Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

“What are we going to do?” Jay Jay said.

Daniel sighed. “We have to go to the police.”

“And tell about the game? ” Jay Jay squeaked.

“No, no,” Daniel said. “Leave it to me.”

They made their way out of the caverns and drove to the Pequod police station. They identified themselves as Robbie Wheeling’s friends and said they had reason to believe he was missing. They described how punctual and responsible Robbie was, and said they were sure he had come to some harm. Robbie always had a lot of money with him, they said, and now he had disappeared after promising a ride home to his friend Jay Jay, over three weeks ago, and they were very concerned. His car was still in the parking lot and his clothes in his room. He had apparently never left Pequod. He was a person who trusted strangers. Perhaps he had been murdered and the body hidden in some … place. His parents had not heard a word from him either, and were worried too.

“There is one other strong possibility,” Daniel said. “Robbie was very interested in those caverns near the campus. He had been talking about going into them. We think he did.”

“You think he went into the caverns over three weeks ago?”

“Right.”

“Without water that length of time he’d be dead,” the police officer said.

Kate could hardly catch her breath. A vision of the caverns as they had been that terrible night she was lost in them flashed through her mind: the blackness and the power of them. She could see Robbie in there alone. “Maybe there’s water in the caverns,” she said. “But you have to look for him either way, don’t you?”

“Oh, of course. Dead or alive.”

Dead or alive. She felt her world falling all around her. She couldn’t look at the others; she knew they felt the same way she did.

As soon as they got back to the dorm from the police station, the three of them — in confusion and desperation and guilty fear — removed every trace of the game from their rooms and locked all of it in a locker at the bus station. They left everything in Robbie’s room untouched. They wanted to go back to the caverns to take away their costumes and wipe their fingerprints off the lanterns, but they didn’t dare. Someone would see them now. They tried to reassure themselves that since this wasn’t a murder the police would be more concerned with finding Robbie than in finding out who had played the game with him. But they were so furtive they each felt as if they were really covering up a crime of violence, not just a prank that would get them expelled. If Robbie had gone into the game and died because of it, he had done so because of them. Part of their minds said logically that wasn’t true, but the pain of having been responsible remained. The worst was knowing they had done this to someone they cared about so much.

The Pequod police department sent a detective to the dorm where Robbie had lived, to find out who his other friends were and question them, and particularly to get more information from Daniel and Kate and Jay Jay. None of the three of them had expected that. They had thought the cops would just go into the caverns. The detective’s name was Lieutenant Jerry Martini. He seemed like a nice enough man; he told them he had two kids of his own in high school, that he worried about secret depression in young adults, and the risks young people took because they thought they were immortal. Martini was so devious he insisted on talking to each of them separately, leaving them totally unprotected and frightened. He went into Jay Jay’s room first.

Jay Jay put his hands into his pockets so the cop wouldn’t notice that his palms were wet. He was sure police detectives looked for things like that. He hoped he looked so preppie and wholesome that no one would think he himself went lurking around in forbidden caverns.

“You were a good friend of Robbie Wheeling’s, right?”

Jay Jay nodded. “He was a … why are you saying I was his friend, like you think he’s dead?”

“Sorry. What were you going to say?”

“That he’s a really terrific guy. Everybody likes Robbie.”

“When you last saw him, was he depressed? Moody?”

“I don’t think I ever saw Robbie depressed,” Jay Jay said. “He was kind of into mystical things … spiritual things.”

“Like Mazes and Monsters?”

Here came the big stuff. Jay Jay’s heart began to pound. “You mean the game?”

“Yes. He was into the game, we could see that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jay Jay said. “He was really involved with it.”

“Did you play it too?”

Jay Jay thought fast. Give him just enough so he doesn’t catch you in a lie. “I used to. But it takes up a lot of time, and I’m a straight-A student, so I can’t afford to take too much time off anymore.”

“What about the caverns?”

“What about them?”

“We heard some of the students were playing Mazes and Monsters in the caverns,” Martini said.

Jay Jay’s stomach pitched. Who had told? Perry? Somebody in the drama department? He tried to look pensive. “I heard that rumor too,” he said in his most ingenuous way.

“Did you ever ask him?”

Think fast, Jay Jay thought. Say yes so they’ll go in and find him. Say no — they’ll go in anyway. No, you have to say yes. “Not exactly,” he compromised. “He did say he thought it would be a lot of fun to play the game in the caverns. He really seemed interested in those caverns.”

I blew it, he thought. Did I blow it? I should have said, Yes he did ! Now I can’t go back and say he did; he’ll know I lied. Jay Jay was starting to feel really sick. His skin was prickling all over. What had happened to the great Jay Jay, the future actor and star?

The cop walked over and looked at Merlin. “What kind of bird is that?” he asked in a friendly voice.

“A mynah bird.”

“Does it talk?”

“Birds can’t talk,” Merlin said.

The cop laughed. “Funny. You teach him that?”

“Yes,” Jay Jay said. “A smart mynah bird can have a vocabulary of several hundred words. Speaking is a conditioned reflex with them though — they don’t reason the same way we do.”

“What’s his name?”

“Merlin,” Jay Jay said. His skin wasn’t prickling quite so much. He tried to decide if Martini was playing Good Cop to disarm him, or if he really was interested. He supposed a mynah bird was something Martini didn’t see very often, even in his line of work.

“Does Merlin bite?”

“All birds bite,” Jay Jay said.

“Fecalite,” Merlin said.

“Oh, shut up,” Jay Jay said to him.

“Who else was playing Mazes and Monsters in the caverns?” Martini asked.

Wham! There it came. “I don’t know,” Jay Jay said.

“But you were his friend.”

“He didn’t tell me everything. ”

“Did he have a girl friend?”

“He used to go with Kate, but they broke up.”

“Was he upset about that?”

“You mean, like suicidal?”

“Yes.”

You just told him Robbie was never depressed, Jay Jay reminded himself. But depressed is different from upset over a broken love affair. He thought of saying yes, and the caverns would be a good place to end it all; but he knew the cop would question Kate too, and less information was always better than more in a clash of wits. On the other hand, Robbie could have hidden his unhappiness from Kate but told his friends …

“Was he upset or not?” Martini asked.

“I think he got lost in the caverns,” Jay Jay said.

Martini raised his eyebrows. “Why would he go in during vacation?”

“Maybe Robbie and his friends were playing the night of my party,” Jay Jay said. “That was the last time I ever saw him.”