In the Hall with the Knife

by Diana Peterfreund

  He probably should have found a way to get out of it, since he’d arrived at his own nine a.m. music theory exam with an aching back and sweaty pits. Still nailed it—which was why he had been the one to shovel the walks. His grades in music theory were way better than the ones in history, and the history term paper wasn’t finished. Rich kids got things like extensions and excuses. The local scholarship kid had to maintain appearances.

  By the third day of snow, even the locals were crying foul, especially because the weather report promised that an even more severe ice storm was on its way over the weekend. The governor declared a state of emergency in the area, and half the town decided to evacuate, in case the storm surge made the two-lane road connecting Rocky Point to the mainland impassable. Headmaster Boddy looked at the situation and finally made the right call. In an email to the entire student body, he announced that all remaining exams would be postponed, and the few people left on campus would leave by noon the next day.

  Only, the storm came one night early, and it was far, far worse than anyone had predicted.

  Vaughn awoke to the sound of great cracks and booms. The power had gone out at some point in the night, and the chill was beginning to set in, especially around the windows. Vaughn remembered how it had gotten two winters ago, when the heat had gone off and ice formed several inches thick on the insides of the panes. He couldn’t see much in the darkness through the driving sleet, but he guessed the sounds were made by trees tearing in two beneath the weight of ice.

  He was half right. At six a.m., their neighbor dropped by to check in on them and reported that a few cottages down by the ravine had gotten stove up in the storm. All empty—thank goodness.

  They probably should have evacuated sooner.

  “Any news from Blackbrook?” he asked Vaughn. Everyone in town knew their golden boy.

  Vaughn shook his head.

  “Ayuh,” said his neighbor. “Them from away don’t know what they’re in for.”

  Vaughn started packing on layers.

  His brother looked amused by the plan. “Sure, kill yourself trying to get out there. Maybe they’ll finally notice you when you’re dead.”

  “Hard telling, not knowing,” Vaughn replied. “If nothing else, they’ll need an extra hand with the sandbags.”

  Oliver snorted. “Right. The only thing those Blackbrook kids respect more than a townie is a janitor.”

  Even after all this time, Oliver still hadn’t kicked the habit of referring to the other students like that. Those Blackbrook kids. Rich, entitled, mostly useless, and shockingly bad at aiming into the urinals.

  They were Blackbrook.

  And that meant Vaughn was . . . Well, he didn’t know exactly what he was. Not these days. But he’d never forget the day his life changed; the day he’d gotten his acceptance letter in the mail from Blackbrook Academy. He’d known it was his ticket to a new life.

  Well, a new half life, at least.

  Vaughn packed a bag while his brother sat in the old rocker, playing with his weapons collection and making snarky comments. Most folks in Rocky Point had at least one gun in their house, and Gemma had taught them both to shoot when they were kids, but Oliver’s enthusiasm was as unbridled as it was unsettling.

  Which was precisely how Oliver liked it.

  Vaughn wasn’t in the mood for his games. “Would it make you feel better to think I’m not going for those Blackbrook kids?”

  “Then who?”

  “Rusty Nayler,” Vaughn said with a shrug. “Linda White.”

  “Whatever,” Oliver sneered. “Give my love to Boddy. I know he’s your favorite ass to kiss.”

  Vaughn finished packing and dressing, but before he headed out into the elements, he made a final appeal.

  “Oliver, if I’m not back in two days—”

  “You think we’re keeping to the schedule in this storm?” His smile was nearly worse than his sneer. “Have fun. I’ve got my own plans.”

  That was never a happy thought. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Oh, like trying to cross the ravine in an ice storm?” He flipped a vintage tomahawk around in his hand. “Maybe they ought to rethink that scholarship.”

  Vaughn knew better than to reply. The scholarship was the best thing that had happened to Oliver in years, too, and he knew it.

  But his brother wasn’t done. He placed the weapon back on the coffee table. “Seriously, why do you bother?”

  Vaughn swallowed. “Someone has to.”

  For a second, Vaughn thought he might get through. But, as always, it was wishful thinking. Oliver was silent.

  “See you, then.” Alone, he headed out into the storm.

  It was a little more than a mile from his house to the Blackbrook campus, which stood at the very edge of the point. When the weather was nice, Vaughn would often ride to campus on his bike. But today, the roads would be greasy. He grabbed a pair of crampons for what he’d bet would be a painful hike.

  There were two ways to get to Blackbrook : the long way, down the old shore road, across the ravine bridge by the old sawmill, and past Cartwright Park and the old Tudor House that marked the edge of the campus. Or, the shortcut across the wooded ravine. Both seemed treacherous in this weather.

  When Vaughn set out, a wintry mix was falling from the sky, stinging his skin with every touch and crackling on the ground like breakfast cereal.

  That was when Vaughn realized he’d forgotten breakfast. Nothing seemed to matter that morning more than not getting trapped with Oliver and his plots, which covered the house like a film of grime. His threats, which lay openly on every nightstand and behind every door.

  He could stop for a snack now, and risk hypothermia before he reached Blackbrook. Or he could press on. Vaughn wrapped his scarf higher over his mouth, pulled his hood farther down around his face, and wished very hard that he’d remembered his balaclava. Gemma had never liked them. Said they made people look like criminals. Oliver had always made a point of wearing his after that. Vaughn only found it funny that people from away, like Gemma, grew up worried more about bank robbers than about their noses freezing off.

  Between the drifts and the ice, it took Vaughn more than an hour to reach the bridge over the ravine on the main road—or rather, what was left of the bridge. English wasn’t Vaughn’s subject, but he was pretty sure there was a metaphor hidden somewhere in the cracked and broken tangle of lumber, rubble, and steel.

  He should have packed more supplies. No one was getting on or off the Blackbrook campus anytime soon. On the other side of the ravine, he saw the old boathouse, already being buffeted by waves as the storm surge pushed the tide up the banks.

  Vaughn turned inland, tracing the path of devastation toward the neighborhood overlooking the ravine. Several times, he heard thunderous crashes in the trees, echoing from rock to rock and drowning out the storm’s crackling hush. Several times, he broke into a sprint as the branches above him creaked and moaned beneath the growing weight of ice.

  This wasn’t like the storms he’d grown up with. Snowstorms would muffle sounds, creating drifts of silence Vaughn had always thought you could get lost in. He’d once heard a song about a man who’d gone walking in a silent wood, only to slip into an enchanted world. But when Vaughn finally came to a break in the trees where the woods gave way to the ravine road, he realized this was no fairyland.

  It was hell.

  Once the home of lumber workers before the mill had shut down, the ravine cottages had seen better days. Porches tilted into the valley and paint was more of a suggestion than a promise.

  Vaughn and his brother had been born in one of these cottages. That one, with the faded green door. The one that currently lay in a mangled wreck at the bottom of the ravine.

  A few cottages got stove up! Typical Maine understatement. Half the homes here had been utterly obliterated. The road was a mess of roof tiles and splintered clapboard, and as Vaughn picked his way through the wreckage, he could barely differenti
ate between sheets of ice and the scattered shards of windowpanes.

  He spared one last glance at the house with the faded green door. For just a moment, he remembered Gemma’s face. Pale and sunken, as it had been the morning he’d found her.

  Be glad she didn’t live to see this. That was the echo of Oliver in his head. That house had ceased being a home long before Gemma’s death, and she wouldn’t even have remembered it, near the end. She’d remembered so little, after all.

  Just her grievances.

  He saw a flash of color against the gray and black of the storm. Another person out in this weather, picking her way through the rubble. Town this size, you knew everyone by their parkas. This was old Mrs. Douglass, from the post office. He waved and she gave him a Yankee nod.

  “Vaughn?” The woman’s voice echoed across the ravine.

  “Ayuh.” She’d had a fifty-fifty shot. He gestured up the slope. “Is the old footbridge still good?”

  “For another few minutes, ’til the storm surge comes in. Don’t tell me you’re going to try to make it to Blackbrook! You’ll get trapped out there! I’m sure they won’t mind if you miss class just this once.”

  Better out there than in the house with his brother. “There’s no class, ma’am,” he explained. “I just want to make sure the flatlanders come through the storm all right.”

  Even through the layers of scarf over her features, he could see the face she made. “Well, good luck to you.” She sounded like Oliver when she said it. As though, if he cast his lot with the Blackbrook folks, she’d wash her hands of the whole matter.

  If he slipped on the bridge over the ravine and fell to his death, well, that was his choice, too.

  That was how it went with those from Rocky Point and their fraught relationship with the school. Since the mill had closed, almost everyone in town made their living off Blackbrook one way or another. But that didn’t mean they had to like it.

  Vaughn had long ago gotten used to the contradiction. All his neighbors bursting with pride that he was a Blackbrook kid, even as they spat the term at the other students at the school.

  Near the top of the ravine was an old handmade footbridge sticking out from the side of the rock. The ice lay thick across its surface, and the drop down the bluff beneath its splintered boards was steep and slippery.

  He could hear Oliver now. Are you numb, risking your life for Blackbrook kids?

  But it wasn’t for them. It had never been for them. It was for Vaughn. He put a foot on the bridge. It creaked and shuddered, but it always did that, even when they’d been kids and Oliver had dared him to cross that very first time.

  Vaughn had never been the daredevil in the family. Every risk they’d ever taken, it had been Oliver forcing his hand. He took a step, and then another. The ice crackled and shattered beneath him. The woods tinkled around him.

  He wondered if Mrs. Douglass was watching him. He wondered if they’d find his body at the base of the ravine. And then he wondered how things were at Blackbrook, and took another tentative step.

  His boots slid out from under him. He grabbed for the rock as he went down, gloved fingers scraping uselessly against the stone. The crampons finally pierced the surface and stopped the slide, and he righted himself, his balance all askew beneath the weight of his pack. One more step, and he’d be safe.

  There. He’d made it. He looked back across the ravine, seeking out the form of Mrs. Douglass in her bright coat, but she was gone. Figured. Vaughn pressed on.

  It took another hour for the high gabled roofs of Tudor House marking the edge of the Blackbrook campus to come into view, and by that time, Vaughn had lost all feeling in his toes and fingers. He remembered learning that victims of hypothermia imagined they were too hot right before the end, and took that as a good sign, as he had never been so cold in his life.

  Tudor House looked dark and empty from the outside, but the power was probably off here, too. He knew Mrs. White would not have left. Vaughn struggled up the marble steps to the porch, the spikes on his boots probably leaving nice long gashes in the stone, and knocked the lion’s head knocker on the ornate front door.

  After a moment, a girl answered. Her skin had the pale, nearly translucent cast most people got around here when the days grew short. Her hair was a muddy brown and aggressively brushed into a short, bushy bob. Her long bangs and square-rimmed glasses nearly hid her shockingly deep blue eyes, which widened as she saw him.

  “Vaughn?” she asked. “You must be freezing. Get inside.”

  He obeyed.

  “Though I don’t know how warm it is in here,” the girl went on, closing the door.

  At once, the sound of the wind and the ice ceased. Vaughn nearly gasped from relief.

  It was dim in the hall, but not dark, as light still came in from the tall window over the door. In the gloom, one might still imagine Tudor House looking as it had a century ago, in its glossy, Gilded Age glory.

  “The power went out last night. Rusty’s working on the generator.” She looked up at him. “Are you okay? You’re not frozen, are you?”

  “It’s a little nippy out there.” She was very pretty, this girl in the nice warm hallway where he’d found himself. She wore an enormous sweater—one that looked like it had been knit for a linebacker—over a pair of fleece leggings and giant, puffy slippers. “Orchid?” he tried as he pulled off his gloves and hat. He was famously terrible with names, but that one had stuck.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “From history class?”

  “Sorry,” he said, unwrapping his scarf. He was used to apologizing for forgetting people’s names and letting people come up with their own reasons why. “I’m so cold.”

  “Of course!” She took him by the arm. “Come sit by the fire we’ve got going in the lounge. Mrs. White made a stew . . .”

  He let himself be led into the lounge, where there was, as promised, a most marvelous fire. There was also another girl there, curled up under what he knew was one of Mrs. White’s handmade crazy quilts. This girl he knew, too. Scarlett Mistry. Junior class president, all around superstar, rich witch.

  As Oliver would say, the most Blackbrook kid in school.

  Scarlett narrowed her eyes in his direction as he took off his coat and got closer to the flames.

  “Vaughn Green?” she sneered. “What are you doing here?”

  3

  Scarlett

  Scarlett Mistry supposed there were natural disasters everywhere. But it was all so very inconvenient.

  When she was a child, her father had gone apoplectic over a hurricane that had flattened one of their multi-million-dollar high-rises in Miami Beach. A landslide in Vail had once collapsed the roof of a Mistry Hotels chalet. And her mother was constantly threatening to sell off the property in New Orleans before the levees gave way for good. Even in her family’s native Gujarat, India, there were terrible floods when the monsoons came.

  Property was a risky way to make a living, in Scarlett’s opinion—not that she’d ever say as much to her parents. She’d long ago decided on an alternative route to fame and fortune, one free from the uncertainty of climate change and its unpredictable effect on the real estate market.

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t factored in power outages.

  So instead of being able to check any of her feeds, she was stuck sitting in a wingback chair, her phone as dead as a brick in her hand, and listening to Orchid pepper the townie with questions about how bad the storm had gotten.

  He wasn’t big on details, that Vaughn Green.

  Not that Scarlett needed Vaughn’s opinion on how screwed they all were. After all, she was spending the afternoon sitting under a quilt by a fire like some sort of pioneer girl. Even the old crank radio the old, cranky janitor had dug out of some dusty storage shed wasn’t tuning in to anything useful. The governor thought they should evacuate—but it was far beyond too late for that, according to Vaughn’s report. The bridge to the mainland was in shambles, washed out by some kind of super
-high tide called a storm surge—Scarlett had learned from the radio and everyone else’s sage nods at the word—that had brought in massive chunks of sea ice, water, and debris.

  “It’s a good thing Tudor House is on a hill,” said Orchid. “Or we might get flooded, too.”

  “We still might,” said Mrs. White, coming in with a tray of food for the half-frozen Vaughn. What had he been thinking, tromping in here from the village in this weather? “The pipes burst once during weather like this. Rusty’s done his best to winterize this place, but you never know with a house this old.”

  Vaughn jumped up to retrieve the tray from the dorm proctor. Scarlett had always liked Mrs. White, mainly because the old woman viewed any resident of Tudor House as under her immediate and all-consuming protection. She would even stand up to teachers and administrators on your behalf—a fact that Scarlett had not yet deployed for herself, but was glad to be aware of, should the need arise. Honestly, it was half the reason Tudor House had been Scarlett’s top choice of dorm, despite being so far from the classrooms. Mrs. White might look like an aging hippie in her crocheted shawls and ever-present witchy broomstick skirt—even in the dead of winter!—but the old lady was entirely made of stone and fire.

  “Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. White. She lowered herself gingerly into a nearby chair. “This cold is getting to be too much for me, too. Maybe I’ll retire and move to Florida.”

  Scarlett laughed. “Mrs. White, you’ll never leave Tudor House.” She was an institution at Blackbrook. People said she’d been here since Tudor housed a girls’ reform school half a century ago.

  “True.” Mrs. White looked at Vaughn. “People come to Rocky Point and don’t leave.”