“Yeah,” I said, trying to smile. “That sounds good.”
“Great,” he said. “Friday after class? Maybe after, we can all get dessert at my parents’ house. Take it easy, you know?”
“Easy,” I murmured. Should relationships be easy? No, I used to think. Everything worth doing took work and time, but for some reason, when I’d woken up next to Noah in the theater, none of that seemed clear anymore. I needed to talk to Dante. I needed him to tell me that he hadn’t killed Miss LaBarge, that there was some reasonable explanation.
Before I knew it, exams were over, and as the snow swirled outside my window, I packed a single suitcase and dragged it across the courtyard. While I was waiting to hail a taxi, I heard shoes crunch in the snow behind me.
“You were just going to leave for three weeks without saying good-bye?” Noah said, his cheeks a deep red.
“I thought you were still in exams,” I said as a taxi pulled over to the curb and popped its trunk.
Noah shook his head. “I was sitting in my room when I saw you step outside. You looked like you were about to be blown away.”
I laughed. “Definitely not with this thing,” I said, lifting my suitcase.
“Here, let me get that,” he said, but I pulled it out of reach.
“I can do it,” I said, and with some difficulty, I pushed it into the trunk.
“Right,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Of course you can.”
The exhaust from the car fogged in the cold as we stood there, not quite looking at each other. “So, I guess I’ll see you when you get back?” Noah said, as if he had meant to say something else, but had changed his mind.
“Yeah,” I said, because what else could I say?
He forced a smile. “Great.”
“Great.”
Noah made to open the door for me, but I beat him to it, our hands touching as I reached the handle. “Oh, you don’t have to—”
“Right. Sorry.”
After I slammed the door, he brushed away a little circle of snow from the window so that we could see each other. He waved good-bye. And I was off.
When I got to the airport, I checked my bag and boarded a rickety little airplane with only one bathroom and one stewardess.
The looming buildings of Montreal shrank into white as we ascended through the clouds.
A disheveled college boy in a baggy sweater was sitting next to me. He was reading Dante’s Inferno. He smiled when he saw me staring at his book. “Do you know it?” he asked, his gaze wandering from my face to my stockings.
I pulled down my skirt. “No,” I said quickly, and put on my headphones.
Massachusetts was masked by a white flurry when we landed. Dustin met me at the airport with a takeout cup of hot chocolate and a big hug, and insisted on carrying my suitcase to the car.
Barren trees frosted in ice formed a canopy over the roads as we drove west to Wintershire House, the tires squeaking as they pressed into the snow.
Dustin asked me about Montreal and St. Clément as he navigated. Tinny Christmas music played softly in the background. We passed frozen ponds, churches with Nativity scenes out front, and white colonial houses buried in snow, their owners shoveling tiny trails to their front doors.
The streetlamps turned on one by one as we drove up the driveway to my grandfather’s mansion. Burlap sacks covered the topiaries, now dusted in white. My grandfather’s car was nowhere to be seen.
“He’s traveling on business but will be back for dinner,” Dustin said as he hoisted my suitcase out of the trunk.
And sure enough, when I ran down the stairs an hour later, my grandfather was standing in the dining room, slinging his dinner jacket over the back of the chair.
“Ah, Renée. Welcome back.” He always said back instead of home.
“Thanks.”
Dustin served us a robust meal of pot roast and spaghetti puttanesca. My grandfather tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt and picked up his fork and knife.
I stared at the pasta, remembering the night at the grocery store with Noah when I had seen Dante on the street. “Wait for me,” he’d written on the flyer.
“Eat,” my grandfather said. “You look gaunt. Gaunt and tired. I take this to mean St. Clément is keeping you busy?”
I picked at my food but couldn’t bring myself to eat it. “You never told me that dying with gauze in the mouth was rare for Monitors,” I said. “How come?”
He coughed.
“May I get you some water?” Dustin said from the corner.
“No, no, that won’t be necessary.” Wiping his mouth, my grandfather met my gaze. “I see they’re teaching you a lot at that school.”
“Why did you make it seem like the way my parents and Miss LaBarge died was normal, when you knew it wasn’t?”
“I didn’t want to upset you any more than I already had.”
“But you knew that they were probably killed by the Liberum. How could you keep that from me?”
He seemed surprised that I knew about the brotherhood of Undead. “I wanted to protect you. If the Liberum killed your parents, there was good chance they could kill you too. It was easier to keep you ignorant of them, in case you got it in your head to go out and find them. I wouldn’t put that type of foolish attempt at heroism past you.”
He picked up his fork and began cutting his meat, eating it in big, quick mouthfuls.
“What else do you know that you haven’t told me?” I asked, watching him chew.
He took a sip of sparkling water. “Excuse me?”
“You must know other things, being the headmaster of Gottfried. You never even told me about the High Monitor Court. You didn’t tell me about any of it.”
“If I may remind you, this summer you were not all that inclined to listen to anything I said. You showed no interest in engaging with the world outside your head.” He pulled the napkin out of his shirt.
“You’re leaving?” I asked. We had only sat down a few minutes ago.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve finished my meal and now I must get to work.”
“But—”
“If I may make a suggestion, I think you should change the focus of your studies. I am paying your tuition so that you can hone your skills as a Monitor.”
“But isn’t learning about the Liberum necessary if I’m going to hone my skills?”
“No. The task at hand is for you to develop technical abilities as a Monitor, not to play detective. We have actual detectives for that.” Pushing his plate aside, he stood up and nodded to Dustin to clear the table.
The next week passed by in a flurry. Dustin took it upon himself to teach me how to cook. Every time I tried to talk to my grandfather about anything—the Liberum, the Nine Sisters, my parents, Miss LaBarge—Dustin would whisk me away to the kitchen, arm me with a rolling pin and an apron, and put me to work, as if he were trying to distract me.
We started with mincemeat pies, the flour of the crust dusting the counters and floors so that inside looked just like outside. After that we made wild mushroom soup and stuffed artichokes, and I graduated to roasting and carving a chicken. First, cut along the breast; next, sever the thighs; and finally, dismember the wings. The cooking part was tedious, but dismembering the chicken was easy, even a little enjoyable, though I didn’t want to admit it.
“You’re a natural,” Dustin said, examining the carcass.
But all I saw when I stared at the bird was the crest of the canary. No matter how hard I tried to ignore it, the secret of the Nine Sisters kept haunting me. My parents, Miss LaBarge—they’d been killed while searching for it. If I were braver, I would continue what they’d started. I’d comb through my visions, find the missing clue that led to the ninth sister, and dig up her secret. I would make sure that the Undead who killed my parents and Miss LaBarge would never find it. But therein lay the problem. What if the Undead who’d killed them was Dante?
At nightfall, when the kitchen staff had retired for the day, I went to the huge lazy Susan by the refrigerator and stepped inside, just like I had done last winter, and pulled on the hook on the back shelf. The ground wobbled and then began to rotate until I was thrust into the room on the other side of the wall. The First Living Room, where my grandfather kept all of his Monitoring books, tools, and paraphernalia, was adorned with a heavy chandelier, hard antique sofas, and animal busts, which followed me with glassy eyes as I scoured through a book on modern Undead theories. I meant to search for information on the Nine Sisters, but when I turned to the index, I found myself flipping to W, and scanning the list until I found the word Wanderlust.
After an hour, I collapsed on one of the sofas, my neck sore and my fingers dusty. I hadn’t found anything. Upstairs, I heard the faucet turn on, the water beating against the ceiling. My grandfather was taking a bath. Running my hands along the carved wood of the armrest, I listened to him hum as the faucet turned off. There was one other place I could check, but I didn’t have much time. Slipping back into the kitchen, I tiptoed down the hall and through the second door on the right.
A single table lamp illuminated my grandfather’s office in a narrow cone of light, where papers scrawled with handwritten notes were strewn about his desk. As I lifted them to check beneath, a file slid out, its contents spilling to the floor. I bent down to pick them up when I noticed that they were articles and postcards, each stuck with pinholes and pieces of tape. Some passages were circled with marker, illegible notes written in the margins in handwriting that I recognized from my last year at Gottfried: Miss LaBarge’s.
The papers suddenly felt incredibly delicate beneath my fingers as I realized they were the clippings from her cottage. Before I could get a better look at them I heard a noise through the ceiling. Freezing, I listened to the drain emptying through pipes in the wall, and my grandfather’s footsteps as he walked down the upstairs hallway.
Gathering the articles in my arms, I stole down the long corridor and into the library. Snowflakes swirled around the windowpanes as I sat at the desk and picked up the first clipping.