Gail was quiet, staring into the distance. This was so much for her to take in.
“You know,” Mary said perkily, trying to clear the air. “This town is mentioned in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Victor and his bride honeymoon here in the book. Isn’t that extraordinary?”
I nodded but didn’t speak. That bit of trivia was not the fun palette-cleanser she thought it was. Victor Frankenstein’s honeymoon did not end well for anybody.
Chapter 17
Biba
By the time Gail’s aunt and uncle dropped us off at Stormcloud Academy, we already had a plan to confirm the story we’d just learned.
During her brief time in Poppy and Erin Holland’s circle, Gail had learned that Poppy was Miss Amelia’s student assistant. Sort of an overstuffed, very official teacher’s pet. It was a perfect union of Poppy’s tight-ass priggishness and her need for influence.
Gail remembered her long monologues about all the extremely sensitive and important tasks that Miss Amelia trusted her with. To hear Poppy tell it, she knew every dirty secret about every student at the school. She had seen statements for Swiss bank accounts and letters of recommendation signed by presidents and kings.
One of the jobs Poppy found dull, but Gail was intrigued by, was organizing the Stormcloud historical archives.
“It’s fucking disgusting up there,” Poppy had complained, “musty and dusty, full of mold and mildew and huge bloody spiders. I don’t see why they don’t chuck the whole thing into the trash. Bunch of ancient papers and photos.”
That had offended Gail’s sentimental nature. For all she knew, there were documents in that archive dating back centuries, to before the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, or Switzerland. Those archives could contain treasures.
Returning to campus the Friday before classes resumed, we wondered what those papers had to say about the old Kings of Stormcloud and their connection to Gail’s father. Only one way to find out….
We dropped our bags in Gail’s room and walked down the hall to Amelia’s office. The one and only time I’d been there was two months ago when I still reeked from the urine that had been dumped over me by Erin at Zephyr’s direction. Something told me that the Kings’ activities thirty years ago were more dangerous than that disgusting prank.
Poppy said there was a curtain in the anteroom to Amelia’s office behind which was a staircase to the archive. Gail brought along a letter opener that had belonged to her father, a keepsake from Cornwall to remind her of him. Wedging it between the doorframe and the door, she was able to jimmy open the latch. Once inside, we found a cascading, crimson-velvet sheath covering the left side of the anteroom, opposite Poppy’s little assistant’s table. Behind it was an inky dark spiraling stairwell, leading claustrophobically upward in narrow swirls.
“We doing this?” I asked uncertainly.
“If a bunch of bats attack us, I’m using you as a shield.”
We turned on the flashlights on our phones and slowly, cautiously proceeded upward. There was an unmistakable smell of fungus and musty parchment above us. Without a railing or banister, I placed a steadying hand on the stonework to my right. Gail placed a hand on my waist. It was goddamned spooky on those stairs. They seemed to curve around and around endlessly with only the whistle of the manor draft and our freaked-out panting to fill the silence.
At last, we reached the top. Poppy wasn’t lying. The place was a mess.
The Stormcloud archive room looked like a hundred hoarders had taken continuous residence there across twenty overlapping generations. There were stacks of pages from every conceivable era, from parchment paper to dot-matrix printouts. Bookshelves were jampacked with visitor logs, student publications, yearbooks, and photobooks.
The furniture was a mishmash of old dining tables, sideboards, desks, and bureaus. Some of them looked to be two hundred years old. With a little repair and some varnish, they could probably be sold for enough money to pay a year’s tuition at Harvard.
“Over here,” Gail shouted from the far end of the room. “Shine your flashlight this way.”
She’d found a candelabra with four half-spent tallow candles and a box of stove matches. What an atrocious lighting option in a room that was 90% paper!
Once the candles were lit, I could see why she had called me over. Stacked before us was an impenetrable wall of wooden crates. Each was scrawled with a year and term: Fall 1995, Spring 1996, and so on. Each box was filled with campus photos. If there was evidence of the students who’d had a vendetta against Gail’s dad, this would be the best way to identify them.
“You have any idea when he was a student here?” I asked.
“Aunt Mary said thirty years. I’d say thirty-five sounds closer to the mark.”
“Mid-eighties then.”
“I’ll take ’84 and ‘85. You take ’86.”
Getting the boxes out was a pain. They must have been jammed in stacks decades ago and left to settle until they had to be wrenched apart. Once we had them down, though, it was sort of a goof. Even though the pictures were taken in the era of color photos, most were black-and-white. I had to giggle at the dated hairstyles: girls with feathered swoops and awful perms, guys with pompadours and hair-metal shag. Everyone was in acid-washed jeans, cropped tees, headbands, and hoop earrings.