Her gaze went to the fireplace. The hearth was clean; the shattered mirror had been replaced by a square modern thing that clashed with the ornate Victoriana of the room. Either the powers that be had attributed the breakage to the storm, or the Housing Office, out of long experience, had decided not to bother tracking down the vandals.
Robin stood in the drafty room on the cabbage-rose carpet and spoke aloud. “Zachary?”
She closed her eyes, held her breath.
The cold air enveloped her. She strained through the silence to hear, feel—anything.
Finally, she opened her eyes. The lounge seemed dreary, dusty, and perfectly, obtusely normal. Not a trace of whatever had been with them over their long, lost weekend.
So why was she shivering?
She looked toward the bookshelves, the yearbooks returned to a neat line. She remained looking at them for a long time.
Outside the door of her room, she listened for a good minute before she slid her key into the lock and twisted the doorknob cautiously.
The room was blessedly empty.
She turned toward her bed…and gasped.
The yearbook lay out in plain view on the rug beside her bed, open to the black-and-white photo of Zachary.
Fury at Waverly swept through Robin. How dare she?
She stooped to pick up the book.
Her hand brushed the leather cover and she gasped again, pulling the hand back, clutching her fingers closed. She’d been shocked—a crackle, like static electricity.
She was suddenly certain that Waverly had not moved the book at all.
She let herself remember for a moment the terror of that night—Zachary’s desperate and inexorable presence. Such fury and…despair. So tormented. Seemingly trapped for eternity in the agony of his death.
But when she looked down at the photo, she felt again the twist in her stomach, the ache of longing and companionship. The haunted young man…handsome, sensitive, diffident…there was no anger or violence there.
He was lost—as lost as the rest of them.
And he was reaching out to her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sky swirled with turbulent clouds outside the cathedral windows in the college library.
Robin walked through the labyrinthine stacks of the periodicals archives, her eyes running along the years listed on the bound spines of old magazines—1950, 1949, 1948—a feeling eerily like going backward in time. She passed the thirties, moved through the twenties, thought faintly of Gatsby and flappers and stock market disasters.
And Hitler. “A dark time in general,” Martin had said.
She halted at 1920, the date in cracked gilt on a wide, crumbling spine.
She stepped to the shelf, pulled out the thick book of bound yellowed news journals.
In the soporific quiet of a study carrel, she pored over old school newspapers with photos of solemn jocks with slicked-back hair and baggy uniforms; ads for soaps that promised God-like cleanliness, for bottled study-aid tonics that might as well have been labeled “cocaine”; news of war, of students enlisting, shipped overseas. The black-and-white pages had turned sepia, fragile; the musty smell was a sense memory of a time she’d never lived.
She carefully turned another delicate page, and stopped, her eyes widening.
She was looking at a photo of Mendenhall. Not quite the rambling hodgepodge it was now, but the main structure was recognizable—except that the top floor, what had to be the attic, was blackened, charred by fire. Smoke still curled from the turrets. The headline proclaimed in seventy-two-point type: FIVE KILLED IN FRATERNITY FIRE.
Robin’s mind barely had time to register. Five? Like us. We’re five—
Then her eyes locked on one of the names: “Zachary Prince, son of Dr. and Mrs. Abraham Prince…”
She scanned the newsprint quickly, the words pounding in her head. “The fire originated in the Mendenhall attic, trapping the five students, who succumbed to the blaze. Fire investigators have no clue how the fire started or what the students were doing in the attic….”
Robin looked up, her eyes dark. Her thoughts roiled, with no coherent theme; everything in her body felt numb.
She turned the page of the book to see if the article continued. There was no more on Mendenhall, but a slip of paper was stuck between the pages, yellowed, with a hand-printed verse:
Robin gasped aloud at the viciousness of it.
You don’t know what you’re dealing with, the voice in her mind said grimly. You’re in way over your head.
She felt a cold prickling on the back of her neck, spreading down her spine. Suddenly, she was sure that she was being watched.
She twisted in her chair, stared back into the narrow rows of metal bookshelves behind her, searching the shadows between the stacks.
No one in sight.
After a long moment, she turned back to the desk and the book, tried to focus again on the article. But the feeling of intrusion remained on her skin, clammy and unwelcome as a stranger’s touch.
The sunset was spectacular and bleak, a thin, piercing silver and black, like a prizewinning photograph. The wind, high and chill, whistled through the spiky, sharp tops of trees.
Lights were on all over the dorm, students hunkered down with their laptops and books in bed or hunched at their desks, wrapped in blankets.
Robin stood at the very end of the third-floor boys’ hall, knocking on the door of Martin’s room.
She stepped back, a bit breathless, waiting. Under her arm she held the book of newspaper clippings from 1920.
There was no sound from within the room and, now that she noticed, no crack of light showing under Martin’s door. Robin hesitated, then knocked again, harder this time, just in case.
Why her first thought was to go to Martin, she wasn’t sure. It was an impulse, or maybe more an instinct: in a group of outsiders, Martin was as much an outsider as she was. There was a bond there—of alienation?—that she trusted more than any connection she had with the others.
At the very least, what she had under her arm was a fact; he would appreciate that. He was as determined as she was to know.
And there’s another connection as well, isn’t there?
Her eyes fell on the little metal piece hammered into the doorjamb, its Hebrew letters barely visible in the gloom of the hall. Mezuzah, her mind reminded her, though she had no real idea how she knew the word.
Funny—didn’t Martin say that first night that he didn’t believe in God? But wasn’t having this piece, this mezuzah, like having a cross beside your door? A reminder of God? Not exactly an agnostic thing to do.
She thought uneasily of the board’s fury at Martin.
But it wasn’t at Martin, was it?
Her mind flashed back to the board, the savage messages:
She stood still. God… a Jewish God… the rage of it… Zachary’s anger is at God….
She knew it was meaningful, somehow. And then the thought was gone, and she was back in the corridor, in front of Martin’s door.