekend.”

“Not even with Malcolm?”

He snorted. “I don’t think we’d be interested in the same spots. Plus, I’d probably cramp his style.”

Shocker. Poe had no style. I returned to my absent gazing out at the dreary rain-soaked landscape.

“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?” Poe went on, and I looked at him. “You never have to worry about anything. You have no idea how rough it was for me at school. I was broke.”

“I’m broke, too,” I said. “Way over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. You’ve seen my files. You know my parents aren’t rolling like Malcolm’s or George’s or Clarissa’s—”

“No, Amy, I was
penniless
broke. Beyond loans. I didn’t go into the city, I didn’t go out, I didn’t go…get pizza and a beer. A two-dollar slice of pizza! I had about five dollars of discretionary spending per week. Thank God for the coffee I stole from the dining hall.” He looked back down at his book. “When I got into—you know—that was it for me. I suddenly had a social life. I couldn’t go to the bars or the clubs or whatever, but I could go to the tomb. It was still tough, though. I had the chops, but not exactly the pedigree. My dad’s a landscaper. I think he practically starved these last four years so I could go to Eli instead of a state college. That’s who I worked for this summer.”