Under the Rose (23 page)

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Santos, I’m not trying to get you upset. I’ve just been trying to get in touch with Jenny, and I haven’t—”

“You’re not the only one.”

Poe and I exchanged glances.

“For the last two days, all we’ve gotten is phone calls, phone calls. ‘Where is Jenny, have you seen her, have you talked to her.’ We haven’t, and she hasn’t answered the phone in her room.”

I thought about her cell phone, still nestled in my bag. It hadn’t shown any missed calls. Wouldn’t her parents try that number as well?

“Oh, Carlos!” said Mrs. Santos. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you worried.”

Poe was scribbling again. He held up another note.
You think the patriarchs knew she was gone?

“So I want to know who you are, and why you’re calling us. You’re not in her class, because we know what classes she’s taking, and you’re no friend of hers, because we know all her friends.”

Maybe you don’t know your daughter like you think you do.
But I couldn’t say that any more than I could say,
I’m a fellow member of her secret society.
“I know her through Micah Price,” I tried, because that was the only barbarian name I knew.

“That boy,” Mrs. Santos spat, “is no friend to our girl.”

Sometimes I don’t get parents. They either go to extremes assuming you’re getting yourself into trouble, or they completely underestimate what their children are doing behind their backs. The Santoses appeared to be the latter kind. They were about to get shocked out of their complacency.

“Ever since she started hanging out with him, she’s been different. She used to come home on the weekends, come to our church. Now she won’t even speak to our priest.”

Or maybe they understood the situation better than I gave them credit for.

“Have you talked to this Price?” Mr. Santos asked. “All her other friends have been calling, but from him, not one word.”

“So you’ve been hearing from her other friends,” I said. “No one else?”

Silence.

When Mrs. Santos finally spoke, it was in a whisper. “You’re one of
them,
aren’t you? The Brotherhood of Death.”

Abort! Abort!
read Poe’s pad.

“So it’s true,” said Mr. Santos. “She joined with you.”

Poe grabbed my arm and squeezed, but I wrenched away. Protecting the secrecy of the society was not my main goal at this point. So far, the Santoses had given me good info. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like discretion stand in my way. “And if I am?”

“Maricel, hang up the phone.”

“Where is my daughter?”
the woman pleaded. “If you are so powerful, you can find her, right? You can help her if she’s in trouble?”

“Hang up the phone,
cariña.
” This time the man’s voice sounded farther away, as if he was at her side rather than on his own extension. “Don’t talk to them.”

“No! You don’t tell me people are calling after Jenny, and I have to hear it from some stranger. So I don’t care what they say about the Brotherhood.” She spoke into the phone now. “You’ll find her, right? You’ll find her for me?”

“I can try,” I said, but the phone had gone dead. I looked at Poe.

His expression was grim. “That was a mistake. The Edison dean won’t presume malfeasance in the case of a girl who skipped town for the weekend, but if parents call and start raving about the ‘Brotherhood of Death,’ especially given the current media scrutiny, then there might actually be some police pressure put on this case. There’s definitely going to be more media attention. All undesirable circumstances.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “If there really is foul play going on, how can it hurt?”

“And if there isn’t, then we just committed treason.”

“How about this: My oaths to the society only pertain to the law-abiding parts?”

“If only it were that easy.”

“For me, it is.” I studied him. “Not for you?”

He was quiet for several seconds. “Ask me when this is over.”

“So you can decide after the choice has been made for you.” Digger, through and through. Would he consider his oaths sacred even if there were felonies involved? What the hell would that do to his political career?

“There’s no filter on that mouth of yours, is there?”

“I call it like I see it.”

“You don’t see everything you think you do.”

“Perhaps not,” I said, “but at least I discovered it wasn’t the patriarchs who have been calling looking for her. Maybe it’s because they know where she is.”

“Maybe it’s because they assume, and rightly, it seems, that the Santoses
don’t.
” And then, as if to keep whatever threads of rapport we’d created from completely disintegrating, he looked down at the pad in his hand. “So now
we
assume the Santoses will be alerting the school, the police, and the media.”

“Hope they have better luck getting people to care than I did.”

“I hope they don’t. And as for us?”

“I think it’s clear.”

He snapped the pad closed. “Micah Price.”

Jenny had crap timing. I really needed to work this weekend. I had a meeting that afternoon with my thesis advisor, at which I’d promised I’d have him a topic at last, and I had a paper due tomorrow morning that I hadn’t even started.

Technically, the paper was due today at five, but everyone knew Professor Szyska never came into the office on Friday afternoons. That was the day her girlfriend came in from the pied-à-terre she kept in the city, to kick-start the weekend. Standing Szyska date night. As long as you slid the paper under her door by 10
A.M
. on Saturday, when she showed up to work, you were golden. Which was good, because I hadn’t even picked a topic for the six-pager I had to write on
The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.
I was considering doing something about the current obscurity of Smollett in the modern collegiate academic curriculum. A well-placed film adaptation or two (perhaps written by Emma Thompson or Richard Curtis) would do wonders for the entire ostler subgenre of comedic 18th century English epistolary fiction.

As for the senior project: I was screwed. But I’d skip the bout of self-flagellating lectures about how I’d spent the last month distracted by George and worry about the issues at hand. Namely: tracking down Micah Price.

Which, it turned out, was not as hard as you’d think. Poe had been planning on working some Digger magic on the registrar’s office, but that wasn’t necessary after I plugged Price’s name into Google. Search results turned up a good dozen news items from the
Eli Daily News
in the past few months. Apparently, he’d been running an ongoing protest outside the Bible as Literature lecture all semester. The class met Mondays and Wednesdays, with sections on Fridays at 10:30. As it happened, we were smack in the middle of Friday section time.

We found the protest, such as it was, on the Cross Campus lawn. I wondered if the scraggly bunch of protesters had enjoyed more popularity earlier in the year. Now the group consisted of Micah, a half-dozen signs, and three freshmen (one of whom was sitting cross-legged on the half-frozen, half-dead lawn and working on his linear algebra problem set). From the stack of protest signs lying abandoned near the group, I could tell Micah had expected more participants. He was shouting into a megaphone, with the result that many of his words were obscured, especially as you closed in on the “blockade.”

“The word of God should
not
be analyzed!” he shouted, echoed by a halfhearted “Yeah” from two of the freshmen (Linear Algebra merely pumped his fist in the air). “It should
not
be subjected to comparison!” (“Yeah.”) “These are not
stories,
to be dissected by the
heretics
who have signed up for this class. These are not
myths,
to be encapsulated and dismissed by the God-hating
atheists
who control this institution!”

His followers waved their signs, which bore slogans like
DON’T TELL ME ABOUT
MY
GOD
,
THE BIBLE IS NOT A FAIRY TALE
, and, oddly,
I AM NOT A MONKEY
. (That last one was probably left over from his Tuesday protest of the Geologic Basis of Human Evolution seminar at the Anthropology department.) “I wonder,” said Poe, “what Bible, particularly, they are up in arms about. The King James? The New International? The Catholic Bible? I wonder if he thinks it’s okay to study the Apocrypha?”

“When I took the class, the text we used was the New Oxford Annotated,” I said. “The big controversy in my class was due to issues of translation. I had a Jewish classmate who argued every week about vowels and alternate meanings, et cetera. I learned more than I ever thought I’d have to about the Septuagint.”

“Maybe they should have a Bible as History class?” Poe asked.

“If possible, that would cause
more
controversy. The problem with teaching the sacred text of a living religion is that some people in the class are going to view it as sacred text. No one gets up in arms about the World Mythology Survey unless they worship Zeus or Odin. But trying to teach using text some people feel has been perverted from the start is bound to cause problems.”

“So why bother teaching it in the Lit department? Why don’t they stick Bible study in the Religious Studies department and be done with it?”

“Because we’re not necessarily discussing the religion. Just the stories for the purpose of context. Some of us want to understand Faulkner and Borges and Steinbeck and have never read the Bible before.”

“And whose fault is that?” He smirked. “This school was founded by a bunch of Puritans who didn’t think Harvard was holy enough. Not in order to teach people who don’t read the Bible.”

“This school wasn’t founded for women either, but look: Here we are,” I snapped. “A lot of things work that way.” I shook my head at the scene before us. “I don’t know how they manage to lecture with this going on all the time.”

“I imagine it becomes white noise after a while.”

We headed across the lawn to Micah’s not-so-merry band. He’d laid off the editorial in favor of quoting scripture. I tapped him on the shoulder during a particularly rousing rendition of Leviticus 26.

“
‘…if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate’
—What?” He whirled on me.

“Pardon me for interrupting,” I said. “But you haven’t seen Jenny recently, have you?”

Micah glared first at me, and then at Poe, but he didn’t get very far with that. Poe was a Jedi master when it came to a good glare. He brought down walls.

“Well, well, well,” Micah said, lowering his megaphone. “If it isn’t the Brotherhood of Death, come to shut me up.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Carry on with your protest, by all means. But let me know when you last saw Jenny, first.”

“Haven’t seen her in days.” He turned back around and lifted the megaphone to his lips.
“‘I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars and pile your dead bodies on the lifeless forms of your idols, and I will abhor you.’”

“Skipped a few verses,” said Poe. He reached over and snatched the cone from Micah’s hands. “Now answer the lady’s questions, and you can get back to your rant.”

The three freshmen froze. Linear Algebra even looked up from his graphing calculator, and I may have been imagining this, but in the sudden silence, I thought I saw a bunch of faces pressed against the glass in the classroom door. Poe waved for me to go on. Clearly, he did not adhere to Malcolm’s constant admonishments for
discretion.

“Right.” I tugged at the hem of my sweater. “Again, when did you last see Jenny?”

Micah’s expression gave Poe’s a run for the money and I felt the sudden need to step back. But I ordered my feet to stay rooted to the spot and lifted my chin. I reminded myself that this was the guy who had threatened Jenny, the one who had almost fought Josh, and who, for all of his claims to piety, was the only person close to Jenny who hadn’t bothered looking for her.

He leaned in close to me. “That bitch,” he hissed, “betrayed me.”

Get in line, buster.

But Micah wasn’t done. “So I don’t care where she is, and I don’t care what happens to her. She deserves whatever punishment is inflicted upon her. Jennifer Santos is a worthless whore of Satan,” he went on, “and you know it, because you are, too.” He spat in my face.

I stood there in shock. So did the freshmen, the students in the classrooms (who most definitely were watching), and everyone else on Cross Campus.

Poe simply stepped forward and handed the megaphone back to Micah.

And then clocked him in the jaw.

I hereby confess: