S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller (23 page)

Cody glanced back and saw Beth with the Tuckaway section, standing in her assigned spot. She stared at him, mouthing the song words, and almost imperceptibly lifted her eyebrows. Banjo elbowed Cody, and he turned back to the front.

Unless, of course, Sin or Houston had been the driver. They were roommates, and Houston had been flirting off and on with Emerson, and maybe the guys woke them up and asked for a ride, and Houston had persuaded Sin to come along. But it was a school night, and Cody couldn’t imagine the überdiligent Sin going on a late-night spree. Maybe she just needed a study break or agreed to be the designated driver to keep Bishop and Emerson safe. That seemed the kind of thing Sin might do.

When the organ music stopped, the crowd filed out silently, and Cody was careful not to step on the dreaded seal again. The fog had lifted, and the campus was already Christmas-festive with wreaths and bows and garland. Cody was surprised they didn’t decorate the huge evergreen, which would have made a perfect Christmas tree, but it was still roped off and untouched.

After a lunch no one ate, they resumed their normal Saturday schedule, and iPads dinged with reading and writing assignments for the upcoming week.

“Try to eat, ya’ll,” Pearl encouraged, before puttering back to the kitchen, where she kept decorating a cake.

“Seems inappropriate today,” he overheard her say. “They should have canceled the contest.”

But for a car to hit a tree so hard that it killed all four of them, even those in the backseat, the car must have been going fast, very fast, and Sin would never have done that, especially at night, in the fog. She was way too careful for that.

Cody sat at the library front desk, perched behind the big PC, looking across at the usual cast in the Reading Room. A girl at the end of his counter folded origami birds for a new string to add to the memorial flock of fallen soldiers.

That left Houston at the wheel. But wasn’t the stretch between Sonic and the campus—which Cody had been on only once—a straight shot? Cody remembered that road was mostly lined with small houses, like the one the old woman was rocking in front of with the commissioner election sign out front, and most of the trees—certainly the big, hit-me-and-you’re-dead trees—were way off road, behind the houses, and even if you careened off the road, in the fog, wouldn’t Houston—or whoever was driving—hit the brakes, or wouldn’t the car—whoever’s car it was—slow down enough so that even if you did hit a tree, way back off the road, it wouldn’t kill you? And didn’t all these new cars have air bags? Even Cody’s ten year-old Camry had air bags front and side.

In the middle of the lobby, the annual Edible Book Fair was in full swing, and housemothers nosed about, judging one another’s handicraft. They had concocted elaborate book-themed cakes (a
Moby Dick
whale, a
Harry Potter
Hogwarts castle, a clever
Grapes of Wrath
angry fruit bowl), and the voting came before the eating. It was a typical S’wanee attempt at normalcy, ever-normalcy, and Pearl was right: It was inappropriate on the same day the school memorialized four dead students.

“I can’t believe it’s starting again,” a matronly housemother whispered in the acoustically challenged lobby to another, who whispered back, “They promised it never would.”

“I’m terrified to go out at night,” another insisted.

“Ladies, ladies, it’s nothing of the sort,” hushed younger-Pearl, shaking her head at the older bitties. “The dean will never let that happen again.” And then she added quietly, “Don’t go scaring your kids, you hear? It’s not right.”

“Who made the
Princess and the Pea
cake?” the Widow warbled with a proud smile. “It’s
darling
.”

How late was Sonic open anyway? Cody had seen Bishop and Emerson at the Lodge around midnight, and even though he’d lost track of them, they must have gone after that. Was a fast-food restaurant, even a drive-in, in a tiny, sleepy town, open all night? Twenty-four-seven?

“Cody, I didn’t see you sitting there! Come get some cake!” Pearl called out as the students clustered when the eating began. “The
Dune
chocolate mousse is heavenly.” The winner,
Atlas Shrugged,
was already globe-carved and devoured.

Dinner was subdued, and there was more food to go around and more places to sit and spread out. The rumblings of anger and rebellion that flared over the past few days had quieted, and Rebel’s Rest simmered down to calm acceptance. Long gone were Caleb’s booming voice and Skit’s throaty cackle. Absent were Vail’s sweet demeanor and Bishop’s and Emerson’s testosterone-fueled one-upmanship. Post-dinner study time was oddly quiet without Sin’s soothing piano as Cody struggled through an essay on the main themes of
Hamlet
.

“Why are so many people dying?” Cody asked, and Banjo said, “I don’t know,” and Elliott said, “I don’t know.” They’d all wondered the same thing.

•   •   •

“Mrs. Simpson, does S’wanee have any archives? Like school history stuff?”

Thus, Cody learned the one utterance to bring out the Widow’s smile just for him. “Why, yes, Cody.” She beamed, almost coy, a wallflower asked to dance. “S’wanee has a rich, wonderful history. Are you really interested, Cody?”

“This way.” She led him downstairs to a wood-paneled research room ringed with windows—a warm, clubby bunker amid the stacks. The room was a S’wanee shrine, with framed photos and shelves behind glass and drawers of primary documents. On the circular table centered on the antique rug sat a box of disposable latex gloves. “Put these on, please,” she offered pleasantly.

“Do you know microfilm?” she asked, and showed him how to load the tiny reels into the boxy, archaic viewer.

“S’wanee has a rich, wonderful history,” she repeated, librarian-proud. “Take all the time you want, Cody. I’ll look after the front desk.”

In addition to precious S’wanee artifacts—the gold pen used to sign the school’s founding document, the original American flag flown and its staff made from a tree near George Washington’s tomb, even the first dean’s spectacles—there were framed photos of visiting dignitaries through the school’s history. President Theodore Roosevelt had visited during that year’s Fog Slog and, from his bully grin of delight, seemed to bask in it. President Eisenhower inspected the ROTC cadets, President Kennedy toured the school’s busy labs, and a British prime minister and various other heads of state paid official visits in the mid-1960s. Apparently, S’wanee was a choice destination for notables, foreign and domestic.

The microfilm drawer was organized by academic year, and Cody quickly located and loaded 1970/1971 into the viewer. The
S’wanee Purple
was first, with weekly reports of visiting speakers, antiwar editorials, and football losses, naturally, to Vanderbilt and pretty much everyone else. There was an article about professors who commuted from other cities, the on-campus Women’s Strike for Equality rally, and growing concerns about the local overpopulation of deer. Someone named Virginia Masters spoke about her discovery of “female multiple orgasms.” The Wellingtons had been disciplined, again, for “drunken, disorderly conduct.” Other than slightly longer hair, the students could have passed for today’s.

There was a short blurb welcoming the newest housemother Pearl, girlish and glowing and thin, and Cody realized he must have undershot her age by at least a decade. In the backdrop of one picture, he spied a much younger but still spiffy Fletcher, and in another, a youthful, prewidow Widow Senex in a gingham jumpsuit and bandana headscarf, her battiness already hatching.

The
Purple
’s last paper before first semester exams was January 15, 1971.

Cody kept scrolling and came upon the
New York Times
, January 18, 1971. On page A22, in the left-hand column toward the bottom of the AP wrap-up, was a quiet headline: “Mass Suicide at Tennessee University.”

According to the brief paragraph: “In a mysterious incident, twelve students at Monteagle University killed themselves in one evening after a drug-fueled rampage that inflicted considerable damage to the small liberal arts college two hours outside Nashville.”

Cody scrolled ahead. The next day’s
New York Times
had a stand-alone article, still short and tucked in the back, that claimed “authorities are investigating the violent deaths that are rumored to have followed an overdose of hallucinogenic drugs on the small, isolated campus.” There was one black-and-white photo of a stone building engulfed in flames, set against a snow-covered ground.

Cody scrolled onto the
Chicago Tribune
,
Washington Post
,
Seattle Intelligencer
, and the
Times of London
, all of which picked up the AP feed in various incarnations with the same burning building photo. All buried the story in the back pages.

The
Nashville Banner
screamed its headline above the fold: “MASSACRE AT S’WANEE.” It was top news and thoroughly investigated, day after day. The twelve students, male and female, had gone on a “violent spree” simultaneously one evening, breaking windows, torching buildings, and even carrying a professor’s Volkswagen into All Saints Chapel, where they placed it, upside down, on the altar. They then fled security and scattered throughout the campus, ultimately killing themselves independently. One girl jumped from the top of Breslin Tower; a boy from Morgan’s Steep. A girl slit her own throat and bled to death undiscovered in Abbo’s Alley. A boy drowned himself in Lake Finney, which Cody hadn’t even heard of. Another boy walked in front of a speeding truck on the main drag through Monteagle—the same street where Cody’s friends died. One girl flayed her own skin from her chest and arms with an “unknown instrument.” Another, according to the paper’s dry prose, “removed her own eyes and tongue with a broken tree branch and was found barely conscious on one of the many trails that ring the campus.” She died shortly after.

The second day’s reporting shed new light, much of it based on student gossip, as the school itself was initially “tightlipped” about the tragedy. The students all lived together at Rebel’s Rest, a “log cabin compound and oldest dormitory on campus.” They were mostly “studious, conscientious students who exhibited signs of acute dementia immediately after dinner on the given night.” Initial symptoms included speaking “nonsensical gibberish, which quickly escalated to paranoid delusions and apparent hallucinatory visions, before the prolonged, violent rampage that culminated in their tragic suicides.”

The third day’s reporting included portrait photos and bios of the victims, as well as candid shots of anguished students embracing one another outside All Saints after the memorial.
Been there, done that
, thought Cody.
Twice.
The victims were bright and shining, and one student was quoted, “It all happened so fast, like the flick of a switch,” and another said, “It wasn’t like them at all. If you knew them, you would know. It just does not make sense.” A side article posed the almost comical question: “Death by Mushrooms?”

The article mined the student rumor that the victims had been poisoned that night by a “reputedly hallucinogenic mushroom indigenous to the outlying campus.” The students called these S’wanee Truffles, “known and feared for their mind-altering potency.” “I would never touch it,” a student was quoted saying. “Everyone knows never to touch the dark purple ones.” “I tried a tiny bit once,” another student was quoted anonymously. “Never again. Never.”

The paper interviewed the managing editor of the
S’wanee Purple
, John Crownover, a junior, whose own reporting implicated a fellow junior in the poisoning. The unnamed student, a “candidate for the Order of the Gownsmen, the school’s highest honor,” is suspected of testing the “mycological properties” on the unwitting victims, as part of a broader research project. According to Crownover, although the school did regular research with “outside contracts, like many universities,” it would “never condone” this kind of testing, for any price or purpose.

Crownover, a fellow Gownsmen candidate whose picture could have passed for any of the current Olympians on campus, stressed this was all hearsay and “unsubstantiated,” but if his reporting could confirm crimes of this “overzealous” student, he would immediately “break the story.”

The
Nashville Banner
apparently stopped covering the story after the third day, and there was nothing more in any newspapers, at least on this microfilm roll. Crownover must not have broken the story after all. As far as Cody would tell, the
S’wanee Purple
didn’t publish again that school year. He rewound and unspooled and reached for 1972/1973.

“There you are, Tiger!” Ross was at the door to the shrine. “I’ve been looking for you. Shouldn’t you be at the front desk?”

He laughed as he led Cody back upstairs. “I’ve been trying to check out these books!” he said, although he’d never checked out a book from Cody before.

The Widow sat chastened at the front desk. “I’m sorry, Ross,” she said, glowering in Cody’s general vicinity. “You can go early, Cody. I don’t need you any more today.” The Bat was back.

Among other things, the archives had revealed the Cherokee definition of the name “S’wanee.” It meant, simply, “lost.”

“Y
ou think they all killed themselves?” Beth asked as they huddled in the Observatory overlooking the Quad, their new secret spot when Cody got off work.

It sounded ridiculous. Only Vail had committed suicide for real, but then again, the only reason they knew that was because students had found her body. Considering all the stuff that S’wanee kept on the “down low,” anything was possible. After all, it had happened before, and S’wanee had stayed initially “tightlipped.”

Eventually, of course, S’wanee must have fessed up about the 1971 tragedy. They even installed a stained-glass window at All Saints to commemorate it, alongside other important chapters in the school’s history. At some point, the school had stopped hiding. The carnage got so much publicity, they couldn’t avoid it. Too many people knew, all over the world.