by Rona Jaffe
Cat realized then that their other son—the Hall junior they remembered—had vanished forever. They remembered the sixteen-year-old. If Hall was still alive he was an adult too, and would never again belong to any of them. When she had been growing up she had been taught that families were forever, but that had only been another of the world’s lies. Now she was forty-three years old, her family had fallen apart, and she of all of them was the only one who still felt like a child. She was the only one who could not take off, run away, do what she wanted. The law might allow her to, but nothing in her conscience or upbringing would. She would worry too much about the others.
“Don’t drink any more,” he said. “It makes you depressed.”
“Drinking is the only thing that makes me able to survive,” Cat said.
“Well, at least you admit how much you drink.”
“So what? I admit it.” She took a big swallow of her vodka. It went down comfortingly.
“That’s the first step in being able to stop,” he said.
“I don’t want to stop.”
“But maybe someday you will.”
“Mmm.” She looked at the colorless liquid in her glass. It was kinder to her than anyone she knew.
“When Robbie comes back,” he said. “When this tension is over. Maybe then you will.”
“When I want to is when I will,” Cat said. “Not when you want me to.”
“That’s all right,” he said.
But the days went by and Robbie neither came home nor called. His friends phoned often, none of them aware that he wasn’t there where he was supposed to be. He’s away, Cat would say—a half lie—didn’t he tell you his plans?
His friends were all disappointed. They had parties to invite him to, or just wanted to see him. No, Robbie hadn’t told them he had decided not to come to Greenwich for Spring Break. Cat didn’t tell them Robbie hadn’t told his parents either.
She couldn’t bear to think that people would be talking about her, saying it had happened all over again with the younger son. No matter what the law or the police called him, her friends didn’t think Robbie was an “adult” who could just walk away, and neither did she.
CHAPTER 3
All the students but one came back to Grant after Spring Break. At first it simply looked as if Robbie had returned with the rest of them. His door was open, his room was neat—with the exception of his desk, which was covered with the customary student clutter—his clothes were in the closet, and his stereo was gone. If anyone had wondered where he was it would appear he had taken the stereo into Pequod to be repaired. It would not occur to anyone immediately that he had gone away leaving his door unlocked and therefore someone had stolen it. It was extraordinary that the thief had not taken his records too, but whoever it was had been in a hurry.
Kate was happy to be back in her cozy nest with Daniel. They unpacked quickly so they could find Robbie and Jay Jay. Daniel was so neat. Kate knew if she hadn’t been living with him she would have tossed everything on her bed and gone to find her friends first. But trying to be less sloppy was a small price to pay for all the sweet things he did for her. They were back and forth from their two rooms (she had decided to think of her room as theirs too, this term) when Jay Jay came running down the hall waving a piece of paper in his hand.
“Something’s happened to Robbie,” Jay Jay said. “I left this note on his bed three weeks ago and it was still lying in the same place when I went in. I’m worried.”
“You mean he left school with his door open?” Daniel said. He shook his head. “Even Robbie wouldn’t do that. He’s around somewhere.”
“I asked everybody on his floor,” Jay Jay said. “His car is in the parking lot but nobody’s seen him all day.”
“What’s unusual about that?” Daniel said.
“He didn’t come to see us,” Kate said. “Were his clothes and everything there?”
“Yes,” Jay Jay said. “When I put the note on his bed there were wrinkles like he’d been lying down, and they’re still there.”
“Ah,” said Daniel pleasantly in a gypsy accent, “the famous wrinkle reader.”
Kate felt uneasy. “Maybe he went home before you left the note, and when he came back he just didn’t notice it.”
“A weak excuse,” Jay Jay said. “Robbie’s bed was always so perfectly made it looked like he was in the Army. He would have seen my note the minute he came back and he would have felt bad for abandoning me, and he’d have come to find me and apologize. You know that’s what Robbie would do.”
“He would,” Kate said. “What do you mean he abandoned you?”
“He promised me a ride to New York and then I couldn’t find him.”
“Then you abandoned him,” Daniel said lightly.
“Well,” Jay Jay said, “maybe he had something more important to do and he was going to find me later. I’ll put the note back so he remembers.”
But they didn’t see Robbie that night in the dining room, nor the next morning at breakfast. After breakfast the three of them went to Robbie’s room. The bed hadn’t been slept in and Jay Jay’s note was still there. Robbie’s car was still in the parking lot.
“I think maybe we should call his family in Greenwich,” Kate said. “If he was going somewhere, he’d have told them.”
“Where would he go without his car and his clothes?” Daniel asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Kate said.
She looked up Robbie’s number in her little address book and dialed it right from his room. Now she was sure something very bad had happened, and she was afraid to even begin to think what it might be.
His mother answered.
“Is Robbie there?” Kate asked pleasantly.
“No.” How nervous the woman sounded! Kate could hear it vibrating down her own body. “Who is this?”
“This is Kate Finch, a friend of his from Grant. Did he go home for vacation?”
“No. Didn’t he tell you his plans?”
“No,” Kate said. “When is he coming back to school, do you know?”
“Don’t you know?” his mother said. Her voice cracked.
“Don’t I know what?”
“What? What?” Jay Jay hissed, poking her. She glared at him.
“Don’t you know where he is either?” his mother said.
“Don’t you know?” Kate asked.
“He never came home,” his mother said. “Are you a very good friend of his?”
“Yes. But we all thought he was going home.”
“Oh, no …” From the pain in that woman’s voice Kate knew exactly what she was thinking. Robbie’s older brother had run away and now his mother thought Robbie had gone off too.
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Kate lied.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well …” What was the point in lying when it might hurt Robbie if something awful had really happened to him? “We’ll ask around, okay? I’ll call you if I find out anything.”
Kate hung up and looked at Daniel and Jay Jay. “Robbie’s vanished into thin air,” she said.
Daniel started looking through the papers on Robbie’s desk. Kate and Jay Jay joined him. There was some homework, but mostly maps and mazes; the one they had used for the caverns and one they had never seen before. It was on pale blue paper, intricately worked out, with a tiny red heart in the center of it. Around it was a beautiful drawing of two white towers set in the clouds in a striated pastel sky.
“I didn’t know Robbie could draw,” Kate said. “And look at the gorgeous lettering.”
“The Two Towers,” Jay Jay said. “That’s the book by Tolkien.”
“Where’s ‘The Great Hall’?” Daniel asked.
“In some book, I guess,” Jay Jay said. “Or maybe in the game. It looks like he was working on a new one.”
None of it made sense. There were all sorts of books in Robbie’s bookshelf; many of them dealing with the occult and other mystical t
hings. That part made sense, in view of Robbie’s new religious kick, but none of it gave any explanation of where he could have gone or why.
“Maybe he went on a retreat or something,” Jay Jay said hopefully. “You know, with one of those cult groups.”
“He would have told us,” Daniel said. “Those people are always telling you how great it is and how it’s changed their lives. Robbie never proselytized about anything.”
Robbie’s room made them all feel uncomfortable. It was such a normal room: normal furniture, normal possessions, a few maps and things pertaining to a special hobby. Jay Jay picked up the note he had left on Robbie’s bed and started to crumple it up.
“Don’t!” Kate said. “That’s evidence.”
“Yeah,” Jay Jay said worriedly. He smoothed out the note and put it back. Then they trooped despondently into Jay Jay’s room where he opened his closet and brought out a bottle of red wine that was left over from his party, and a box of Oreo cookies.
“Hi, Merlin,” Kate” said. “Say hello.”
“Birds can’t talk,” Merlin said.
They sat down and drank and munched. The sky darkened outside their window as the sun set. Daniel sighed. “Do you think some maniac got him? Like The Freeway Murders in California?”
“Robbie wouldn’t hitchhike,” Jay Jay said. “He had the car.”
“April fool,” Merlin said.
April fool … why was that somehow so important?
“Wait …” Kate said. She started to think out loud. “Those maps Robbie made … The Great Hall … Robbie’s brother’s name was Hall. The one who ran away. It’s not a place, it’s a person.”
“He had a brother who ran away?” Jay Jay said. “He never told anybody.”
“He told me,” Kate said. “And April first, April Fools’ Day, was the night his brother left … at his own birthday party. We all saw Robbie at Jay Jay’s party, and then we never saw him again.”
“You mean he went off to look for his brother?” Daniel said.
“Oh, my God!” Kate said. Now she knew: she was right, she had always been right. She should have listened to her instincts.
“What? What?” Daniel and Jay Jay clamored.
“Robbie’s gone into the game,” she said. “He’s become Pardieu.”
“The caves!” Daniel said.
“We have to go get him,” Jay Jay said. He grabbed all his equipment—the maps, the spray paint, the compass; the safeguards that had lulled them in the real world, the magic that had gone awry in the fantasy one—and they ran down to Kate’s car.
They knew at once she was right.
“It’s my fault,” Jay Jay kept saying all the way to the caverns. “It’s my fault.”
“No,” Daniel said. “It’s mine. Kate suspected it, and I talked her out of it. She saw him becoming Pardieu. Now when I look back it was all so obvious, but I ignored it because it was so unreal. Who could have dreamed of such a thing?”
“It’s not anybody’s fault,” Kate said. “It’s the game’s fault.”
“Oh, who cares anyway who’s to blame?” Jay Jay said finally, as the red Rabbit skidded into the safety of the clump of trees outside the forbidden caverns. “Just let him be all right.”
The dark rooms of their maze looked different now, and the pleasure was gone. A decomposing body could be real. There were no monsters; only the reality of death. They held their lanterns high and searched carefully, calling for Pardieu because they knew Robbie would not answer, and each of them felt an icy terror far beyond anything they had conjured up in their make believe. For the first time they were playing the game as they would have liked to play it—to the limit of danger and fear, and with a true yearning for the reward—but now there was nothing in it at all of fun or adventure. There was no sign anywhere that Robbie had passed by, but if he had believed himself to be Pardieu then he would have gone off with nothing. The dripping of the water on the stone reminded them all that he could have drowned.
Finally they stopped to rest in a small room of the maze. “We can’t do this alone,” Daniel said.
Jay Jay was hunched in the corner looking very small and frightened. “His map was different,” he said softly. “I don’t understand his map.”
“He invented his own caverns,” Kate said. “A Holy Man can see things that aren’t there. Don’t you remember?”
“What are we going to do?” Jay Jay said.
Daniel sighed. “We have to go to the police.”
“And tell about the game?” Jay Jay squeaked.
“No, no,” Daniel said. “Leave it to me.”
They made their way out of the caverns and drove to the Pequod police station. They identified themselves as Robbie Wheeling’s friends and said they had reason to believe he was missing. They described how punctual and responsible Robbie was, and said they were sure he had come to some harm. Robbie always had a lot of money with him, they said, and now he had disappeared after promising a ride home to his friend Jay Jay, over three weeks ago, and they were very concerned. His car was still in the parking lot and his clothes in his room. He had apparently never left Pequod. He was a person who trusted strangers. Perhaps he had been murdered and the body hidden in some … place. His parents had not heard a word from him either, and were worried too.
“There is one other strong possibility,” Daniel said. “Robbie was very interested in those caverns near the campus. He had been talking about going into them. We think he did.”
“You think he went into the caverns over three weeks ago?”
“Right.”
“Without water that length of time he’d be dead,” the police officer said.
Kate could hardly catch her breath. A vision of the caverns as they had been that terrible night she was lost in them flashed through her mind: the blackness and the power of them. She could see Robbie in there alone. “Maybe there’s water in the caverns,” she said. “But you have to look for him either way, don’t you?”
“Oh, of course. Dead or alive.”
Dead or alive. She felt her world falling all around her. She couldn’t look at the others; she knew they felt the same way she did.
CHAPTER 4
As soon as they got back to the dorm from the police station, the three of them—in confusion and desperation and guilty fear—removed every trace of the game from their rooms and locked all of it in a locker at the bus station. They left everything in Robbie’s room untouched. They wanted to go back to the caverns to take away their costumes and wipe their fingerprints off the lanterns, but they didn’t dare. Someone would see them now. They tried to reassure themselves that since this wasn’t a murder the police would be more concerned with finding Robbie than in finding out who had played the game with him. But they were so furtive they each felt as if they were really covering up a crime of violence, not just a prank that would get them expelled. If Robbie had gone into the game and died because of it, he had done so because of them. Part of their minds said logically that wasn’t true, but the pain of having been responsible remained. The worst was knowing they had done this to someone they cared about so much.
The Pequod police department sent a detective to the dorm where Robbie had lived, to find out who his other friends were and question them, and particularly to get more information from Daniel and Kate and Jay Jay. None of the three of them had expected that. They had thought the cops would just go into the caverns. The detective’s name was Lieutenant Jerry Martini. He seemed like a nice enough man; he told them he had two kids of his own in high school, that he worried about secret depression in young adults, and the risks young people took because they thought they were immortal. Martini was so devious he insisted on talking to each of them separately, leaving them totally unprotected and frightened. He went into Jay Jay’s room first.
Jay Jay put his hands into his pockets so the cop wouldn’t notice that his palms were wet. He was sure police detectives looked for things like that. He hoped he looked so preppi
e and wholesome that no one would think he himself went lurking around in forbidden caverns.
“You were a good friend of Robbie Wheeling’s, right?”
Jay Jay nodded. “He was a … why are you saying I was his friend, like you think he’s dead?”
“Sorry. What were you going to say?”
“That he’s a really terrific guy. Everybody likes Robbie.”
“When you last saw him, was he depressed? Moody?”
“I don’t think I ever saw Robbie depressed,” Jay Jay said. “He was kind of into mystical things … spiritual things.”
“Like Mazes and Monsters?”
Here came the big stuff. Jay Jay’s heart began to pound. “You mean the game?”
“Yes. He was into the game, we could see that.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jay Jay said. “He was really involved with it.”
“Did you play it too?”
Jay Jay thought fast. Give him just enough so he doesn’t catch you in a lie. “I used to. But it takes up a lot of time, and I’m a straight-A student, so I can’t afford to take too much time off anymore.”
“What about the caverns?”
“What about them?”
“We heard some of the students were playing Mazes and Monsters in the caverns,” Martini said.
Jay Jay’s stomach pitched. Who had told? Perry? Somebody in the drama department? He tried to look pensive. “I heard that rumor too,” he said in his most ingenuous way.
