“You told me you were going back to New York. You said you had a train to catch, but you didn’t leave until the next morning.”
Color flooded Michelle’s cheeks. “How is that any of your business?”
“Two murders on campus means I get to be skeptical.”
But Michelle had regained her composure. “Not that it’s your concern, but I’m seeing someone here and I try to come to town a few times a month.
My boyfriend is fine with it, and even if he weren’t, I don’t deserve to be interrogated. I was worried about you.”
Alex knew she was supposed to apologize, to make nice. But she was too tired to play diplomat. She had held Darlington’s soul in her hands, and in it she’d felt the heavy, slumberous tuning of a cello, the sudden, exultant flutter of birds taking flight. If Michelle had stuck her neck out, even a little bit, they might have been better prepared. They might have succeeded.
“Worried enough to show up with a smile,” Alex said, “but not enough to help Darlington.”
“I explained to you—”
“You didn’t have to make the descent with us. We needed your knowledge. Your experience.”
Michelle licked her lips. “You made the descent?”
So she hadn’t talked to Anselm or the board, hadn’t met with the Praetor.
Was she really just worried about Alex? Was Alex so unused to the idea of kindness that she instantly distrusted it? Or was Michelle Alameddine a champion liar?
“What are you doing here, Michelle? What were you really doing in New Haven the night Dean Beekman died?”
“You’re not a detective,” Michelle clipped out. “You’re barely a student.
Go to class and stay out of my personal life. I won’t waste my time on you again.”
She turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd. Alex was tempted to follow her.
Instead she slipped into her Shakespeare lecture. Mercy had saved her a seat, and as soon as Alex was settled, she checked her phone. Dawes was headed to Tripp’s loft to cook.
Alex pinged Turner privately.
Michelle Alameddine is on campus and I think she just lied about why.
Turner’s reply came quickly. What did she tell you?
Said she was running an errand for the Butler Library.
She waited, watching the screen. Doubt it. She doesn’t work at the Butler.
Since when?
She never did.
What was this? Why had Michelle lied to her—and to Lethe—about her job at Columbia? Why was she really on campus, and why had she tracked Alex down? And what about the fact that, when Alex had referred to two murders, Michelle hadn’t blinked? As far as anyone on campus knew, there had been only one murder. Marjorie Stephen, a woman Michelle actually knew, had supposedly died of natural causes. But Michelle had no reason to hurt either professor. At least not one Alex knew about.
She couldn’t concentrate on the lecture, though she’d actually done the reading. Part of the reason she’d let Mercy talk her into this class was because she’d covered two semesters of Shakespeare’s plays already. There was plenty more to read, because there always was, but at least she hadn’t had to bluff her way through every lecture.
Maybe there was an upside to all this disaster. No more struggling through classes. No more watching divas swallow bird shit for the sake of a hit album. Alex tried to imagine what life might look like on the other side of all this, and it was too easy to picture. She didn’t want to go back to the hot, seasonless glare of Los Angeles. She didn’t want to work a shit job and make shit pay and get by on scraps of hope, days off, a beer and a fuck to make the month more bearable. She didn’t want to forget Il Bastone, with its tinny stereo and its velvet couches, the library that had to be cajoled into giving up its books, the pantry that was always full. She wanted late mornings and overheated classrooms, lectures on poetry, too-narrow wooden desks.
She wanted to stay here.
Here. Where their professor was comparing The Tempest to Doctor Faustus, tracing lines of influence, the words singing through the room. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Here beneath the soaring ceiling, the brass chandeliers floating weightless above, surrounded by panels of tawny wood and that Tiffany window that had no business in a classroom, alight with deep blue and green, rich purple and gold, groupings of angels who weren’t quite angels despite their wings, pretty girls in glass gowns with halos that read Science, Intuition, Harmony, while Form, Color, and Imagination clustered around Art. The faces always looked strange to Alex, too solid and specific, like photographs that had been pasted into the scene, Rhythm the only figure who looked out of the frame, her gaze direct, and Alex always wondered why.
The Tiffany window had been commissioned in honor of a dead woman.
Her name, Mary, was inscribed on the book that one of the kneeling angelsnot-angels was holding. The panels had been packed away during the Black Panther trials, in case of riots. They’d been mislabeled and left to molder in boxes, until someone stumbled over them decades later, as if the campus was so sated with beauty and wealth, it was easy to forget something extraordinary, or simply mourn it as lost.
What’s the point of it? Alex wondered. And did it need a point? The windows were beauty for its own sake, for the pleasure of it, smooth limbs, flowing hair, boughs heavy with flowers, all of it hiding in a lesson on virtue, meant as a memorial. But she liked this life full of pointless beauty. It could all disappear as easily as a dream, only the memory of it wouldn’t fade the way dreams did. It would haunt her the rest of her long, mediocre life.
A girl was leaning against the wall beneath the Tiffany window, and Alex had to ignore the twinge she felt at the gleam of her golden hair and honey skin. She looked like Hellie. And no one had a tan like that before winter break.
In fact, she looked exactly like Hellie.
The girl was staring at her, blue eyes sad. She was wearing a black Tshirt and jeans. Alex’s heart was suddenly racing. She had to be hallucinating, another symptom of her literal hangover from hell. She knew better, but a wild hope entered her head before she could stop it. What if Hellie had somehow found her through the Veil? What if she had felt Alex’s presence in the underworld and crossed over to find her at last? But Grays always looked the way they had in death, and Alex would never forget Hellie’s pallid skin, the drying vomit on her shirt.
“Mercy,” Alex whispered, “do you see that girl under the Tiffany window?”
Mercy craned her neck. “Why is she staring at you? Do we know her?”
No, because Alex had erased every bit of her old life, the good right along with the bad. She hadn’t propped a photo of Hellie on top of her dresser.
She’d never even spoken her name to Mercy. And the girl standing there beneath all those angels-not-angels couldn’t be Hellie because Hellie was dead.
The blond girl drifted toward the back door of the lecture hall. This felt like a test, and Alex knew damn well she should stay right where she was, pick up her pen, pay attention, take notes. But she couldn’t not follow.
