Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

But what would stop him the next time he tried to push his way into her? Would she have to return to the borderlands to sever the connection? She’d do it. She’d throw herself on Salome Nils’s mercy to be let back into Wolf’s Head. She’d let Dawes drown her a thousand times.

Alex turned, keeping her back against the door. It felt like safe harbor. Afternoon light filtered through the remaining stained-glass window in the foyer. The other had been boarded up, the pebbles and shards of shattered glass lying dull in the deep shadow. There was blood on the old wallpaper where Dawes had hit her head. No one had made an attempt to clean it.

Alex peered through the archway to the parlor, half-expecting to see Dawes there. But there was no sign of her or her binders or her index cards either. The house felt empty, battered and wounded. It put a hollow ache in Alex’s heart. She’d never had to return to Ground Zero. And she’d never loved Ground Zero. She’d been happy to turn her back on it and never look into the face of the horrors she’d done there.

But maybe she did love Il Bastone, this old house with its warm wood and its quiet and its welcome.

She pushed away from the door and got a dustpan and broom from the pantry. It took her a long while to sweep up the broken glass. She poured it all into a plastic bag, sealed it with a strip of tape. She just wasn’t sure if she should throw it out. Maybe they could put the broken pieces in the crucible with some goat’s milk, make it whole.

It was only when she went to wash her hands in the little powder room that she realized there was dried blood all over her face. No wonder Tripp had asked if she was okay. She rinsed it off, watching the water swirl in the basin before it vanished.

There was bread and cheese that hadn’t spoiled yet in the refrigerator. She made herself eat lunch, though she wasn’t hungry. Then she went upstairs to the library.

Dawes hadn’t replied to her text. She probably wasn’t even looking at her phone. She’d gone to ground too. Alex couldn’t blame her, but that meant she would have to find a way to block her connection to the Bridegroom on her own.

Alex yanked the Albemarle Book from the shelf but hesitated. She’d recognized the first date North had forced her to scrawl in her notebook instantly: 1854, the year of his murder. The others had been meaningless to her. She owed North nothing. But Darlington had thought the Bridegroom murder was worth investigating. He would want to know what those dates meant. Maybe Alex wanted to know too. It felt like giving in, but North didn’t have to find out he’d snagged her curiosity.

Alex unslung her satchel and took out her Shakespeare notebook, opening it to the blood-spattered page: 1854 1869 1883. If she did some kind of search for all those years, the library would go mad. She had to find a way to narrow the parameters.

Or maybe she just needed to find Darlington’s notes.

Alex remembered the words he’d written in the carriage catalog: the first? If he’d actually done any research on North’s case, she hadn’t found it in the Virgil bedroom or at Black Elm. But what if his notes were here, in the library? Alex opened the Albemarle Book and looked at Darlington’s last entry—the schematic for Rosenfeld. But right above it was a request for something called the Daily New Havener. She copied the request exactly and returned the book to the shelf.

When the bookcase stopped shaking, she pried it open and entered the library. The shelves were filled with stack after stack of what looked less like newspapers than flyers packed with tiny type. There were thousands of them.

Alex stepped outside and opened the Albemarle Book again. Darlington had been working in the library the night he’d disappeared. She wrote out a request for the Rosenfeld schematics.

This time when she pulled the door open, the shelves were empty except for a single book lying flat on its side. It was large and slender, bound in oxblood leather, and completely free of dust. Alex set it on the table at the center of the room and let it fall open. There, between elevations of the third and fourth subterranean levels of Rosenfeld Hall, was a sheet of yellow legal paper, folded neatly and covered in Darlington’s tiny, jagged scrawl—the last thing he’d written before someone sent him to hell.

She was afraid to unfold the page. It might be nothing. Notes on a term paper. A list of repairs needed at Black Elm. But she didn’t believe that. That night in December, Darlington had been working on something he cared about, something he’d been picking at for months. He’d been distracted as he worked, maybe thinking of the night ahead, maybe worried about his apprentice, who never did the damn reading. He hadn’t wanted to bring his notes with him, so he’d stashed them someplace safe. Right here, in this book of blueprints. He’d thought he would be back soon enough.

“I should have been a better Dante,” she whispered.

But maybe she could do better now.

Gently, she unfolded the page. The first line read: 1958-Colina Tillman-Wrexham. Heart attack? Stroke?

A series of dates followed—coupled with what seemed to be women’s names. The last three dates on the list matched those North had forced her to write in her notebook.

1902-Sophie Mishkan-Rhinelander-Brain fever?

1898-Effie White-Stone-Dropsy (Edema?)

1883-Zuzanna Mazurski-Phelps-Apoplexy

1869-Paoletta DeLauro-Kingsley-Stabbing

1854-Daisy Fanning Whitlock-Russell-Gunshot

The first? Darlington had believed that Daisy was the first, but the first what? Daisy had been shot, Paoletta had been stabbed, but the others had died of natural causes.

Or someone had gotten smarter about killing girls.

I’m seeing things , thought Alex. I’m making connections that aren’t there. According to every single TV show she’d ever watched, serial killers always had a modus operandi, a way they liked to kill. Besides, even if a murderer had been operating in New Haven, if these dates were right, this particular psychopath had been preying on girls from 1854 to 1958—over one hundred years.

But she couldn’t say it was impossible, not when she’d seen what magic could do.

And there was something about the way the dates clustered that felt familiar. The pattern matched the way the societies had been founded. There’d been a flurry of activity in the 1800s—and then a new tomb hadn’t been built for a very long time, not until Manuscript in the sixties. An unpleasant shiver crawled over Alex’s skin. She knew Skull and Bones had been founded in 1832 and that date didn’t line up with any of the deaths, but it was the only year she could remember.

Alex took the notes and padded down the hall to the Dante room. She grabbed a copy of The Life of Lethe from the desk drawer. Scroll and Key had been founded in 1842, Book and Snake in 1865, St. Elmo in 1889, Manuscript in 1952. Only the founding date of Wolf’s Head matched up with 1883, but that could be coincidence.

She ran her finger down the list of names.

1854-Daisy Fanning Whitlock-Russell-Gunshot

She hadn’t seen Daisy’s name hyphenated anywhere else. She’d always just been Daisy Fanning Whitlock.

Because it wasn’t a hyphen. None of them were hyphens. Rhinelander. Stone. Phelps. Kingsley. Russell. Wrexham. They were the names of the trusts, the foundations and associations that funded the societies—that paid for the construction of their tombs.

Alex ran back to the library and slammed the shelf shut; she yanked the Albemarle Book free again but made herself slow down. She needed to think about how to phrase this. Russell was the trust that funded Skull and Bones. Carefully, she wrote out: Deed for land acquired by Russell Trust on High Street, New Haven, Connecticut .