I called the hospital the next day, and they told me that Mr. James Orcutt had checked out. I left him a voice mail, but he never called back. And he didn’t show up at the Rose & Grave tomb as usual in time for our first society dinner of the semester, leaving me to wonder if he’d
a) finally gotten a life outside of Rose & Grave
b) realized that no one in my club wanted him around
c) was lying unconscious and concussed, alone, in his shabby apartment.
Unfortunately, something else did show up at the tomb that night, and it shot to hell all my fantasies of a happy-go-lucky last semester at Eli. We’d spent most of the evening congratulating ourselves on a raid well done and regaling one another with stories of our Winter Break adventures. Toward the end of the evening, there was a soft knock at the door of the Inner Temple. Soze stepped outside to speak to Hale, the tomb’s cook and caretaker, then returned, a somber expression on his face, and held up a large manila envelope. “We have a problem.”
Immediately, the chatter and backslapping stopped.
“The following was delivered to Hale by the caretaker of Dragon’s Head.” He slipped two sheets of paper out of the envelope and laid them on the conference table. One was a grainy, shadowed photo of black-clad figures in ski masks climbing the wall around the Dragon’s Head tomb. The other was a page from our class’s Freshman Facebook. My photo was circled in red.
My heart sank into my sneakers and I pressed closer, trying to get a better look. “How did they know?” I whispered. Very few barbarians were aware of my involvement with Rose & Grave. There was Brandon Weare, my ex-boyfriend, but he’d have no cause to share the information with anyone. Lydia, my roommate, but she’d never do that to me—or to my fellow knight Soze, who’d been her boyfriend since the start of the school year. And finally, there was Genevieve Grady, the old Eli Daily News editor, whose place in Rose & Grave I’d inadvertently swiped last year. Could she have let it slip?
Soze pointed again to the photo, and I noticed a faint red pen circle around one of the figures’ footwear.
“How many seniors have yellow Chuck Taylors, Bugaboo?”
Oh, crap.
Everyone now leaned in to look.
“You gotta be kidding me,” said Puck. “How can they even tell the color in the dark?”
Angel put her hands on her hips and faced me. “We were supposed to wear all black!”
“Well, some of us don’t have your shoe collection,” I snapped. “I can’t exactly climb walls in sequined black pumps or knee-high black stiletto boots.”
“No, but I’d pay to see you try,” drawled Graverobber.
“Me, too,” said Puck. He winked at me. “Knee-high stiletto boots? You were so holding out on me.”
Lucky snapped her fingers in his face. “Focus.” She turned to Soze. “What do you think they mean by this?”
Soze sighed. “It’s a threat. They’re saying they know which society is responsible for the raid, and, more to the point, they know the identity of at least one of the knights involved.”
“So?” asked Thorndike with a shrug. “We want to negotiate with them anyway. Our statue for, uh, the location of theirs.”
“But that was before they could pick Bugaboo out of a lineup,” said Bond. “Now they could force us to return the dragon without giving up our statue in return.”
Man, and here I thought we’d make it through the end of the school year sans any more barbarian scandals. “How?”
“I don’t know,” said Bond. “But whatever it is, they’ll do it to you.”
The missive from Dragon’s Head dampened the mood of the evening, and no one felt much like hanging out once the meeting dismissed. After taking a rain check on a planned game of Kaboodle Ball (despite protests from George) the members of the club headed our separate ways. Josh accompanied me back to Prescott College, on a pretense of seeing his girlfriend and my roommate.
“Feeling okay?” he asked.
I shrugged inside my winter coat. Once again, I’d shown how very appropriate my society name was. I’d screwed up the raid for everyone. Poe had cracked his head open for nothing. “Do you think Greg was right, that they’ll come after me unless we give them what they want?”
“Probably,” Josh said in a hushed tone, as we passed the Dragon’s Head tomb.
“I hate the idea of capitulation.” I kicked the snow, caught sight of my sneakers, and grimaced.
“Really? Wait, you wouldn’t be Amy Haskel, by any chance, would you?” He grinned. “I’m inclined to say it’s up to you what we do. I don’t want to give in either, but then again, I’m not the one with the target on my back.”
“But what could they actually do to me?” I asked, swiping my proximity card at the Prescott College gate. “What would we do, if the situation were reversed?”
“The usuaclass="underline" murder, mayhem, total annihilation of our victim and anyone she’s ever loved.”
“That’s it? Piece of cake.”
We walked up the steps to the suite I shared with Lydia. Josh paused at the door. “Seriously, though, they’ll probably start by publicizing your Digger status.”
I twirled my finger in the air. “Whoop-de-doo. Worse things could happen. Heck, it might even help me get into grad school.”
“Or…” He hesitated at the door. “They might press charges against you for breaking and entering.”
That one stopped me in my tracks.
“And the related theft,” Josh added. “They have a picture with identifying features, you probably left fingerprints somewhere in the building, and I don’t want to know how valuable that dragon is.”
“That probably wouldn’t help with my grad school apps.” I could feel a headache coming on. “But wouldn’t they have to let the police into their tomb, let all sort of stuff become public?”
Josh sighed. “I really don’t know how the rules work at Dragon’s Head. I know the policy of the Diggers is to keep as many of our activities below the radar as possible—not to involve the barbarian world in whatever happens on the inside of our organization. We wouldn’t risk opening the tomb up to scrutiny to get a statue back. We’d find another way to deal with it. But Dragon’s Head? Who knows?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, grasping at straws. Orange jumpsuits weren’t really my thing. “But I thought the cops tended to look the other way when it came to society pranks.”
“Yes. Tend.”
“Josh, I must say, you aren’t exactly the embodiment of comfort at this moment.”
The door flew open and Lydia stood on the other side. “I beg to differ,” she said. “He’s my favorite bodily comfort. Now, exactly how long have you guys been standing here, hatching secret plots?”
Josh kissed her on the forehead. “The real question is how long you’ve been standing here listening to us hatch our secret plots.”
“Not long enough, unfortunately.” She pulled his head down for a real kiss.
I trailed the sickeningly sweet couple into the wood-paneled common room, dropped my coat on the couch, and followed after it. Josh took the recliner on the other side of the coffee table, and Lydia perched on its arm, resting her hand on the back so as to be in easy finger-twirling distance of her boyfriend’s hair.
Do I sound bitter? I don’t mean to. But here are the things you need to know about Lydia:
1) She’s been my best friend and roommate for years, and we’ve seen each other through everything—I mean everything—from highly inappropriate relationships with T.A.s (not mine!) to regrettable anonymous one-night stands (guilty as charged).
2) Up until this past fall, her love life was every bit as disastrous and strewn with little pieces of ventricle and aorta as mine. Then she met Josh, a man whose own romantic history left much to be desired, and they both fell hard.