“Wait, he’s a professor? How long has he been
here?” “He’s been teaching at Yale for twenty
years.” Alex couldn’t help but laugh.
“What?” Dawes demanded.
“If he’s been here that long and we’re just hearing about him now, he has to have been Lethe’s last choice.”
“Not necessarily—”
“You think people were lining up for the job? The last guy ended up dead.”
“From a heart attack.”
“Under mysterious circumstances. No one wanted the gig. So they had to tap this guy.”
“Professor Raymond Walsh-Whiteley.”
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were kidding.”
“He was something of a wunderkind. Graduated from Yale at sixteen, postgraduate work at Oxford. He’s a tenured English professor and, based on the opinion pieces he writes for The Federalist, very old-school.”
Alex thought about making an excuse, putting this off awhile longer. But what good would that do? And better to meet with the Praetor now, one-on-one, than wait for Anselm to get around to arranging a dinner where she’d have to worry about a Lethe board member scrutinizing her too.
“Okay,” she said. “I can go after lecture.”
“I’ll meet you at JE when you’re done. We can try to hammer out the rest of the Gauntlet.”
“Fine.”
“Be polite,” Dawes insisted. “And dress nicely.”
That was really something coming from Dawes, but Alex knew all about playing the part.
Alex tried to stay focused in Electrical Engineering 101, but that was a challenge on her best days. It was offered in a cavernous lecture hall and was probably the most democratic course at Yale since everyone was only there to fulfill a requirement—including Alex, Mercy, and Lauren. They spent most of the hour quietly debating what drink they’d serve at Liquor Treat, eventually arriving at tequila shots and gummy worms.
Alex wasn’t really surprised that parties and classes and homework were continuing on in the wake of the murders. Right now, the campus believed that one man had died horribly. No one knew that Marjorie Stephen might have been killed too. There’d been no memorials or assemblies for her.
Beekman’s death was shocking, grim, something to talk about over dinner and worry about if you were walking home after dark. But none of the students nodding off in their chairs around Alex had been at that crime scene or looked down into that old, startled face. They hadn’t felt the sudden rupture that came with death, and so they simply kept on living. What else was there to do? Dress up like ghosts and ghouls and dead celebrities, drown the terror of their own mortality in grain alcohol and Hawaiian Punch.
Liquor Treat was considered a kind of pregame before people headed out to the real parties, and Alex could slip out early to prepare for the ritual at Sterling. There would be no uncanny activity to worry about at the Manuscript Halloween party this year. They’d been penalized for the drugs they’d managed to lose track of the previous semester and that had been used to victimize Mercy and other girls unlucky enough to cross paths with Blake
Keely. But she would still have to oversee something called a songbird ritual for them on Thursday.
Alex walked back to JE with Mercy and Lauren. She would have to skip lunch if she was going to make it to the new Praetor’s office hours. She darted into her room to change into her most respectable outfit: black jeans, a black sweater, and a white collared shirt she borrowed from Lauren.
“You look like a Quaker,” Mercy said with disapproval.
“I look responsible.”
“You know what she needs?” Lauren asked. She popped into her room and returned with a dark red velvet headband.
“Better,” said Mercy.
Alex examined her prim, humorless face in the mirror. “Perfect.”
Professor Raymond Walsh-Whiteley’s office was on the third floor of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, his hours taped to the heavy wooden door. She hesitated.
What exactly was she in for? A lecture? A warning? An interrogation about the ritual at Scroll and Key?
She tapped lightly and heard a disinterested “Come.”
The room was small, the walls lined from floor to ceiling with overflowing bookshelves. Walsh-Whiteley was seated in front of a row of leaded-glass windows. The panes were thick and watery, as if they’d been made from heated sugar, and the gray October light had to fight its way through. A brass lamp with a green shade craned its neck over his cluttered desk.
The professor looked up from his laptop and peered over his glasses. He had a long, melancholy face, and thick white hair combed back from his forehead in what was almost a pompadour.
“Sit.” He waved at the single chair opposite him.
It was strange to know that a former Lethe deputy had been living on campus all of last year, cozied away in this cubbyhole. Why hadn’t anyone mentioned him? Were there others?
“Galaxy Stern,” he said, leaning back in his chair.
“I prefer to be called Alex, sir.”
“Small favors. I would have felt a fool calling someone Galaxy. Quite the whimsical name.” He said whimsical with the same disgusted spin other people reserved for fascist. “Is your mother prone to such flights?” A little truth couldn’t hurt.
“Yes,” Alex said. “California.” She shrugged.
“Mmm,” he said with a nod, and Alex suspected that he’d long since written off the whole state, possibly the entire West Coast. “You’re an artist?”
“A painter.” Though she’d barely touched a brush or even a piece of charcoal since last semester.
“And how are you finding the start of the school year?”
Exhausting? Terrifying? Way too full of dead bodies? But people were only really talking about one subject on campus.
“This thing about Dean Beekman is pretty terrible,” she said.
“A tremendous loss.”
“Did you know him?”
“He was not a man who could stand to remain unknown. But I do feel deeply for his family.” He steepled his fingers. “I’ll be blunt, Miss Stern. I am what is fondly called a dinosaur and less fondly described as a reactionary. Yale was once dedicated to the life of the mind, and while there were diversions and distractions, nothing could be as diverting or distracting as the presence of the fairer sex.”
It took Alex a long moment to process what Walsh-Whiteley was saying.
