Tom Dolby - The Trust

“Not that Meckling freak,” Phoebe said, jumping in. “He’s like the Nurse Ratched of shrinks. I still can’t believe my mom took Daniel’s recommendation. I guess she didn’t know that he was part of it all.”

“I know someone good,” Thad said. “He helped my older brother when he was going through a lot of stuff.”

Lauren nodded. “I guess so. I don’t know. I just want it all to go away.”

“I’m not sure we can make it go away,” Nick said. “But I think we can get out of it.” He looked at Phoebe. “My grandfather gave me a challenge yesterday to search for something.”

“To search for what?” Thad asked.

“We don’t know exactly,” Phoebe said. “I’m worried it might be a trap.”

“We might as well try,” Thad said. “And you think this would get all of us out of the Society?”

“He said that if we solve this, ‘you and your friends will never hear from the Society again,’” Nick said. “The search starts at the beach.”

“Which beach?” Patch asked.

“That’s what we don’t know,” Phoebe said.

“Phoebe and I will start this coming Friday,” Nick said. “For now, we need to figure out what to do about these meetings, right?” Nick said. “In particular, the one tomorrow night.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what we have to meet about,” Phoebe said. “Like they couldn’t just let us digest everything that’s happened so far?”

“I’m not going,” Lauren said. “I can’t go on any longer with it.”

“Me, neither,” Thad said.

“Pheeb, what about you?” Lauren asked.

She looked at Lauren and Thad. “I’m with you guys. I’ll skip.”

“Maybe Patch and I should go,” Nick said. “You know, so they don’t think something’s going on?”

“I guess so,” Phoebe said.

“I’m just so angry about it all,” Lauren said. “I think we should go to the police. What could the Society do to us? We could tell the cops everything we know. I don’t even care if I don’t get into college, if they bust us for being drunk that night. We weren’t responsible for Alejandro’s death. We were partying with him. It wasn’t that part that killed him.”

Everyone looked uneasy.

“Do you really think the police would believe us?” Nick said.

“They would have to believe something,” Phoebe said. “Don’t you think? I mean, we’ve made this mistake before. We should have gone to the police the night that Alejandro disappeared.”

“We didn’t know what was happening. We didn’t know how bad it was going to get,” Nick said.

“Honestly, inside the club, most people didn’t even see him,” Thad said. He turned to Patch. “What do you think?”

Patch shrugged. “I, um, I don’t really know. It’s hard for me to say, since I wasn’t there.”

Patch realized, at that moment, that this was part of his uneasiness. Even though he should have felt like a real member, he didn’t. He would never feel like as much of an insider as they did. Even though they all greeted him warmly and treated him as a friend, he still felt like an interloper. They were the chosen ones, and that was the way it was always going to be.

And why, he wondered, did he want to feel like an insider to this group that he and his friends were now trying so desperately to escape?

One of the perks of being a member of the Society was that its town house on East 66th Street had a private, glassed-in rooftop swimming pool. The text message that Nick, Patch, and the others had received said that on Monday night there would be a pool party, a rare treat in chilly January.

As Nick approached the doors of the classic brownstone with Patch, he thought about how, for the first time, the two of them would be going to a Society meeting together. For a moment, it felt as if this was the way things were supposed to be, as if the world had righted itself and all had been put back in order.

Of course, that was far from the truth of the situation. Nick sighed inaudibly as the door was opened for them by Anastasia Lin, who was Phoebe’s mentor in the class above her. She was dressed casually, in jeans and a cashmere sweater, though she wore her usual dramatic red lipstick.

“Nick! Patch! It’s so good to see you,” she said as her eyes darted from one to the other. “Is Phoebe with you?”

Nick noticed Patch giving him an awkward sideways glance. “No, um, she’s coming separately,” Nick said. “She might be a little late. She said she wasn’t feeling well.” He hoped the lie would allay any suspicion when it later became clear that Phoebe was skipping the meeting.

Anastasia led Nick and Patch up several flights of stairs in the direction of the rooftop pool. Nick wanted to give Patch the full tour of the town house, but he also didn’t want to attract suspicion from any of the other members who were roaming about. Like a classic gentlemen’s club, the place had the odor of cigars and worn leather, and its walls were adorned with aging oil paintings of mediocre quality, along with framed medals, photographs, and letters from politicians, all yellowing at the corners and wrinkled in their frames.

With everything Nick now knew about the Society, being at the town house felt cheap. He wouldn’t exactly describe the first night there in the fall as magical, but it had possessed a certain aura of exclusivity, of the idea that they were part of something special. There had been a richness that the building held; now, in its place, all he felt was a troubling emptiness, the feeling of promises broken, of betrayal.

“So this is it,” Patch said as he looked around. They were on the top floor. The entryway to the swimming pool had a white marble floor and a tiled dome ceiling. Through the entryway, blue light from the pool flickered against the potted palms that lined the sides of the room. The roof of the swimming pool was glass, so you could see the stars as you floated in the water.

A bar had been set up against one wall, and Emily van Piper, one of the members of the class above them, was mixing drinks. She was wearing a blue swimsuit with a wrap tied around her waist. With her blond hair, she fit in perfectly with the pool party atmosphere. Nick knew Emily was Lauren’s mentor and would surely notice she was missing as well. Nick and Patch got ginger ales, but luckily, Emily didn’t ask about Lauren.

Nick stood with Patch on the side of the pool. “Are you going to put your suit on?” Patch asked, motioning to Nick’s messenger bag. Both of them had dutifully packed swimsuits, as per the instructions they had been given, but swimming was the last thing Nick wanted to do.

Nick shook his head. “No.”

As he looked at all the members splashing around the pool and relaxing so easily, Nick thought back again to the first time he had been here, in the fall. It had all been fun and entrancing and mysterious. Most exciting of all had been meeting Phoebe, seeing her in a swimsuit a mere twenty-four hours after they had met. He couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t interested him, that he hadn’t been paying attention.

Charles Lawrence walked over to Nick. He wore a bright red square-cut bathing suit and had a towel draped around his neck as if it were the middle of summer and he was a lifeguard at the country club doing his hourly patrol.

“Having fun?” Charles asked.

Nick gave Charles a blank look. It was difficult to know how to act around Charles-he was, after all, the de facto leader of the older class of Conscripts. He had started out as a friendly guy, someone everyone liked, but as last semester progressed, Nick suspected Charles of having a hand in Jared’s and Alejandro’s deaths. He was the one who had handed Alejandro a drink before his collapse, and he was the first one who had discovered Jared at Cleopatra’s Needle. Nick didn’t know whether to be afraid of Charles or to scorn him.