Chapter Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN
EARLY FALL IN EARNEST IS nothing like it is back home.
By six in the evening a bitter wind sweeps through, colder than it would be in Pine Grove during midday December.
By eleven I can see my breath in front of me, and I grin when I sense the turning of the season, beneath it the quiet promise of a true, white winter.
I pull the hood of my black sweatshirt over my head and blow on my hands.
“Thank you all for meeting me here tonight.” My voice is low, and though I genuinely mean the words, I stifle a laugh when I glimpse the glare Missy is shooting my way.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Daisy says.
Sam gives a noncommittal grunt.
“Okay, well…” I crane my head and peer at the top of Biltmore Hall, the turrets blackened by night. “How the hell are we supposed to break into this thing?”
Missy stalks past me and puts her Ariana Grande-sleeved palm on the handle of the door and flings it open.
“Wha—” Daisy gasps from behind me.
I glance around, nerves making me jumpy.
“Come on,” Missy hisses over her shoulder as she saunters right into the building like it’s not supposed to be locked.
We follow close behind.
Even though this entire thing was my idea, I hesitate before I join them.
“How—” I start, as I meet them in the western hallway of Biltmore.
It’s deathly quiet and spooky dark. I squint my eyes, trying to make out the details of their faces and the hall around us, but mostly everything is one big, gray blob, save for the periodic blue security lights in the ceiling corners and the blinking red ones marking every camera.
“Don’t worry about it,” Missy snaps. “I have my ways.”
“Sorry, but that’s not really good enough,” Sam hisses. “This is starting to feel like a setup.”
Daisy snorts. “Yeah, that was a little too easy.”
“Shh,” Missy whispers, yanking on Daisy’s and my arms, pulling us closer until we’re nearly touching faces, her voice lowering even further.
“Was it too easy, or do I just know that security doesn’t bother to lock the door because the key always jams during their rounds?
You’re right, that was the easy part, but now we need to be more careful.
We should stick to the walls. The cameras aren’t as good at seeing on the edges.
If we keep our faces toward the perimeter, they won’t be able to make out who we are. ”
“That seems…,” Sam trails off, trying to find the words. “Like we’re definitely going to get caught.”
“No, we’re not.” Missy says. “I’ve never been caught.”
“You’ve never been caught, but that doesn’t mean—”
“It’s fine!” Daisy interjects quietly. “I know where they keep the tapes for the cameras.”
“You…”
“What—”
“I’m sorry?”
We all speak at the same time.
Daisy shrinks. “So maybe last year I hypothetically broke into the security office to erase a video of me and Emma doing something we weren’t supposed to in the AV lab.”
“Is everyone at this school secretly breaking into things?!” Sam squeals.
“You need to chill!” Missy sneers.
“Hey,” I say. “Watch it.”
She levels me with a look, her hazel eyes turned deep brown with the lack of light. “The headmaster’s office is on the third floor.”
We slink against the walls and into the stairwell, keeping our hoods yanked up and our heads down. No one speaks as we ascend. On the third floor Missy peeks her head out into the hall and gives us the all clear.
“Nelson typically takes his smoke break around now. That gives us enough time to get in, open the cabinet, and see what we can find. He usually comes back and checks the fourth floor first and makes his way down before taking another break. We need to be sure that when he reaches the office, he can’t see us through the window of the door. ”
We nod in agreement and follow her into the hallway. Even though the wooden floors are covered in plush maroon rugs, they still groan beneath us. My heart rate spikes with each sound.
The door to the headmaster’s office has Alastair Matsoukas engraved on a bronze plaque that sits below a foggy door light.
I try the knob just in case. It doesn’t budge.
Pulling the bobby pins from my pocket, I stretch them into right angles before shoving them into the lock.
“How did you learn how to do this?” Daisy asks. “This is a very hot skill to have.”
I chuckle, but I’m too busy concentrating to give a real answer to her question.
When the lock finally clicks, I turn my head slowly, meeting Missy’s eyes. “I’m in.”
She scoffs and shoves past me, stomping straight to the cabinet at the back of the room. “Close the door behind you,” she calls to Sam before trying the top drawer unsuccessfully.
I take in the room. It’s stuffed full of knickknacks and loose papers, taxidermic animals and leather-bound books locked away in ornate dark-wood curio cabinets. I’m drawn to one in particular, the glass door slightly ajar.
“Stop gaping at everything and come help!” Missy hisses from the floor.
“Oh, sorry,” I apologize as I cross the room and crouch beside her. “I’m not sure my bobby pins are going to fit in that.” I eye the tiny keyhole.
“Found it!” Daisy says, a little too loudly.
Sam emerges from the shadows like a spooked ghost. “Shh! You’re going to get us caught.”
Daisy drops to the ground, crawling to us. “I found the key!” she says, only quieter this time.
“That was… quick,” I say, impressed but also kind of terrified. “Where was it?”
Daisy hands me the key, and I hold it up. It has a circular bow and a small slash of a blade.
“It was in this little box inside another box in the top drawer of his desk,” Daisy shrugs.
Missy and I look at each other.
“What?”
“It’s just… we haven’t been in here that long…,” I trail off.
“Yeah, how the hell did you know where it was gonna be?” Missy’s voice isn’t laced with curiosity like mine. Instead it holds something closer to suspicion.
Daisy stutters. “I—I didn’t know that it was going to be in there! I guessed, or, like, I don’t know, I could just, like, feel that it was going to be in there.”
Silence.
“Suuuure…,” Missy draws the word out.
“Anyway…” I turn back to the cabinet, used to the oddness of Daisy.
In all the time we’ve spent together, it’s become clear that she’s got some affinity for…
something. It’s just a fact about her, one she seems to lean in to freely, undisturbed by the idea that there’s so much more about the world that we don’t know.
Unlike me, given that I feel like someone placed a bomb inside my chest, and any minute the clock is going to run out.
“We don’t even know that this is the right one.” I push the key into the lock, and it glides in smoothly, turning with ease.
“Told you,” Daisy mutters, but I ignore her, too busy pinching the latch and pulling the first drawer out.
“Someone take out your phone,” I say, reaching into the abyss. “I can’t see anything!”
My fingers trail along the rows of file folders.
“It looks like they only keep records for about ten years.”
They’re alphabetized, so I’m busy flicking through the B’s when the sound of keys jingling outside the door sends my heart rocketing into my throat.
“Nelson!” Missy hisses. “Hide!”
I’m scrambling to my feet when she grabs my hand and yanks me down and across the floor until we’re both shoved beneath the footwell of the large solid wood desk.
“Hey!”
“Do you want to get caught?”
I want to lift my head to see where Daisy and Sam have hidden, but the clinking of the metal keys is growing louder.
Beside me Missy’s anxious breath is sweet like fruit gum, and crammed into this small space, I realize that the rest of her smells sweet too. Like sugar and cherries.
“Did you find her folder?” she asks me. Moonlight slants into the room just enough to illuminate an angled strip across her eyes, and almost nothing else. She’s staring at me intently, and I’m struck by the rawness of her expression.
“I—”
The keys are at the door now. She jerks, slapping one hand against my mouth and using the other to dig her fingernails into my thigh.
A beam of light lazes across the room, and I hold my breath, ears straining to hear Daisy and Sam, wherever they are.
Preemptively wincing as though Nelson is going to slam the door open and drag us all into the town square for a lashing.
Time feels like it’s moving in slow motion, Missy’s body hovering over my own, her trembling muscles vibrating against me. But slowly, eventually, the keys meander down the hall. Missy undigs her nails from my leg and releases my mouth, blowing out a shaky, uneven breath.
“Fuck!” Sam spits from somewhere behind the desk. “Fuck!” They bump into something, and again we freeze. “Fuck!” they say even quieter this time.
Missy climbs out from beneath the desk, and I follow, scooting across the floor until I’m once again peering into the depths of the cabinet.
“Flashlight,” I say, and Missy pulls out her phone.
This time I find her folder easily.
Beaumont, Fiona Amelia
We’re silent as we all stare at the file in my hands. The moment feels huge, like there’s no going back after this, like we’ll forever be bound by this night.
“Well?” Sam finally asks.
I open the front flap and flip past a couple pages. Immunization records and demographic info. Tucked between them is paper creased and smudged with something dark. “Oh,” I say slowly as I read it, glancing up at Missy.
“What?” She snatches the page from my hands. “Oh…”
“What?” Daisy squats down and peers over Missy’s shoulder. “Oh.”
Sam sighs and squats as well.
“Why does he even have this?” Missy asks.
“In her student file?” Daisy adds.
I take the police report and scan the words. Fiona Beaumont, Age: 17. “It says they made multiple attempts to contact her foster parents, but they never responded.”
“So there really isn’t anyone looking for her…,” Daisy trails off.
Fire burns in my belly. There’s a buzzing in my head, and I can’t quiet it. A missing brown girl, and no one gives a shit. Alastair Matsoukas squirreling this report away? Why?
I close my eyes. Will the static to recede.
When I open them, I place the paper on the ground and use my phone to scan it. We flip through the rest of the file, but there’s nothing we don’t already know.
I put the folder back, defeated.
“Well, what was the point of that?” I snap to no one in particular. Just the universe and the godforsaken stars that have rejected me. I don’t care that there’s nothing blatantly incriminating here, I still can’t shake the feeling that we’re so close to finding something damning.
“Well, let’s check the rest of the drawers just in case,” Missy insists, pulling the middle one open roughly, her hands shaking.
She pushes the files aside frantically, her breath coming faster and faster. When she doesn’t find anything, she slams that drawer closed and opens the next.
This one is nearly empty save for some random junk and a leather-bound portfolio. She pulls it out slowly, opening the cover.
It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Instead of folding out like a book with pages tacked into the middle, it unfolds like a map, until we’re laying it on the floor between us.
Inscribed in curling black and gold ink—names. So many names and lines and dashes. Some are scribbled out, some are circled. Small, illegible notes are written in stiff, slanted cursive along the margins. But there’s a clear path that starts and finishes the same way.
Four names circled at the top, and four at the bottom.
“Are those… lineages?” Sam asks, taking the notebook from me to get a better look. When they gasp, I already know why. “Harper,” they say. “Your name is on here.”
My name. Fiona’s. And many others that I don’t recognize.
Except, there: Adiola Cane.
And on the other side of the map: Sandra DuPont.
Two dead girls, one missing… and me.
Vomit claws its way up my throat, and I have to swallow it down. Once. Twice.
Daisy unfolds a yellowing paper with a half ring coffee stain in the bottom corner.
“This fell out of that… thing…”
LAND TRANSFER NOTICE:
BEAUMONT–CLARK TO BILTMORE–MATSOUKAS
I think back to the articles I read for my history project.
“This must be from when they took over the land of that old school that burnt down,” I say. I don’t mention the witches. The lynching.
I check the date of the notice. November 10, 1926.
“But why would he have that in his cabinet? What does it matter? It’s been a hundred years,” Sam says.
“I don’t know…” I pull out my phone and snap a picture of what we’ve found.
I can’t understand the connection between the two documents. Two bloodlines from the map are listed on the land transfer, Beaumont and Clark, but why are the other names circled? My name linked through the generations to a Maggie Willow? And there’s a fourth surname of interest, Walker.
I carefully refold the large maplike thing and tuck the document back inside before placing it into the drawer.
“What are you doing?” Missy asks.
“We can’t take the portfolio,” I say quietly, suddenly sapped of energy. “He’ll know someone took it, and then all of the sneaking and deleting of footage would be pointless.”
I close the cabinet, and Daisy puts the key back where she found it.
All the while my mind is twirling endless circles.
Where is Fiona?
This at least confirmed my suspicions that she was tied to the Beaumont Clark School. Turns out maybe I am, too.
Both of us were invited here on a full scholarship. Both of us are legacy students. I remember what Missy said about how Fiona changed when she got to campus. Am I changing in the same way?
If those women protecting the school were witches—if I have some kind of magic of my own—does that mean Fiona does, too?
Or…did?
I gulp when I picture those other two familiar names. The memorial page in the yearbook. The half-rusted bench plaque.
My teeth are nearly chattering by the time we make it out of the building and into the night. When we reach the dorm Missy goes back to her room, her shoulders slumped and her face twisted into a scowl.
Daisy and Sam linger by my door, unsure of what to say.
“Are you okay?” Sam asks, their hand resting on my forearm.
“I just—what does it even mean?” Daisy counters, frustration lacing her tone. “I feel like we’re missing something, or like—like you’re not telling us something.” Her brows pinch together. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are hard.
“I have no idea,” I say, surprised by how steady my voice sounds. “Maybe they’re tracking who the land belonged to as part of a historical preservation type thing.” I shrug.
“So why the locked drawer?” Sam asks curiously.
I sigh. “I don’t try to understand the minds of white people.”
This at least earns a reluctant chuckle from them.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m tired…”
And I am. I’m so tired.
“Yeah.” Sam starts to back away. “You sure you’re fine?”
I nod, turning the key to my room in the lock.
“Okay…” Sam and Daisy retreat down the hall.
A few steps later, Daisy looks over her shoulder, her brows still pinched.
I give her a tight smile.
Inside my room I pace until my pinky toes have blisters from the shag rug I brought from home.
When I sleep, I dream of flames turning my flesh to ash.