Under the Rose (20 page)

Methinks it’s not what our forefathers had intended with that oath. Plus, we had other oaths to think about, like the ones saying we were to
further the society’s friends and plight its enemies, and place above all others the causes of the Order of Rose & Grave.
Not to get all Kurt Gehry here, but I think it was safe to say Jenny was an enemy of the Order. Thus, she must be plighted.

Whatever that meant. Was “plight” even a verb?

On the floor at my feet there was a blinking red light. I reached over and pushed aside a few papers. Yet another keyboard, this one obviously a wireless. Look at the way Jenny treated her equipment! I picked it up, and flipped it over, accidentally jostling the tracking ball as I did so. One of the screens flickered to life.

So much for security. The monitor displayed a webbrowser window open to the Phimalarlico webmail page. A “Compose” window lay open. I leaned into the screen.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject:

I’m so sorry. By now, I know you are all very angry and I think you have every right to be. I don’t know if there’s any explanation for_ help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help

The words filled the page. I pressed
Return
and they started up again—help help help—filling every screen in the room.

I sat there for a moment, blinking at the screens. The chaos around me took on a new, sinister meaning. Maybe Jenny
wasn’t
usually so messy. Maybe someone had been here before me, rifling through her stuff. Maybe Jenny wasn’t hiding. Maybe she’d been disappeared.

He’s out for blood, and we all know from personal experience the man doesn’t bluff.

No doubt about it: We’d found our leak. Now the only problem was finding out what had happened to her.

I hereby confess:

He was the last person

I wanted.

11.

Friend-in-Law

I grabbed Jenny’s cell phone and keys and got my ass out of the room. Who should I call? The campus police? The dean? The FBI?

First, I called Josh. “Jenny’s gone,” I gasped into the phone as I ran across the Edison College courtyard. “She’s not in her room and it’s been—trashed. She’s definitely responsible for the leak. Come quick.”

“How were you in her room?” Josh asked.

“I broke in with my prox card.”

Josh was quiet. “You broke into her room?”

“Josh! I think something bad has happened to her.”

“And you broke into her room? What were you thinking?”

I was thinking that if no one believed me about Jenny, I was going to get some proof. And now I was thinking she’d been kidnapped. “What does it matter? The point is, she’s gone! We have to do something. Should we call the police?”

“And report your breaking and entering?” he scoffed. “Amy, unless there’s blood all over the floor, I don’t think you’ve got much of an argument.”

The only people who leave blood on the floor are your girlfriend’s society,
I wanted to snap, but held my tongue.

He went on. “She’s probably just studying somewhere. Have you tried calling her?”

“I’ve got her cell phone in my hand.” But that was a good point. I pressed the button for
Recently Dialed Calls.
Micah, Micah, Micah, Home, Sally’s Pizza, someone named Grace, two numbers in New York, and two more here in Connecticut. I’d call those later.

“You
stole
her cell phone? Broke into her room and stole her cell phone. Are you crazy?”

“You’re right.” I stopped running, and stared down at my contraband. “I shouldn’t touch anything until the police get here.”

“You need to go put her stuff back. And then you need to write a note to have her call you. Go home, wait for her, and hope she doesn’t get you in any trouble. Just because you’re a Digger doesn’t give you free rein to start breaking laws. I’m not a lawyer yet, but I’d say nothing you did tonight is cool.”

“But Josh, you’re not listening to me. I think she’s in trouble. There’s this half-finished e-mail on her computer and it says ‘help’ all over it. You said Gehry was out for—”

“Amy, I can see you’re really upset, but you need to chill out for a second and think. Where are you right now? Why don’t you come home so we can talk about this—”

“Come home?”
I cried. “My suite is not your home, Josh Silver! My best friend is not your latest romantic mistake. And you are
not
my superior. I was there. I saw what her room looks like. You have to believe me that she’s in trouble.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” And then he hung up.

I walked back to Prescott, stewing. Maybe I should just call the cops, but Josh’s words echoed in my head. The last thing I needed was to be arrested on counts of breaking and entering. And, like he said, I doubted they’d take me seriously anyway. So a college student was a slob. They’d laugh me out of the station if I tried to file a missing persons report when the person in question had been gone for maybe a few hours. For all anyone knew, she was still at the library, “help help help” or no.

That opinion was buoyed by the next ten calls I proceeded to make. Mara and Omar were appalled that I’d even think of breaking into someone else’s suite (Mara, like the stick in the mud she was, even threatened to go to my dean with the information, until I reminded her of her Digger oaths); Kevin and Harun laughed and asked how many cracked-out conspiracy theories they could expect from me before this whole thing was over (Kevin even jokingly warned me that if I persisted in arguments along these lines, he’d start to suspect it was me behind the website); Odile said that no matter how angry I was at Jenny, there was no cause to start committing felonies; Ben was out jogging off his ire; and Nikolos, Greg, Demetria, and Clarissa told me little other than to leave a number after the beep.

I stood in the Prescott courtyard. No way was I going to go back to my place and let Josh lecture me. But I had one Digger left, and maybe I could get him to listen. I took the stairs to George’s room.

Light spilled through the crack near the floor, and I heard music, but I had to knock twice before he answered. And when he did, as soon as he saw me, George burst into a grin. “Hey there, cutie,” he said, and pulled me inside. “You ran off so quickly earlier, I thought I wasn’t going to see you tonight.”

His T-shirt was soft and hugged his chest and shoulders, and his similarly well-worn sweatpants sat low on his hips. His hair was tousled and he was wearing his glasses. I love George’s glasses. I love him in his glasses. As soon as we were inside, he crossed to his desk and closed his laptop. Sign of a guilty conscience if I’ve ever seen it. But I didn’t have time to worry about that now. “George, I was at Jenny’s.”

“She behind this whole snafu?” he asked. He was rummaging in his mini-fridge now, and retrieved two beers. “Figures as much. That girl’s a menace to the society. No pun intended.”

“Yes, but that’s not all. She wasn’t there.”

He popped the caps off and handed me one. “I’d be hiding out, too, if I were her.”

“I think she’s been kidnapped.”

He raised an eyebrow over the rim of his glasses. “Really. Why? Find a ransom note? Someone holding her for a million shares in Microsoft?” He chuckled and took a pull on his beer.

“No, I found a half-finished e-mail covered with the word ‘help.’”

This shut him up for a second, but then he regrouped. “Come on, Boo. Who do you think would kidnap her, aside from your average cult deprogrammer?” He leaned back on his futon. “And to them I say, have at it.”

This was beginning to get frustrating. Why would no one take me seriously? I’d been right about the patriarchs last time, but no one had listened until we all lost our summer jobs. “I think it was the patriarchs. I think they discovered she was behind the leak and had her disappeared.”

At this, he really started laughing. “Right. We’ll find her with cement sneakers at the bottom of New Haven Harbor. That’s not those guys’ style.”

“What about last spring?” I argued, though my pique was fading fast. Eight discouraging conversations were about as many as I could take.

“Wrecking a couple of undergrad internships is about as criminal as these dudes get. I thought you were over this whole Rose & Grave mythology thing.”

“I was until I went into Jenny’s room.”

He pulled me down beside him on the futon and started rubbing my neck. “Just relax for a second. You’re freaking out.”

I felt his thumbs dig into the tightness near my shoulder blades and bit my lip. Okay, I was. Freaking out again, just like they expected me to. I’d been named Bugaboo for a reason—I was the one who knew the least about how the society worked, who would be most prone to paying attention to its carefully cultivated legends. But I’d been proven correct during Reading Week last semester. A bunch of the patriarchs had banded together to ruin our newly tapped club, and they’d almost succeeded. However, George was right. They hadn’t been doing anything illegal. Just unethical.

Still, the deeper George kneaded my flesh, the tighter my throat grew with unspoken words, and yes, even unshed tears. The rest of them hadn’t seen what I saw.

George pushed my hair to the side and began to kiss the back of my neck. “Listen,” he whispered between nibbles. “My dad was a Digger, and so was his dad and his dad and his dad, and the closest anyone ever got to breaking the law was a couple of campus pranks. Kurt Gehry and his gang like to talk big, but they’d never do anything dangerous. They’re a bunch of punks with power, that’s all.”

Man, did I want to believe him. I hadn’t been with George since the day the site went live. We’d been too preoccupied to get…occupied. And it did make a lot of sense. The professional bullying of a bunch of undergrads sounded a lot more realistic than actual cloak-and-dagger stuff. And now that I was sitting here, half in George’s arms, the idea that Jenny was in danger—that she was indeed tied up in someone’s trunk or sitting in a dark room with an interrogation light swinging overhead—well, it sounded patently ridiculous. No wonder everyone had laughed at me. “You really think it’s okay?”

“I know it is.” He took me by the shoulders and swiveled me until I faced him. “Relax. This is all going to blow over. It’s just the latest in a long line of society scandals.” He lowered me until I was reclined against the futon. “Let’s get your mind off of this.”

Strange and unnatural forces must be at work, for here I was in the presence of George Harrison Prescott, yet I found myself
not
in the mood. Okay, maybe some of my suspicions were over the line, but that didn’t mean I had to disregard all of my instincts. I sat up. “What were you doing before I came in?”

“Working. Why?”

“Working on something so private you needed to shut your screen?” I folded my arms. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“Boo—”

“It’s okay, you know,” I said quickly. “We have no
understanding.
”

“So then, why does it matter?”

Because I was curious. “IM-ing with some chick? Surfing MySpace profiles for pretty young things?”

He laughed. “Come on, now. I’m a player, not a pervert.”

I shook my head. “You’re so ready to claim that title.”

“I don’t need to claim it, baby,” he said, leaning in. “The Diggers already dubbed me Puck.”

But I was temporarily immune. “What were you doing?”

He collapsed back against the futon. “Are we really going to start doing this? I thought you were cool.”

“I am.”

“Then, what?” He studied me. “Is this some kind of turn-on? You want to know what other girls I’m with?”

An enumerated list? Hardly. “I want us to be honest.”