The Academy Page 3
“I’m not even sure who said it,” she confessed. “I don’t know the other girls well enough yet to tell them apart by the sound of their voices, but it was two girls talking and not wanting to be heard. I’m certain of that. And one says to the other how she broke the no-food-or-drinks rule in the chapel. She had smuggled a cup of coffee into the chapel, when Mr. Randolph suddenly emerged from the common room, on his way home. The chapel floor had apparently been waxed, and the girl had lost her balance and dumped the decaf next to Sir David.”
Sir David was a glorious Italian marble statue of a dashing knight kneeling on one knee and holding a four-foot marble sword, with a space carved out of his back and shoulders to hold the school Bible, an oversized illustrated King James edition bound in red leather.
“She panics because Randolph is a religious man—him having lost his wife and all—and maybe he was not heading home but to the chapel for a few prayers before dinner, or maybe to play the chapel organ or something. He does that almost every night, supposedly. And there’s her decaf, in a puddle at the foot of Sir David. So she goes to mop it up, seeing how much of it she can contain with a napkin, and to her surprise, it all comes up. One napkin. An entire cup of coffee.”
“So she was okay,” Steel said purposely, wondering why he was using what little free time he had to listen to her, when he could have been doing something important, like playing PlayStation.
“Earth to Steel! Have you ever used a school napkin? They’re the size of half a Kleenex. There is no way it could have absorbed a full cup of coffee. Which is the whole point.”
“A napkin is the point?” he said, deciding to keep his editorials to himself.
She jutted her chin out, then arched her eyebrows. She did everything except say, “How stupid can you be?”
“The coffee disappeared beneath Sir David,” she said. “That’s the only explanation.”
He kept quiet, still not getting it.
“I take it you’ve studied fluids and liquids,” she prompted.
“Some.”
“Sir David has to be a half ton of marble sitting atop a marble floor. There is no way a cup of coffee could fit in the space between the marble of his pedestal and the marble of the floor. The only logical conclusion—and this is the same conclusion the two girls had—is that there is negative space beneath Sir David.”
“Negative space.” It blurted out of him.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she pressed.
“I doubt it, but it’s possible. A crypt?”
“Yes. Or an underground burial ground or tomb, or something! It’s like National Treasure Three is what it is. And we’re like Nicolas Cage.”
He debated telling her about the fifteenth squeak.
“What?” she asked. He hated the way she could read his mind. It wasn’t the first time.
“I wouldn’t be so sure it’s a crypt,” he said.
“Why not?”
And so he told her about the boys disappearing from the dormitory washroom. He finished by saying, “It’s a little harder to make upperclassmen disappear than a cup of coffee.”
“You’re thinking they went into some kind of hidden staircase or tunnel?” she said.
“I wasn’t exactly thinking that,” he said. “Not until you came along.”
“Like a network of tunnels or something under the school?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But it might be worth checking out. Sir David. Tonight.”
“But we could be expelled,” she said.
“But now that you’ve told me, I have to know,” he said.
“No you don’t.”
“I do. It’s just the way I am. And besides, they’re not going to expel us if we turn up some ancient tomb that goes back to 1660. That’s when the chapel was built, you know?”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “The school was founded in the late eighteen hundreds.”
“Yeah, but the chapel was built in 1660 in England, Kaileigh. It was taken down, shipped across the Atlantic, stone by stone, and reconstructed here in 1881, soon after the founding of the school, which was then a priory.”
She looked at him, impressed.
“So I read that pamphlet they gave us at orientation.”
“And remembered every word.”
“My curse.”
“But a priory! That’s monks, right? Monks loved tunnels and crypts. And I heard the school has a history of secret societies and clubs.”
“From whom?” he asked. He’d not heard any such rumors, but the idea of secret societies appealed to him. He thought of the boys with the blowguns. He thought about his father having worked to get Kaileigh accepted.
“What did you mean by ‘They’re not going to expel us’?” she asked.
“You’re going to let me do this alone?” he said.
Her eyes pleaded with him. She didn’t want to be dragged into this.
Steel said, “The first day of school, right before I met you?”
“Yeah?”
“I saw some guys. It was so freaky, I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”
“Freaky, how?”
“Maximum freakiness,” he said. “I missed a sign saying the gym was closed, and I kind of let myself in, and I saw these guys—upperclassmen, I think…” He paused, realizing how stupid this would sound. “Ahh…using…blowguns in the gym.”
“Blowguns…”
“I know how it sounds, but I’m serious: they were shooting at mannequins.”
“Mannequins…”
“And the coach was telling them to shoot harder if they wanted the darts to work.”
“Darts…”
“Yeah…” He felt about an inch tall.
“So you’re saying this is a weird school,” she said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“No, I’m saying these guys…I mean, they’re obviously different. Right? I mean, you think Blowguns 101 is on everyone’s elective list? They’re different like…I’m different,” Steel said.
“And where do I fit in?” Kaileigh sounded like she was ashamed of not being a freak of nature.
He avoided answering her. “So if there’s a tomb beneath the chapel, or if there’s a bunch of tunnels or something,” Steel said. “Or if there’s a group of students doing something in secret, I’ve got to know about it.”
“Because of the way you are,” she mocked.
“Don’t, okay?” he said. “We’ve both seen the stories on the news about boys doing stupid things in secret at schools. It doesn’t usually turn out so great for the other students. I need to know what’s going on, and I need to know from you if you’re in or out. I’m going to check out the chapel. You can do what you want.”
She pursed her lips, deep in concentration. “If I get kicked out of here, your father will not be pleased,” she said.
“So let’s not get caught,” Steel said.
“Right,” she said sarcastically, shaking her head, but allowing a small smile to reveal itself. “Good idea.”
The cloud cover over Boston held the threat of rain like a fist wrapped around a sponge. Some people on the streets carried umbrellas, while others wore trench coats in preparation, everyone walking with hunched shoulders as if the rain were already falling. On the bank of the Charles River loomed an imposing structure. From the outside it looked like a cross between a stone library and a church. It was situated on a small weedy patch of mostly brown grass populated by a few withered and struggling trees that had once been mighty. A pair of resident squirrels skittered between the trees—trees that had outlived generations of Bostonians who had used this place.
The sounds were many: cars and trucks on Commonwealth Avenue, not far away; the insectlike buzz of an outboard motor spilling up from the Charles, interrupted occasionally by the rhythmic chanting of a coxswain; the whine of a jet aircraft on final approach to Logan Airport.
The building had seen many lives, many uses: for twenty years it ha
d been a fraternity house for a famous university. For six years, a storage place for rowing sculls—owing to the property’s relationship to the Charles River. For one brief moment of glory it had served as campaign headquarters for a failed politician, draped in bunting with red-white-and-blue signs planted on the lawn.
Now, considered abandoned by most who drove past, it was commonly referred to as the boathouse, and it fell under the protection of the Boston Commission for Historic Restoration and Preservation, a pet project of a former mayor, a man determined to preserve nineteenth century architecture. The building was considered too beautiful to tear down, too far in disrepair to receive funding to rehabilitate, and so it languished in the shadows of more practical, if less satisfying, buildings that served as its neighbors. It was also known by some as the Corinthians because of the four stone columns that supported a false gable carrying a gorgeous frieze depicting Paul Revere’s famous ride. Some Boston blue bloods believed it haunted.
A small squirrel made its way along a narrow, well-traveled line in the grass where the unkempt and weed-ridden lawn met the building’s stone foundation. The squirrel’s tiny ears twitched at the onset of unfamiliar sounds, and it scurried more quickly, darting down the path with the erratic stop and start of an animal that believed it was being stalked. The squirrel reared onto its hind legs and sniffed the air as it reached the rusted stub of a decayed iron pipe that was layered with globs of cracked concrete where the pipe protruded from one of the stone columns. Hesitating for only one quick squirrel heartbeat, the creature leaped effortlessly and disappeared into the darkness, lifting its feet daintily to avoid the stagnant and foul-smelling water that had festered for years, decades perhaps, in the bottom of the pipe. If a squirrel could hold its nose, this one would have.
It raced blindly through a number of intersections, turning first left, then sharply right, then left again, the route committed to memory from a hundred other visits. Finally a faint glow appeared as the pitch-black melted into a gray fog. The squirrel reached a dead end and jumped straight up, its little feet scratching at the rim of a pipe flush with a wooden floor in a small room that echoed with the sound of dripping water. Across the floor, up a slanting board that had dislodged from the ceiling, the squirrel scampered and sprang into flight, traveling a full six feet into the air before reaching a dangling light fixture that swung first forward, then back, then forward again, the squirrel using the momentum to launch toward the next fixture. Its tiny claws on its equally tiny feet scratched across the floor above a ceiling as it danced from one room to the next, knowing little of the area below.
“You hear that?” a boy of fourteen said from where he sat on two stacked car tires directly below the route of the squirrel.
“Rats,” said another boy, who wore his nearly orange hair over his ears and down to his shirt collar in the back.
In the room were six of the currently nine boys at Corinthians, varying in age from twelve to seventeen. They sat on secondhand lawn furniture: pool chairs and a chaise lounge or two, some without all the original plastic straps. There were nine cots spread between two rooms, with fresh linens and towels provided once a week. (One of the boys held a job at a Laundromat.) A bench seat was pushed against one wall—the middle row from an SUV, complete with cup holders. The bench was occupied by Brian Taddler, who had made a point of lying down so that no one would attempt to share it with him. Taddler sometimes slept on the bench seat as well, and he farted a lot, clouding the surrounding area with rancid odors that would not go away.
“Squirrels,” Taddler said. “It’s squirrels.” He stated this absolutely, though he had no idea if he was right. He did this primarily to convince himself of it, for he was terrified of rats and found it hard to sleep if he pictured the rodents running around. A mental image of a cute little squirrel was altogether different, though he would never ever use a word like “cute” around this lot.
They were tough boys, each and every one. Not as tough as Brian Taddler, or so he convinced himself. He did not want to test the theory.
“I’ve seen the little black rice they leave behind,” Johnny said. “And squirrels don’t poop no black rice. Their stuff is more like pellets.”
“Well, I’ve seen plenty of pellets around.”
“So maybe it’s both,” Johnny said, not wanting to pick a fight. He was an okay boy who might have once played on a Pop Warner football team had he been dealt a better hand. He had wide shoulders and a thick, brutish chest. But his face was cherubic, his cheeks a constant violent red, and his voice had not yet broken, providing him a high tenor that was a good imitation of Alvin the chipmunk.
His mother and father took turns testing the physical limits of alcohol abuse. He’d run away in his fifteenth year, and had been briefly in residence in a city shelter, the same as Taddler and most of the others.
The boys spent a good deal of time in this particular room because its skylight was intact, and because a large hole in the plaster of the far wall offered access to a complex escape route that eventually led outside—an escape route that required one to be shorter than five foot four and less than one hundred and forty pounds, meaning if discovered by adults, the boys had a viable exit strategy. It was also a room that, in winter months, when the steam heat failed, as it often did, was small enough to retain some collective body heat.
Over near the hole in the wall, a group of car batteries had collected, all but one dead. A braid of wires ran from the live battery’s stubby terminals, including two that disappeared up through another hole in the ceiling, eventually reaching the roof, where they had been connected to a solar panel purchased through Amazon.com. The solar panel trickle-charged the car battery, filling it with power by day, so the boys could drain it at night with lights, PSPs, and iPods.
The other wires powered such luxuries as a seven-watt compact fluorescent bulb and a variety of improvised security devices, each installed at an entrance and collectively wired to a red taillight stolen off a motor scooter.
Presently, the taillight flashed once and stayed red for a count of three. Then it went dark. All six boys moved silently toward the escape hole, their eyes trained on the warning light. It illuminated once again for a count of three, then went dark.
The boys relaxed noticeably. That was the sign for “all clear.”
“I’ll check,” Johnny said. He headed out the door and through a maze of interconnected hallways and eventually into the building’s central gallery, a circular space holding what looked like a stone altar, and surrounded on three sides by smaller Corinthian columns. Stories about the altar included a human virgin sacrifice and the speculation that it was a pedestal for a missing statue, all part of the boys’ late-night entertainment, which also included ghost stories about bodies buried beneath the building.
Lending to the stories had been the discovery of six peepholes throughout the building, which afforded spying on adjacent rooms. In each case, a small slit had been cut into a wall, offering a vantage point, sometimes into a hallway, sometimes a meeting room, or into the central gallery, where Johnny now trained an eye.
A woman entered. Well dressed, like a librarian or schoolteacher, she moved comfortably and confidently in the dim room, waving directly at Johnny’s peephole. Johnny waved back, though his effort went unseen because of the wall separating them.
“It’s her,” Johnny confirmed, reentering the small smelly room.
Each of the boys shifted uncomfortably, trying to sit up straight.
“Was she bringing—”
“Yeah. Of course,” Johnny answered.
As the woman entered, Taddler wondered how a person could look so unremarkable. She had a plain yet somehow expensive look about her, which Taddler saw even if the other boys did not. Derek, one of the older boys, had claimed she was a parole officer. Taddler didn’t think so. A preacher’s wife, he thought. Or a single woman who took care of her aging mother by night and tended to a handful of young teenage boys by day.
She carefully set down the grocery bags. The boys knew better than to even touch them while in her presence. She demanded and won their full attention.
“Collection? Derek, it’s your turn, I believe.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Derek said, his tone softer than what he used on his friends.
“Sixty-seven dollars, ma’am.” He passed her the cash.
She accepted it, saying, “Very good. Not bad at all. That should buy you all enough food to see you through the weekend.” She stuffed the money into her purse without counting it.
The purse was real leather with a shiny interior. Inside was a fat, purple, leather wallet, a fancy pen, and some sunglasses. Taddler found everything about Mrs. D. intriguing. Her actions seemed genuine, though her purpose clouded. She claimed to want the best for them. He wasn’t so sure.
“There’s a job to do. There are papers in a guest’s room at the Haymarket,” she said. “Each room has a printer/copier, so all we have to do is find the papers and copy them.”
“And get out,” Johnny said, causing the other boys to chuckle. Not Mrs. D. She’d given them only the small piece of her name, just as she’d given them only a small piece of anything to do with her. Even the boys who’d been there more than a year knew precious little about her.