Page 8 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"For what? We haven't gotten to your chapter."

"For the talk," she said, warm, entirely sincere, already reaching for her bag. "It helped. It really did."

We had not had a talk. I had said maybe eleven words, and four of them were take your time. She stood in my doorway visibly lighter than she'd come in, shoulders down, face smoothed out, and could not tell me what she'd come for. She looked at the sticky note on her own folder, in her own handwriting, and laughed at it, and said the chapter was basically fine, she didn't know why she'd gotten so worked up on Monday, and left.

Vaguer. That's the word I wrote down. She left lighter and vaguer, in that order, and her footsteps on the stairs were quicker than the ones that had come up.

I sat in my linen closet and let my eyes snag again on her Monday email. Urgent, underlined, sideways since last Thursday. Whatever had been sitting on her Monday was not sitting on her Wednesday. She didn't miss it. And nobody watching her cross the quad, swinging her bag, would have said one thing about her was wrong.

That's the part I couldn't put down. Nobody would say anything was wrong.

Item fourteen: Leah Brandt cried for four minutes, timed, and couldn't say why, and stopped like a program terminating.

Item fifteen: she left lighter and vaguer, in that order, and thanked me for a conversation that never took place. What did she think we said?

Thursday morning I saw the Headmaster exactly once, at distance, crossing the chapel walk with the Provost, fog to his knees and his coat the same gray the stone becomes in rain.

Item sixteen: the coat. This is a meteorological observation and the file is closed.

* * *

Thursday night I was at my window with the lamp off by eleven, because once is a sighting and twice is a pattern, and I'd been raised by a woman who said you can't complain about data you didn't collect.

At 12:14 the light came on in the closed building. Third floor, same warm lamp-color, same unhurried pace, two windows' worth. Then dark. I had the notebook against the sill and my pen already moving when it came on again, and this is where Thursday stopped being a repeat of my first sighting, because it came on lower. Second floor. It crossed two windows at that same walking pace, went dark at the stair end of the building, and came on again on the ground floor, one window, fainter, the color of a lamp seen through more glass than before. Then it went down.

I don't mean out. I mean down: the glow dropping below the sill line the way a lamp sinks when the person carrying it takes the first steps of a descending stair. And then there wasn't any more building for it to be in. The plans on the campus map show no basement. The light went down past the ground floor of a three-story building and did not come out of any door, and I stood at my window with my pen not moving for what the clock says was six minutes.

Somebody was walking downstairs. Floor by floor, patient, at home. In a padlocked building. Into a floor that doesn't exist.

I called the campus security number on the card Croft had slid under my door my first week. To their credit: fourteen minutes, two of them, a big officer whose jacket tag said DELL and a young one who never said one word. To their further credit, they didn't talk me out of it in the doorway. Dell picked the key off a ring of about forty like he'd done it before, and we went in, all three of us, into the smell of cold plaster and pigeon and forty years of nothing.

Dust on the stairs, unbroken. "You'd have seen tracks in that," Dell said, and he was right, and I hated it. Ground floor: lath, droppings, a dead pigeon gone papery in a corner. Second floor: dust, an old desk on its side, the windows I'd watched the light cross, shut and filthy. At the base of the stairwell, a door marked PLANT with a padlock the size of my fist, dusty, closed. Dell put his light on it and moved on.

"Third floor?" I said, at the foot of the stairs.

"Roof void's over the third," Dell said. "Condemned. Nothing up there but what'll come down through a ceiling one of these winters." He wrote in a notebook of his own, which endeared him to me against my will: time, my name, no entry found. Then he said, kind, unhurried, that the fog does odd things with lights this time of year, and that there'd been kids with a lantern in there years back, and the memory of it does the rounds every fall.

I thanked them. I meant it. I went to bed, and at two in the morning, flat on my back with the radiator ticking, my brain finished its paperwork and handed me the bill.

Their flashlights never went above the second floor. Neither did their feet.

Item seventeen: the light went DOWN. Past the ground floor. There is no basement on the plans.

Item eighteen: security searched the building and never set foot on the third floor, which is the floor I called about. Who searches a building and skips the one floor in the report?

* * *

Friday I went by the security office at the gatehouse with a pretext I'd rehearsed: I'd given a statement, I wanted the incident number for my records, I'm a records person, ha ha. The day officer wasn't Dell. She was perfectly pleasant, and she took down the bound ledger, an actual bound book, because Ashgrave logs its overnight security shifts in a book like it's 1911, and she opened it to the week and ran her finger down the pages.

Wednesday's page. Then Friday's.

The Thursday page wasn't blank; it was missing. In its place was a stub, down close to the spine, cut clean along a straightedge. The entries jumped from Wednesday, 11:40 p.m., bicycle reported in the west lot, to Friday, 7:05 a.m., delivery gate. Thursday night, the walk-through, Dell's careful no entry found, my name, gone, the whole night razored out of the record close to the binding.

She flipped past the stub without her finger pausing. That was the detail that walked home with me. Either she was used to pages being gone from a bound ledger, or her eye had learned not to see the stubs, and I couldn't decide which one of those I hated more, and I've thought about it since, and it's the second one.

"Looks like a page is out," I said.

"Old binding," she said. "They lift sometimes."