Wildalone (36 page)

M
Y PARENTS' VISIT
was almost over. We didn't even have all of Sunday, just a few more hours before they had to leave for the airport, midafternoon, to catch their flight back.

“Cheer up, you'll be coming home in less than a month.” Dad pinched my cheek, having no idea that their departure was only part of the reason for my dismal mood.

I was grateful not to have to explain. Let them think that, homesickness aside, I was “nicely settled” at Princeton. Happy. Carefree. Dating Jake. As his brother would say: Why complicate things?

After lunch we stopped by the chapel. While they marveled at the excesses of neo-Gothic architecture, I asked them to imagine being there for a night of organ music—sitting in one of the pews, infinitely small, while thousands of wood and metal pipes howled up against the vaulted ceiling in an attempt to tear open the entire sky. Still, their thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. I walked away, to give them a moment of peace. And as I stood by the exit, watching the two figures sitting quietly, backs hunched, shoulders
touching as if chained together by a shared sadness, I realized that to them this wasn't just a school chapel. It was a church unlike any other. The place where, fifteen years ago, they would have been sitting like this, among those same pews, at their daughter's funeral.

Later that afternoon, after we had said good-bye at the hotel and swallowed the tears and reminded ourselves that Christmas was only weeks away, I went back to the chapel. Just hours earlier, my family had been sitting here. And now they were not. It was surreal how loss happened, too fast for the mind or the heart to adjust to it. One minute you had a parent, a boyfriend, a friend . . . and the next you didn't. The only constant was this inescapable sense of loneliness. At Princeton, I would often hear talk about learning to find happiness within one's self and not needing anybody else—a skill I hoped to never acquire. But at moments like these, I doubted that I had a choice.

As I was about to leave, a stream of light filled the nave: the sun had come out. After a day of impenetrable gray clouds, it had finally peeked from the sky, down through the stained-glass windows, spilling their reds and blues like jewels over the chapel's interior.

You need a key, the windows won't speak to you without it
, a janitor had told me not long ago, while giving me a tiny object I still carried in one of my coat pockets. Without a clue what a few glass panels could possibly say to me, I found the spyglass and pointed it up, back toward the exit.

At first, all I could see in the little tube was a circle of gray. Maybe it was broken. Or did something block the lens? Actually, I was just holding it wrong, pointed too high up at the ceiling. When I tilted my face a bit—to the left, and slightly lower—things began to slip into view.

Grainy texture. It had to be the wall, falling into focus as it got closer to the light. Lower still—an arched rib, framing the first glass pieces. And from there on down, luminous, bursting in ruby-red, in scarlet, in lapis lazuli and ultramarine, poured a window of astonishing beauty. A delirium of color encaged in stone.

Various faces looked out from the glass, announced by painted trumpets. Apostles. Angels. Animals of sacrifice. All in their own individual
rosettes. Below them, in vertical alcoves, bowed those of eternal fame: thinkers, visionaries, writers. But everyone was paying tribute to one man, a man seated in the center.

His right hand was lifted, ready to bestow a blessing. And in his left he held a book—open to where the pages had no text, just a single letter each:

A | Ω

I lowered the spyglass in disbelief. Was this why Silen had sent me to the chapel that night? I had assumed it was for the
Phantom
film screening. But what if it wasn't? What if he had figured out that these two letters would “speak” to me, just as they had spoken to my sister back in 1992? He must have known her. Or if not, then he probably knew Giles. The reserved art professor and the janitor who went around unlocking doors and sharing odd pieces of wisdom—it was an unlikely duo. Besides, what business would the two of them have, collaborating secretly to send me on a scavenger hunt with clues about Elza's death?

I headed to Forbes, trying to decide what to do next. I could ask Silen about the story he had expected those windows to tell me. But this required finding him first, and our encounters at the Graduate College were so sporadic that I couldn't count on the next one happening anytime soon.

Giles, on the other hand, was just a phone call away. Yet confronting him presented a different problem. If the man had been hiding something for fifteen years, he wasn't likely to volunteer it now. I had to be strategic with him. Provoke him. Say one thing and mean another. He had done it himself at Carnegie, chatting with me and my parents without any sign of a guilty conscience, while dropping hints about “the myths of a world many believe to be long gone.” Was he one of those many? Or did he know for a fact that this world was, as of yet, not gone at all?

As I replayed the conversation in my mind, I remembered something else he had said to me that evening:
Miss Slavin, I suggest you peruse the playbill. You might find the note on
Asturias
most beguiling.

It was the first thing I did when I walked into my room. And the beguiling
part turned out to be not the note but the image next to it: the coat of arms of the Principality of Asturias. A blue banner under a royal crown, and a gold cross with a letter hanging from each bar. Alpha on the left, Omega on the right.

My e-mail practically composed itself:

Dear Professor Giles,

It was lovely to see you at my concert! I did find the note on Asturias beguiling. Perhaps you might find the window over our chapel's entrance even more so.

If you have some time on Monday, could I stop by your office?

Thea

Within minutes, his reply hit my in-box. Monday certainly worked fine. However, while normally he was not in the habit of coming to campus on weekends, he didn't mind a brief meeting that same afternoon.

“PLEASE, TAKE A SEAT.”

He had heard me walk in but wouldn't look up from the book. It had an illustration in red and blue: a stained-glass window.

“I did drop by the chapel today, as you suggested. The Alpha and Omega, quite remarkable. Do you suppose your sister knew?”

“She seems to have known a lot else, so I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Neither would I.” The oversized volume finally glided shut. “But to get to the point, Miss Slavin, how did you find out about this yourself? The letters are so high up, even I never noticed them in all my years at Princeton.”

One of the janitors thought the stained glass would speak to me. He even gave me a spyglass.

I trimmed the answer down to a palatable version: “The window was hard to miss, on my way out of the chapel.”

“What were you doing at the chapel? If I recall, you don't practice a religion.”

“No, not really. Unless the piano counts.”

He stared at me blankly—humor didn't seem to be his thing. I reminded him that the chapel was a Princeton landmark. People went to see it even if they had no intention of praying there.

“Well, of course. But I was hoping that the reason you asked to see me had to do with . . . No, never mind. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

I could tell he was disappointed. Once again, like a big tasty bite, the elusive truth had been snatched from right under the cat's nose.

“Do you play Scrabble, Professor Giles?”

Half surprised and half skeptical, he watched me take a small velvet pouch out of my bag and empty it on his desk: seven wooden blocks, borrowed earlier from the Forbes game room. I turned the letters so they faced him and formed the first word, DAEMON. A spare
A
was left on the side.

“Now, if we remove the Omega and let the Alpha take its place—” I pulled out the
O
and pushed the other six letters toward him. “Can you guess the new word?”

I wished I had a camera: Giles and his jaw dropping, as he spelled out MAENAD. His mouth extended to an oval, the gray mustache drooping over it, curved up at the tips—a perfect Omega of his own.

“How extraordinary! Although it would mean that . . .”

“That my sister wasn't referring to the Bible, but to something else. You said a similar statement was attributed to Dionysus?”

He nodded, looking at the letters while the sentence probably still flashed through his mind:

I AM THE MAENAD AND THE DAEMΩN,

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

“Professor Giles, what if Elza included this because it wasn't just a quote but the ritual itself?”

He looked up, slowly. “Beg your pardon?”

“You know, some sort of chant. The secret words one would repeat, to
summon Dionysus. A woman whose lover has just died, let's say. She goes through the ritual and turns into a maenad. The man comes back to life as a daemon. Exactly as you were describing it to me: two lovers possessed by the god, united in him forever. No beginning and no end.”

He didn't move, didn't even blink—an oddly scared man, who suddenly seemed desperate for our discussion to stop right there. “How did you come up with all this?”

“Forbes had a Scrabble night; I pulled seven letters and had to play a turn. It happened to be the alternative spelling, with
AI
, but the words were still anagrams—except for the
A
and
O
.”

“I see. A perfectly rational explanation.”

“Do you think everything has to be explained rationally?”

A pen began to revolve under his fingers, hitting the desk consecutively with each of its ends. “It is hardly a matter of what I think.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“Miss Slavin, what anyone thinks is beyond the point. With all due respect to your late sister, if there is indeed an explanation that defies rationality, I don't advise getting involved in any of it.”

“Elza is my family. Was, at least. Which makes me involved, whether I like it or not.”

“Involvement and curiosity aren't the same thing. For your sake, I sincerely hope you are confusing the two.”

I wasn't confusing them, not anymore. “By the way, funny you should say this.”

“How so?”

“Back in September, when you asked me to depart from the syllabus, I assumed you were just curious. Now it turns out you were actually involved.”

The pen stopped. I handed him a copy of the second article from the
Daily Princetonian
and his eyes scanned the page quickly—he already knew what was on it. His name, printed there all those years ago, had linked him to his dead student for good.

“I was wondering when you would bring that up. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised it took you this long.”

“Me too. I came to Princeton determined to find out what happened to Elza, but ended up sidetracked by . . . by everything else at school.”

“It was probably the wiser choice.”

“Not so much a choice as a mistake—to believe that the past is just a past and I have nothing to do with it. When, in fact, on this campus past and present seem dangerously close to being the same thing. Don't they?”

He stared at me, absolutely still.

“Would you please tell me what happened at the funeral home that day?”

“If you mean what happened to your sister, I am not sure I can be of much help.”

“You are the last person who saw her.”

“That's what the newspapers claimed, yes.”

“Are you saying that someone came to Harriet's after you?”

“She was there when I left. So someone
must
have come after me.”

He could very well be telling the truth. But what if he wasn't? It wouldn't be the first time in the history of crime that a culprit looked like a normal person. Respectable member of society. College professor, even. For all I knew, Giles might have been obsessed with the Greek rituals, eager to enact what he believed to be the greatest mystery of the ancient world. And a unique opportunity had presented itself, fifteen years back, with a student from his class. She had been the ideal target: a gullible foreigner, with a predilection for myth and a subtle unrest in the blood. Now, in an almost exact repeat of events, he had come across her equally unsuspecting sister.

“Professor Giles, I need to know what happened.”

“Very well, then. I can tell you, if you insist. But, first of all, I have strong doubts that you'd be better off hearing it.”

I assured him I could handle my own well-being.

“And second, you must promise me that it will never leave this room.” He rose from the chair: a tall and skinny Don Quixote, fired up for a fencing duel with an invisible windmill. “So do I have your word or not?”

“You do.”

“Good.” A cautious smile, under the mustache. “I think keeping your promise would, ultimately, benefit us both.”

He walked over to the window and stood there, looking out at the campus where life followed its usual, undisturbed agenda.

“I was shocked by the news, like everybody else. We hadn't lost a student for many years, and in the whole history of the school there had never been a case where violence was involved or even implied. So the police went to great lengths—very discreetly, of course—but came up with nothing. Or at least nothing that seemed significant on its face.”

He paused, as if I was to draw some brilliant conclusion from his last words.

“Naturally, the school conducted its own investigation. Requested full records, all her academic work—which wasn't much, she had been here just a couple of months. The only item in my possession was her paper and I turned in a copy of it. But a unanimous decision was made not to stir up scandal, so I was instructed to neither raise nor answer any questions.”