Chapter 34
Drayton’s professors kept private apartments on school grounds. At the distant edge of campus there was a block of townhomes, off-limits to students, where the faculty spent their nights. It wasn’t hard to locate Dante’s residence, because each of these narrow row houses bore a plaque on the front, designating their ownership. Dante’s was a dark brick, half-covered in crawling ivy. Its windows glowed warm in the chill autumn night.
Lennon knocked.
After a long beat, Dante answered. He didn’t look surprised to see her on his stoop. “You can’t just show up to my private residence in the middle of the night.”
“You showed up at my parents’ home, uninvited, on Christmas .”
“That was different.”
“How so?”
“For one, you wanted me to come—”
“That’s—”
“Don’t deny it, Lennon. Second, there was little to no risk of anything when I showed up at your parents’. The same can’t be said for you being here. It doesn’t look right, me with my advisee on my doorstep in the middle of the night. What if someone saw us?”
“Then I guess you better get me inside before someone does.”
His gaze hardened. “We have an agreement, Lennon.”
“I know. This conversation won’t breach it. It’s school related. Perfectly within the bounds of our advisorship.”
Dante looked unmoved. “Is that a promise?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
He rolled his eyes but stepped out of the doorway, showed her into a small living room—furnished tastefully in the same style as the rest of the campus. A coffee table in front of the couch was covered in at least a dozen white envelopes.
“What is all of this?” she asked.
Lennon hadn’t expected a real answer—Dante was always one to keep his secrets—so when he offered one it came as a surprise. “There’s a congressional campaign out of Pennsylvania that one of the school’s primary donors would very much like me to quash.”
Lennon sat down on the couch. “Will it be violent? The quashing, I mean.”
Dante sat down on the couch beside her, a careful distance between them.
“Most likely.”
“How will you do it?”
“I won’t do it. I’m going to refuse them.”
“But if you did?”
Dante thought through this carefully. “I’d try my hand at diplomacy. And if that didn’t work, and inevitably it wouldn’t—that’s why they wrote to me in the first place—I’d put a bit of force behind my words.”
“Which is to say you’d persuade them?”
“Correct.”
“What if they won’t bend?” Lennon asked, knowing from her studies that high-stakes targets were often stubborn, married to their own agendas, and reluctant to be put off of them. They might even have persuasive defenses of their own, ways to ward off psychic attacks.
But Dante didn’t seem troubled by this prospect. “If they won’t bend…then I opt for violence. But only the clean kind. A well-timed stroke. An unfortunate car crash. A suicide maybe, if the circumstances allow for it. It’s ugly work, and I don’t relish it.”
“Then why do it at all?”
“Because it needs to be done,” said Dante. “This school, the people who depend on it, we exist in a closed ecosystem, and we all have to do our part to sustain it. This work—these letters—is a part of that. You’ll be getting letters like that soon, if you haven’t already. But you’re not here to talk about work.”
“No. I’m not.”
“What are you here for?”
“You had a confrontation with Claude the day before he was expelled. What happened?”
“Claude came into my office drunk,” said Dante. “He toppled a bookshelf and accused me of a number of salacious misdeeds, including murdering Benedict. I drew the line there.”
Lennon swallowed dry. “And by ‘drew the line,’ you mean—”
“It’s clear to me that Claude wasn’t going to be able to stay at this school without destroying himself, and I was willing to allow him to do that. But to drag you into the mire of his drunken self-annihilation was a step too far, so I made my concerns apparent to Eileen and the rest of the professors here. A hearing was assembled, and Claude showed up drunk, which I imagine didn’t do him any favors. The hearing took a vote, and he was expelled.”
“And by ‘expelled,’ you mean you took his memories of Drayton. Of everyone he met here. Benedict included.”
Dante got up off the couch to pour himself a drink. She thought he wouldn’t answer the question, but then, staring down at his empty glass, he nodded. “I left Claude’s memories intact,” said Dante, which came as a surprise to Lennon. She’d assumed all of the students expelled from the school had their memories taken. “I saw no reason to take them. All I did when I removed him from this campus was give him the chance at a normal life, because the one he had here was clearly killing him. Now, I’d call that mercy. But you can make of it what you will.”
“What about Benedict?”
“What about him?”
“Did they ever find a suicide note? Something to explain why he did what he did?”
She watched Dante’s expression carefully, but he remained as casual as ever. If the mention of Benedict’s death provoked anything in him, Lennon certainly couldn’t see it.
“There was nothing,” he said, and for some reason, she didn’t believe him.