Chapter 29
There was no memorial service for Benedict. No mention of his death apart from a small, framed obituary posted on the same bulletin in Irvine Hall where all of the students’ grades were announced. It was short and mostly devoid of emotion—detailing in large part Benedict’s contributions to the school and his love of gardening. Fittingly, students placed flowers beneath the posting until the arrangement spilled out into the middle of the corridor. No cause of death was mentioned in the obituary, but rumors about how and why Benedict died were thoroughly disseminated across the campus.
A long weekend followed Lennon’s return to Drayton. Classes were suspended for the week of Thanksgiving break, and many students returned to their homes for the holiday. Lennon was not among them, though she did call her mom in one of the phone booths scattered around the campus to tell her she was okay and busy with her studies.
“Are you sure you can’t come home?” The sound of her mother’s voice was enough to make Lennon’s throat clog with tears. “Not even for the day? We’ll be making all your favorites. Mac and cheese, yams with mini marshmallows burnt dark the way you like.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, but I’m too busy. I have to study.”
This was a lie.
The real reason that Lennon didn’t fly home for Thanksgiving was Claude. He was utterly inconsolable, and in the days after Benedict’s death he drank himself violently ill, to the point where Emerson poured every bottle of spirits on his bar cart down the toilet, just to avoid him poisoning himself. With his supply cut off, Claude took to wandering the campus and sometimes even venturing beyond it, sourcing his drinks from convenience stores in Savannah proper by way of the Logos elevator, which allowed access to a floor on the riverfront downtown. Claude’s drinking became so extreme that he couldn’t be left alone, so the members of Logos divided his care into shifts that lasted all day and stretched on deep into the night, when Claude was most prone to his drunken tantrums. One moment he’d be despondent in his chair, and the next he would rage, throwing things and toppling tables and cursing.
They should’ve taken him to the infirmary, but when Lennon suggested as much, the cold looks she received from Emerson, Kieran, and even Sawyer were enough to shoot that idea down dead in the water.
“If you take him to the infirmary in this state, they’re sure to expel him,” said Kieran sharply. “We have to give him a chance to grieve and sober up on his own terms. He’ll be fine with time.”
But Lennon wasn’t so sure.
Things came to a head on a particularly terrible night when it was her turn to watch Claude. He’d been abnormally subdued that evening, and Lennon was beginning to suspect that there was something seriously wrong—that he was succumbing to liver failure or some other malady caused by alcohol poisoning—when he sat upright in bed and looked at her.
“You know…Benedict never much cared for Dante.”
Lennon looked up from the book she’d been studying, a text on the thin and hazy boundary between psychology and religion, assigned by her metaphysics professor. Finals were just three weeks away, and she had a number of exams to study for, papers to write. “What?”
“Benedict didn’t like Dante. Didn’t trust him.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Lennon. She had learned to talk to Claude like a child when he was drunk, a strategy that usually soothed him. But that wasn’t the case tonight.
Claude’s mouth twisted into a rictus. “You’re just so smug,” he said. “You open a gate, and you think you have the answers to everything. But you don’t know. You don’t understand.”
Lennon kept her gaze on her book. “You should rest. You’re tired.”
He tore the textbook out of her hands and hurled it across the room. “Look at me.”
Empty-handed, afraid, but too prideful to show it, Lennon raised her gaze. “What is it, Claude?”
“He was murdered. I don’t care what anyone says. He was murdered, and Dante did it.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” said Lennon, trying to stay calm even as her heartbeat quickened. “Dante didn’t know that Benedict was dead. He was just as surprised as I was. I saw it on his face.”
“He’s a good liar.”
“Not that good,” said Lennon. “No one is that good.” But even as she said this, she wasn’t sure it was true. After all, wasn’t it Dante who’d called persuasion a great lie well told?
“He could’ve been lying,” said Claude, seizing on her uncertainty. “You know he could have.”
“Let’s assume you’re right,” said Lennon, keeping her voice low and soft and as sweet as she could manage. “Why would he take me to Benedict’s house if he knew Benedict was dead in there? If he had killed him, wouldn’t he have wanted to cover his tracks?”
Claude made as though he hadn’t heard her. He struggled so much with the words he attempted to say next that for the briefest moment Lennon considered the possibility that he was fighting a tongue tie, an advanced persuasive trick that prevented victims from saying specific words or pieces of information. “Because Ben told me he was scared of him before he died. He told me that Dante said horrible things to him. Ben wasn’t afraid of anyone, but he was afraid of him.”
“Look, I don’t know what it is you know about Dante, but I can assure you he wouldn’t just…I mean, he wouldn’t—”
“He wouldn’t what?” Claude demanded, cutting her short. “Spit it out. Tell me how surprised he looked. Tell me how he wept. Tell me something that makes him seem anything less than guilty.”
Lennon replayed the moment of Benedict’s discovery. Dante had remained composed, sure, but Lennon had expected no less of him. Stoicism wasn’t a damning offense. Just because he didn’t look as shocked as she felt didn’t make him a murderer.
“Benedict is dead,” said Lennon, and it seemed a risk to say those words aloud in front of someone who grieved him so acutely. As though he would blame her for his advisor’s undoing because she’d simply dared to give voice to it. “At some point you’ll just have to accept that.”
Claude seemed ready to slap her. Gone was the poised young man Lennon had met months ago. He was all grief and malice now.
He began to rage. The way he did every night. He put a fist through the wall. Cleared his bookshelves, textbooks and notes toppling to the floor. He kicked his bar cart and tipped it sideways. Somehow, he broke a window. Lennon didn’t see it happen—she was too busy backing away—but when she turned, Claude was half out the window, screaming terrible things about Benedict and Dante and everyone else. He forced himself through the break in the glass, carving up his forearms and stomach as he leaned outside.
Lennon screamed for help, and Sawyer burst through the door seconds later. The two of them attempted to pull Claude back, grabbing tight fistfuls of his shirt. But Claude wasn’t small or weak, and he was even stronger when he was drunk. He struggled for a few minutes and threw them both off his back in his desperation to get at the window. Lennon fell against the bed. Sawyer, however, fell harder and cracked the back of his head on the corner of Claude’s nightstand.
Lennon had had enough. She cast out a hand and caught Claude in a vicious psychic hold, seizing his limbs and forcing him back away from the window and onto the floor, where he thrashed and struggled and spit at her. So she locked his jaw shut to quiet his screaming.
“Stop,” said Sawyer, face screwed with pain, clutching the spot where his head had struck the nightstand. “You’re hurting him, please—”
In Dante’s class they had spent the past two weeks learning a skill called anatomical persuasion . It involved careful interference with bodily functions—orders from the brain that could trigger a variety of symptoms—anything from sneezes to fevers or hives. It was amazing to Lennon just how many symptoms could be induced mentally. This type of persuasion seemed, to Lennon, the closest to real magic. And perhaps that was why she was so damn good at it.
Claude’s lips peeled away from his gums in an ugly sneer. “Let me go, you fucking bitch—”
Lennon knocked him out. One moment Claude was thrashing and screaming threats, the next he slumped lifeless to the floor.
Sawyer pressed unsteadily to his feet. “Oh my god — ”
“He’s fine,” said Lennon. “I was gentle.”
Emerson, hearing this commotion, appeared in the doorway of Claude’s bedroom. If she’d been sleeping at all, she certainly didn’t look like it. “Enough,” she said, and applied a pressure to the words that cleanly severed Lennon’s hold on Claude, something that Lennon was formerly unaware was even possible.
Lennon broke to her knees.
Emerson peered down at her, something in her eyes that was not unlike fear. As if Lennon had been the one raging and breaking things and not Claude. As if she were the violent one, even though all she’d tried to do was subdue him. “Help me get him to the infirmary,” Emerson ordered.
Emerson and Lennon dragged a near-catatonic Claude to a bed in the infirmary, where he would remain for the duration of the semester, under a psychiatric hold.
“When he’s stable, he’ll be released into the care of his family,” Dr. Nave assured them on his way out of the infirmary. It was late, and with Claude now sleeping soundly, he looked ready to return to his own bed. “He just needs time to grieve and sober up.”
“He won’t finish his classes?” Lennon asked.
“Does he look like he’s in a condition to do that?” Emerson tossed a hand at Claude, chained to his bed by cloth shackles. “Be serious. He’s too sick.”
“I’ve never seen anyone grieve like this,” said Lennon softly, worrying about her part in all of this. She’d subdued rats into catatonia before, but never a person. And it felt strange to have cast such a dark spell over Claude, to have dragged him into lifeless slumber against his will, even if it was necessary in the moment. “It’s terrible.”
“He’ll come around,” said Emerson, and she stood up. When Lennon didn’t rise with her, she half turned. “You’re not coming? There are nurses on staff twenty-four hours. You don’t need to babysit him anymore.”
“I want to sit with him for a while,” said Lennon, nodding to Claude asleep on the bed. “I feel shitty about what I did earlier. If he wakes, I want to apologize. Especially if, you know, he’s going to be leaving. Who knows when or if we’ll even see him again?”
Emerson gave a small nod and left. No sooner was she gone than Claude opened his eyes, staring blearily up at Lennon, his cheek pressed firmly against the pillow.
“You don’t want to apologize,” he said. “Even if you did, you wouldn’t mean it, and I wouldn’t forgive you either.”
Lennon leaned forward, her voice low. “What did you mean when you said Dante said terrible things to Benedict? What did he say?”
Claude rolled away from her so that all she could see was his back, his once-glossy curls now tangled and matted at the nape. “He said he was going to kill him,” Claude whispered. “Dante said to Benedict that one day, someday soon, he was going to fucking kill him. He said it would be August all over again.”
“August? What happened in August?”
Claude didn’t answer.