“Was that the first time something like this happened?” asked Ronald’s soft-spoken blond wife.
“No,” the owner said. “The first time it was a tomato flinging around the room. Kind of funny. This second time was much scarier, more violent.”
I paused the video.
Ronald Darkins was dead. But maybe his ex-wife wasn’t.
Returning to his Wikipedia page, I copied her name again and then pasted it into the search bar.
As I started to scroll through the results, I murmured “Please be alive” a couple of times. My heart sank when I saw there was an obituary from 2004. But that Kathleen Darkins had been born in 1920 in Kansas City and lived her whole life there. So she wasn’t my Kathleen Darkins.
A few results down were the words Kathleen Darkins, proprietor. I clicked on that link and found myself in an About us section of a website for something called New Moon Wellness Emporium.
KATHLEEN DARKINS, PROPRIETOR
Kathleen has worked as a teacher, a massage therapist, and a life coach. She owns the New Moon Tea company, as well as the Essential Herbals soap line. She opened New Moon Wellness Emporium in 2003. She is available for wellness consultations Tuesday and Thursday evenings as well as Saturdays—by appointment preferred.
I clicked to the home page. The shop sold “Teas, essential oils, crystals, candles, herb soaps, herbal supplements, and other wellness essentials.” It also advertised classes and workshops on crystals, which some other lady—not Kathleen—taught. It was located in a suburb of Boston—just about an hour from here. I took in a breath and held it for a moment.
There was no picture of Kathleen available. But I had a hunch that running a “wellness emporium” was exactly what a woman who’d been doing ghost hunting in her thirties would be doing in her sixties. Also, a person who owned such a shop would be more likely to keep the last name from a marriage that brought her a little bit of mystical notoriety, wouldn’t she? I was certain I had the right Kathleen Darkins. What I wasn’t sure of was what to do with this information.
Under Contact us, I found a phone number and an email address.
I hesitated before typing Dear Ms. Darkins.
Windham-Farnswood had swept Taylor’s death under the rug—or shoved it into the cleaning supply closet, to be exact. And it looked to me like this wasn’t the only thing about Dearborn Hall the school had decided to keep quiet over the years. I wanted to know more.
Holding my breath, I finished a quick message inquiring if she had any time available for a consultation on Saturday. I didn’t have a car, but Maylin and Anthony did. Only seniors could have cars on campus—and with stringent restrictions. But Maylin in particular was often looking for an excuse to get off campus on weekends. At this point, we still had time to get permission—if I could convince her. That is, if Ms. Darkins wrote back.
* * *
“I’m having a little trouble understanding.” Maylin poked at her salad, frowning at her hard-boiled egg. “Why can’t you just order your mom something from Amazon?”
Maylin wasn’t really looking at me as she spoke. Instead, she was staring at Alex’s chocolate ice cream and peanut butter, which was quickly disappearing into Alex’s mouth. We were sitting at one of the corner dining hall tables with two other girls—Rhea, a friendly junior I knew from newspaper, and Alex’s sophomore tutoring charge, whose name I was still hoping I’d remember sometime.
“It’s not as weird as it sounds. We went shopping at this little place this one time my mom came to visit last year. She loved this lady’s candles and soap. And she doesn’t have a website you can order from or anything.”
Alex raised her eyebrows and licked peanut butter off her spoon.
“That’s funny,” she said. “I thought you told me once that your mom hated hippie shit.”
Damn that Alex and her steel-trap memory. I wondered what else about me she’d never forgotten. I was beginning to regret that I’d not asked Anthony. I had thought Maylin would be an easier sell since she loved shopping.
“Not really,” I said. “I mean, she’s not like ‘spiritual’ or whatever. But she likes a nice-smelling candle as much as the next middle-aged lady. Or she liked these ones.”
“I bet if you called the shop owner and told her the situation, she’d be willing to send an order to your mom,” Rhea pointed out.
“Well, I want to smell and pick out the stuff myself. And I don’t have a credit card or anything. I can only go and pay cash. Besides, wouldn’t you like to get out for a few hours and away from Windham? I looked up the town. They’ve got some really cute shops.”
“Just drive her, Maylin,” Alex mumbled. “You’ve got that car, you might as well use it.”
“You want to come?” Maylin asked Alex. Rhea and the sophomore couldn’t come since they didn’t have senior privilege.
“Well, no. I can’t. I have a lot to do at the greenhouse. And I have to rewrite my chem lab.”
“There’s still time to get permission if you put in for it tonight,” I reminded Maylin.
When Maylin wants to go for a weekend joyride, she gets her mom to write to the administrative office to tell them she has permission to go visit her aunt Grace in Amherst. Aunt Grace does exist, but Maylin has only seen her once since her first semester at Windham.
“Okay,” Maylin said reluctantly. “Wes has a basketball game anyway.”
I thought I saw Alex rolling her eyes as she got up to get seconds on ice cream.
“Did she roll her eyes at me?” Maylin hissed.
“No,” Rhea said quickly, blowing her red bangs out of her eyes. “I think she just had wicked brain freeze.”
We went silent as Alex returned to the table.
“So you two decided if you’re going?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Maylin said. “We are.”
“Good,” Alex said.
She ate the ice cream quickly, in big bites. When a gob of peanut butter fell into her lap, she picked it up with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.
“See you later,” she said, picking up her bowl and spoon as she stood. “I’ve got a ton of work tonight. Oh! Shit. You and I have a session tonight, right?”
She was looking at the sophomore, who nodded.
“My room this time,” Alex said. She left the dining hall, and her sophomore followed moments later.
“What’s that girl’s name again?” I said.
“Chloe,” Rhea replied. “She’s my roommate.”
“She’s really shy,” Maylin observed, stating the obvious.
“Well…yeah,” Rhea admitted. “But she’s nice.”
I was slightly embarrassed by Maylin, who had a persistent and inexplicable habit of calling out shy people. Like they were rare birds, to be spotted and proudly pointed out.
“Hey—guys,” I said, eager to change the subject. “I’ve got something I’ve been wondering about.”
“Yeah?” Rhea said. “What?”
“Either of you ever noticed any hearts carved in the walls of this building?”
Maylin snorted. “What’re you talking about?”
But Rhea’s big brown eyes seemed to pop.
“Rhea?” I said. “Is that a yes?”
“I have, actually,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“An alum I know mentioned it, that it was a thing, years ago. Where have you seen one?”
“Well…” A look of doubt came over her delicately freckled face. “I don’t live in Dearborn.”
“So you saw one in Barton?” I asked.
“No. In the joint laundry room in the basement. Do you want me to show you? It’s kind of hidden.”
“Sure,” I said.
Maylin waved at me as we got up. “Have fun with that. I’m thinking about nine-thirty or ten tomorrow?”
; “Great,” I said. “Thanks. My mom will appreciate it.”
* * *
“Here,” Rhea said, pointing behind one of the dryers. “I found it when I was searching for a lost sock back there.”
I looked where she was pointing. There was indeed a heart carved into the wall there—a little smaller than my hand. Inside it were scratched letters:
“Oh,” I said, slightly disappointed. A standard lovers’ heart with initials. Like you’d carve on a tree. Maybe there was some slim chance that the S stood for Samuel. But probably not. I had been thinking of Samuel as a first name, not a last name.
“Was that not what you meant by a heart?” Rhea asked.
“No, that’s definitely a heart,” I said dumbly. “Thanks for showing it to me.”
“Who was the alum who mentioned it?”
“Oh…um…a friend of my mom’s,” I shot back—unsettled by how fast my brain could produce the weird lie. I hoped she didn’t ask more. I didn’t want to have to build the lie, or bring my mom into it any further.
Rhea nodded, apparently sensing my reluctance to say more.
“This reminds me of the time we all snuck Reggie Brooks into the girls’ room,” she said. “In the English hall to see the graffiti that had been written about him.”
“I forgot about that,” I said. That had been a particularly slow day in the school newspaper room. Someone had scrawled, Reggie Brooks is yummy, perhaps sarcastically, but Reggie had seemed tickled regardless.
“I miss Reggie,” Rhea said. “Is he still around?”
“Yeah. He’s in my calculus class. I think he just got sick of newspaper. Joined robotics or something instead.”
It felt like Rhea wanted to stay and talk. I knew the feeling—not wanting to go up to your room yet. Not wanting to face all the books and term papers and your roommate’s boring but well-intentioned face. Just not yet.
“Are you on the soccer team?” I asked her. I seemed to remember seeing her out on the fields.
I was wondering about Tricia, last year’s soccer coach and Dearborn RD. The only adult present when Taylor had died.
“No,” she said. “Last year. But I wasn’t very good. I didn’t try out this year.”
“I was just wondering if you know what happened to the old coach.”
“Tricia?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone said she’s a bartender now or something.”
“Serious?” I said. That sounded made-up, but I thought it might be rude to say so.
Rhea shrugged. “Probably beats babysitting at rich-kid camp.”
And then there was that awkward moment where I wasn’t sure if I was dealing with a fin-aid kid like myself, or one of those self-effacing well-off kids like Star.
“True,” I said.
21
“Hey, why did you run off like that?” Star asked.
She was already sitting cross-legged on her bed, laptop open, when I came back from dinner.
I rummaged through my backpack, uncertain which homework assignment to start on first. “I wasn’t feeling so great.”
“I think Ms. Noceno was disappointed. She was happy I brought in a live one for her. She gets tired of hanging out with just me.”
“I’ll go back sometime,” I promised, plugging in my laptop.
“There aren’t any letters from or to a Sarah Chase, in the letter archives, she said. But she photocopied some of the stuff from the ghost-story file for you to look at.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Star got up and fished in her own backpack. “She must have liked you. Either that or she’s working on getting the archive use numbers up. I think there might be a budget issue with keeping it open.”
Star handed me a thin packet of stapled papers. “She and I looked through that ghost file together. Most of the stuff was kind of silly—like the occasional student newspaper article about the ghost. Filler for Halloween or whatever. Someone does an article every few years. But we both thought you might want to see this. A student in 1994—her name was Melanie Obringer—put together a collection of stories she was able to gather from alums, going several years back. It looks like it wasn’t a school project…just like a casual compilation. She didn’t write a report or introduction or anything.”
“Cool,” I said, looking at it. It seemed like it had been photocopied from an old dot-matrix printout.
I had a single room, and I liked it that way. Until the night I saw her and heard her. I woke up in the middle of the night. I have no idea what time it was. Everything was quiet—it must have been past midnight, at least. I heard a low, whispery laugh. I looked up from my bed and saw this silhouette behind my curtain. She was pale and small with big eyes and long hair, wearing white. A white nightgown, like. I’m shivering just telling you this, all these years later. She was fuzzy because of the curtain, but I think she was staring at me. She said, “He sees.” And then it seemed like she was coming toward my bed. I closed my eyes. I was screaming. And when I opened them, she was gone. The next day my next-door dormmate did say she heard me screaming, but of course everyone told me I was dreaming. To this day I don’t think I was dreaming. She was there. In the room. I refused to sleep alone for weeks. It was against the rules, but I slept on my friend’s floor with a sleeping bag for a while. When I finally felt ready to sleep in the room again, I slept with the door wide open. Which was also against the rules. But I kept opening it whenever the housemother would close it. Till she gave up and let me sleep with it open until I graduated.
—Sheila Hahn, ’74
I sucked in a breath as I read this one. He sees. Who sees? Samuel?
“What?” Star said.
“So…creepy.” I tried to sound casual, and to keep the paper from shaking in my grip. Taylor had been wanting a break from her room. But she’d been out of close friends by then. No one left to ask if she could sneak onto their floor with a sleeping bag. Would she still be alive if she’d had someone to ask? I exhaled and let my gaze move on to the next accounts:
I heard three knocks on my door two nights in a row. The following morning I awoke just at dawn, feeling unsettled. There was a dead bird, slightly rotted, at the foot of my bed. I brought it straight to Miss Finneran. She interviewed every student in the dorm trying to find out who had done it. She asked me if I had any enemies in the dorm. I think she had probably watched The Godfather recently, and was thinking of the horse head. But I felt then—and feel now—that there was something malevolent in that building. I didn’t have enemies at that age. I was the quiet, studious type who just went about my work, minded my own business.
—Diane, ’80*
I woke up at three a.m. and heard a whispering coming from my closet. I bolted out of my room. Nobody believed me. It was terrifying. It only happened the one time. I slept with my lights on for the next few nights. I tried to convince myself it was in my head—that it was part of a dream. But I know it wasn’t. A couple of days later I found a heart shape scratched into the side of my closet. I know it wasn’t there before that.
—Karen Norcross, ’90
I steadied my hand again, noting not just the whispering but the familiarity of the name. She was one of Suzie Price’s “Haunteds” in the Facebook group. It was likely from this Karen that Suzie got her information about the hearts.
I woke up in the dark and felt a presence pressing on my chest. I thought I was going to die. Something blackish was over me, over my bed. I tried to scream. I couldn’t. It was like my mouth was full of sand. I tried and tried. When I finally managed a wail, it scared the shit out of my roommate. Excuse my French. When she woke up, the dark presence was gone. I was afraid to go to sleep the next night. But it didn’t return.
—Anita, ’92*
*Last names were left out upon alumnae request.
I let all of these stories sink in for a minute. I could feel Star’s eyes on me as I rested the papers on my knees.
“You know what’s weird?” I said slowly.
“Well, there are a lot of things that are weird here,” Star said, sinking onto her bed.
“That old letter that Ms. Noceno showed me from Louise what’s-her-name. She said the ghost wears black. The girl here who saw the ghost in the ’70s said she was wearing a white nightgown. And other stories I’ve heard also say she’s in a white nightgown.”
“Well…” Star pulled up her feet and sat cross-legged. “Who’s to say a ghost can’t change clothes?”
“Or maybe there’s more than one ghost.”
“Yeah.” Star smiled a little. “Maybe they fight for our attention.”
“This is prime haunting ground, I bet.” My gaze instinctively crept upward at the crack above Star’s bed. “What better real estate for a ghost than a building that looks like an old insane asylum?”
“Filled with potentially hysterical young ladies,” Star added.
“What else have you got there?” I asked, pointing to the other folder Star had offered—which was now on her bed by her feet.
“Oh! Ms. Noceno took the liberty of also sending along some information about campus deaths. Since ghost curiosity-seekers always want to know about that. She reiterated that there’s no record of anyone dying in Dearborn before last year.”
Star reached over and handed me the folder.
“Uh…thanks,” I said, taking it.
“She said it’s easy information to access—campus deaths—because she said someone researched the question a long time ago.”
I flipped through the grim file. The first thing in it was a stapled set of papers on which Ms. Noceno had stuck a neon-green sticky note. Josephine Lewis, Thrown from horse.
“Did you look at this stuff?” I asked Star, showing her the sticky note.
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 12
