The Professor Page 21

  In any case, I started making excuses to go to the rare-manuscript room whenever possible, and I realized that Anthony’s been leaving me clues. For instance, he left his ring—the one with the weird, black stone—on my bedside table. It might’ve been an accident, but instinct tells me he left it there on purpose. It turns out that Anthony’s involved in some insane club, the Black Raptor Society. The ring is a key to their secret clubhouse, the entrance to which, you guessed it, is hidden in the rare-manuscript room. The scope of this society is insane. I started doing some research on them. They’ve done a fair job of covering up their tracks, but I couldn’t believe the hold they have on their members. I found their charter, and I swear, the majority of Waverly’s rich jerks who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground are all part of this society. I guess that explains how most of these morons got accepted to Waverly in the first place.

  I looked at Lauren. “Didn’t you say there has only been one other person to break in to the Black Raptor clubhouse other than me?”

  “I sure did.”

  “That was my mother?”

  “I guess it runs in the family.”

  I skimmed through the rest of the first entry. Other than my mother’s dedication to freeing my father from BRS’s grasp, it didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. I’d spent the last few weeks discovering the same things that my mother had already uncovered several years prior. History really did seem to have a way of repeating itself.

  “Can you open the next entry?”

  “Sure.” Lauren closed the first file and double-clicked the second. “It skips ahead quite a bit. I guess O’Connor didn’t think the stuff in between warranted our attention.”

  I squinted at the new entry. My mother’s handwriting had grown messier, as though she had written in haste. It was much harder to decipher.

  April 3, 1985

  Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. I promised Anthony that I wouldn’t go back to the Raptors’ clubhouse, but I couldn’t help it. He told Harrison Flynn about the security cameras that he installed. I think it was a mistake. I don’t care if Harrison is Anthony’s best friend. I’ve never trusted him, and I was damn right not to. He was mixed up in all this Raptor hazing crap. He didn’t put a stop to it. He deserves whatever consequence comes with that.

  Last night, I followed Harrison after he left Anthony. He went straight to the clubhouse. Obviously, I couldn’t just waltz in after him, so I went back to Research Hall and used one of the secret passageways to get in. It led me right to the dining room where, lo and behold, Harrison and Anthony’s ex-girlfriend were holed up and getting cozy. I stayed in the passageway, of course. The other Raptors have no idea that I know where the clubhouse is.

  Here’s the gist of it. Harrison told Catherine about the security footage, which means she’s now on a manhunt for those tapes. I spent all of today collecting the footage and hiding it. I haven’t told Anthony yet. When he finds out I’ve been going to the clubhouse without him, he’ll probably be on the warpath. But this is for his own good. A student died at Catherine’s hands, and I’ll be damned if she gets away with it just because of her family’s last name. If she gets her hands on these tapes, we’ll never find another way of getting rid of her.

  I have no idea why I’m writing this down. I shouldn’t be, I know. But if I don’t, I might go insane. Today, I went out and bought a storage trunk to hide the tapes in. It’s reinforced. You could probably blow the thing up, and it still wouldn’t open. The lock can be customized to whatever shape you want. I decided that my mother’s locket, the one that she gave to me when I left home to go to Waverly, was a suitable key. I mean, it hangs around my neck, twenty-four seven, which basically means Catherine Lockwood would have to kill me before she could get the trunk open. Then again, I suppose she’s killed before. Who’s to say she wouldn’t do it again?

  See why I have to write all of this down? I sound like I’m neck deep in paranoia. Secret societies, underground clubhouses, a double-agent boyfriend, and murder? This is not what I expected out of my university experience. I’ve been sick to my stomach over this insanity for weeks… I can hear Anthony outside my door. He’s probably wondering why I haven’t spoken to him all day. Here we go…

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. I thought that I had been daring in my own escapades with the Black Raptor Society, but my mother had already taken it to a whole new level. And the locket…

  “You wouldn’t happen to have that locket, would you?” asked Lauren as though she had read the thought running through my mind.

  “I do,” I confirmed with a nod. “There’s only one problem.”

  “Which is what?”

  “It’s back at my apartment.”

  “You mean the apartment that’s most likely being watched over at all times by Catherine Flynn’s cohorts?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’ll be fun.”

  “Do we really need the locket?” I asked, knowing that a caper back to campus would surely lead to a run-in with the Raptors. “I mean, we have no idea where my mother even hid that trunk.”

  “Actually, we do,” said Lauren. “That trunk has been sitting at the back of the Raptors’ art room for as long as I can remember.”

  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “So Flynn already has the trunk full of security footage of her hazing and killing Waverly students.” I dropped my head into my hands, thinking of a way to use all of this to my advantage. “If I can get the locket out of my apartment, we can use it as a bargaining chip to get Wes back.”

  “Seriously?” Lauren closed O’Connor’s laptop and set it aside. “If we can get access to the tapes in that trunk, we could shut down Catherine for good. You want to give that opportunity away?”

  “If whatever’s on that security footage could put Catherine in jail, then why did my mother never turn her in?” I demanded. “In case you hadn’t noticed, everything turned out in Catherine’s favor. She got everything she wanted. Obviously, my mother’s plan didn’t turn out accordingly. So, yes, if offering her the key means getting Wes back safe and sound, I’m sure as hell not going to turn my nose up at the opportunity.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” argued Lauren. “I can’t let you just hand over the only chance we might have of burying Catherine Flynn.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say I’d actually hand the locket over,” I clarified. “I said I would offer Flynn the key.”

  A devious glint sparkled in Lauren’s eyes. “I like the way you think, Costello.”

  I grinned. “Let’s get started.”

  It was easier than expected to get into my recently vacated on-campus apartment. Night had fallen completely, and the streetlights near my apartment building were rarely maintenanced. Their lights were dim, some burned out completely. Under the cloak of night, with my face tucked into the collar of a borrowed, black trench coat of Lauren’s, I was barely recognizable. Even still, creeping around the Waverly campus made me nervous. Catherine Flynn was sure to have her Raptors keeping an eye out for me.

  At the building next to mine, I paused to glance around the corner. Sure enough, a slick black SUV idled in the parking lot across from my apartment. The Raptors didn’t bother with subtlety. The headlights were more or less trained on my front door. I slipped around the back side of the building and surveyed the landscape. All was still and dark. It looked like no one from the society had bothered to stand watch over the back door to the apartment. Lucky me.

  I yanked the trench coat up to cover as much of my face as possible then quietly dashed up the stairs to my apartment. I pressed an ear to the door, listening to make sure no one else was inside. Silence. I turned the key in the lock and warily went inside.

  The familiar scents of Franklin’s subtle doggie smell and Wes’s cologne hit me like a ton of bricks. I took a deep breath, holding back tears. This was not the time to fall apart because I missed my own bed. I h
ad to get the locket and get back to Lauren if we were going to set our plan in motion on time.

  The apartment was still trashed from the Raptors’ last visit. I stepped over the dried bloodstain on the carpet in the living room, mourning the fact that I would never get my deposit back, and made my way down the hallway and into the bedroom. It had been wrecked as well. The Raptors had been searching for something before I arrived. I thought it had been all of the research on BRS that O’Connor had left for me, as the Raptors had made a point of confiscating every little thing that might have shed any light on their secret society. Now, as I pondered the overturned jewelry box on the vanity, I realized that they had been looking for my mother’s locket as well.

  I wandered into the bathroom, which had remained mostly untouched. The drawers had been rifled through, but the Raptors hadn’t discovered anything beyond a bag of makeup and a box of tampons. I opened the medicine cabinet, which looked as though it had been ignored completely. It was a mistake on their part. If the Raptors had been just a bit more thorough, they would’ve noticed the elegant, gold chain dangling over the lip of an unused medicine cup on the second shelf of the cabinet. It was where I used to keep the necklace when I showered, and now I picked it up with delicate fingers, drawing the gold locket into my hands.

  Inside, I had placed a picture of my face on one side and a picture of Wes on the other. Behind those photographs, I knew the locket also held matching pictures of my parents. I peeled back my photograph to inspect my mother’s face. It was true what O’Connor had said. I did bear a remarkable resemblance to her. We had the same facial structure and the same strange quirk that pulled one side of our mouths up more than the other when we smiled. My father’s image, on the other hand, didn’t make sense to me. I had seen very few photos of him, but never had he looked the part of a Raptor. Even in this picture in the locket, he laughed widely. His hair wasn’t neat and tidy, and he wore a rugged flannel rather than donning a more expensive collared shirt like the rest of the society. Not to mention, if my father had been a member of the Black Raptor Society, how was it that I’d never discovered his membership before? I had been to the clubhouse. I had seen their charter. To my knowledge, Anthony Costello had never signed it.

  I snapped the locket shut, slipped the necklace over my head, and tucked it beneath my sweater, ignoring the anxiety that brewed in the pit of my stomach. There was no time to doubt the information I’d been given. Both O’Connor and my mother had confirmed my father’s involvement with BRS. The discrepancies made me nervous, but if I was going to get Wes back, trusting the past was the only way I would succeed.

  I made a mistake in not checking if the coast was clear before slipping out of the apartment. With my back to the landing, I locked the door, only to turn around and find myself face to face with a young guy about my height. He looked familiar—maybe I’d seen him around campus before—but I couldn’t remember his name off the top of my head. He grinned lopsidedly, leering at me from two blackened eyes and a bruised nose.

  “Nice face,” I commented, and then I drew a can of mace from where it waited in my coat pocket and sprayed it directly in his face.

  Clearly, Davenport and Flynn hadn’t expected me to employ enough audacity to return to my apartment. If they had, they might have sent someone with a little more common sense to keep watch over the area.

  “You bitch!” he yelled, rubbing furiously at his eyes. I backed away, but he lurched toward me, grabbing blindly at my coat. He seized the collar and roughly drew me in. Pinning me against the railing of the second level, he lifted me up so that only my toes were touching the floor. I glanced at the ground below me. It was a short drop, but it certainly wasn’t one that I was going to survive without breaking a wrist or an ankle.

  The boy adjusted his grip on my coat, and his hand inched closer to my throat. I ducked my head, clamped my teeth around the fleshy part of his thumb, and bit down as hard as possible.

  He howled in pain and shoved himself away from me. The middle of my back slammed against the railing, and I flinched at the abrupt jolt, but Davenport’s thug was heading my way for round two. With his eyes red and streaming and the puffs of vapor pouring from his nostrils, he looked like a crazed demon bull. Trapped against the railing, I had nowhere to go other than the set of steep stairs off to my left. He crouched down and charged as if he had every intention of rugby tackling me. At the last second, I stepped to the side. Simultaneously, I seized the boy’s wrist and used his own momentum to propel him forward. When I let go, he flipped headfirst over the railing. He landed with a thunk on the grass below, and I heard the grunt that forced the breath out of his lungs.

  I raced down the stairs, sparing a glance backward just to make sure the idiot was still moving. He groaned and rolled over to his side, so I took that as a sign that I hadn’t accidentally killed him and sprinted to where I’d parked Lauren’s car as quickly as the long trench coat would allow.

  20

  When I returned to Floorboard Lit, I still felt out of breath. I parked Lauren’s car in a secluded space beneath an oak tree then leaned my head against the steering wheel and focused on expelling the tension around my lungs. My throat felt tight, and I was finding it challenging to pull in full breaths.

  The neon open sign that hung in the front window of the bookstore had gone dark. The nearby streetlight flickered, and the shadows of the oak tree’s branches reached through the windshield to wrap me in its clutches. Suddenly claustrophobic, I threw the driver’s-side door open, gulping down the cool air outside. I was scared to even glance at my watch. It would tell me that my twelve hours to find Wes were almost up. If we were going to make a deal with Flynn, it would have to happen soon.

  It was this thought and nothing else that convinced me to trudge up the steps to the bookstore’s porch for the twentieth time that day. Inside, the scent of freshly ground coffee beans still lingered. I poached a leftover chocolate muffin from beneath a glass cake dome then found Lauren dozing in a shady corner of the deserted cafe, her long legs draped over one armrest of a worn leather chair and her head tipped back over the other. O’Connor’s laptop lay open and stagnant in her lap as if she’d fallen asleep while decoding more of the files. Her shoes lay abandoned on the floor beside the chair, so I nudged the soft wool of her winter socks instead.

  “Lauren,” I whispered. The silence of the cafe should have been comforting, but I only felt unnerved. Lauren stirred, and O’Connor’s laptop slid off her lap. I caught it before it could hit the floor and sat down in the chair opposite Lauren’s. I typed in O’Connor’s password and found that Lauren had indeed been working vigorously to decode more of my mother’s diary entries.

  April 15, 1985

  I’m pregnant. God, I can’t believe I just wrote that down. Pregnant. With Anthony’s child. I should’ve realized sooner, but I was attributing all of the vomiting to stress and anxiety. How stupid can I be? I can’t believe this is happening. It’s not all awful though. I thought telling Anthony would be a bear, but he took it well. In fact, he was ecstatic. I wasn’t expecting that. Part of me was waiting for him to dump me and run back to Cat Lockwood. Instead, he picked me up and twirled me around. Yes, tall and stern Anthony Costello twirled me around like a damn ballerina. I couldn’t help but laugh. It felt so good. I mean, I know this is technically an inconvenience, but I can’t think of it as a mistake. If anything, it’s given us a good reason to get out of Waverly as soon as possible. Anthony’s already agreed. We’re leaving tonight. Together. We’re turning in the security footage to the police and then getting the hell out of here. I can’t wait to see Catherine’s name in the paper. She deserves everything that’s coming to her.

  I sighed. My mind couldn’t decide what to feel as I read through my mother’s words. On one hand, I understood her. We had the same goal—to take down Catherine and the Black Raptor Society—but my mother had had more ammunition. Those security tapes would have immediately put Catherine in jail. Daddy Lockwood
would have bought her freedom no doubt, but still, it was obvious that my mother’s plan to turn in Catherine and escape the Waverly campus unharmed did not come to fruition.

  On the other hand, reading my mother’s diary felt like an invasion of privacy. I hadn’t known her long enough to form any lasting memories of her. She had died of a brain aneurysm when I was two. I felt far away from her words, as if I were reading them underwater. The letters themselves were clear, but the meaning was not. If my father had reacted differently to my mother’s pregnancy, would I even be alive? After all, she had considered me an “inconvenience.”

  “Nicole?”

  I glanced up from the computer screen. Lauren had awoken. She groaned and stretched her arms over her head.

  “I see you’ve found the rest of your mother’s journals,” she said, gesturing to the laptop. Then she caught sight of the empty muffin wrapper on the coffee table in front of me. “Where’d you get that?”

  I pointed to the cake dome on the counter. “How many entries did you decode?”

  “Two or three,” she called over her shoulder as she waltzed to the counter and collected a muffin for herself. “How many have you read?”

  “Just the one from April fifteenth.”

  “There are two from that day.”

  “There are?”

  Lauren nodded, peeling back the wrapper of her confectionary treat. “O’Connor wasn’t kidding, Nicole. Those entries… they’re tough to read.”

  I frowned, still staring at the word “inconvenience” in my mother’s handwriting.

  “Uh-oh,” said Lauren as she took in my expression.