Chapter 34
Violet
I had never gone to college—that went without saying—and neither had Bradley.
We both felt out of place on the campus of the Fell College of Classical Education, with its air of quiet contemplation, its dedication to the study of topics no one used in everyday life.
A noticeboard in a hallway of the administrative building featured information about the Marcus Aurelius Society (not the Marcus Aurelius Study Group, which was entirely different, according to the note’s writer).
Another note stated that a debate about the relative merits of fourteenth-century popes would be held on Tuesday night.
The attendees, the note warned, were to be civil this time.
Bradley’s muscles were of no use to us here, even if he’d had them on display.
It was up to me to approach a bespectacled student and ask if there might be a history of Fell anywhere on campus.
The kid sent us to the library, across the quadrangle.
We only saw three other students as we walked, all of whom gave us a wide berth.
Fell College wasn’t known for its large number of attendees.
The library was small, dusty, and dim. The librarian gave us a glare that could have singed metal, but when she heard our request, she called over another bespectacled student, this one a blond boy with too-big metal-framed glasses and a fading pimple on his chin.
The kid, who was probably eighteen and would have been crushed immediately under my ass if I sat on him, gave us a haughty look.
“Yes?” he asked, his voice as icy as a nobleman’s.
“Take them to the Local Literature room, Farley,” the librarian said.
Farley gave her a shocked look. “The Local Lit room is for students only.”
“The library is for students only,” the librarian corrected him. “The Local Lit room is supposed to be for local residents who ask to use it. No one has ever asked.”
“You have a records room that no one ever uses?” I asked.
The librarian gave me her glare again, and I flinched. “Just because it isn’t used doesn’t mean it has no purpose. Farley, please let them in.” She handed Farley a key. “You have one hour,” she said to us.
Farley led us in annoyed silence down one hall, then another. He stopped at a door that said fell local literature—residents only and inserted the key. “In here,” he said.
The room was the size of a large closet, with a single stuffed bookshelf and a wooden chair in the corner. Placed beside the chair was a floor lamp. The whole atmosphere was that of a disused attic, crossed with a police interrogation room.
“I can tell you don’t teach interior decorating at this college,” I said.
That made Farley mad, which was satisfying. “What are you even doing here?” he asked us. “You can’t possibly need research because you’re writing something.”
“Hey,” Bradley interjected. “I can write.”
Farley looked him up and down. “When was the last time you tried it?”
“You guys don’t write so great yourselves.” Bradley pointed to the motto engraved on a plaque above the door. “That’s not even in English.”
Farley looked at the plaque and his cheeks went red. “That’s Latin. Vincit qui se vincit. It’s the college’s motto.”
“Yeah, well, you can vincit your way out of here, Pimple Face,” Bradley said. “Get lost.”
The kid hesitated. “You’re my responsibility. I should probably stay.”
Bradley crowded him until he stepped back, out of the doorway. “Bye,” Bradley said, then swung the door shut, turning the lock. “God, I hate nerds.”
“How many nerds did you bully in high school?” I asked him.
“All of ’em,” was the reply.
“That’s what I thought.” Since I didn’t see a light switch, I turned on the lamp.
It had a hundred-watt bulb that made the room brighter than the surface of the sun.
I squinted and tilted the bulb toward the wall, which made it flicker before it settled down again.
“Let’s get this over with.” I walked to the bookshelf and began studying the titles.
“I’ll supervise,” Bradley said, dropping into the room’s only chair. He leaned back, tilted his head against the wall behind him, and closed his eyes.
The books were a collection of pamphlets, essays, and maps about the city of Fell.
All of them were originals, and some dated as far back as the 1850s.
There was a musty old memoir by a long-dead, long-forgotten city councillor, published—seemingly by himself—in 1912 and bound so cheaply it was falling apart.
I turned the loosening pages carefully, hoping for something juicy, but the book seemed to be a collection of the man’s complaints and grievances about other city councillors and everyone else in town, especially anyone who had crossed him.
I couldn’t help but aspire to achieve that level of pettiness by the end of my life.
Robert R. McCannon was my new role model.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said to Bradley when I realized I’d spent twenty minutes perusing the weird collection on the bookshelf. Bradley’s eyes were still closed, and he seemed to be napping. “I’ll come out when I’m done.”
“Nope,” he replied without opening his eyes. He must be bored, but I realized he was staying in case Sister sent another one of her otherworldly messengers after me. It was strangely chivalrous. I wondered how many dead people I might see wandering around the FCCE. Did people die here often?
“Make yourself useful, then,” I said to Bradley, handing him an old map. “Hold this open under the light.”
He unfolded it and angled the lamp, and we both stared at it. The map seemed to date from around 1900, which predated even the FCCE. Some of the ink was sun faded, and the edges were worn.
The spot where the FCCE campus now stood was only farmland on the map. I oriented myself by finding the main road in and out of town, which now led to the interstate. I traced my finger along the main streets, trying to picture what Fell might have looked like in 1900.
“Yeah,” Bradley said. “This is definitely Fell.”
He pointed. Along the edge of the map was a line I knew was Number Six Road, near where the Sun Down Motel now stood. Off the edge of Number Six—the road wasn’t named on the old map—was a square labeled Graves—Unknown. It was marked with small x marks in careful handwriting.
“There are a lot of cemeteries,” I said. “For such a small town at the time, Fell had a lot of dead people.”
“Like I said,” Bradley agreed. “It’s definitely Fell.”
My eye moved to the spot where my neighborhood should be, where our house should be. I saw only open land on the map, with a tidy label written on it: Whitten Estate.
I felt a chill up my back, one that—for once—had nothing to do with ghosts. It was those two words, Whitten Estate. The name sounded right somehow, familiar, as if I’d overheard it years ago and had forgotten it until now. Like I’d known a Whitten at some point and couldn’t remember from where.
“Whitten,” I said to Bradley, taking the map from his hands. “They might have built our house, or part of it. The house is old enough. It’s a start.”
“Looks like they own your whole neighborhood,” Bradley said. “At least, they used to. The whole thing was one lot.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “They sold it off?”
Bradley shrugged, then sat back in his chair. I squinted at the map in the harsh light. On the Whitten Estate, near the edge of the grounds, were more small, careful x’s, though these were unlabeled. Graves unknown?
I refolded the map and looked through the rest of the shelves, hoping to find something that contained the name.
If the Whittens had an estate in Fell in 1900, then they were a rich, important family at the time.
Someone must have mentioned them, or some Whitten must have felt himself important enough to write papers or memoirs.
Then, it seemed, they’d had some kind of downfall, which led to the estate being broken up. Someone must have noticed that, too.
Where were the descendants of the Whittens now? If the family left Fell, where had they gone? Was there any way I could track down their descendants? If so, would any of them have any old documents from their ancestors?
It was a start. I glanced at Bradley. He had picked up the memoir of Robert R. McCannon and was leafing through it. “This guy was a dick,” he remarked.
“Remind you of anyone?” I asked, but the insult didn’t have much venom in it. Harping on Bradley was becoming more of a habit than a passion at this point.
“Ha ha,” Bradley said, deadpan. “This guy keeps mentioning ‘the honey-sweet, innocent countenances’ of his teenage daughter and her friends. I’m not sure what a countenance is, but I think this old guy might have been a piece of shit.”
“You’re likely right.” I picked up another book, but it was written in 1968. We were already living in the Whittens’ house by then. Still, I leafed quickly through the pages in case the book mentioned the name.
“The map said Whitten, right?” Bradley turned another page. “This guy didn’t like them, either. He dishes the dirt right here.”
“What?” I put down the book I was holding and held out my hand. “Give it here.”
My gaze quickly scanned the page. Robert R. McCannon was talking about the prominent families of Fell, and how he—according to himself—played the part of trusted confidant and adviser to all of them, beaming his wisdom on them (and, presumably, on their teenage daughters).
I spent many evenings with the Whitten family, one of the founding families of Fell, now much diminished in size as well as in prominence.
Successive generations of Whittens had suffered misfortunes, such as death by shipwreck, fire, and wasting disease.
Many of their children did not live to see the age of five.
Some said that the misfortune was earned by the family’s coldness and pride, and I could not disagree.
I tried to give counsel to the family in the hopes of turning their fortunes around, but Henry Whitten refused to listen.
When his daughter, Anne Whitten, died by her own hand in 1907 at the age of twenty-one, it was a truly sad day, as she was the final heir.
Her younger brother, Edward, had died in a childhood accident a year earlier.
My hands were ice. My stomach turned.
A little boy dead in an accident. His older sister.
Sister.
I found you, Sister, I thought, my terror mixing with my inescapable triumph. I found you at last.
“Violet?” Bradley stood behind my shoulder. His voice was tight with concern.
“I’m fine.” And, though my heart was beating hard and cold sweat was beading on my neck, I was.
Sister wasn’t here, and neither were any of her emissaries.
For once, she wasn’t breathing down my neck, waiting for her chance.
She was gone somewhere else, she didn’t know what I was doing, and while her back was turned, I had finally found her.
Maybe Sister didn’t win everything. Not every time.
The doorknob rattled, and an alarmed knock sounded. “What are you doing in there?” Farley’s voice called out. “Your time’s up. What are you doing?”
I unlocked the door and opened it. Farley’s face was flushed, and he looked past me, directly at Bradley. “You weren’t supposed to lock the door,” he said.
Bradley shrugged, unconcerned.
“You better not have taken anything from the shelves,” Farley continued in his annoying drone. “Everything in this room is the property of the college.”
I stepped in front of him, blocking his view of Bradley. I gave Farley my haughtiest glare. Clay called it my Bitch Glare, but that didn’t matter. I never had to care what Clay thought about anything ever again.
Farley’s gaze rose to my face, his eyes locked with mine, and he paled.
“We don’t steal from libraries,” I said in my iciest tone. “We came here to research. We’re finished now.”
Farley nodded. He was worried. He was supposed to supervise us, and he’d left us alone in here. Too bad.
“You’ve been most helpful,” I said in the sarcastic tone that actually said I will cut your head off and drink your blood if you don’t obey me. “We’re leaving now. Step aside.”
The kid stepped out of the doorway and back into the hall. I strode off in the direction of the front entrance without a backward glance. I heard Bradley fall into step behind my left shoulder.
I’d given Bradley a mere few seconds, but I knew it was enough time. When we were out of earshot, approaching the front doors, I asked softly, “What did you take?”
“The map,” he whispered back. “I figured it was what you wanted.”
He was right. The map would do just fine.
I pushed open the doors, walked out into the cool air of the parking lot, and smiled.