Dead Beautiful (30 page)

The Final Will and Testament of
Minnie Roberts, Age 14

Bequests

1. I leave my Japanese fighting fish to my cousin Jenny.
   
2. I leave my sketches to my parents.
   
3. I leave my clothes to my cousin Jenny.
   
4. I leave my ballet slippers to the Bethleson Children’s Hospital.
   
5. I leave my books to the Gottfried Copleston Library.
   

Final wishes

1. If you’re reading this, I will probably already be buried in the Dead Forest. Please find me.
   

Thank you for a beautiful life.

I blushed as I read it, feeling like I was violating her most private moments. “It’s perfect,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said, folding it into the drawer. “I also left a note explaining what I had seen that night, along with a sketch of the scene, which I drew afterward. Those were confiscated by the school.

“Anyway, when I went to the headmistress’s office, I thought I was going to die. But instead, she just told me that I was wrong. She hadn’t even been at Gottfried that night, and had witnesses to prove that she was actually in Europe. And then she gave me a week of detention for sneaking off campus after hours. Everyone said the same thing. That I made it up, that I was crazy. My parents sent me to a psychiatric ward for the summer.” Minnie gazed at her sketches. “The thing is, I spend most of my time watching things. I know what I saw. I’m not lying.”

She stared at me, her eyes watery and searching. I could tell that by now she wished she was wrong because the reality was even more disturbing to accept. “I believe you,” I said.

A symposium dinner was held at the end of the fall semester to celebrate the beginning of winter. In the tradition of Plato, it was a themed dinner designed to encourage discussion on various philosophical subjects. But the only thing people were interested in talking about was Eleanor.

The dining hall was filled with long rectangular tables, each covered in royal blue tablecloths that collected in folds on the ground. The feast was elaborate and distinctively New England, with buttered corn, poached gourds and candied yams, venison, quail, wild turkey, and Cornish hen, all roasted to a golden brown, along with blueberry cobbler, sugared fruits, and an elaborate array of desserts made from maple syrup. The professors were sitting at tables that lined the edges of the hall, forming a
U
around us. In the middle were the student tables, one for each grade, girls on one half, boys on the other. I was sandwiched between Emily Wurst and Amelia Song, a quiet girl who played the harp in the orchestra and kept to herself. Minnie Roberts was actually one of the few people I wanted to talk to, but it was impossible to ask her more about Cassandra in the dining hall, so I spent most of the dinner watching her push the food around on her plate. I tried to pretend I couldn’t see people staring at me, whispering my name and then Eleanor’s. Every so often I glanced around the room, hoping to see Dante, who told me he’d be there, but was only met with Nathaniel, who looked just as bored as I did on the other side of the table.

I pushed my fork off the table with my elbow. Trying not to draw attention to myself, I crouched down to pick it up and crawled under the table, letting the tablecloth fall behind me like a curtain.

Beneath it, the din of the dining hall was muted, and everything was dark and calm. I sat there for a few minutes, staring at the line of feet on either side of me, and then began to crawl to the door.

When I finally made it outside, I let out a sigh. The only thing I was sure of was that both Cassandra and Benjamin were dead, and that the school knew about Cassandra. That much I knew from the files. But was Minnie right? No, I thought. Impossible. Rubbing my temples, I turned to make my way back to the dormitory, when I saw one of the maintenance workers run up the path and into the dining hall.

Moments later, the door to the dining hall burst open and Headmistress Von Laark strode outside, her ivory cloak billowing behind her. I ducked behind a bush. Professor Bliss and Professor Starking pushed out of the dining hall on the heels of the headmistress, all staring out toward the dormitories.

In the distance I could barely make out a person carrying something down the pathway. I watched him through the leaves as he approached, until he was close enough for me to see his face.

Dante emerged from the night fog, cradling a body in his arms. I clasped my hand over my mouth to muffle the gasp that involuntarily escaped. It was Eleanor.

Her blond hair dangled just above the ground, blowing in the winter wind. She was unconscious and wrapped in a thick wool blanket, her body convulsing in sudden, violent jerks. I could see the quiet rise and fall of Dante’s breathing as he handed her to Professor Bliss and Professor Starking, who carried her to the nurses’ wing, her limp silhouette swaying back and forth like a hammock.

Dante glanced through the bushes in my direction, as if he knew I was there, and then turned his attention to Headmistress Von Laark, who was questioning him. He looked exhausted. Just behind him, a pair of maintenance workers approached.

“This young man has been lurking around here all week, trying to find the girl,” the older man said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “We had been trying to get into the basement for days, but the pipes kept freezing,” he continued, “so we couldn’t drain it. And then all of a sudden this young man emerged from the front of the girls’ dormitory, carrying the girl in his arms.”

The headmistress looked from the man to Dante. “Is this true?”

“I was walking past the dormitory when I saw her stumble out the front door. She could barely walk. I caught her just before she fell,” Dante said calmly.

“It’s been a week and a half, and we still haven’t been able to drain that place,” the maintenance worker said with exasperation. “The water is still almost up to the ceiling. Who knows how she managed to find a crevice to breathe in. How she even survived is beyond me.”

The headmistress narrowed her eyes, which were darkened with eyeliner. “Curious,” she said, her lips red and pursed. She turned to Dante. “Why were you outside the girls’ dormitory?”

“I told you. I was just walking past on my way to the dining hall,” he said. “Right place, right time.”

The headmistress didn’t look like she believed him, but gave up questioning for the moment. “See me in my office tomorrow morning,” she said, dismissing him.

“And do we know how Eleanor Bell ended up in the basement?” she asked the maintenance workers.

They both shook their heads. “We just work the plumbing,” the older one said. “The flood was caused by a series of broken pipes on the first floor. They were clean breaks, though, not made from freezing or bursting. Broken on purpose, if you ask me.”

Headmistress Von Laark flinched.

“Disgusting business, whatever happened down there,” the man said, spitting a wad of chewing tobacco on the ground. “But I guess there’s only one thing that matters.”

The headmistress had started to walk away, but stopped on his words. “Which is?”

“She’s alive.”

The headmistress frowned. “Let us hope.”

CHAPTER 12
The First Living Room

E
LEANOR SURVIVED. SHE SPENT A WEEK IN THE
nurses’ wing before being transferred to a hospital in Portland, Maine, and then home over winter break to recover. Between the panic that ensued after her discovery and final exams, I barely saw her before she left. Nathaniel and I visited her every afternoon, but most of the time she was delirious. The nurses said that she was technically fine; they couldn’t determine if anything traumatic had happened to her other than malnutrition and a slight case of pneumonia from being in cold water for such a long time. But there were a few complications. Her skin was freezing yet she refused to use any blankets or sheets; she was hungry but turned away all of the food given to her; she was tired but she never slept. Eleanor didn’t know what had happened either. She told Mrs. Lynch that the only thing she remembered was going to the library to study. After that, everything was blurry.

The news only made people more uncomfortable. Had she been attacked? Was it an accident? I obviously thought the former, though the fact that she wasn’t afflicted with any sort of heart failure did disturb my theory. And even though I was happy she was safe, I was also more confused. Mrs. Lynch reopened the investigation, looking for new leads, new evidence. But just when they were ready to begin, winter came in full force, burying the campus—and all of its secrets—beneath three feet of snow.

But let me rewind. After Dante carried Eleanor out of the girls’ dormitory, he came and found me in the bushes. “This is a nice spot,” he said over my shoulder into the evergreen shrubs. I all but screamed at the shock of him suddenly behind me.

“How did you find her?” I asked him.

“You said you thought she was in the basement. So I’ve been going to the dorm every day to check.”

I gave him a curious look. “I didn’t tell you that I thought she was in the basement,” I said. “I told Eleanor’s father that.”

Dante stared at me. “You didn’t?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Dante looked troubled, but I didn’t care.

“Cassandra is dead,” I said bluntly, because how else can you say something like that? “I saw her file. Which I found in Gideon’s room, by the way.”

“How did you get into Gideon’s …” But his words trailed off. “Wait, her file? You have it?”

“Yes, but—”

Suddenly he stood up. “Show me.”

I led him to the third floor of the library. On the way I told him about the rest of the files and their contents, and the real reason why I’d wanted to find them. But when we got to the oversized book section, the files were gone. I double-checked the decimal numbers, even took half the books off the shelves and shook them by their spines, but the files were unmistakably missing.

“They were here,” I said. “I put them back the other day.”

“Did you show them to anyone else?”

“Only Nathaniel, but he wouldn’t have taken them.”

“Could anyone else have known that you took them?”

I shook my head, until I remembered running into Gideon as I was leaving the boys’ dormitory. By now he must have realized that someone had been in his room and that the files were gone, but could he have known it was me, and followed me to the library? I swallowed. “Yes.”

Finals came and went. I studied for them in a blur, meeting up with Nathaniel during study hall, where we talked briefly about Minnie’s story. Nathaniel brushed it off. “Everyone knows she’s crazy,” he said, looking up from his geometric proof. And somewhere between exams and my study dates with Dante, I tried to do research, starting with the cryptic phrases on the school files, because it was the only evidence I had. This time Dante helped me, though by help, I mean sat next to me in the library scouring Latin books without telling me how they were relevant to figuring out why Gideon had had the files and what the files actually meant. But all of my work yielded nothing. When I asked Dante if
Non Mortuus
meant anything to him, he replied, “
Not Dead.
”

“I translated that too,” I said over my book. “But does it have any significance to you?”

Dante shook his head. “No.”

“What about
Undead
?”

He laughed. “Like revenants and zombies?”

I sighed. “That’s all I could come up with too.”

There were virtually no books or documents on Gottfried Academy, just like the article had said, and no matter how many times I searched “Undead” in the library catalog or online, I couldn’t find a single legitimate piece of information other than the expected Web sites about the general category of vampires and ghouls and zombies. I tried “
Non Mortuus,
Gottfried,” and then “
Sepultura,
Attica Falls,” and then various iterations of “Cassandra Millet,” “
Non Mortuus,
” “Two Deaths,” “Benjamin Gallow,” and “Deceased,” before I gave up.

By the Friday before Christmas, everyone had already started to leave campus. Cars lined the half-crescent driveway in front of Archebald Hall; chauffeurs were packing luggage in trunks while everyone said good-bye for the winter holidays.

Dustin came, just like he said he would, in my grandfather’s Aston Martin. I was standing with Dante beneath the lamppost in front of the building, my luggage resting at my feet as large flakes of snow floated down on us. When I saw Dustin pull up the path, I threw my arms around Dante, breathing in the woodsy smell of his skin for the last time before break.

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “I want to stay here with you.”

“It’s only a few weeks,” he said, checking his watch. “See, we’re already five minutes closer to seeing each other again.”

“Come with me,” I said. “It’ll be so much fun. We’ll explore the mansion, play croquet in the snow, sneak into my grandfather’s cigar parlor....”

Dante shook his head and laughed. “As tempting as that sounds, I’m not sure your grandfather would like me.”

I sighed. “Okay, fine. How about this: on Christmas Eve, I’ll sneak into my grandfather’s library, and you sneak into Copleston Library, and it will almost be like we’re together.”

Dante raised an eyebrow. “And on the night in question, what kind of book should I be reading?”

“A love story. And not a tragic one. I hate those.”

“It’s a date.”

I heard the engine turn off and the car door open. “Miss Winters,” Dustin said with a smile, stepping out of the car in a three-piece suit. Against my protests that I could do it myself, Dante carried my luggage and packed it in the trunk, while Dustin held the door for me.