Alex left a green desk lamp burning at the Hutch. Dawes wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t quite bear to leave the rooms in darkness.
She was unlocking the door to the Vanderbilt entryway when a text arrived from Dean
Sandow: Have confabbed w Centurion. Rest easy.
She wanted to throw her phone across the courtyard. Rest easy? If Sandow intended to
handle the murder directly, why had she wasted her time—and her coin of compulsion—
visiting the crime scene? She knew the dean didn’t trust her. Why would he? He’d probably been up with a cup of chamomile tea when he got the news of Tara’s death, his
big dog asleep on his feet, waiting by the phone to make sure nothing went horribly wrong
at the prognostication and Alex didn’t humiliate herself or Lethe. Of course he wouldn’t
want her anywhere near a murder.
Rest easy. Everything else went unsaid: I don’t expect you to handle this. No one expects you to handle this. No one expects you to do anything but keep from drawing unwanted attention until we get Darlington back.
If they could find him. If they could somehow bring him home from whatever dark place he’d gone. In less than a week they’d attempt the new-moon rite. Alex didn’t understand the specifics, only that Dean Sandow believed it would work and that, until it
did, her job was to make sure that no one asked too many questions about Lethe’s missing
golden boy. At least now she didn’t have a homicide to worry about or a grumpy detective
to deal with.
When she entered the common room to find Mercy already awake, Alex was glad she’d
stopped to shower and change. She had thought college dorms would be like hotels, long
hallways pocked with bedrooms, but Vanderbilt felt more like an old-fashioned apartment
building, full of tinny music, people humming and laughing as they went in and out of the
shared bathrooms, the slamming of doors echoing up and down the central staircase. The
squat she’d shared with Len and Hellie and Betcha and the others had been noisy, but its
sighs and moans had been different, defeated, like a dying body.
“You’re awake,” Alex said.
Mercy glanced up from her copy of To the Lighthouse, its pages thick with pastel sticky notes. Her hair was in an elaborate braid, and instead of bundling up in their ratty afghan,
she’d thrown a silk robe patterned with blue hyacinths over her jeans. “Did you even come
home last night?”
Alex took a chance. “Yeah. You were already snoring. I just got up to get a run in.”
“You went to the gym? Are the showers even open this early?”
“For crew and stuff.” Alex wasn’t actually sure this was true, but she knew Mercy cared less about sports than just about anything. Besides, Alex didn’t own running shoes
or a sports bra, and Mercy never asked about that. People didn’t go looking for lies that
didn’t have a reason, and why would anyone lie about going for a morning run?
“Psychos.” Mercy tossed a stapled stack of pages at Alex, who caught them but
couldn’t quite bring herself to look. Her Milton essay. Mercy had offered to give it a read.
Alex could already see the red pen all over it.
“How was it?” she asked, shuffling into their bedroom.
“Not terrible.”
“But not good,” Alex muttered as she entered their tiny cave of a room and stripped out
of her sweats. Mercy had covered her side of the wall in posters, family photos, ticket stubs from Broadway shows, a poem written in Chinese characters that Mercy said her parents made her memorize for dinner parties when she was a kid but that she’d fallen in
love with, a series of Alexander McQueen sketches, a starburst of red envelopes. Alex knew it was partially an act, a construction of the person Mercy wanted to be at Yale, but
every item, every object connected her to something. Alex felt like someone had come along early and snipped all of her threads. Her grandmother had been her closest link to
any kind of real past, but Estrea Stern had died when Alex was nine. And Mira Stern had
grieved her but she’d had no interest in her mother’s stories or songs, the way she cooked