Was that Elias the math teacher? My forehead furrowing, I risked easing a little farther down the side hall to get a better view.
He passed through a streak of faint moonlight on his way to the hall opposite me, and the glimpse I got of his chiseled face confirmed it. He walked on as if he were going exactly where he was supposed to be, up the stairs to the male students’ bedrooms.
I waited for a few minutes after he’d vanished up there to be sure he wasn’t going to march back down, escorting some guy who’d gotten into trouble. Elias didn’t return. Did he sleep up there with the students? I’d noticed he didn’t totally fit in with the other professors, but I’d assumed he was still part of the staff with whatever benefits they got.
What had he been doing up this late?
When the coast appeared clear, I pushed those questions aside and got on with my own quest. I slunk across the landing past the classroom doors, down the main staircase with its sweeping grandeur, and into the thick shadows around the foyer.
Despite the sparse blooms on the wall-climbing bushes, the smell of roses still lingered in the air. It was always a little stronger down here than in the bedrooms, where I could forget it if I wasn’t thinking about it. It tickled my nose as I crept to the door of the dean’s office.
I stopped there and held still for a moment, listening to the sounds of the building. There was a faint creak like the walls settling. A gust of wind warbled past the front door. No sign that anyone other than me was up and awake.
I dug the coffee shop reward card that I’d decided to potentially sacrifice to this cause out of the pocket of my pajama pants. I hadn’t taken a close look at the mechanisms on the dean’s door when I’d arrived, but I’d had plenty of time to consider the other inner doors since I’d started attending classes. Like everything else in this place, the planes of wood and the locks built into them were old, verging on antique—nothing I couldn’t tackle. I’d popped my first lock when I was only ten, to steal back a treasured figurine my fifth grade teacher had taken from me.
The card eased between the door and the frame easily enough. I wiggled it against the bolt until I liked what I felt, and then dragged at it while twisting the knob.
I hadn’t lost my touch. The lock clicked over, and the door swung open at my nudge.
Just in case someone got up for a midnight snack and came by this way, I closed the door behind me. Turning on the main lights didn’t seem wise, but I tapped on the flashlight function on my phone so I could actually see for this search.
If there were records of Cade’s time at Roseborne College anywhere, they’d be in the dean’s possession. Maybe he’d lied to me; maybe he’d forgotten they existed—either way, I’d track them down.
Unless they’d vanished like the relics of my brother’s existence back home had, along with everyone’s memories of him.
I didn’t let myself dwell on that last possibility. My phone’s light skimmed over the hearth and the seating area around it. Nothing there looked like it contained any storage. I walked along the walls, touching the paneling, just in case.
A couple of the bookshelves at the other end of the room had cabinet doors on their bottom halves. I opened those with a glimmer of hope and found nothing but more books. With a grimace, I pulled out a couple of volumes.
They were both bound in old, pungent leather, as were many of the volumes on the shelves above. The others were covered in aged cloth. The pages I opened shone yellow with age. The copyrights showed they’d been printed in the 1920s or before, all of them more than ninety years old. I couldn’t spot a single newer book on any of the shelves.
The dean was a collector, I guessed. His personal library covered a wide variety of subjects, from educational strategies to legal history to poetry, but there wasn’t going to be any information about Cade in there.
That just left the desk. Come on, come on, I thought at it as I tugged open one drawer and another.
The first one I checked held only a small, black bottle and blank paper that looked nearly as old as the stuff in the books. I held the bottle up to the light and realized it was ink. Okay… When I unscrewed the lid and swirled it around, the stuff inside didn’t move. It was totally dry. Time for the dean to switch to pens, obviously.
The contents of the other drawers included a box of cigars, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, a wool scarf that’d gotten tatty, and a leather notebook that gave me another spark of hope. That spark dimmed when I opened it to find page after page of a shorthand notation I couldn’t decipher. From the fading of the ink, it looked like all this writing had been done well before Cade’s time here anyway.
Surely the school didn’t operate without student records of any kind? I still hadn’t seen any computers that might have held digital files either. How did they even find out about people like Cade and Ryo to offer them scholarships? Maybe there was a separate room just for records in the building somewhere…
I was just shutting the last drawer on the desk when footsteps rasped against the floor outside. My heart lurched. I darted around the desk, meaning to wait by the door to listen for when the passerby had moved on, but they were coming straight to me. The knob turned.
There wasn’t really anywhere to hide where I could count on going undiscovered, and it’d look a hell of a lot worse if I made it clear I knew I was doing something shady. I stepped closer to the sofa and bent over it just as the door opened.
I straightened up with a little jump as if startled. Dean Wainhouse peered at me and flicked on the light. “Miss Corbyn. What are you doing in here?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, channeling my nerves into awkwardness. I motioned toward the sitting area. “I couldn’t find something I brought with me, and I got the idea I might have left it in here when I was first talking to you, so I came down to check… The door wasn’t locked. I didn’t want to bother anyone.”
I couldn’t tell from the dean’s steady gaze whether he believed me or not. “I would prefer if you have inquiries regarding this room that you wait until proper office hours,” he said. “Did you find your item?”
“No. I guess it’s just lost.”
“Let me know what it is, and I’ll keep an eye out.”
Oh. Er. “It was just a pen,” I said, grasping for the first thing that popped into my head that I could conceivably have misplaced. “A pretty one with this silver vine pattern on it, kind of like my tattoo.” I pulled my sleeve up high enough to show what I meant. “One of my friends gave it to me. If you do find it, that would be great!”
“I’ll let you know if I do. You’d better get back to your bed now.”
Those last words came out in a subtly commanding tone that didn’t leave any room for argument. I gave a little laugh and hurried past him into the foyer with another mumbled apology.
It felt too risky to poke around anymore tonight now that he was up and knew I’d been roaming around too. I meant to at least scan the halls as I went up for a door I hadn’t gone past yet that might hold those elusive records, but by the time I’d climbed the first couple of steps, a dull ache had formed behind the bridge of my nose. As I continued on, the headache spread behind my eyes and through my skull with a throbbing pressure.