Sanctum (15 page)

Dan gazed down at the paper, watching the neat letters blur together until they were just thick black lines on the page. None of them spoke for a long while, and then Dan blinked and folded up the letter, handing it across the table to Abby so she could get a look.

“We might have stumbled on something completely unrelated,” she said, scanning the page, “but I don’t think we can rule out a connection.”

“I don’t think so either,” Jordan agreed. “Feels like way more than a coincidence—the warden’s last year at Brookline, Felix’s map leading us to that house, and now that letter. It never left town. Somebody read it, too. The envelope was open.”

“I had a dream about this,” Dan said. He shrank preemptively from their curious looks. “I mean, that’s not proof or anything, but I saw the warden speaking to someone named Harry, almost like . . . assigning him a task. Someone was stalking her,” Dan murmured, but then a worse thought occurred. “Maybe even stealing her mail . . . She mentions wanting to write an article here. If she was in town, maybe it’s in the archives you found in the library.”

“You’re right, that’s not proof, but really, why rule anything out at this point?” Abby paused. “I wonder if that article would have been in the local paper or the school’s,” she said. “Either way, there should be copies of all the back issues. We can probably even run a search on her name with some keywords.”

“It sounds like she stumbled on some kind of cult,” Dan replied. A few orange leaves drifted down from the branches above them, joining the stacks of research on the table. Jordan brushed them away impatiently.

“You think the person you saw at Aunt Lucy’s was in the same cult? These letters are old, Dan,” Abby said. “What are the odds these Scarlets or whatever are still a thing?”

“The description matches,” Jordan replied, scratching his chin. “Skull, red robe . . . Maybe it’s not a cult. She said it was supposed to be about academics, right? What if it’s like the Skull and Bones or the Sevens?”

“If it is,” Dan began slowly, “I doubt anyone will want to talk to us about it. Isn’t the whole point of those societies to remain top secret?”

He looked between his two friends, who hesitated. Jordan scratched the side of his stubbled cheek with a pencil eraser, and Abby fiddled with the zipper on her book bag.

“Let’s not go asking any fishy questions just yet. I think the archives would be our best bet,” she said finally. “We can spend the afternoon there, and then we have the carnival tonight. That will be a good opportunity to get away and check the next address. I don’t think we should be breaking into any houses in broad daylight.”

“I wonder if that bright burning star is something we can cross-reference or LexisNexis or whatever,” Jordan mused, pushing up from the picnic table. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

“If it’s tied to this secret cult society, I doubt we’ll find any general information,” Abby replied. They mustered under the big barren tree and then crossed from the green of the quad to the paths. The library wasn’t far, just beyond a shallow hill, a half block from the chapel.

Dan tried to go over what he had dreamed one more time, before all the details slipped away entirely. The warden had been in that house with that man, going through the stolen mailbags. Could that man really have been part of a secret society? He certainly didn’t fit the profile of what Dan pictured when he heard “Skull and Bones.” On that note . . . could Warden Crawford?

Dan shuddered to think of the warden joining—or worse,
forming
—a secret society, extending his reach beyond the walls of Brookline. As Caroline had said in her letter, societies like that were about power and influence. Those were two things the warden definitely didn’t need.

“Right, Dan?”

Starting, Dan glanced up to find both his friends watching him. He hadn’t heard even the beginnings of what they were asking.

“Sorry, what was the question?”

“You were lost in thought, weren’t you?” Abby smiled faintly as they reached the tall doors to the library. A few students were clustered outside, chatting over steaming coffee cups. “What’s up?”

“I was just thinking . . .” His dreams had certainly become vivid, but were they evidence or just his imagination? “We know the warden was using Brookline as his personal research playground, but what if it wasn’t just him? What if he was mixed up with these Scarlets?”

“He did have a hard-on for the best and the brightest,” Jordan agreed.

“That’s . . . a scary thought,” Abby admitted.

For all the people who’d been milling about outside, the inside of the library was virtually empty. A bored desk worker wandered over, glanced at their weekend prospie badges, and waved them through the security sensors on either side of the doors.

Since Jordan had been here before, Dan and Abby followed him to a spot near the stairs leading down to the AV archives. They set up at a row of computer terminals with a small, round table close by for their papers and bags. “It would explain how he got away with so much. . . . I mean, if he had influential people watching his back, covering up his experiments at the asylum . . .”

“Oh!” Jordan slid into a computer chair, bouncing excitedly. “That’s something we can check, too. Asylums must have been subject to inspections and things, right?”

“They were, yeah.” This was Dan’s area of expertise, and he was glad to contribute something of value to the discussion. “Usually nurses inside the facilities secretly reported on the higher-ups, tipping off outsiders to what was going on inside the hospitals. Even then, wardens would do their best to downplay whatever horrible stuff was going on, and they’d usually get away with it, too.”

“Jesus, and here I thought Brookline was an isolated incident,” Jordan muttered.

“I don’t know if it got as bad as Brookline anywhere else,” Dan said. “I’m just saying, if there were cover-ups going on elsewhere
and
the warden here had the ear of the dean or the president of the college? It’s no wonder he got away with it for so long.”

“That’s good,” Jordan said, typing furiously. “Well . . . not good, obviously, but it’s another angle to check. We can easily find out who was running the college when the warden was at Brookline, then we can start digging on this alleged secret society.”

He tapped the enter key and then they heard a soft
bew
as the monitor turned off.

“What the . . .” Jordan smacked his palm against the computer monitor. “It turned off!”

“These are old,” Abby said, turning to the next keyboard over and typing. “It’s probably just a surge. I’ll check for . . . you . . .” She frowned, hitting the enter key about sixteen times.

“The hell?” Jordan said, hitting the side of her monitor, too. “No way that was a surge. It froze. Control-alt-delete, asshole. Wake up!”

He said those last two words just a little too loudly, and three different students whipped around in their seats to give him a death glare. Jordan sank down sheepishly.

Dan shifted to face his own computer, but he didn’t really have a doubt what would happen. Warden Daniel Crawford. AND. Scarlets. He hit enter, his cursor stopped blinking, and next to him Jordan swore viciously, all exactly as he’d predicted.

“How hard would it be to make this happen?” Dan asked, frowning.

“Hard.” Jordan glanced around the periphery of the AV room. “You would need to install an actual program on every single computer with whatever keywords and combinations you wanted to trigger the freeze. I’m not sure I could even program something like that.”

“Well, it’s a pain but maybe it will only slow us down.” Abby spun around once completely in her desk chair and then said, “We can use our own laptops, right? They would be clean.”

“Sure, but we won’t have access to the college’s digital archives from our own computers,” Jordan said. “They would require a student ID for that kind of thing.”

“I can use my phone for internet,” Dan pointed out. “We all can.”

“And as far as the archives go, we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.” Abby slid out of her chair, going to collect her bag from the round table. “Jordan, show me where you found those newspapers. We can start there and try to find that article of Caroline’s. That letter she wrote was October 1968. If she went ahead and published the article, it might have been soon after.”

Dan nodded and followed Jordan up to the second level, which was even more deserted, quiet, and dark, with only every other row of lights turned on to conserve energy. The book stacks formed narrow aisles, broken up every dozen or so shelves with small areas to sit and study. Cubbies with computers ran along the stout wall overlooking the first floor.

At the top of the stairs, Jordan took a sharp left, bringing them through the maze of stacks. He and Abby chatted softly ahead, and Dan hung back, letting his eyes roam over the shelves and books, which all seemed to blur into one another. Shelf, aisle, shelf, aisle, over and over again, all of them abandoned. Shelf, aisle, shelf, boy, shelf, aisle . . . Dan stopped abruptly, then took two small steps back to look down the darkened lane formed by the two tall bookshelves.

The boy in the striped sweater and cutoff pants. Dan’s mouth dried up, his tongue lying limp and numb in his mouth. He could feel a buzzing sensation starting in his lips, adrenaline hitting his system, making his whole body seize with sudden tremors. The boy in the shadows was drained of color, as if he were living in black and white, though his eyes seemed to glow faintly like coals. Blood dripped down through his hair and onto his forehead, into his eyes. . . .

Abby’s and Jordan’s quiet voices died away.

Dan blinked, expecting the boy to disappear, but he was still there, watching. Then he turned and walked down the aisle, away from Dan, only just visible in the darkness between the stacks. Without another thought, Dan followed.

Aisle after aisle, Dan chased the little apparition. He sped up, then decided to keep his distance, until the boy turned a sharp corner and Dan had to jog to make sure he didn’t lose him. His heart pounded in his chest, that buzzy adrenaline numbness flooding through his veins faster now. Dan took the corner hard and fast and shouted, slamming chest first into Jordan. Dan stumbled back, the wind knocked clear out of his lungs.

“Dan! Where the hell did you come from?” Jordan spun, checking over his shoulder. “I thought you were right behind us.”

“I was.” He raced to think of an excuse other than
I followed a ghost child
. “I just took a shortcut.”

“Scared me half to death.”

“Are you okay? You guys hit each other pretty hard.” Abby reached up to touch Dan’s chest where he’d run into Jordan.

“I’m fine.”
I’m not at all fine. I’m losing it
. “No, I’m not fine. . . . It’s that little boy again. I just saw him.” Dan glanced in every direction, but the boy was gone again. He turned to see where they had stopped, and a steep wall of shelves rose up to the ceiling. Binders upon binders were lined up in neat rows, the spines labeled with spans of years.
Winter 1961–Winter 1963
,
Spring 1963–Spring 1964
, and so on.

Right away, Dan noticed a gap, a clean, dust-free space where two binders obviously belonged.

And the boy led me right to this spot.

“You see things you shouldn’t be able to see. You know things you shouldn’t be able to know.”

Damn it, Felix, stop being right about me.

“The years the warden ran Brookline,” he murmured, fitting his hand into the empty space. “They’re missing. The little kid led me right to it.”

He heard Jordan whisper a barely audible “Creepy, Dan.”

“But not everything is missing,” Abby said excitedly. She pushed her arm into the gap left by the missing archive binders. He heard her fingernails scratch along the surface of the shelf, then she grunted softly, batting a slim, dusty binder toward them. The last swat was a little too rough, and the folder tumbled off the shelf. Dan managed to catch it before it could hit the carpet.