Chapter 11
Conrad
Tonight’s party was supposed to be a way for the newest members to familiarize themselves with Scroll her one-track mind was fixed on the catacombs.
“And yet you can’t seem to help but sound a little judgmental,” I said.
I didn’t aspire to things I knew I’d be terrible at, and being someone’s boyfriend fell into that category. Like most things, I knew how relationships ended. Besides, if I wanted to watch one fall apart in real-time, I’d go home to the Upper East Side and visit my parents.
“Oh.” Her voice jumped an octave. “I didn’t mean to come across that way. I’m sorry, I really wasn’t judging,” she said from behind me. It actually sounded genuine, and it made me pause on the cool stone floor for a brief moment. “And it’s not like I’m one to talk, I have my own flings-only rule.”
Wow, an apology and a self-deprecating comment in a single breath?
Huh. I didn’t expect that.
She was a litany of contradictions. The by-the-book type who impersonated her best friend to crash a party. An overachieving student who seemingly had no issues breaking rules—case in point: our current location.
In a depressingly predictable world, Malena was an anomaly.
She stopped ahead of me when the domed walls of the wine cellar reached a dead end and looked over her shoulder at me, eyes glinting. All that was left was a single door. Which she promptly began attempting to pry open, making the correct assumption that it led to the catacombs.
“You know, for someone who prides themselves on functioning brainwaves”—I held up my key patronizingly—“you miss some pretty obvious things.”
I unlocked it and she rushed through like she was worried I’d change my mind and lead us back up to the party. I shut the door behind me, and we were exactly where she’d been gunning to be.
The catacombs consisted of musty and damp stonewalled tunnels that were scarcely lit with electric lanterns. There were a few entry points into them, all of which were from basements of old buildings on campus. The doorways were still there but had been sealed for years.
“So… who knows about the catacombs?” Malena asked, her head on a swivel as she peered down the dark tunnel. I sidled up next to her and used my phone’s flashlight to light the path. The walls were wide enough to allow about four people to walk side by side, but she stayed close.
“There are hundreds of stories about them,” I reminded her.
“I mean who knows.” She threw me an unamused look. “Stories are one thing, but who knows how to get in here?”
“Nobody knows.” What part of secret did she not understand?
“So where does the tunnel go?”
We’d just left the mausoleum by way of its wine cellar, so it would probably be another forty-five minutes before we got to one end. “Walking in this direction”—I pointed ahead of us—“we’ll be at the bay in about an hour. If we turned around, we’d be at the clock tower in ten minutes.”
She nodded, and for a couple of minutes, a quiet passed between us as we walked.
Maybe she’d get bored and we could head back soon.
“And these doors?” She stopped and pointed to the first door we came across. A thick wooden door with an iron handle, sealed all around its frame with what was probably mortar. She flicked an annoyed look at me. “Way to bury the lede.”
I sighed. “It’s not that interesting. The catacombs were once accessible from half a dozen or so campus buildings. With the exception of the clock tower and our mausoleum, the doors have been sealed since the Eisenhower administration.”
“So you’re telling me no students have snuck down here in the centuries they’ve been around?”
“No, they have, but wandering around the catacombs is pretty useless since all these doors are sealed and only members of Scroll what do you want me to say?”
“Something more interesting, for starters,” she mumbled to herself. She paused and pursed her lips, inching a step toward the doorway, eyeing the iron handle with palpable curiosity. “How do you know that all those doors are sealed?”
“Every so often a member tests the theory.” James and I drunkenly stumbled through here last year ourselves, come to think of it. In the low light, I watched her perk up. Great. This little menace was going to give it her best shot. “And, as expected, they didn’t open.”
“Who could access them?” she asked.
“Nobody. Because they are sealed.” My patience was wearing thin, but I did my best to head off what I predicted—no, what I knew—was about to happen.
She yanked at the door that led to the old theater. Then shoved her shoulder against it, as if that was going to open it. When she had no luck opening the door, she moved back to my side.
“So which building do these doors lead to?” She went on like she hadn’t even registered what I said.
When I didn’t answer, she looked up at me.
Standing this close, I could trace the delicate curve of her cheek and the way her smirking lips made her look utterly devious.
“If you help me with this, I’ll be out of your way sooner. ”
The statement knocked the gears back into full speed in my head. “The old theater.” I motioned to the door in front of us. “Then the Amherst Building, the old lab building, and then one of the shell houses at the bay.”
“Why those spots?” She started moving farther down the tunnel and I followed a step behind her.
“They were the first buildings on campus,” I guessed, but curiosity sprouted in my head. “These tunnels were used during Prohibition to get booze in from the bay.”
She stopped abruptly, whipping around with wide eyes. The cream-colored sweater she wore slipped a bit off her shoulder, and my eyes momentarily traced up the line of her collar bone. “No way.”
I blinked a couple of times and couldn’t help but chuckle.
Her unfiltered delight was infectious, and as I stood there in the damp tunnel, knowing we’d make our way toward the next sealed door that she’d undoubtedly try to open, I realized it was a pretty cool story.
“Yeah, the old science lab was a distillery too. I came across a story about it in one of the journals in the mausoleum last year.”
A grin grew like a weed across her face, and I bit my lip to leash my own.
Sometimes—especially when my family life was circling the drain—those journals were a way to get me out of my head. And they were one of the things I loved about Scroll & Ivy. Inside of each was an entire unknown history.
We kept walking along and she moved a bit closer.
The next doorway came into view a few minutes later. “Feel silly for questioning the lore?” I goaded.
“Jury’s still out on that.” She walked up to the threshold at the next door, the frame looking like the last but dustier.
As she crouched down to inspect the prehistoric-looking hinges, I tapped my phone to wake up the screen. I didn’t have service, but I wanted to check the time. We’d been down here a while, and it was nearly eleven at night.
A loud thud sounded and I startled, almost dropping my phone.
A cloud of dust and debris and the sound of coughing assaulted my senses, and when it settled, the door was wide open. Malena, who must’ve fallen forward, sprang up.
With wide eyes and hair askew like a mad scientist, she looked at the open door then to me, then back to the open door.
“Well, don’t just stand there.” She turned and poked her head into the dark room. “Let’s go.”
An unfamiliar feeling, warm and jittery, danced down every nerve ending. She flicked her hair back and swatted at the air in front of a door that should have never opened.
A rogue smile took control of my face.
Maybe not everything was as it seemed.