basis,” Sister Rose added. The smile vanished in place of a serious look. “We will see how the first semester goes and decide at the end of it whether or not you’ll continue at St. Ursula’s.”
That stung a bit, but still—it was her first full-time teaching job! If she had to prove herself in it, well, that was probably to be expected. Any school would want to evaluate her competence.
Sister Rose abruptly stood up. Lauren scrambled to her feet, still stunned. The headmistress stuck out her hand and gave Lauren’s a surprisingly firm shake. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Kavanaugh. I look forward to your arrival next week.”
On the train journey back to her cramped apartment, Lauren replayed the interview in her head and wondered at having gotten the job. She needed it so badly and she’d gotten it.
All the way out here on the train, she’d kept up an internal pep talk, telling herself that if she didn’t get this job, there would be another. Only not this year.
It was too late for any other job to come through. The most she could have expected was for some regular teacher to go on maternity leave and free up a long-term substitute position.
So what that she had to live so far from a town. There were buses—she’d manage. And she could save money and pay off the credit card companies breathing down her neck. Every day she’d checked her messages and the mail, hoping to hear from a school, but now she wouldn’t have to bother.
Thinking of the mail reminded her of what had arrived in yesterday’s post. There’d been such a gap between this letter and the last that she’d gotten a shock when she saw the slim white envelope stuck in the middle of a pile of bills. She thought—she’d hoped—he’d forgotten all about her, but he never would.
It had taken him so long to find her and now she would be leaving again. Maybe this time he wouldn’t be able to find her. She stared out at the dirty window at the wet landscape streaking past, hands clenched in fists in her lap. Maybe at the school she would finally be safe.
Chapter Two
At night the lights go out and the school rests. From the sky, spotted by low-flying planes, it looks like some great coiled beast, the peaks of the rooftops like scales on a dragon’s back.
Lights must be out in the dormitories at ten; that is the rule and that is the official end to the day.
The first day was over. The hustle of moving in, the rush of old girls finding one another and the stress of new girls finding their way around—all of this noise was absorbed by the stone buildings and dissipated into the woods surrounding them. The day was over and everything that has happened now slipped into the past.
At night the school rests, but not everyone. There was movement in the dark hallways. Hours have passed. Those who were watching waited and then wait some more. Fifteen minutes after midnight they slip out of the doorways from different houses. They are used to carrying their shoes and stepping silently. They are used to pulling hoods over their faces.
Out of the houses they came, silent figures moving through the darkness. They don’t speak until they’re past the buildings, until they’re in the shelter of the trees.
“Hurry,” one of them said. “We’re late.” She held a small flashlight pointed at the ground. A round beam of light, eight inches across, is all that guides them. Still, they are used to this. They found the path they needed and moved along it.
“How do you know she’s even going to be here?”
“I heard her telling someone.”
Their feet crunched quietly against the crushed limestone, but they didn’t worry. No one will hear them out here, well, maybe not no one.
They found her near the pond. She was taking off her clothes slowly, piece by piece, and they watched her in the darkness. One of them giggled as the girl stripped off her bra and panties, adding them to the pile of clothes she left on the bank. She didn’t hear, though, because she was moving toward the water.
“You couldn’t pay me to swim in there,” one of them whispered only to be hushed by the others. The girl looks as if she might agree, lifting her foot out as soon as she put it in, obviously cold, her pale arms wrapped around an even paler torso. But this was only for a second. In the next, she stepped into the water, moving forward until she was swallowed by the dark liquid.
“What’s she doing? Where did she go?” A hiss in the silence.
“Ssh, there she is.”
Up again, emerging from the water like a sylph, like Venus, her hair hanging about her pale shoulders as she stood for a moment. And then she began to swim, careful strokes with her head above the water. She floated on her back and they could see that she was staring up at the sky. She was saying something. She was talking to the moon.
“God, she’s so weird.”
“Where’s the rope?”
She doesn’t see them until she’s swimming back to the shore, until she’s stepped forward in the soft mud of the bank, until it’s too late to run, too late to do anything but scream.
Chapter Three
There are flames licking her hands, curling around the pale pink of her skin like orange petals on some deadly flower. The heat is curling the tiny almost invisible hairs on her bare calves. Something sizzles and there is a smell she doesn’t know, a charred scent, steak on a grill but with something sweet overlying it.
Lauren woke with a start, breathing hard. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, expecting to see the brightly colored Matisse poster she’d hung over a long scar in the chipped plaster of her apartment in Hoboken. Instead there are bare, cream-colored walls.
She didn’t see the battered chest of drawers she’d rescued from someone’s garbage. There is only a single bed with a nightstand tucked beside it and a closet. Above the bed, hanging above her head, is a crucifix in dark wood with the Christ figure in silver. She reached up a hand and ran it over the cool metal. The clock on the nightstand glowed five o’clock. Her first class as a full-time teacher would begin in just under four hours.
Moving day had been yesterday. She’d arrived along with most of the students. The sound of car doors slamming and teenage voices squealing echoed through the halls. Boxes and trunks were hauled into rooms by drivers. Music began playing almost as soon as the first girl arrived.
There were ten dormitories, called “houses,” all of them in the same Victorian Gothic style as the main building, all of them named for Doctors of the Church. Six began with “A”: Ambrose, Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Anthony, and Avila. The remaining four began with “B”: Basil, Bonaventure, Bernard, Bede. Lauren’s apartment was in Augustine House.
The inside of the building was relatively modern. The long hallways were carpeted and each room was outfitted with twin beds, desks, dressers, and a shared bookcase. The windows were casement style, but they were double-glazed and the house smelled of fresh paint.
At one end of the hallway was a large common room, where girls could watch TV or play the board games that were stacked on a shelf. At the other end was her apartment.
“I know it’s small,” Sister Rose said,
