by Tom Dolby
All in all, it was not a fun place to spend an evening.
Nick and Phoebe took the elevator to the intensive care unit. He was grateful that Phoebe had wanted to accompany him on this trip.
The word was that Palmer’s condition had stabilized, though his doctors were keeping him under close observation. Visiting hours were officially over, but Palmer had left word at the desk that Nick was to be let up.
Outside Palmer Bell’s room, one of the Guardians was standing watch in a dark suit. He nodded to Nick and Phoebe as they entered, though Nick ignored the brutish guard.
Nick’s grandfather was conscious, but his movements and speech patterns were slow. It felt so strange to see the handsome older man lying in a bed, powerless.
“How are you doing, sir?” Nick asked. “You remember Phoebe, right?”
“Mmmmpph,” Palmer grumbled.
“Is there anything we can do for you? Do you need anything?” Nick knew he was asking more out of reflex than anything else, as he knew all his grandfather’s needs were taken care of.
Palmer cleared his throat and began speaking slowly. “I’m glad you came. I do need you to do something for me.”
“Of course, anything.” Nick realized that he was being polite to his grandfather out of tradition and habit, not out of any genuine sense of respect.
There was a pause, as if Palmer were collecting his thoughts. Nick heard Phoebe shifting awkwardly as she stood beside him.
“Your father won’t understand this, your brothers won’t understand this. I will not tell them about it, and I suggest you don’t, either.”
Nick nodded.
“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last. And I know you want to get out.”
Nick looked at Palmer, then at Phoebe. “What do you mean, sir?”
“I know you want out of the Society. It has been obvious from the first week. Your actions last month on the island made it very clear.”
“Well, I-I mean-” Nick stammered. He didn’t know what to say. “Why-why would you say this?”
“Nicholas, I want you to live the life that you want to lead, not one that has been set up for you by your family. I have seen-I have seen how destructive that can be. How much can be ruined when families tell their children how to live.”
Nick nodded. “What about my friends?”
“If you do this one task for me, you and your friends will never hear from the Society again.”
Nick paused. This was a major breakthrough, the chance to gain freedom from this group that had terrorized them over the past several months.
“What is the task?”
Palmer chuckled, and then started coughing. When it subsided, he spoke again. “Now just telling you-that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” Nick looked glumly back at Phoebe, as she shrugged.
Another day, another riddle. It seemed as if that was what their life was amounting to these days. Nick heard Phoebe sigh.
Palmer clutched Nick’s hand. His grandfather’s fingers felt dry and brittle in his own.
“Son, you must go to the beach. You’ll find everything you need at the beach. At both beaches.”
“I’m not sure I understand. What’s at the beach?”
“All the treasures are buried in the sand. You remember the beach: the sand castles, all the shells, the jellyfish, the pieces of driftwood you would bring back to the house. You and your brothers used to spend all day on the beach.”
Nick scowled. His grandfather was playing them like puppets. “And you want us to go there because…”
“You must go to the beach, you must go down below. Below the surface of things.”
“Sir, I don’t understand. Which beach? The house in Southampton?”
“You need the key first. You need to find the key.”
“Where do we find the key?”
“Both beaches.”
Nick looked at him, confused. What did he mean? Southampton had several beaches: Cooper’s, Fowler, all the others. Not to mention the rest of the beaches in the Hamptons, all the way east to Montauk.
A nurse knocked on the door. “I’m sorry to cut this visit short, but Mr. Bell needs to take his medication.”
“Wait!” Nick said to his grandfather. “You’ve got to tell us more than this.”
“You have enough,” Palmer said. “Nicholas, you may not realize this, but you have always had everything you need.”
Chapter Seven
As they went down in the elevator, Phoebe didn’t know what to make of Palmer’s request. Would he really grant them an exit from the Society? As the group’s Chairman Emeritus, did he have the power to do this? Phoebe was skeptical. She had been burned by the elder Bells before-namely, Nick’s father, who had some of her paintings taken out of her gallery show last year-and so she was hesitant to trust the old man. More importantly, she knew that Parker Bell and Palmer Bell were responsible for Jared’s and Alejandro’s deaths. Why would Palmer go against his son’s organization, a group he had spent so many years leading?
“Are you really sure this makes sense?” Phoebe asked Nick. “I mean, it could be a trap, right?”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t really know.”
“He seemed remarkably lucid,” Phoebe said. “I thought he had suffered all sorts of brain damage.”
“He did, supposedly,” Nick said. “That’s what’s so confusing about this. I can’t tell if he’s faking it, or if he really is out of it and he’s just spouting nonsense.”
“It’s another riddle. It almost sounds like a treasure hunt. But once again, we don’t know what the treasure actually is. What was that about things being buried in the sand?”
The elevator doors opened. Phoebe nudged Nick in the ribs, motioning down the hall with a nod. They needed to stay quiet. At the lobby entrance was Gigi, Nick’s mother, with a packed monogrammed tote bag. Phoebe had acknowledged Gigi earlier that day at the service, but hadn’t said hello to her.
“Phoebe, darling!” Gigi said, as if the two of them were meeting at a cocktail party instead of a hospital lobby that smelled vaguely of disinfectant. “It is so sweet of you two to visit Palmer. I’m sure it meant so much to him. I’m just bringing him some fresh clothing-those nurses are such Nazis, but I think they’ll let me in. How did he seem?”
Nick paused, as if he wasn’t sure quite how much to say. “Better than I thought. But a little bit strange. I think maybe it’s that thing where people have a stroke and they start reminiscing about the past.”
Nick clearly didn’t want to tell his mother about the conversation. Gigi was an Elder of the Society and took very seriously her role as the wife of the Chairman.
His mother sighed. “Sweetie, you can’t pay any attention to him. They’ve got him on so much medication. You know how it is.” She looked down at the bag. “I’d better bring this up to him.” She gave Phoebe an air kiss. “Nice to see you, darling.”
Nick pushed his way out of the hospital into the cold night air. The two of them started walking west.
“What should we do?” Nick asked.
“We have to call a meeting, just among the five of us,” Phoebe said. “It’s going to take more than you and me to figure all this out.”
Chapter Eight
Whenever Patch found that his world was closing in on him, he liked to go to the Metropolitan Museum to help clear his head. There were little nooks and crannies that he knew about, away from the tourists, among the more obscure collections. European Decorative Arts was one of his favorites-it was basically a fancy word for antiques. There was something cool about thinking that people had sat on these chairs, eaten on these tables, conducted their affairs and intrigues. And that we, today, would never know what had transpired.
It was such a universe apart from his own problems, it made him forget them momentarily. On Sunday afternoon, he could almost forget everything he was thinking about the Society, all of his questions. A Society meeting had
already been called for the following evening at the town house. Would he go? Would Nick and the others? He didn’t know.
Patch’s phone buzzed as he was examining an antique harpsichord. It was a text from Phoebe, confirming the details of a meeting at Lauren’s that night with just the five of them. It made sense that they would do it there; Lauren was the only member whose parents didn’t have any connection to the Society. Phoebe had told Patch about Daniel Fullerton, the guy her mom was dating, who was in the Society; Nick’s parents were involved, of course; and Patch’s grandmother, Genie, would likely overhear whatever they were planning and have an opinion on it. This new guy, Thad-they didn’t know much about his family, but Patch imagined that Phoebe figured he was too recent a friend to take a risk on. Patch had learned that trusting people hadn’t been so easy these past few months.
A few hours later, Patch arrived at Lauren’s apartment. Despite the nap she said she had taken, Lauren looked exhausted, her hair messy and matted. The five of them stood around her kitchen, and at her urging, helped themselves to the refrigerator full of food. It was stocked, which surprised Patch; it seemed welcoming, like a normal house, not that of a fashionable socialite, which was Lauren’s mother’s reputation. He and Nick and Thad dug in.
Lauren, who wore jeans and a baggy sweater, carried her cup of tea into the living room. Nick accepted a beer, and Patch decided he would have one, too-just one, to help him relax. Phoebe sat protectively next to Lauren on the sofa in front of the windows with the gauzy curtains that faced Park Avenue. What had happened in the past few months had been hard on all of them, but Lauren was particularly feeling the blow right now. Though Patch had heard her admit that she didn’t even know if things with Alejandro were going to last, he imagined that it still burned, to have someone in your life disappear like that, as if they had never existed at all.
For a moment, he realized that this was how he felt about his parents. He had been too young when his father died to have any clear memories of him, and his mother had been hospitalized since Patch was six.
“How are you holding up?” Nick asked Lauren.
Lauren shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I suppose. I haven’t done any of the winter reading, I feel like I’m going to be floating through my classes tomorrow. Sebastian wants me to come up with new jewelry designs-I guess he thought it might distract me or something? All I want to do is sleep and watch stupid movies.”
“Do you think…” Patch paused, not wanting to say anything inappropriate. “Do you think it might help for you to talk to someone about it all? Like a professional?”
“Not that Meckling freak,” Phoebe said, jumping in. “He’s like the Nurse Ratched of shrinks. I still can’t believe my mom took Daniel’s recommendation. I guess she didn’t know that he was part of it all.”
“I know someone good,” Thad said. “He helped my older brother when he was going through a lot of stuff.”
Lauren nodded. “I guess so. I don’t know. I just want it all to go away.”
“I’m not sure we can make it go away,” Nick said. “But I think we can get out of it.” He looked at Phoebe. “My grandfather gave me a challenge yesterday to search for something.”
“To search for what?” Thad asked.
“We don’t know exactly,” Phoebe said. “I’m worried it might be a trap.”
“We might as well try,” Thad said. “And you think this would get all of us out of the Society?”
“He said that if we solve this, ‘you and your friends will never hear from the Society again,’” Nick said. “The search starts at the beach.”
“Which beach?” Patch asked.
“That’s what we don’t know,” Phoebe said.
“Phoebe and I will start this coming Friday,” Nick said. “For now, we need to figure out what to do about these meetings, right?” Nick said. “In particular, the one tomorrow night.”
“Honestly, I don’t know what we have to meet about,” Phoebe said. “Like they couldn’t just let us digest everything that’s happened so far?”
“I’m not going,” Lauren said. “I can’t go on any longer with it.”
“Me, neither,” Thad said.
“Pheeb, what about you?” Lauren asked.
She looked at Lauren and Thad. “I’m with you guys. I’ll skip.”
“Maybe Patch and I should go,” Nick said. “You know, so they don’t think something’s going on?”
“I guess so,” Phoebe said.
“I’m just so angry about it all,” Lauren said. “I think we should go to the police. What could the Society do to us? We could tell the cops everything we know. I don’t even care if I don’t get into college, if they bust us for being drunk that night. We weren’t responsible for Alejandro’s death. We were partying with him. It wasn’t that part that killed him.”
Everyone looked uneasy.
“Do you really think the police would believe us?” Nick said.
“They would have to believe something,” Phoebe said. “Don’t you think? I mean, we’ve made this mistake before. We should have gone to the police the night that Alejandro disappeared.”
“We didn’t know what was happening. We didn’t know how bad it was going to get,” Nick said.
“Honestly, inside the club, most people didn’t even see him,” Thad said. He turned to Patch. “What do you think?”
Patch shrugged. “I, um, I don’t really know. It’s hard for me to say, since I wasn’t there.”
Patch realized, at that moment, that this was part of his uneasiness. Even though he should have felt like a real member, he didn’t. He would never feel like as much of an insider as they did. Even though they all greeted him warmly and treated him as a friend, he still felt like an interloper. They were the chosen ones, and that was the way it was always going to be.
And why, he wondered, did he want to feel like an insider to this group that he and his friends were now trying so desperately to escape?
Chapter Nine
One of the perks of being a member of the Society was that its town house on East 66th Street had a private, glassed-in rooftop swimming pool. The text message that Nick, Patch, and the others had received said that on Monday night there would be a pool party, a rare treat in chilly January.
As Nick approached the doors of the classic brownstone with Patch, he thought about how, for the first time, the two of them would be going to a Society meeting together. For a moment, it felt as if this was the way things were supposed to be, as if the world had righted itself and all had been put back in order.
Of course, that was far from the truth of the situation. Nick sighed inaudibly as the door was opened for them by Anastasia Lin, who was Phoebe’s mentor in the class above her. She was dressed casually, in jeans and a cashmere sweater, though she wore her usual dramatic red lipstick.
“Nick! Patch! It’s so good to see you,” she said as her eyes darted from one to the other. “Is Phoebe with you?”
Nick noticed Patch giving him an awkward sideways glance. “No, um, she’s coming separately,” Nick said. “She might be a little late. She said she wasn’t feeling well.” He hoped the lie would allay any suspicion when it later became clear that Phoebe was skipping the meeting.
Anastasia led Nick and Patch up several flights of stairs in the direction of the rooftop pool. Nick wanted to give Patch the full tour of the town house, but he also didn’t want to attract suspicion from any of the other members who were roaming about. Like a classic gentlemen’s club, the place had the odor of cigars and worn leather, and its walls were adorned with aging oil paintings of mediocre quality, along with framed medals, photographs, and letters from politicians, all yellowing at the corners and wrinkled in their frames.
With everything Nick now knew about the Society, being at the town house felt cheap. He wouldn’t exactly describe the first night there in the fall as magical, but it had possessed a certain aura of exclusivity, of the idea that they were part of something sp
ecial. There had been a richness that the building held; now, in its place, all he felt was a troubling emptiness, the feeling of promises broken, of betrayal.
“So this is it,” Patch said as he looked around. They were on the top floor. The entryway to the swimming pool had a white marble floor and a tiled dome ceiling. Through the entryway, blue light from the pool flickered against the potted palms that lined the sides of the room. The roof of the swimming pool was glass, so you could see the stars as you floated in the water.
A bar had been set up against one wall, and Emily van Piper, one of the members of the class above them, was mixing drinks. She was wearing a blue swimsuit with a wrap tied around her waist. With her blond hair, she fit in perfectly with the pool party atmosphere. Nick knew Emily was Lauren’s mentor and would surely notice she was missing as well. Nick and Patch got ginger ales, but luckily, Emily didn’t ask about Lauren.
Nick stood with Patch on the side of the pool. “Are you going to put your suit on?” Patch asked, motioning to Nick’s messenger bag. Both of them had dutifully packed swimsuits, as per the instructions they had been given, but swimming was the last thing Nick wanted to do.
Nick shook his head. “No.”
As he looked at all the members splashing around the pool and relaxing so easily, Nick thought back again to the first time he had been here, in the fall. It had all been fun and entrancing and mysterious. Most exciting of all had been meeting Phoebe, seeing her in a swimsuit a mere twenty-four hours after they had met. He couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t interested him, that he hadn’t been paying attention.
Charles Lawrence walked over to Nick. He wore a bright red square-cut bathing suit and had a towel draped around his neck as if it were the middle of summer and he was a lifeguard at the country club doing his hourly patrol.
“Having fun?” Charles asked.
Nick gave Charles a blank look. It was difficult to know how to act around Charles-he was, after all, the de facto leader of the older class of Conscripts. He had started out as a friendly guy, someone everyone liked, but as last semester progressed, Nick suspected Charles of having a hand in Jared’s and Alejandro’s deaths. He was the one who had handed Alejandro a drink before his collapse, and he was the first one who had discovered Jared at Cleopatra’s Needle. Nick didn’t know whether to be afraid of Charles or to scorn him.
