I hereby confess:
I had no problem getting people
to believe me after that.
I was also not getting back to sleep.
“Oh my God,” cried Angel. “Don’t touch it! Fingerprints.”
“That envelope has been through too many hands,” said Juno. “And getting fingerprints off hair—”
“What are you,” said Angel, “CSI? No? Then shut up. And, George, for fuck’s sake, put that down!”
Nobody, I’m proud to report, thought of fining her at that moment.
“What should we do?” said Puck, holding the braid away from his body as if it were a live snake. “Call the cops?”
“Yes. Then call Soze,” said Juno. “And that Poe guy. You said he’d been helping, right, Bugaboo?”
I nodded dumbly. “What—what else is in there? Is there any kind of note?”
Puck shook his head. “I’m almost afraid to look.” But look he did, and to our collective relief, the envelope was devoid of any additional body parts.
“Well,” Juno reasoned, “at least it isn’t a finger.”
But this provided little comfort. I called Soze (who was still asleep) and Poe (who wasn’t—but vampires hunt at night, right?), and they both told me to wait until they arrived to phone the cops. Puck offered to call his dad, though we all thought that maybe Mr. Prescott needed to stay by his wife’s side this morning. I called Gus Kelting on the TTA board, who’d arranged my internship last summer, but his voice mail said he was away on business. We tried to brainstorm other sympathetic patriarchs, but the list was a bit thin at the moment.
“Who could have done something like this?” Angel said in a shaky voice. “Her hair was so beautiful….”
“Right, because beauty is the issue,” said Juno.
Puck moved from seat to seat. “I don’t believe it could have been—I can’t—it’s just a stupid society, right? A frat? I mean, shit, I don’t like her very much, but she’s a good kid, you know? They wouldn’t…”
We all spent a lot of time looking at the braid, which Puck had finally dropped on the coffee table.
It seemed to take Poe and Soze forever to arrive, but in actuality, it was probably closer to twenty minutes. Considering Poe’s apartment was a good twenty-minute walk from campus, I was impressed.
“How did you find it?” Soze asked.
Puck gestured to the envelope. “It was on the porch. Like, in the mail.”
Poe picked it up and studied the address label. “It was mailed? Here? How odd. The postmark says Manhattan. Thursday.”
“Well,” said Bond, “that narrows it down.”
I raised my hand. “Guys, the other day, when I took Jenny’s phone, there were some phone numbers in New York City. I called them, but there was no answer.”
“Again, not so helpful,” said Angel. “When are we calling the police? I think we’ve got evidence here.”
“But evidence of what?” asked Poe. “If it was the patriarchs, why leave the trophy on the stoop? Shouldn’t they be sending it to the guy running the website? Or even to Bugaboo or me, because we were the ones tracking them?”
“Evidence of what?” Juno asked incredulously. “Of a kidnapping, that’s what!”
“Okay.” I tried again. “Before we were interrupted with the Locks of Not-so-much Love, I was thinking about Ada Lovelace—”
“’Boo, what does that have to do with anything?” Puck asked.
I ignored him. “And I remembered that in Lucky’s room she had some mail addressed to Ada Lovelace. I thought it was junk mail, but now…”
“She probably used a fake name on some Internet site,” said Puck. “I do that.”
“Porn sites?” Angel asked. Puck shot her a look.
“You wouldn’t put a fake name and a real address, though,” said Poe, and turned back to me. “Do you remember what kind of mail it was?”
I shrugged. “I thought it was junk mail. It was still there on her desk when we were in her room yesterday. It’s probably nothing, but it’s weird. We should tell the cops—”
“Let’s go check it out,” said Poe.
“How?” I said. “You want me to break in again?”
Poe smiled. “Won’t be necessary.”
Soze stepped in. “What does this have to do with anything? We need to call the cops, right now. Lucky could be in trouble.”
“I called them last night,” said Poe, avoiding my eyes. “I was getting worried. But they backed up the dean.”
“But now…” Soze pointed at the hair.
Poe shrugged. “Try it again, see what happens. But I’m sorry to admit they may be mildly accustomed to lunatic phone calls about the Diggers. I don’t know if a hank of hair is going to convince them of much.” He looked at me. “Coming?”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
Angel picked up the envelope. “I’m going to look up this zip code, see what neighborhood it comes from.”
Soze shook his head. “If someone checks our Internet search records, don’t you think it will look suspicious that before we called the police, we checked up on the evidence?”
Poe laughed mirthlessly. “We’re Rose & Grave, junior. Everything we do looks suspicious.”
Poe was a man of mysterious talents. Unbeknownst to either the dean or me, he’d sabotaged Jenny’s lock yesterday while we were up there visiting. A small piece of tape held the catch in place. Now we slipped inside and collected the Ada Lovelace mail.
“This isn’t addressed to an Eli P.O. Box,” I said. “It’s all been sent to someplace in New York City.” And it was weird stuff, too. An electric bill, a cable notice…not your usual college loan consolidation crap. Of course, Jenny being a millionaire and all, she probably didn’t have any loans.
Clarissa called. “The zip code 10002 is for Union Square and the Lower East Side.”
“Thanks,” I said. I looked at the envelope. “Hey, where is Ludlow Street in Manhattan?”
I could practically hear her wrinkle her nose. “The Lower East Side.”
What were the chances? I hung up and looked at Poe. “What does this mean?”
“It means that Miss Goody-Goody’s got a secret crib.”
I considered this for a moment. “Is it possible that everyone was right all along? That Jenny did just go away for the weekend, but now maybe she’s run into trouble down in New York?”
Poe gave a determined nod. “I’m going down there.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He looked at me. “Amy, you haven’t slept and you look like hell.”
“So? I’ll sleep on the train.”
“And…it could be dangerous.”
“Right, because you’re the badass who freaks out when he punches someone?”
Poe took a deep breath. “You are very difficult.”
“You set the curve.”
Sleeping on the Metro North commuter train takes talent. Sleeping on the Metro North commuter train in the middle of a (possible) kidnapping investigation while your partner-né-nemesis sits across from you and marks up pages of his law textbook with a squeaky highlighter takes the kind of talent usually reserved for deaf, blind, and comatose Zen monks. I gave up before we hit Stamford.
According to Poe’s curt update when I stopped pretending to sleep, Josh had called the police, who’d berated him for not contacting campus security when Lydia had caught an intruder in my room. If anything was stolen, we were to file a report—with campus security. But nothing had been stolen, and the second Josh dropped the words “Rose & Grave” in the mix, the cops clammed up. Either they thought we were Eli pranksters, or they didn’t want to get involved. Either way, we were on our own.
I stared out the window for a while, and then, for a while longer, I stared at Poe. He was back in his usual attire today: wool pants slightly shiny at the knees, and a pilled gray sweater under a black wool overcoat in dire need of a good lint brushing. But really, who was I to talk? I was wearing yesterday’s clothes for my glamorous trip into the city. Maybe later we could catch dinner and a show.
You know, after we did our Remington Steele act.
Poe caught me staring. “Can I help you?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking—sorry, spacing out.” I looked out the window. “This isn’t what I imagine when I think about going to the city for the weekend.”
He returned to his textbook. “I wouldn’t know. I never went into the city for the weekend.”
“Not even with Malcolm?”
He snorted. “I don’t think we’d be interested in the same spots. Plus, I’d probably cramp his style.”
Shocker. Poe had no style. I returned to my absent gazing out at the dreary rain-soaked landscape.
“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?” Poe went on, and I looked at him. “You never have to worry about anything. You have no idea how rough it was for me at school. I was broke.”
“I’m broke, too,” I said. “Way over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. You’ve seen my files. You know my parents aren’t rolling like Malcolm’s or George’s or Clarissa’s—”
“No, Amy, I was penniless broke. Beyond loans. I didn’t go into the city, I didn’t go out, I didn’t go…get pizza and a beer. A two-dollar slice of pizza! I had about five dollars of discretionary spending per week. Thank God for the coffee I stole from the dining hall.” He looked back down at his book. “When I got into—you know—that was it for me. I suddenly had a social life. I couldn’t go to the bars or the clubs or whatever, but I could go to the tomb. It was still tough, though. I had the chops, but not exactly the pedigree. My dad’s a landscaper. I think he practically starved these last four years so I could go to Eli instead of a state college. That’s who I worked for this summer.”
And it must have been nigh on impossible to go crawling home to his father and admit he couldn’t get a job the year he graduated from Eli. Sudden contrition overcame my usual disdain for the man seated across from me.
I leaned forward. “James, I’m so sorry—”
He slammed the book closed. “For Christ’s sake, stop calling me that!” He looked away, ran his fingers through his hair. “My name is Jamie. Always has been. Not Jim, or Jimbo, or James. Nobody calls me James.”
Jamie? I sat back against my seat and digested this for a few moments. So Poe had financial issues at school. He was far from the first. Lydia’s dad got laid off from work her sophomore year, putting the whole family in pretty rough financial straits, and she didn’t become a misanthrope. She simply picked social activities that were free. Amazing how much fun you could have with some classmates and your college’s cracked Parcheesi set. Still, it explained a lot.
“I still think of you as Poe, you know. It suits you.”
He met my eyes and cracked a smile. A real smile. “Two dollars. And you don’t want to know what I think of you as.”
“I can probably guess.” I watched him open his book back up. “So, are things…better now?”
“Law school gives me a more reasonable living expenses budget,” he said, “but I’m not exactly carting around in high style.” He gestured to his outfit. “It’s okay, though. I’ll make it all back when I’m out of school. I’m going to work for some big firm for a while, get rich.”
“And then?”
He shrugged. “Politics. Provided I have any connections left after this little caper. Which looks unlikely. You still going to work in publishing?”
“I don’t know. I thought about it a lot this summer. I was working for—”
“Kelting’s think tank.”
“Right. We put together a little book of memoirs. Exprostitutes, illegal aliens caught up in the sex trade…. It was pretty powerful stuff. But it also made me realize how limited my education really is. Smollett et al. are fine, but I think I’ve got a lot more to learn.” I looked down the train car, at the gum-encrusted floor, anywhere but at Jamie. I hadn’t talked to many people about this. “I was thinking of maybe going to graduate school. Not necessarily for Literature. Maybe something else.”
“More school, more debt,” Poe said. “I don’t suggest going unless you have a clear plan in mind.”
Right. Way to pop that little bubble.
“Unless you do know what you want to do, and pretending you don’t is your way of getting around actually making the decision.”
“Pardon me?”
Poe put his feet up on my seat. “In undergrad, there was this type. Drove me crazy. They would always act coy about it, but what they wanted to do was go into politics. And not the government-appointee kind like Josh or me or even Kurt Gehry. They wanted to run for office. But somehow, they believed that saying they wanted to run for office was some sort of ego trip that signified they shouldn’t.”
“I don’t want to run for office.”
“Not saying you do. But maybe you want to be a social worker, or a teacher, but won’t admit it because you’re afraid people won’t think it’s lofty enough for an Eli grad.”
“If I thought that, you’re precisely the type of person who I’d be afraid of judging me.”
He put his hand to his chest. “I’m the son of a gardener.”
“You’re a Digger at the best law school in the country.”
“You’re a Digger at the best university in the country.”
“Even more reason to aspire to greatness.”
He laughed. “Someday, go look through the roster of the patriarchs. See what they all do for a living. You may be surprised. We’ve even got a garbageman.” He opened his book again. After a page or so, he added, “My mom was a social worker.”
“Did she retire?”
“She died.”
And that pretty much killed the conversation. We rode the rest of the way into New York City in silence, and I even managed to doze off for a little while. I don’t know how many pages Poe read, and I can’t be sure, but I think the humidity in the car must have done wonders for the squeakiness of his highlighter, because it completely stopped making noise.
We arrived at Grand Central Station, and Poe deciphered the tangle of subway lines while I ran into a nearby shop to grab a couple of umbrellas. Though the tunnels were warm, to judge from the streams of icy water leaking through the cracks and dripping down the subway stairwells, it was a real bitch of a day outside. One switch to the F train later, and we were on the LES. (Lower East Side—I can swing the lingo with the best of them.)
“So what’s the plan?” I asked Poe as we picked our way through the puddle-riddled streets.
“I don’t have one. I thought we’d go up to the apartment and knock, see what happens.”
“Sounds brilliant.” I rolled my eyes.
“That I am.” We turned the corner. Jenny’s building was a grungy, graffiti-sprayed five-story job with a bodega on the first floor. Whatever gentrification may have swept through the Lower East Side recently had skipped this particular spot, which didn’t mean Jenny had acquired it any more cheaply. I wonder if her parents, or even her ersatz boyfriend (you know, the one nursing his glass jaw) knew about her little hideaway. According to Poe, his club hadn’t been aware of Jenny’s apartment during their deliberation process, so it must be a relatively recent development.
We entered the vestibule and buzzed Jenny’s apartment, but there was no answer. There was no name on the tiny mailbox slot, either. With nothing to lose, I pressed the other buttons. After a second, there came a muffled response.
“Delivery,” I said, and the door buzzed open. I smiled at Poe. “You aren’t the only one with little tricks up your sleeve.”
A middle-aged man in a work shirt streaked with grease stuck his head over the banister. “Mind telling me what you want?” he said, lumbering down the steps and wiping off his hands with a towel. “You don’t look like you got a package.”
“Are you the super here?” I asked. “We’re looking for the resident of 4A. Ada Lovelace?”
“Never met her.” He shrugged. “She leased the place a couple months ago, when the new owner took over. But I don’t think she’s here much.”
“Do you know if she’s been in this weekend?”
“Look, girly, why don’t you and your boyfriend—”
“We’re not trying to start a fight,” said Poe, stepping forward. “We merely wanted to leave this note for her.” He held out a small card emblazoned with the Rose & Grave seal.
The man’s eyes went wide, and he looked at us each in turn. “Who are you guys?”
“Who do you think we are?”
“Couple of punks.” The super nodded at the card. “You’re the second crew to come in here waving that symbol around like I should care. What are you, a gang?”
“You don’t know what this symbol means?” asked Poe, a hint of defensiveness creeping into his voice.
The guy shrugged. “Some Da Vinci Code crapola. I don’t give a shit. Now, why don’t you get out of here before I throw you out.”
Back on the street, Poe kicked at the cornerstone. “I don’t get it. The D-bomb usually works like a charm.”
“Maybe in New Haven,” I said. “And D-bomb?”
“Drop the Digger name into a conversation and see how quickly your way is smoothed for you,” Poe said.
“Isn’t that against the secrecy policy?”
Poe lifted his shoulders. “What’s the point of power if you can’t use it every once in a while? The policy of the society is to fly under the radar, it’s true, but they do occasionally throw their weight around.”
“You mean like last spring when they made us lose all our internships?” I looked back at the building. “Well, we don’t seem to have much influence here. Plus, I’m about to freeze or fall asleep standing up—possibly both. So let’s continue this conversation in the nearest coffee shop, okay?”
Poe sighed. “Fine. Let me run around the corner real quick and see what the fire-escape situation looks like. If I can get up there—”
“Whatever, Spider-Man.” But I couldn’t help smiling.
“I have some skills you aren’t aware of, Miss Haskel. Anyway, if I can’t jimmy the window, I can at least peep inside.”
“And get yourself shot and/or arrested?”
“Just let me look. I’ll be back in two seconds. Don’t drown while I’m gone, okay?” He winked and took off.
I ducked under the bodega’s canopy and rubbed my arms through my coat. I should have brought gloves. I should be in bed right now, curled up with the fall issue of the Lit Mag. Damn Jenny. Okay, that was it. I needed coffee now. I went inside the shop. Ghost town, like the rest of the street on this ugly day. The guy behind the counter was watching daytime television, and there was a young truant in a black wind-breaker shoplifting candy in the corner. “Small coffee, please,” I said to the attendant. “Actually, make it two.”
The guy nodded and went to pour the cups. He looked over at the boy. “Buddy, gonna buy something?”
The boy picked up two PowerBars. “Yeah,” he mumbled.
But it was enough. I turned my head toward the kid with the familiar voice, who looked up, facing me fully. “Oh my God…”
“So,” Jenny said, “you found me.”