The Book of Blood and Shadow (17 page)

“So they lied.”

“Or someone else was here. Looking for something.”

I thought again of what the cops had told me, about Chris hiding something in his family’s safe. I thought again about the letter, and where holding on to it fell on the stupidity scale of one to death wish.

“He’s contacted you, hasn’t he?” Eli said.

“What? Who?”

“Him. The boyfriend. The cops think he’s halfway across the country by now, but maybe you know better. Maybe he’s still here until he gets what he came for?”

I stood up. “You think he did this?”

Eli shrugged.

“So he tore up his own room, looking for ‘something,’ because, what, he couldn’t remember where he put it?”

“He tore up Chris’s stuff,” Eli said. “Then maybe his own, as a decoy.”

Chris kept a bunch of flattened cardboard boxes at the back of his closet, a collection he was too conscientious to trash but too lazy to recycle. They were still there. I pulled one out. “Let’s just do this,” I said. “We don’t have to talk.”

I picked through the ruins, folding every stray shirt, smoothing out wrinkled history notes, putting scattered paper clips, staples, stamps, and pens neatly back into their containers. Eli didn’t question my judgment on which things belonged to Max and which to Chris, nor did he ask why the Moores would want a stack of index cards from a first-semester paper on the Glorious Revolution or a collection of stolen shot glasses, one from each frat. He just took what I handed him and put it into a box. I gave him everything, because if I were Chris’s parents, I would have wanted everything.

I wanted everything.

Eventually Chris’s side of the room was stripped, bare as it had been on the day we’d moved him in and sprawled out on the
empty bed, wondering whether his unknown roommate would mind he’d been summarily assigned the crap bed under the broken window. Max’s side was as clean as it was going to get, waiting for his return.

But when I let myself believe in that return, when I tried to imagine it, the screen inside my head went blank. There was no Max without Chris. And I was pretty sure there was no me without either of them.

I would not cry in front of a stranger.

I’d set Max’s Voynich notebooks on the side of his desk, and, with my back to Eli, I started leafing through them, anything to distract myself from the rising panic.

They distracted me. Not the scribbled stabs at translation, which I’d seen several times as I hunched over the pages with Max, trying to make sense of the nonsensical, but the bottom notebook: a small, blue, college-lined, spiral-bound notebook with most of the pages ripped out. I’d never seen it before, as I had never seen what lay inside its manila inner pocket: a brown, weathered page of Latin that looked even older than the one I had hidden in my bedroom.

Max didn’t even like to make photocopies without express permission from the archival librarian, for fear of damaging the least rare of books. He was mostly oblivious to the demands of the outside world, but when it came to this kind of thing—rare books, manuscripts, letters—he did what he was told. He followed the rules. So if he had something, it was because he was allowed to have it.

Whatever it was.

“You can, you know,” Eli said. “If you want to.”

Shielding the notebook from him, I pulled out the page and slipped it into my pocket.

“Can what?” I turned around, keeping my face blank.

He gave me a strange look. Like maybe he’d seen me. “Take something.”

Maybe he had.

“Something that belonged to him,” he said. “I can tell you want to.”

He held something out to me, a framed picture. I didn’t have to get any closer; I recognized the frame. It was the picture of the four of us on the green, the one from the news. “I don’t want that.”

“Something else, then.”

“Is this you trying to be nice?” There had been a roll of packing tape under the pile of crap spilled out of Chris’s desk. I started sealing up the boxes.

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“You’re right, I didn’t know him,” he said eventually. He joined me by the box, holding the cardboard down tight as I ran the tape across. “We hung out when we were little, but I don’t even think we liked each other that much. Then he moved, and that was pretty much it.”

“So why are you here?”

Eli looked up. We watched each other across the sealed box. His eyes were a startling blue. “Truth?”

“Why not?”

“They made me.”

“Your aunt and uncle?”

“Them. My parents. Everyone. It was too hard for them, or something. It had to be me, because I didn’t know him.”

“Because you don’t care.”

A hint of red flushed his pale cheeks. “Someone murdered my cousin,” he said. “I care about that.”

Something about the way he was kneeling over the box struck me as too familiar. “Was it you the other day on the green? Watching me?”

“What are you talking about? Someone’s following you?”

“Forget it.” Wishful thinking, maybe. Creepy cousin beat murdering psychopath any day of the week. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I can go,” he said. “If you want to stay awhile.”

“Just to be clear—”

“Yes. This is me trying to be nice.”

“I think I liked you better honest.” I wanted to stay behind. I wanted to curl into Max’s newly made bed and close my eyes, inhale the leftover Max scents, lemony detergent and the cinnamony shampoo that he used under protest because I loved it. There, just maybe, I would finally be able to sleep.

“At least take this.” Abruptly, looking like he was thinking better of it even as it was happening, he extended a sheaf of papers to me.

“What is that?”

He shrugged. “I found them in a folder, taped under Chris’s desk. While you were in the bathroom.”

“And you weren’t going to tell me?”

His expression had a hint of something, but it wasn’t shame. “I’m telling you now.”

I ripped the pages from his hand. They were faded and stiff. Old. Maybe, I thought, forcing myself to tuck them away before I could get a better look, as old as the page I had stolen from the Hoff’s collection, old as the page I’d found in Max’s notebook, older, far older, than anything Chris should have had in his possession. Taped under his desk, like he was hiding them from Max. From me.

Nothing made sense anymore.

“What makes you think I should take these?” I asked.

“They won’t mean anything to Chris’s parents.”

“And they’ll mean something to me?”

“If you don’t want them—”

“I want them.”

“Suit yourself. Now let’s get out of here. I’ll send someone for his stuff.”

I’d wanted to escape his presence all afternoon, but now I lingered, knowing in all likelihood I would never see him again. One more piece of Chris gone. It occurred to me I would probably never see Chris’s parents again, either. Or his house. And thanks to me, his dorm room was officially gone.

I understood, suddenly, why my parents were so determined to keep our house. Sometimes shrines served a purpose.

Eli paused on the steps of the dorm. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wanted to linger. “So let’s say, for the sake of argument, your boyfriend didn’t do it, and he’s hiding out somewhere for perfectly innocent reasons, or he’s … you know.”

“Or he’s. Yeah. I know.”

“Then who did it?” he asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

“So what are you doing to find out?”

15

I call on you
, Max’s stolen letter began.

I call on all my brothers, to join my struggle
.

We will reclaim that which has been stolen
.

That which is ours by right will be ours by blood
.

We will rout the foreigners who tear down our proud city and rebuild it in their own image. We will topple the Churchmen who proscribe our worship and consign the holiest among us to death. We will reclaim our land by the grace of our Lord. We will destroy the one who seeks to steal our birthright
.

We seek this power not for evil, but for what is just, and what is right. Join me, and swear this oath, by our Lord, that the search will never end until our triumph is at hand
.

It was signed
V.K
., which meant as little to me as the short paragraph just above the signature, a language jammed with accents and consonants that could have been Czech, or could have been Klingon. There was nothing to explain why Max had it, or whether it meant anything more to him than it did to me.

The letters from Chris’s side of the room were unsigned, but it seemed unlikely their shaky words had been scrawled by V.K.’s steady hand.

You have no need to worry
, read the first one, also in Latin.

The girl has no suspicion we are watching. And I believe you are wrong. She has no volition of her own. She once followed her father’s orders. Now she follows Groot. It should be no trouble to switch her loyalties. The mother is here in Prague. She pushes the girl to be more practical, to find a household position, or find a husband. The Emperor has taken all their possessions. The girl thinks herself a philosopher. Or perhaps a poet. But these are dreams, and she knows that. She will do what you need, if you pay
.

15 November 1598
.

The girl was Elizabeth. It had to be. But that didn’t matter. Not as much as the look on Chris’s face when I’d confessed to him about my stolen letter … while all this time, he’d had a sheaf of them taped under his desk, like the handiwork of the world’s most wholesomely boring spy.

They were just letters, I told myself. They didn’t have to mean anything.

16

The Whitman Center didn’t look like a hospital. Temporary home, over the years, to New England’s most famous depressive artists, manic poets, schizophrenic geniuses, and a high percentage of the region’s wealthiest worried well, it had long ago embraced the moral therapy reforms that dictated genteel patients with decidedly ungenteel conditions should nonetheless be treated like gentlemen, and as a result, it looked more like a college campus than a mental institution. Building C, a three-story yellow colonial at the top of a hill, sported brightly polished columns along its wide facade, which endowed the place with a certain dignity and made it easy to imagine its patients decked out in their finest nineteenth-century petticoats and top hats, sipping tea while dapper, goateed doctors etiquetted the madness right out of them.

It wasn’t until I stepped through the double doors that a new set of images surfaced in my mind’s eye, images lodged somewhere in my brain from an old AP Psych slide show, or maybe a late-night horror movie, doctors in white Frankenstein coats looming over gurneys, electrodes dangling from their clawed hands, padded rooms, straitjackets, lobotomized zombies drooling, all hope abandoned.

Building C wasn’t a fright show. But it wasn’t a tea party, either. Past the reception desk was another set of double doors, which buzzed loudly as the guard ushered me through, then locked again behind me. Yellow walls gave the corridors a sickly tinge. An older woman with thick gray hair knotted into a braid brushed past me, clutching her gown and murmuring something about preparing for a date. I smiled politely, because that’s what you do; I smiled but then looked away, because that’s who I am. It
was impossible to imagine Adriane’s parents making their regal way through here, Mr. Ames in his custom-tailored suit, Ms. Kato in one of the silk kimonos she claimed had been handed down through the women in her family for two centuries, though Adriane had once confided that her mother’s old-country ancestors were fishermen and fieldworkers, and the silk kimonos, rather than being smuggled over on a 1950s steamer with the young Grandma Kato, came special order courtesy of a Newbury Street “exotic wear” boutique.

It was impossible to imagine Adriane here.

She had a private room and, if you ignored certain problematic elements—the door that locked only from the outside, the metal grate across the window, the call button installed over the bed—it looked like a motel room. A cheap motel, of the kind no one in Adriane’s family would ever be caught dead in, but it was better than I’d expected. So was she.

She sat on the edge of a blue armchair, shoulders back and neck erect with that annoyingly perfect dancer’s posture. Her sleek black hair was brushed and pinned back with her favorite blue rhinestone barrettes, and despite the tank top and yoga pants—an ensemble Adriane had always been able to pull off with the panache of an undercover starlet caught in the famous-people-are-just-like-us section of some celebrity tabloid—her skin was impeccably powdered, her lashes curled, her lips glossed to a healthy pink and turned up in a faint smile. So it had all been a bad joke, I thought, crossing the room—bad but brilliant, hiding in this place, leaving me alone and afraid. “You suck,” I said as my arms went around her. “You suck and I hate you, and why didn’t you call?” I squeezed tight, feeling, for the first time since that night, like I could breathe again.

She didn’t hug me back.

“Okay, maybe I don’t actually hate you.”

It’s not that she wasn’t hugging; it’s that she wasn’t moving. I let go.

It was the eyes I should have noticed, the eyes beneath the pale silver shadow and delicate liquid liner. They didn’t track me as I took one step backward, then another, retreating to the doorway; they barely blinked.

“Oh, aren’t you popular, Adriane?” a loud, cheerful voice said behind me. “Three visitors in one day, how nice!”

If Adriane thought it was nice—if Adriane
thought
—she didn’t let on.

“You can go on in,” the nurse told me. “She doesn’t bite.”

“Does she … Is she …” If I couldn’t formulate the question, it seemed unlikely I could handle the answer. I changed course. “She looks good.”

“Doesn’t she?” The nurse beamed. Her round face practically glowed. It was obscene to look so healthy in a place like this. “Her mama comes in every morning to put her together.”