The Little Woods

by McCormick Templeman

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  If you wanted to communicate Hello, using that line as the alphabet, the encryption would work out to: 1 12 10 18 57.

  But while such an encryption would be ridiculously easy to decode if I had knowledge of the key text, without that piece of information, the message would be next to impossible for me to penetrate. But I had to give it a try. Since I’d needed to solve an Odyssey-themed puzzle to get the note, I figured it was also the obvious choice for the key text. I pulled out the Fagles translation we used in class and gave it a go. The first few lines were:

  Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

  driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

  the hallowed heights of Troy.

  Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,

  many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,

  fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.

  Next I consulted the first line of the encrypted note: 15 36 9 2 3 22 24, 5 12 7 4 17 36 30 128 77 46 44 18 39.

  I set about decoding but was quickly disappointed when the line read Anoinhm, thmgmnwsavruu.

  Not exactly what I was looking for, but I tried not to get too down about it. I tried a few different editions, but I had a deepening sense that I was on a fool’s errand. I bit down on the end of my pen. It was possible that the key text was the Odyssey, and that the starting point was not the beginning. The string of consecutive numbers, which I now realized was a word lifted straight from the text, perhaps for emphasis, could be an indicator that a particularly meaningful passage had been chosen to use as a key text. This also explained the addition of the letter J. If the sender intended for the passage itself to have a clear significance, it might be a passage that happened not to include the letter J. Either way, there was just no way I could solve it without more information.

  I was chewing my eraser and staring out the window when I saw Freddy emerge from the stacks. Clearly agitated, she looked at me as though I’d caught her doing something. I waved, but she pretended not to see me. Weird, I thought, but then, I didn’t exactly have Freddy figured out yet. I decided to ignore it and tried to focus back on the note.

  There had to be another way. Maybe I was going about this all wrong. In essence, I didn’t really care what the note said. What I wanted was the identity of the sender. Because of the timing, I couldn’t help but connect the box with Iris. What if someone I knew had found the body and was trying to bait me? It occurred to me that maybe I should be thinking about who would have the skill and the time to make something as complicated as the puzzle box. It seemed to me you’d have to have a bit of the artist and the engineer about you to be able to make something like that.

  What struck me was that from what I knew of Iris, that described her rather well. Maybe it was someone close to her, someone who liked the same things she did. My stomach soured when I thought about what that could mean. Maybe that was the link. But then why send it to me?

  I looked out the window and noticed the sky was growing dark. As much as I fought it, I knew I had to examine the very real possibility that the box might be from the killer. I also knew there was another step I needed to take—to Clare, and the possibility that she hadn’t died in the fire—but I couldn’t go there quite yet. That was a chamber of my heart I needed to keep closed a while longer.

  Someone opened the library door, and a cold breeze rushed in. I looked up to see Carlos. He nodded at me, then headed up the stairs. There was something I was missing, some avenue I wasn’t exploring. I wrote the words puzzle box in my notebook and then circled the word puzzle. I knew Iris had been a math kid, and sometimes math people liked puzzles. I knew Carlos did. He was always playing sudoku and doing crossword puzzles. Maybe someone else had the same interests as Iris. Maybe they’d gotten obsessed with her. Maybe they’d let their obsession get out of control. It was worth checking into, but I didn’t know where to start. It wasn’t like they had a puzzle club at St. Bede’s.

  And who would be able to make something so intricate? I figured I could talk to the art teacher and ask him about the woodworking shop, see if there were any students who were particularly skilled. And then there was the dragon. I had to figure out why the killer had drawn the dragon on the wall of that cave. If I could figure out his reasoning, I would be one step closer to him. From history class, I knew that in some cultures dragons could be a good luck symbol, but mostly they were perceived as symbols of evil. In the Bible, they stood in for the devil himself.

  I bit my lip and tapped my pencil against the desk. I knew that if I kept my head straight, I could manage to turn something up.

  The bell rang and I started gathering my things. I felt a sense of accomplishment as I slung my bag over my shoulders and headed down the stairs, but something else weighed on me. At some point I was going to need to have a little chat with Carlos.

  Later that day, I returned from the bathroom to find Jack splayed out on my bed, reading Jean Genet. His face erupted into a sybaritic grin, the kind that made something catch in my throat and sent a surplus of oxygen to my brain.

  “Hi,” he said, pushing himself up to stand. “You look weird. Why are you dressed like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I groaned. “I feel kind of ridiculous. Are you even allowed to be in here?”

  “No. Can we talk outside?”

  “I was just going to see Alex,” I said, grabbing my sweatshirt. “Do you want to walk me?”

  “Don’t go. Hang out with me.” His huge brown eyes were shameless, pleading. He extended his hand, his hips jutting forward. “Puhleeez?”

  “Walk with me,” I said. “Is Sophie busy? Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yeah,” he said, falling into step alongside me. “She’s got this math thing, so I thought I’d go slumming and drag you over to the side of the hill for a smoke and a cuddle.”

  “Sorry. I promised Alex. And since when do we cuddle?”

  “I don’t know. We could start.”

  “God, you really can’t handle Sophie being occupied.”

  “It’s true. Also, you’re my chemistry partner, doesn’t that get me some rights? You can recite the elements of the periodic table to me and tell me I’ve been a naughty boy.”

  When we reached the trail that led down to the side of the hill, he stopped. “Come on. Boyfriends are lame. Come watch me smoke cigarettes.”

  “Well, lung cancer is cool, but I think I’ll pass.”

  He shook his finger at me. “Someday I’ll be famous and then you’ll beg to watch me smoke cigarettes.”

  “I’ll see you later, okay?” But just as I waved and turned to go, he got a strange look in his eye. “What? What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just … Don’t sleep with him.”

  “What?” I gasped, blood rushing to my face. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “So then you haven’t yet,” he said, and for some reason, I found myself staring at his hips, the smooth lift of his abdomen, the curve of his torso. I looked away, but not before he noticed.

  “That is seriously none of your business,” I said.

  “It kind of is, though,” he said, curiosity giving way to theatrical sanctimony. “Sex leads to babies, and babies lead to overpopulation, and the next thing you know you’ve basically destroyed the planet. Why do you want to destroy the planet, Cally?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Plus it’s a sin,” he said with childish delight. “It says so in one of those religious books. I can’t remember which one.”

  I didn’t know why I did it, but for a moment, I let myself again admire his silhouette, lithe and angular, set against the evening sky, and then I shrugged and headed over to see Alex.

  “Don’t make the baby Jesus cry!” he called after me.

  On the walk to Alex’s, I found Iris weighing heavily on me again. I knew there
couldn’t be a connection between her and Clare, yet the two were beginning to fuse together in a way I found disconcerting. I needed to separate them. I needed to find out more about Iris—the girl no one seemed to know.

  Alex sat on his bed, reading Proust.

  “You look really nice.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a seat next to him. “But I’m feeling kind of creeped out.”

  “I can’t say that’s the usual reaction when someone starts dating me.”

  “It’s about Iris. It’s just really disturbing, you know?”

  “Of course,” he said, delicately placing a bookmark in Swann’s Way and setting it beside him. “Everyone is a little on edge, but I can imagine that it must be worse for you.”

  “Why for me?”

  “Because you’re sleeping in her bed. That has to be really weird.”

  “Yeah, I guess. You know, I was kind of wondering if I could ask you about her.”

  “Me?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Can’t you ask Helen?”

  “I know they were roommates, but Helen says she didn’t know her at all.”

  Alex shook his head. “Helen’s being a drama queen. Iris used to go to the lake house with all of us. At some point last year she stopped coming. I think she and Helen had a fight or something, because I never saw them together again after that.”

  “Really?” I asked. “How random that they ended up roommates.”

  “There’s nothing random about it,” he said, shaking his head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Room assignments aren’t random.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Nope. One of those ladies put a request in for the other.”

  “That is so weird. Why would they do that if they hated each other? And the way Helen tells it, living together didn’t make them any friendlier.”

  “Dude, I have no idea.”

  “So what was the deal with Iris? Why didn’t people like her? If she was so pretty, why was she unpopular?”

  He laughed. “She wasn’t unpopular. She was just kind of different, you know? Like there was something a little off about her. She was cool and everything. We hung out sometimes, but some of the guys sort of thought that she might be, like, sick.”

  “Sick how?”

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She was just … she wasn’t promiscuous, but everything for her was about sex. I can’t explain it exactly. It’s just that it was like the language she spoke.”

  “So she slept around a lot?”

  “No. I don’t think she slept with anyone. But every interaction was about sex. I totally fell for it. Everything she said was a double entendre. Everything was loaded and sexual, and obviously she was hot, so I was pretty much putty in her hands. For about a week, I just followed her around and did what she said, sort of endured her sexual hegemony.…”

  “Sexual hegemony? Nice.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I hung around for a while until I figured out I wasn’t going to get anywhere, then I took off.”

  “And she just kept doing that?”

  “Yeah. She even flirted with faculty members. Some were even into it, I think.”

  “I bet I can guess who,” I said, my mind returning to Reilly leaning over Shelly Cates in chemistry lab.

  “It was weird,” he said. “And when she left—or I guess now I should say ‘when she was murdered’—I thought she checked out and went to be a model or something. But I should have known something was up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sort of wondered if she was mixed up in something. Like maybe she was dealing drugs to the local kids or something. She seemed to have money all of a sudden, and it was kind of weird. I just wonder if she got herself mixed up with some bad people.”

  “Did she have any friends?”

  He shrugged. “Friends? No. I don’t think so.”

  “Really? How could she not have any friends?”

  “She’d always pick one boy to string along and that’s who she’d spend time with. Then he’d get sick of her and she’d move on to somebody else,” he said, shifting around. “Last spring she got sick and spent a couple of days in the infirmary. Turned out she wasn’t sick like in the traditional sense. It turned out she had some kind of emotional breakdown. I haven’t really told anybody, so keep it on the DL. I only found out because I tore my meniscus and ended up in there at the same time. Anyway, whatever she was going through, whatever happened to her last spring, I think it must have really messed her up, because she changed after that.”

  “How’d she change?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, she always had problems relating to other people, but she got really cold after that. And she always seemed to be focused on something a million miles from here. She was involved with something. I don’t know if it was drugs or what, but she went from an A student to a C student really fast. Rumor had it she was failing marine bio. If that happened, she wasn’t going to get asked back.”

  “Asked back? What does that mean?”

  He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Every summer we all get evaluated, and the administration decides whether or not we’ll be asked to return in the fall. With Cs, Iris might have managed it, but not with an F. With an F she was going back home to Queens.”

  “Maybe she was trying to get sent home,” I thought aloud. “Maybe whatever happened to her in the spring was so traumatic that she was failing on purpose so she could leave. God.” I sighed, suddenly overwhelmed with sadness for the girl. “If only she had been kicked out, she’d be alive today.”

  He looked at me strangely. “Why are you so interested in this, anyway? You didn’t even know the girl.”

  I shrugged. “That’s probably why. I just want to understand who she was. I just want to know what happened to her.”

  “Cally, it’s no big mystery. She went out to meet her dealer. Either he killed her or some vagrant killed her.”

  “Or maybe a vagrant drug dealer killed her,” I snorted. “Anyway, how can you be so sure?”

  “Because I saw her get the call.”

  “What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “The day she disappeared, I was in the bio lab working on our cellular respiration lab before dinner. Iris was in there too—she was Asta’s lab assistant, so she was in there a lot, but that day she was super edgy. She even yelled at Asta about some grade. She was really hostile, raising her voice, even. I mean, no one talks to Asta like that, you know? They were arguing. It seemed like it was about something Iris had found in the display case or something. It was super weird, and then someone came and got her, told her she had a call back on the dorm phones. She never came back. The next day she was dead.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “Of course I told the police back in October, but no one thought she was dead back then. It takes on more importance now that they’ve found her.”

  “Do they know who it was?” I asked, running my hand across my forehead. “Do they know who called her?”

  He shook his head. “No. The person who came and got her can’t remember who called.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes. “She doesn’t even remember taking the call.”

  “Really? You’d think you’d remember something like that.”

  “Yeah. You would. Especially if you were someone with early acceptance to Harvard.”

  “Freddy?”

  “President Bingham to you,” he said, and wrapped his arm around me.

  I was reading Don Quixote, wondering if I was Dulcinea or Quixote and deciding that I was probably just Sancho Panza, when Helen asked me if I wanted to come to her house for spring break.

  “We have a spring break?”

  “I think that’s kind of implicit in my invitation. Don’t tell me you haven’t started studying for midterms.”

&nbs
p; “Why would I study for midterms?”

  “I thought you were supposed to be this wunderkind. Don’t you ever study?”

  “Don’t have to. That’s why I’m a wunderkind.” I smiled.

  “You’re lazy is what you are.”

  “Yeah, well, I know you are but what am I? Hey, though, I wanted to ask you something. It’s about Iris.”

  “Oh God, not this again.”

  “Do you know if she was into puzzles?”

  “Puzzles? How would I know that? I told you, I didn’t know her.” She shook her head.

  “Yeah, but you were roommates. Did you ever see her doing a crossword puzzle or anything?”

  “Dude, no. You are so weird sometimes.”

  “What about art? Was Iris an artist?”

  “I don’t know. Can we drop this already? You are seriously creeping me out.”

  “Fine,” I sighed. “Is everyone going to your house? Pigeon and Freddy?”

  “We’re only inviting you, silly,” she said, and knit her brow as if anything else would be absurd. “The others are wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but we just want to chill and not think about things.” She stretched her arms up over her head and then fell back onto her bed. “It should be really relaxing. Really earthy.”

  I didn’t know what really earthy meant, but I figured I’d put in my request form anyway. That night I slept fitfully, drifting into and out of fever dreams. At one point I was convinced Helen was gone for what seemed like several hours, but when I forced myself awake to get up and go wash my face, I saw that she was sleeping soundly, and when I took my temperature in the morning, it was normal.

  Midterms were mildly unpleasant, but I survived them, and before I knew it, it was the night before spring break. After study hours, I packed my things and headed up to the library to check in with Carlos before he left. I found him reading in his usual spot. I slumped into the chair beside him.