by Monica Nolan
After pasting in the last of the Musings clippings, Bobby turned to the first issue of The Tower Chimes, the school’s literary magazine, which had just come out. Leafing through it, she saw that the field hockey drama had permeated even the remote world of literature lovers. Munty Blaine, of all people, had written an “Ode to Field Hockey,” which featured a:
“heroic figure, silhouetted by the sun,
who, to girls like god to time, makes us run.”
And Lotta’s poem, written in the modern, non-rhyming style, was even more telling. “The Solitary Girl” began:
“She stands alone
the solitary girl
against the faceless mob.”
Skimming the long poem, Bobby’s attention was caught when she came to these lines:
“venturing on two wheels
into woods dark and drear,
where none dare follow.”
The hairs rose on the back of her neck as the image of the eerie, glowing bicyclist rose unbidden in her mind’s eye. Could it have been Angle she’d seen that night?
She closed the magazine and stared unseeingly at the trophy on her mantelpiece. A few days after she’d seen the glowing cyclist, she’d questioned Mona discreetly about the most frequent bike borrowers. Where did they go? What were they doing?
“Most of them go to the Mesquakie Massacre Gift Shoppe, to buy fudge or saltwater taffy,” the housekeeper had explained with a smile. “Over the years they’ve worn quite a trail through the woods. It’s against the rules, of course, but girls will be girls!”
So there was an explanation. And yet—
It had been past midnight. The Mesquakie Massacre Gift Shoppe would have long since closed; and—
Who among the student body was brave enough to venture into the haunted woods after dark?
Why had she dressed in a flowing black robe?
Why was she glowing?
A knock at the door made Bobby jump. Who could it be at this hour? Swinging open the door, she saw Enid, looking harried in a worn blue bathrobe she’d pulled on over some striped flannel men’s pajamas. Rod’s, perhaps? Bobby felt her usual rush of resentment at the sight of the anti-sport Math Mistress, and thinking about Enid’s well-dressed boyfriend made her even more bad-tempered.
“Yes? What is it?” she asked shortly.
“I’m sorry to bother you.” Enid was apologetic. “I think a fuse must have blown over in Manchester. Do you have a flashlight? I can’t find mine.”
“Just a sec.” Bobby left Enid standing in her doorway while she retrieved her flashlight from the emergency supplies—tissues, candles, melba toast, sanitary napkins, sedatives—that she kept in her bedside drawer. She returned and held it out to Enid. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Enid took the flashlight but didn’t leave. “The thing is,” she bit her lip and Bobby realized the Math Mistress was ill at ease, “I’ve never changed a fuse.”
“Where’s Ole? Have him do it.” The advice came out more dismissively than Bobby intended.
“I can’t find him. I’ve looked all over.”
Bobby couldn’t help smiling at the picture of Enid tramping around the dark, chilly campus in her striped pajamas and bathrobe.
“Never mind, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out.” Enid turned to go. Bobby reached out to stop her, regretting her obvious amusement, and Enid flinched at the touch of Bobby’s hand on her shoulder. Goodness, the Math Mistress was even more prickly than usual tonight!
“Wait, I’ll show you, just let me slip on my sneakers,” said the field hockey coach, suiting action to word. “It’s not complicated, but we don’t want you electrocuting yourself!” She almost added that two dead math mistresses in a year would be too much for Metamora, but stopped herself. “Let’s go.”
Enid led the way to Manchester. Inside the dorm all was dark, and Bobby flicked the hall switch on and off to no avail. Muffled giggles told her she and Enid were not alone. Taking the flashlight from Enid and switching it on, she caught a group of pajamaed fourth formers in its powerful beam.
“What are you girls doing up?” she queried. The girls responded in a startled chorus. “Gwen had to go to the loo—” “The lights were off—” “And she was scared—” “We were keeping her company!”
“Well, head back to bed now and stay there,” said Bobby firmly. “Miss Butler and I are going to fix the lights, so you won’t have any more excuses to be roaming around!”
“Yes, Coach Bobby,” giggled the fourth formers as they dispersed. Gwen Norton hung back to ask, “Will you come and say good night to us before you go?”
Bobby had established a tradition of visiting Cornwall’s bedrooms in turn, a different one each night, to say a special good night to the occupants. It was good for morale; the reward of a bedtime visit from Coach Bobby was more powerful than any number of reprimands for the high-strung third formers of Cornwall.
“All right,” agreed Bobby. “But only if you girls stay in bed, all of you. I’m counting on you, Gwen, to maintain order while Miss Butler and I are in the basement.”
Gwen’s eyes in the glow of the flashlight were shining with devotion. “I won’t let you down, Coach Bobby!”
As the two teachers descended the narrow, winding stairs to the basement, Bobby apologized to Enid. “I’m sorry I took over like that, in your dorm, it’s just—”
“Forget it,” said Enid tersely. “I’m sure it was more expedient than waiting for me to attempt discipline!”
Bobby knew Manchester had a reputation as a particularly rowdy dormitory, but she’d put it down to fourth-form high spirits. Was Enid having discipline difficulties?
The Math Mistress held the flashlight as Bobby efficiently changed the fuse. “There,” she said as she pushed the main service switch back on and the storeroom was flooded with light. “You’ll be able to do it yourself next time.” She dusted her hands and closed the fuse box.
Enid seemed to have lost interest in learning the ins and outs of fuse replacement. She held out the flashlight to Bobby. “Take this, will you? I’ve got something in my eye.”
Without the protection of her heavy spectacles, Enid looked lonely and lost as she stood in the dusty storeroom rubbing one eye.
“You’ll just make it worse,” said Bobby. Pulling out a handkerchief, she gently pushed Enid’s hand aside and dabbed delicately at her reddened, watery eye. “How’s the math club doing? Angle seems to be enjoying it.”
Enid made no reply. Her breathing was erratic. Goodness, thought Bobby. Have I set her off again? “Angle—I mean Angela—told me all about that tree height problem,” she tried again. “What was it, something about measuring the shadow?”
Enid grasped Bobby’s upper arm in a vise-like grip. “Would you shut up about Angle?” she ground out between clenched teeth.
“Why—why—I thought you were interested—” Bobby faltered. Enid was looking at her with a strange intensity.
“My God, Bobby, what do you think I’m made of?” Enid groaned harshly. “I’m only flesh and blood!”
Her grip on Bobby tightened, and as if magnetized, Bobby drew closer to the Math Mistress, who was vibrating with a strange passion Bobby had never suspected she possessed. Bobby’s mind was in a whirl. Did Enid—was Enid—?
Enid’s mouth fused to Bobby’s, and the gym teacher’s thoughts were blown away by this gale-force passion. This was no palpitating schoolgirl, Bobby realized dimly as the whirlwind of desire engulfed her, no married woman sneaking illicit thrills. Enid’s lips were fierce, seeking, hungry. They set Bobby on fire. The gym teacher’s response was immediate. She put her arms around the other woman, and the flashlight fell to the floor with a crash.
The noise seemed to startle Enid back to her senses. Suddenly she pushed Bobby away from her. “I can’t do this,” she said unsteadily. “I don’t want to do this.”
Bobby couldn’t believe her ears. All of the Math Mistress’s actions added up to Want with a capital W�
��what obscure calculation could divide them now, leaving Bobby with a big fat zero?
“Wait a second,” she said, moving toward Enid. A sound above made them both stop and cock their ears. Someone was coming down the staircase. A second later, Gwen Norton appeared in the doorway of the storage room, her eyes wide and so breathless with fright she could hardly gasp out her message: “Coach Bobby—Miss Butler—the third-floor corner suite is empty! Linda Kerwin, Penny Gordon, and Sue Howard have disappeared!”
Chapter Seventeen
Kent Tower
Three students missing! Gone from their beds well after lights out! This was a serious infraction of the rules—or something worse.
The two teachers nearly collided with each other in their haste as they raced up the staircase, with Gwen at their heels. At the first floor Bobby easily took the lead as she sprinted to the second floor, leaving the less athletic Enid and the panicked fourth former behind. The third floor’s hallway was shorter than the second floor’s, and the corner suite at the end of the corridor consisted of two bedrooms connected by a tiny sitting room. The sitting room’s bay window surveyed the quad, which was shrouded in darkness at this hour. Bobby switched on the light and cautiously opened the door to one of the bedrooms. Dead silence met her. A sweep of her flashlight revealed bodies huddled under the covers. But no—not bodies. Bobby turned on the lights and poked at the nearest mound. Pillows covered with blankets.
Enid and Gwen arrived, breathless, as Bobby emerged from the second bedroom, where she’d found the same clumsy deception.
“Gwen’s right, they’re gone,” she reported grimly. “The old pillow trick. But where?”
Gwen began to cry. “They’ve been taken!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Enid. “They clearly went of their own free will.”
“They should have been back by now! Something must have gone wrong! I told them what they were doing was dangerous!”
The teachers exchanged a look. “You’d better tell us what you know, Gwen,” said Bobby firmly.
Gwen blubbered it all out. Linda had received a replacement ouija board that day—she’d ordered it from a novelty company several weeks ago. It was common knowledge throughout Manchester that Linda and her occult-minded friends were planning to hold a séance as soon as the board arrived. Just where, Gwen wasn’t sure, except that it was a place with powerful spiritual associations.
As Gwen wept quietly, sure that her classmates had been swallowed by the spirit world, Enid and Bobby stood in the sitting room at a loss, trying to figure out where the would-be mediums had gone for their séance. Bobby thought of Mesquakie Point, but at the mental image of the three girls stumbling through the forest in the pitch dark, she discarded the idea. Not even Linda would have the stomach for that trip. It must be somewhere on campus….
“Look!” Enid grabbed her arm. “Did you see that?”
Even in the midst of this crisis, Bobby’s thoughts flashed back to that moment in the Manchester basement when Enid had first grabbed her by the arm. She would never be able to look at Enid the same way again. The math teacher’s hand burned into Bobby’s arm like a branding iron. As if she’d read Bobby’s mind, Enid released her grip immediately.
“What? Where? I don’t see anything,” Bobby stuttered.
Enid turned off the lights in the suite’s sitting room where the little group was standing. “There.” She pointed out the window. “Kent Tower!”
Now that the room was dark, the faint light in the tower was clearly visible. Of course. Morbid-minded Linda would choose that location for her otherworldly activities!
“That’s them,” said Bobby grimly. “Let’s go.”
The quad was dark and empty, yet somehow unquiet, alive with tiny noises: the scrunch of Bobby’s tennis shoes on the dry grass, the ominous chirping of the crickets, the sudden rustle of some small mammal in the bushes. Bobby and Enid crossed it rapidly, driven by an unspoken sense of urgency that had no basis in the harmless hijinks of the irrepressible fourth formers. As they swung open the door to Kent and the squeak of Bobby’s shoes on the tile echoed through the empty hall, Bobby asked in a low voice, “How do we get up into the tower? I’ve never been.” Enid replied, “I have. The stairs are over here.” She led the way to a small medieval door that Bobby had always assumed hid a closet, but which now revealed a narrow circular stone stairway. Wondering why Enid had been exploring the tower, Bobby hastened after the young mathematics instructor, whose blue bathrobe was already disappearing around the first curve. If she cupped a hand behind her ears, she could hear above them a faint mumble of voices. As they climbed higher, Bobby began to distinguish words. “E,” said a voice that might be Linda’s, “L. I. C. H.” What strange alphabetical games were the fourth formers playing? “It’s her,” gasped the terrified voice of Sue Gordon. “It’s Miss Froelich!”
Miss Froelich. In her mind’s eye, Bobby saw again the body tumbling through space. Instinctively, she looked down—over the stair railing, down through the center of the twisting stairway, more than fifty feet down to the floor.
Her vision blurred, and she sagged against the rounded wall of the tower, away from the drop. Above her she heard Linda’s quavering voice, “Are you at peace?”
The dizzy Games Mistress tried to force herself along but only managed another step and stopped there, frozen, clinging helplessly to the railing. Her face was covered in a cold sweat. “Look, it’s moving!” She heard Penny’s eager voice. And then a chorus of voices: “No!”
“Bobby? What’s the matter?” Enid had returned and her grip on Bobby’s arm was a lifeline.
“Just a—touch of—vertigo,” Bobby gasped.
“Don’t look down. Lean on me.” Enid put her arm around Bobby and practically hauled the stricken Games Mistress up the remaining steps by brute force. Bobby clung to her fellow mistress as a drowning woman might cling to an inner tube. The two of them fell through the door to the narrow platform that encircled the turret.
“It’s her!” shrieked Sue, and the three girls recoiled in terror, knocking the board askew and sending the planchette skittering across the uneven stone paving. Linda was the first to recover. “No, it’s Miss Butler,” she corrected, a tinge of disappointment in her voice.
Bobby pressed herself against the cylindrical wall of rough stone that enclosed the stairs, as far away as she could get from the crenelated battlement. The three friends, wrapped in blankets and supplied with cookies as well as candles and a flashlight, were huddled on the west side of the tower.
“The séance is over,” Enid said peremptorily, picking up the planchette. “And you don’t need a soothsayer to predict that you girls are in serious trouble!”
“We were just going to ask the spirit world where my sister Kayo’s necklace is,” Linda explained glibly as the two other fourth formers gradually recovered from the shock of seeing two of their teachers, one bent over and clinging to the other, appear on the tower.
“We’ll discuss that in the morning. Right now you must all get back to bed as quickly as possible. It would have been better for you if you’d stayed there in the first place.”
The dismayed girls began to collect their occult paraphernalia. “Give me that,” Bobby managed to croak, pulling herself upright, when she saw Linda attempt to hide the ouija board in the folds of a blanket. The amateur spiritualist handed it over reluctantly. “We were just getting somewhere,” she muttered.
“And I’ll take that.” Enid held out her hand for the flashlight. “Out of bed after lights out—playing a forbidden game—climbing the tower, which is off-limits, as you well know! And on top of that filching school property!”
“We were going to return it,” protested Penny weakly.
“Let’s go, girls. Stop dragging your feet, Linda, you go first. Miss Blanchard and I will bring up the rear.” As the cowed girls began to descend the stairs, Enid asked low in Bobby’s ear, “Can you make it?”
Bobby nodded. “I�
�m all right.” She wasn’t, but the need to maintain her status with her students stiffened her spine. Closing her eyes and keeping a tight grip on Enid, she felt her way down the stairs, trying to picture the hockey field, flat, level, plainly marked with orderly chalk lines.
Even so, the descent seemed to last forever. Bobby could hear Penny Gordon snuffling—worn out by the late hour, the excitement, and the prospect of serious punishment. Suddenly Bobby felt Enid stop. “Miss Craybill!” Linda’s voice exclaimed. Bobby’s eyes flew open.
She was four steps from the bottom of the spiral stairs, and Miss Craybill was framed in the stairwell doorway, her face unearthly white in the glow of Enid’s flashlight. Her gray hair was down her back in two braids, and she had on a surprisingly elegant quilted silk dressing gown in a deep shade of eggplant.
“What’s all this?” she demanded. She, too, carried a flashlight, and Bobby blinked as the Headmistress played the light over their faces.
“I’m afraid these girls have broken quite a few rules,” said Enid. “Miss Blanchard and I found them up in the tower having some sort of—”
“Midnight feast,” interrupted Bobby. Her instinct told her that saying the word “séance” to Miss Craybill at this eerie hour as she confronted them with a wild look in her eye would be a bad idea.
Alas for her caution. “It was Linda’s idea,” sniveled Penny. “Her and her stupid ouija board!”
Miss Craybill recoiled as if struck, then she leapt upon poor Linda before either of the teachers could interfere. “What have you been doing now, you wretched girl? Why can’t you leave her in peace? Why can’t you leave her in peace, I say?”
