“Oh,” Ellsbeth said. She thumbed at the compounding clay in her palm, feeling it absorb her warmth. “Is there…any way you could make an exception? I have a…paper due.”
The Manga Boy sighed and closed his book. “Yeah, okay. They pay me jack shit here. I don’t give a fuck.”
She almost burst out laughing. Illegal magic was staining the palm of her left hand red, and she was being let into the library she needed just because she asked, and someone didn’t really care.
The lights in the archive library required Ellsbeth to wave her hands wildly a few times before they acknowledged her presence and popped on. The computers hummed pleasantly in a row, and she slid into the chair at the first one and began her search. There was no way she would be able to find the name of the boy her sister had possibly been dating, and she couldn’t search “why was a Banestooth pin in my sister’s bathroom when she died.” And so instead she just searched “Banestooth” and scrolled as far as the scanned newspapers allowed her.
Maybe Bertie had been dating someone trying to pledge Banestooth. Maybe he had come with her into the bathroom that night, looking for a private corner away from a shared dorm with a roommate. Maybe something had happened—maybe even an accident—and he had covered it up. Maybe he had gotten away with it. Maybe Banestooth had helped.
As soon as the theory sprouted in Ellsbeth’s mind, she could see it so clearly. Of course, no one would want to ask too many questions; prevent a scandal, that was all that Newlyn sought to do. And after the massive, public scandal of Maxwell Keene, another accidental murder of a fellow student would have been a disaster. Dean Lennox had personally requested that the police not perform an autopsy: She more than anyone would have understood how calamitous another accidental murder would have been for Newlyn’s reputation.
Ellsbeth groaned when the search loaded: There were thousands of results in the archive for Banestooth. There was an article on the front page of theNewlyn Courierfrom 1951 about the commemoration of Banestooth’s centennial celebration. The accompanying photo featured three rows of stern-faced men in suits standing in front of the same house Banestooth still occupied, only here strung with a bannerproclaimingOne Hundred Years!Ellsbeth scanned the article: It was fawning, congratulating the “fine men of Banestooth” on their collective excellence in “academia and sport!” Ellsbeth kept scrolling through the online newspaper scans: There was an article about a new chairman of the federal reserve who had been a Newlyn alumnus and a member of Banestooth. Another Banestooth member won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Ellsbeth scrolled past three Rhodes Scholars and a handful of Fulbright awardees.
The only vaguely interesting thing Ellsbeth found was a poorly scanned blueprint of the building itself from the 1970s, hidden in an uploaded packet of all of the housing options on campus. She zoomed in on the fuzzy image: The first floor had a large foyer, a dining room, a kitchen, and a handful of double rooms. The second floor had more bedrooms—mostly singles—and something labeled the club room. The third floor had a game room and the largest bedrooms of all, mostly suites. There was no basement.
She printed out the blueprint, just in case, wincing at the whirring of the industrial library printer as it chugged to life, even though she was completely alone on the floor.
The problem was, she wasn’t finding anythingnefarious.The club itself had never been investigated for any wrongdoings. There were no cheating scandals, no allegations of sexual assault or harassment. For something akin to a fraternity, Banestooth had a shockingly chaste reputation, at least in the public record.
Ellsbeth searched “Banestooth + suicide” and was disappointed to find it yielded only two results: a glowing review of a 1991 campus production of’night, Motherstarring a Banestooth boy, and a mental-health advocacy program led by the Banestooth class of 2009.
Trying to find records of all of the suicides at Newlyn was even more unhelpful. Several years ago, there was a student petition to put up a suicide net below the top floors of the science library to prevent possible jumpers (it never happened). There were scattered obituaries, and though the obituaries themselves never mentioned the cause of death, there was always the telltale punctuation at the bottom of the article:If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide or self-harm, please call…
Newlyn was a small enough school that there was never anythinglike an epidemic, not nearly enough suicides that Ellsbeth could pin red string on a corkboard and gasp at the discovery of a mass murderer. Just one, it seemed, every few years, usually a bright-eyed young girl who crumbled under the pressure of life away from home for the first time. Nearly five years ago, there had been a girl named Catherine Teale who had jumped from an open window on the eleventh floor of the science library. Her obituary was equal parts glowing and vague—Catherine was a brilliant girl, with a bright future, et cetera. Only one aspect of the article caught Ellsbeth’s eye. It was a quote from one of Catherine’s friends:“I’m still in shock. I just never thought Catherine would ever do something like this. Friday night, we went out together to a party on Governor Street. Saturday morning, she was dead.”
Ellsbeth lived on Governor. About half of the street was graduate student housing. The other half was dotted with aging Victorian homes occupied by locals or junior professors. It was not a street any undergraduate would ever trek to in order to attend a party. Unless they were going to a party at Banestooth.
There were frustratingly few articles about Catherine Teale in the archives. Her obituary had just two photos of her—what appeared to be a senior class picture, and a photo of Catherine in a tank top, her hair in a braid, sitting on a rock and grinning, face flushed having reached a mountain peak after a hike.
Ellsbeth needed more. She needed the police report. She needed photographs of the scene. The compounding clay seemed to vibrate in her pocket. She began making mental plans to go back to the police station, but as it turned out she didn’t needto.
While she scrolled, she found a link to a forum she didn’t recognize.
i was there the day catherine teale died. i was fucking there.
You saw her fall?
no, but i saw her body at the bottom of the library. fucking gnarly.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
She was in my freshman dorm. She was nice. RIP. don’t ask for pics of a fucking dead girl!!!!!
:’(((((( pics.
The last comment was a hyperlink. Ellsbeth held her breath and clicked. The photos were taken on a cellphone, through police tape. Catherine Teale’s body was bloodied and twisted like a circus performer on dark pavement slick with blood and blackened snow. Her dark braid covered her face, but still, Ellsbeth had to turn away from the photos several times before her stomach settled enough to let her look in earnest.
There were cuts across her bare arms, and a sickening pool of blood so dark on the concrete that it looked brown, soaking into her jeans. But there, in the third picture, she could see it—three cuts across her chest, deep and already scabbing over. Three parallel cuts on a diagonal, from the clavicle to the breast.
The same cuts that Bertie had.
The buzzing sensation started again in Ellsbeth’s head, the feeling she got when she was about to complete a ritual correctly or solve a difficult problem.
Ellsbeth went back through the obituaries in the archives, looking for connective threads. She looked for girls, for freshmen, deaths that involved blood.
There was Bertie last winter. And Catherine Teale four years before that.
But four years before Catherine Teale, there was a young woman named Emily Kirkman who jumped in front of a train. And there was Paula Rodriguez who leapt from the top of the library four years before Emily. Ellsbeth couldn’t find a suicide four years before Paula, but there was a girl named Constance who was hit by a car while walking home from a friend’s house at midnight. Every death was in the winter, at the top of the second semester.
