“Uhhh, I don’t remember off the top of my head …”
“Dr. Strauss, the physics professor, you don’t remember him coming in at nine p.m.?” I asked, growing irritated. “You’d think a professor coming to visit a student after hours would be noticed.”
Max shot me a look and took off his hat. He flashed her a smile, all dimples and pearly teeth. “We sure hate to be a bother, but anything that jogs your memory would really help.”
The girl stared at Max, and for a second, I thought she’d drowned in those baby blues. “Yeah, I remember,” she said at last. “Well, it’s not, like, that unusual. He had stuff he was bringing her. A stack of papers, I think?”
I squinted. The 9 had been written over with a 3. “And the logs here, it looks like the time was changed. Do you remember changing it?”
“I didn’t change it, but he probably got one of the other girls to. They love him. I’m sure if he asked, they wouldn’t even question it. No one’s gonna risk getting on his bad side.”
“His bad side? What do you mean?”
She looked at me knowingly. “You went here, right? Then you know how he is. Oh, people can try to speak out against him, but until a whole lot of girls come forward, it doesn’t matter. The last girl who tried to start shit against him doesn’t even go here anymore. Then there’s the fact that, because he’s hot, some girls don’t mind the attention. I don’t know if this girl Dani minded or not, but I guarantee if it did bother her, she probably didn’t think there was much she could do about it. Someone like Strauss, who’s that popular around campus, he’s basically untouchable.”
Or was, I thought. Strauss wasn’t on the council anymore. Maybe someone finally took a stand against him. Maybe he wasn’t as untouchable as we all thought.
The handsome, charismatic, twenty-nine-year-old professor on top of the world, taken down a few notches. Removed from his position of power and obviously pissed about it. Maybe he’d wanted revenge.
Maybe he’d gotten it.
Before heading in for the night, I looked up at the bull skull over House Torlaine, trying to spot the graffiti mark I’d seen from the balcony. It was harder to see in the dark, illuminated only by the flickering floodlight above the door, but it was definitely there. I had a better view from the building’s west corner if I carefully avoided a prickly pear cactus buried in the loose soil. Now I saw it wasn’t just a graffiti tag, but some sort of odd symbol, a circle drawn in black ink on one side of the bull’s snout, with a triangle formed by ten dots inside it (one dot on the first line, two on the second, three on the third, four on the fourth). Beneath the other eye socket, the number 191. The way the roof sloped, the only way you could see them was if you were standing at this exact spot or on the balcony on the back of Ludlow House.
191?
A room number? The dormitory rooms only went up to 36. I thought of the nearby buildings, wondering if any of the classroom blocks went to 191. It was a small campus. Did we even have 191 classrooms? I wasn’t sure.
I wanted to study it more, but then the RA was shuffling me inside. I went in and closed the door.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Max walked into the library around noon. I shouldn’t say that, because of course that’s not how Max moves. He saunters. He sauntered into the library, big, bright smile on his face, hat drawn over his head, hands in his pockets, the perfect cool guy. Meanwhile, my hair was a wreck, eyeliner smudged down my cheeks. It’d only been a couple of days, but I felt like I hadn’t bathed in weeks.
He sat down at the table and pulled two books from my unread stack. “Marboli’s Hex and Other Curses from the Ancient World?Curse Tablets, Dolls, and Spells That Bind? Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
I propped up on my elbow, eying the notebook across from me. “I’ve been thinking … There’s something else we need to try. Orsomeoneelse. But you’re not going to like it …”
He looked at me, and I looked at him. He’d already started backing away. “Oh no no no no, Cella, no way. Come on.”
“We need to talk to her, Max …”
“No, come on, there are tons of other leads still.” For his size and general—let’s go with woodsy nature—you wouldn’t think Max was scared of anything, but he could be the biggest chicken. Spiders sent him running into the next room, complaining about headaches or poor air quality as he scurried out the door. Heights were also a particularly sore topic. I was all but forbidden to mention the time we went to the county fair and he very nearly had a heart attack on the kids’ Ferris wheel.
“Look, we’re not going to be able to fix her if we never see her, and she might be able to give us something concrete that points to who did this to her and how. Our council meeting is two days from now. Do you really want to show up empty-handed? We have to talk to her eventually.”
He grumbled, shoulders sagging. “I know. I was just hoping it would be later rather than sooner.”
When we stepped into Maritza’s cottage, everything felt about ten degrees colder than the air outside. Dani was lying in the bed, and Maritza was at the stove, brewing tea.
“How is she?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “She is getting worse. Whatever this is, her body can’t take it for much longer.” She held up a rag near the copper sink, nearly soaked through with blood. “Started last night. I’ve had to change the bandages on her arms and legs twice already this morning.”
“Would it be okay if we speak to her?”
Maritza bit her lip. “She’s not good today. You should come back tomorrow.”
Max turned around; that was all he needed to hear, but I took a step closer.
