All in all, there were five men in the senior class of 1985 at RFU who had the same Jane Eyre line as their yearbook quote, along with anumber.
“92158,” Hunter said. “What the hell does thatmean?”
I shook my head slowly. “No idea. A code to open a safe, maybe? Or a street number for an address the new members need toknow?”
“Yeah, maybe. It’s way too short to be coordinates or a phonenumber.”
I frowned. “Wait a minute… I noticed something before.” I went back to the third guy and put my finger underneath the 1. “His number is the only one with a period after it. That can’t be an accident, canit?”
“That would make it 921.58,” Hunter said, scratching at his cheek. “Still means nothing tome.”
My eyes widened as clarity hit me like a bolt of lightning. “Oh! I know what itis!”
“What?”
“It’s a Dewey Decimal code,” I said excitedly. “You know, the call number for a book in alibrary.”
“Oh, yeah,” Hunter said, brows lifting. “That’s gotta beit.”
“Yup.” I rose to my feet and held out my hand. “Let’s go find thatbook.”
9
Laney
Once we gotto the library, it didn’t take us long to find the correct row ofshelves.
“921.46…. 921.54… oh, here it is!” I said, tapping the spine of a thick book with the call number921.58.
I pulled it out and showed it to Hunter. “Transnistrian Architecture: A Marxist Interpretation, by James R. Neilson,” I readaloud.
Hunter snorted. “Who the fuck would want to readthat?”
I arched an eyebrow. “I think that’s the point,” I said. “The Network wants their stuff to be accessible so their members can come in and grab it whenever they want, but it needs to be something non-members will totally ignore. Hidden in plainsight.”
“Well, let’s have alook.”
I sank to the carpeted floor and leaned my back against the shelf before flipping the front cover open. The first page had nothing but an image of a serpent coiled around a rose. “Just what I thought,” I murmured. “It’s a fake book cover to mask the realshit.”
Hunter slid down next to me, brows furrowed. “Keepgoing.”
I turned to the second page. It had four columns, each filled with letters, symbols, and strings of numbers. “Any idea what this means?” I asked, glancingupward.
“No fucking clue,” Hunterreplied.
I kept flipping through. The next few pages were exactly the same as the second one—numbers, letters, symbols, and then more numbers. It all seemed to be in some sort of order, hence the column arrangements, but I couldn’t make any sense ofit.
There were a lot of totally blank pages after that. At least twenty-five of them. Then I found a full page of information in neat blackhandwriting.
“This is more like it,” I murmured. “Actualwords.”
Hunter frowned and tilted his head to read it. “Looks like a mini dossier on someone named LucyWalker.”
I quickly flipped through the next few pages. They were all similar to that first one—a woman’s name, followed by information about her like her date of birth, hair and eye color, height and weight, and family background. It also included a date of initiation into the Medusa Society, contact details, a record of all the money spent on her, and a short description of her usual attitude andbehavior.
One page in particular stood out from the others. While all of the other entries were written solely in black ink, this girl’s name had a red line drawn through it. Her name was Vera Everett, and she’d been initiated in1995.
“This must be all of the Medusa girls over the years,” I said, going back to the first ones. “Looks like Lucy Walker, Yui Saito, Emilia Emerson, Jennifer Bing, and Lisa Adams were the first. They were all initiated in 1986 at the old RFA across town, while this campus was stillRFU.”