“Star is being modest,” Ms. Noceno said. “I believe the girls have just made a discovery about one of Caroline Bromley’s peers. They were just about to tell me what it was.”
Star stared at me, apparently paralyzed. Neither of us wanted to bring up the Taylor connection, clearly.
I glanced from Ms. Holland-Stone to Ms. Noceno. Ms. Holland-Stone was wearing black leggings and boots and a fluffy gray poncho, with her hair swept up in a mother-of-pearl hair clip. Looking at their expectant faces, I noted that they weren’t actually that far apart in age. It was just that one tried very hard to look young—and the other perhaps the opposite.
“She died young,” I offered. “She was sixteen.”
“What was her name?”
“Sarah Black.”
“Oh.” Ms. Holland-Stone dropped into the chair next to Star’s and stared blankly at the closed laptop. “Not Leonora Black?”
“No,” Star said softly. “Her sister.”
“We’re going to try to find out more about her,” I said.
I nudged at Star’s elbow, and she opened her laptop. As Ms. Holland-Stone read about Sarah Black, Ms. Noceno got up, walked over, and read over their shoulders.
“This is sad, that this young woman died. Leonora’s sister. But is she directly related to your studies of Caroline?” Ms. Holland-Stone asked.
Star glanced at me. “Well…”
“Sarah Black is more my project than Star’s,” I said. “Sorry to distract her.”
“You’re doing a senior project?” Ms. Holland-Stone looked skeptical. “History? Who’s your advisor?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a personal project.”
“Which we encourage, dear,” Ms. Noceno put in, patting me on the shoulder. “If you want to find out more about this girl, though, it appears that our resources at Windham might be somewhat limiting. She apparently only spent a year or two here. Most of her life was in Rochester, New York. You might want to see what kind of resources they have there.”
Ms. Noceno stepped away and disappeared into the back glassed-in portion of the archives. Some of the Darkins report was coming back to me now in pieces. About the tricky difference between ghosts and poltergeists. About how one tended to stay in one place, and the other had a tendency to follow people wherever they went.
“We ought to see what they’ve got, yeah,” Star said. “They probably have death records, newspapers?”
“Is your primary concern her death?” Ms. Holland-Stone asked. She raised an eyebrow at me, then shifted her gaze to Star.
“No,” Star replied. “But she was sixteen. Naturally we’re curious how she died.”
We were all silent for a few moments.
“Let’s speak honestly,” Ms. Holland-Stone said. “Since you mentioned this to me earlier, Star. This is related to the Dearborn ghost stories, right?”
Star glanced at me. I watched Ms. Noceno returning to her desk, frowning, file folder in hand.
“Right,” I admitted.
“Excellent,” Ms. Holland-Stone said, folding her arms. “I was curious about that myself, when I was a student at Windham. Especially my senior year. Unfortunately, there have been so many Sarahs at Dearborn through the years…as students and teachers, actually…that it seems nearly impossible to get to the bottom of the story.”
“But there haven’t been many Sarahs who died this young,” Star pointed out.
“Well…” Ms. Holland-Stone rearranged her fluffy poncho to drape over her thighs and looked at her watch. “You might be onto something there.”
“Speaking of Sarahs and Dearborn,” Ms. Noceno said, “I found something odd in the art collection listing. As we all know, the Sarah Dearborn portrait no longer graces the walls. Since the 1950s. But apparently the damaged portrait stayed on campus—probably in a basement somewhere—until 1975 because there is a bill of sale and agreement here that says an alum purchased it with the intention of restoring it and returning it to campus. A woman named Norma Fleming. I guess she never did, because there’s no documentation about it after that. And we obviously don’t have the portrait, so I suppose she never got around to it. Or found it too badly damaged to restore.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Sad,” Ms. Holland-Stone offered.
“Weird,” Star added.
“I’ve got an appointment after this, ladies.” Ms. Holland-Stone looked at her watch again. “So, Haley, if you’ll excuse us? We’ll go to that table so you don’t have to move.”
“That’s okay,” I said, hopping up. “I was about to leave anyway.”
It was true. The date February 10 was still echoing through my head. I doubted I’d be able to concentrate on anything else.
As I started to gather my things, Ms. Noceno gestured for me to come to her desk and I followed.
“I took the liberty of looking this up for you. Rochester is a fairly large city, so I suspected this would be the case.” She turned her computer screen so I could see it. Beneath the heading Rochester Public Library were the words Rochester Newspaper Index written in purple.
“If you give me your email address,” she said, “I’ll send you the link. They don’t have all of their old newspapers scanned and online, of course. But they have a very nice index of all of the article headings and topics that you can look up alphabetically online, see? Going back to 1818.”
She clicked on the heading AAB-ACC and it brought us to some scans of old-fashioned catalog cards. She scrolled down. The cards said things like:
ABBEY, E. WINIFRED
—Married John F. Corris
UA, Je 28, 1876, 3 – 5
ABBEY, JOSEPH (BRIGHTON)
—Obituary
UA, My 22, 1879, 2 – 2
“You look up what you need,” Ms. Noceno explained, “and then you request the actual article from the library staff. A small fee for each article. But it says here they can scan and send material. So you don’t have to wait for snail mail or go all the way to Rochester.”
“Thanks,” I said, writing down my email for her. “I’ll definitely give that a try.”
“Good luck,” she said, turning her screen around again. “Come back if you need anything.”
I tried to wave to Star, but she and Ms. Holland-Stone were deeply engaged in Caroline Bromley talk.
34
Hi everyone. I am the latest member of this group and I am doing some research. Was wondering if any of you who had supernatural experiences in Dearborn can recall the exact date it happened? I would really appreciate your responses.
I wrote the Facebook message to the “Haunteds” group as soon as I’d gotten back to my room, before I’d even taken off my coat. Then I turned my laptop volume all the way up so I could hear if any responses came in while I got settled, crammed some potato chips in my mouth, and got out some calculus homework. Within a few minutes, two replies came in.
Laurie Rowell: Hi Haley. Sorry, it was 20+ years ago. Only remember that it was winter of second semester.
Penny Sidorski: I’m old. Don’t know the date. It was over the course of a week, though. Not just one day. Noises. No sighting for me.
I suspected most of the responses would be like this. I closed my laptop and texted Star:
You going to be back soon?
I was eager to talk with her about what we’d found. And I didn’t like being alone in Dearborn right now. This feeling had been creeping up on me since the fright I’d had the other night with the knocking on the door.
To distract myself, I picked up my phone and typed a text to Anthony:
What are you up to right now?
His reply:
Hanging with Vince. We have become study buddies.
Damn. He was with his new crush. Good for him, but this meant he wouldn’t be availa
ble to talk and dull the feeling of aloneness in this room.
Have fun, I wrote back reluctantly, then refreshed the Facebook page to find a new message.
Jane Villette: I’m pretty sure mine was on Valentine’s Day—the night of. My boyfriend and I had a “romantic” outing before dinner, and then I thought the whispering I heard later was my punishment from hell. I was a very dramatic and guilt-plagued teen.
I exhaled. This felt like good news. I turned back to my calculus homework and managed to finish a problem. As I started the next one, another message notification dinged.
Darla Heaney: Mine was right after my birthday, which is February 9. I can’t remember if it was one or two days after. I think one. So probably the 10th, but maybe the 11th.
My chest tightened. I had to remind myself to breathe as I dove for the keyboard.
Darla, can you tell me what kind of experience you had?
I typed fast, worried that Darla would log off before she saw my reply.
Darla’s reply took less than a minute.
A face in my window.
What kind of face?
A girl. It was terrifying.
More than once?
No, just once. Which was enough.
I wasn’t sure what to ask next, but I wanted to keep Darla from walking away from this conversation.
Did the girl look angry? I typed.
Darla was silent for a few minutes, but I saw the little texting dots appearing and disappearing.
This is bringing back really bad memories, someone named Lynette Rakoff interjected.
I think I was too frightened to see it to say. Her face wasn’t clear. Like she had a veil or a shroud over her face.
The back of my neck prickled. Where the hell was Star? By the pond somewhere, getting hickeys from Mark Byrne the Sideburn?
I positioned my hands over the keys. They were shaking, and I didn’t know what to type next. What did it mean that the ghost seemed to come back often on the same day? What did it mean that Taylor had died the same day as Sarah Black?
What year was that? I typed.
2010.
Star walked in, flushed and smiling.
“Hey!” she greeted me.
She’d definitely been with Mark after the archives.
Okay, thank you for all of the info, everybody, I wrote before slapping my laptop closed.
“We need to get ready,” I told Star in a low voice.
“For what?” she said. “Dinner?”
“No,” I replied. “For February 10th.”
* * *
Star and I sat by ourselves at dinner—for the first time ever.
“Okay,” she said. “We know that Sarah Black died young, the same day of the year that Taylor died. That feels…significant. Significantly scary and horrible.”
I nodded and nibbled on a piece of lettuce. I never used words like horrible, but was grateful for people like Star who were willing to.
“Especially since that’s just six days from now,” I murmured.
“But then the rest of the hauntings are fuzzy, in terms of dates,” Star pointed out. “You only got one confirmation that a haunting occurred maybe on that date.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. Two deaths on the exact same day…Whatever Sarah Black’s ghost did to the other girls, it feels like she…or it…killed Taylor. Or at least…was involved in her death. I mean, is there any way around thinking that?”
Star shuddered but then took a big, enthusiastic spoonful of mac and cheese.
“We know that Sarah Black didn’t die in Dearborn, though,” she said. “She left at Christmas, it says. Dropped out. She wasn’t a student here anymore. That makes me inclined to think that she didn’t become the Winter Girl.”
“So you think it’s a requirement for a ghost to haunt the exact place they died?”
“Well…no,” Star admitted. “Look…why don’t you forward me that Rochester Library link that Ms. Noceno gave you. Maybe we can find out how she died. I’ll work on that for you. That might help us a little.”
“Maybe she caught some kind of illness here and then went home and died?” I said. “So in a sense she blames her death on this place? Either way, it looks like the dorm has a February 10th problem.”
“I wouldn’t go straight to that, though,” Star said slowly, bringing a spoonful of pasta up to her face and staring at it for a moment. “I’d say hold off until we can figure out more about what happened to Sarah Black.”
Normally I enjoyed mac-and-cheese night, too, but tonight I didn’t have the appetite for it.
I chased a slippery cherry tomato around my plate, trying to spear it with my fork.
“Sure, we should find out more about Sarah Black. But beyond that, we know enough to be afraid of what might happen on February 10th. And we probably ought to try to do something about it.”
“What can we do, though?” Star asked, lowering her spoon without taking a bite.
I gave up on stabbing the tomato. I was thinking of that creepy thing one of the girls had said in the Darkins report: Some girls say that she’s looking for her replacement. Was Taylor the replacement? Was Taylor the ghost now? How many replacements were there? With Sarah Black dying in Rochester, that could be just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t want to say this out loud to Star, though—for fear that speaking it could make it more possible, more true. My hands were starting to go cold.
“I’m thinking about Students X and Y,” I said, trying to rub some warmth back into my hands. “About how they were so different. Did Student X encounter, like, a murderous ghost? And that’s why she went sort of crazy, she was so scared? And then Student Y seemed to be able to acknowledge the ghost quietly, without much trouble.”
“Maybe they encountered entirely different ghosts?” Star replied. “I mean, why doesn’t the report focus on that? It seems like Ronald Darkins just tries to say it’s all about the girls’ different psychologies. Why does he go straight to that?”
“Well, that’s another thing I can ask Kathleen about, I guess. I was waiting until I had the whole report read. But I’ve got about a hundred questions now.”
“You sure that lady’s legit?” Star asked.
I shrugged. “No. But she’s participated in tons of paranormal investigations, she remembers Dearborn pretty well, and she seems interested and willing to talk to me about it, no strings. Know anyone else like that who can help us with these…supernatural issues?”
“Well…no,” Star admitted.
We were both silent for a minute. I picked up the cherry tomato with my fingers and popped it into my mouth. When I chewed it, a slightly foul taste filled my mouth. The tomato had looked nice on the outside, but on the inside it had started to go bad. I forced myself to swallow it anyway.
“I just had a thought,” I said hoarsely. The thought was just as rotten as the tomato. Almost as rotten as the previous thought about Taylor, but not quite.
“Yeah?” Star was corralling her last couple of pasta elbows onto her spoon.
“What if the problem isn’t Sarah Black at all? It was just blamed on her, over the years, because she’d died young? But what if she was the victim of the problem, not the cause?”
Star glanced up from her plate. “How do you mean?”
“Bad things happen on or around February 10th,” I said. “Sometimes really bad things. We’re assuming that if Sarah Black died on February 10th, 1889, she was the start of it. But maybe there is something older and darker than her. That was here before her? A spirit or a poltergeist or a curse or something. It followed her home and killed her. It’s still here, ready to mess with us. It messed with Taylor.”
Star put down her spoon, abandoning the two little elbows left in it.
“I don’t like where this is going,”
she whispered.
“Me neither,” I said, feeling my stomach begin to sour—from the tomato or the weight of my own words, I wasn’t certain. “But you have to admit it’s a possibility.”
Star glanced around the room, scanning the other tables, but then focused her gaze on me.
“Are you trying to decide who to tell that your roommate is going crazy?” I asked quietly.
“Not at all,” Star said. “I’m wondering if you can call that Kathleen lady as soon as we get upstairs.”
35
It was 7:59. I’d texted Kathleen in the dining hall and we’d agreed on eight p.m., but I didn’t want to be obnoxiously punctual. While I waited for a couple more minutes to pass, I glanced over the first few questions Star and I had jotted down when we’d gotten back upstairs.
Ronald seemed unsure if there was a ghost or a poltergeist. How did YOU feel?
Did the date February 10 ever come up as an especially problematic or dangerous time?
Tell me more about Students X and Y. Can you tell me their names?
Star helped me come up with these questions before she’d left so I wouldn’t feel weird and self-conscious on the phone.
I scribbled Do you think girls here are in danger? below the other questions and dialed Kathleen’s number.
“Haley?” she said, instead of hello.
“Yes,” I said, feeling a wave of relief that she’d answered.
“Have you read the whole report?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“It’s a lot to take in.”
“Yeah…I’ve got some questions.”
“I figured you would.”
“I’m curious about Students X and Y,” I said. “Can you tell me what you remember about them?”
“Okay. Sure. I vaguely recall Ron using those mysterious labels in his report. He liked to keep things kind of cryptic even when it wasn’t really necessary. But since I didn’t read the whole thing before I scanned it for you, you’ll have to remind me which girl is which.”
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 20
