On Friday morning at school, the junior class had a meeting with Chadwick’s director of college advising, Mr. Gregory. He went on and on about the importance of their grades and extracurricular activities, particularly in the second semester of their junior year. This would be the second-to-last official set of grades that admissions committees could use to evaluate the candidates from Chadwick, and for those who were applying for early admission to places like Yale, it would be the last full set of grades available before an admissions committee would make its decision. Phoebe noticed some of the students sitting in the back, their feet perched rudely on the desks in front of them, as if none of this applied to them. Phoebe wasn’t going to make any assumptions; she knew she still had to keep her grades up. She had met with a few alumni who were on different admissions committees last semester at a meet and greet sponsored by the Society. It had all been done under the auspices of a “private gathering sponsored by a group of helpful alumni.” But she didn’t feel like she could just coast on through.
Phoebe tried to focus on Mr. Gregory’s talk, but something had happened last night that she couldn’t get out of her mind. When she asked to use the bathroom at Patch’s apartment, he had directed her to Genie’s, as he said that his own was a mess. Phoebe had developed a terrible habit of snooping when she was in other people’s houses, and she couldn’t help taking a peek into Genie’s medicine cabinet. Besides, she was curious about the woman. There was something Genie wasn’t telling all of them about her past, and Phoebe was anxious to know what it was.
Just a few weeks ago, Genie had told Phoebe and Nick about her broken engagement with Palmer Bell in the 1940s. But Phoebe sensed that there was more to the story. Why had Genie ended up in the same apartment building as Palmer’s son and his family? Was it simply coincidence that Nick and Patch had become such good friends?
Phoebe imagined that Genie’s secrets might help them unravel the mysteries about the Society that they had been trying to uncover. She hadn’t wanted to pry Patch when he was so new to the group, but there were things she had noticed: the wistful, far-off look in Genie’s eyes when she had talked about Palmer that afternoon a few weeks ago, the way she fiddled with the locket around her neck, how Patch seemed to have such a strange relationship with the Bell family, as if he were both an outsider and a close family friend.
“Phoebe!” Nick tapped her on the shoulder. “We have to go. The presentation’s over.”
She nodded distractedly, only able to think of one thing: as she had stood in Genie’s bathroom the night before, amidst cold cream, perfume, and prescriptions, she noticed a blue glass bottle of tuberose perfume. It was vintage, not something Genie would have bought recently. From the gold script on the bottle, it might have been forty or fifty years old. Phoebe gently opened the bottle and held it to her nose, and the smell brought her right back to the same scent in that velvet-lined sarcophagus in the warehouse on Gansevoort Street at the Night of Rebirth.