Diana Peterfreund - Under the Rose

“It’s Amy Haskel, Mrs. Santos. I’m a friend of your daughter’s from Eli.” Poe was now holding up two fingers. The jerk actually planned on fining me for this!

“I don’t know you,” Mrs. Santos said. “Are you in Edison College? Where’s my daughter?”

“That’s why I’m calling. I think your daughter went out of town for the weekend and she has…my notes for a project we’ve got due on Monday. I’m trying to track her down to get them back. Has she been at home?”

“She has your notes? That’s not like Jenny. What project?”

This lady made my paranoia look like amateur night. “It’s an English project. Shakespeare.”

“Jenny isn’t taking Shakespeare this semester. And she certainly wouldn’t leave campus without telling us in advance. She must be at the library.”

“No, Mrs. Santos. She definitely left. None of her suitemates have seen her for almost a day and a half.” Poe was scribbling on a notepad. He held it up.

Don’t scare her.

Too late. The other side had gone quiet. “Her roommates?” There was a catch in the woman’s voice. “Have you notified her dean? Why hasn’t anyone called us?”

“I’m calling you now, Mrs. Santos.” But now that I did have her mother worried, I was afraid of what it would mean if I was wrong. Maybe Jenny was on her way home, or staying at a friend’s, or even holed up at Micah Price’s apartment. Maybe the rest of my club had been correct, and I was getting everyone stirred up for nothing. “You’re in the Bronx, right?”

“Who is this?” There was a new voice on the phone, one I assumed to be Mr. Santos’s. “Why are you scaring my wife? What happened to my daughter?”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Santos, I’m not trying to get you upset. I’ve just been trying to get in touch with Jenny, and I haven’t—”

“You’re not the only one.”

Poe and I exchanged glances.

“For the last two days, all we’ve gotten is phone calls, phone calls. ‘Where is Jenny, have you seen her, have you talked to her.’ We haven’t, and she hasn’t answered the phone in her room.”

I thought about her cell phone, still nestled in my bag. It hadn’t shown any missed calls. Wouldn’t her parents try that number as well?

“Oh, Carlos!” said Mrs. Santos. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you worried.”

Poe was scribbling again. He held up another note. You think the patriarchs knew she was gone?

“So I want to know who you are, and why you’re calling us. You’re not in her class, because we know what classes she’s taking, and you’re no friend of hers, because we know all her friends.”

Maybe you don’t know your daughter like you think you do. But I couldn’t say that any more than I could say, I’m a fellow member of her secret society. “I know her through Micah Price,” I tried, because that was the only barbarian name I knew.

“That boy,” Mrs. Santos spat, “is no friend to our girl.”

Sometimes I don’t get parents. They either go to extremes assuming you’re getting yourself into trouble, or they completely underestimate what their children are doing behind their backs. The Santoses appeared to be the latter kind. They were about to get shocked out of their complacency.

“Ever since she started hanging out with him, she’s been different. She used to come home on the weekends, come to our church. Now she won’t even speak to our priest.”

Or maybe they understood the situation better than I gave them credit for.

“Have you talked to this Price?” Mr. Santos asked. “All her other friends have been calling, but from him, not one word.”

“So you’ve been hearing from her other friends,” I said. “No one else?”

Silence.

When Mrs. Santos finally spoke, it was in a whisper. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? The Brotherhood of Death.”

Abort! Abort! read Poe’s pad.

“So it’s true,” said Mr. Santos. “She joined with you.”

Poe grabbed my arm and squeezed, but I wrenched away. Protecting the secrecy of the society was not my main goal at this point. So far, the Santoses had given me good info. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like discretion stand in my way. “And if I am?”

“Maricel, hang up the phone.”

“Where is my daughter?” the woman pleaded. “If you are so powerful, you can find her, right? You can help her if she’s in trouble?”

“Hang up the phone, cariña. ” This time the man’s voice sounded farther away, as if he was at her side rather than on his own extension. “Don’t talk to them.”

“No! You don’t tell me people are calling after Jenny, and I have to hear it from some stranger. So I don’t care what they say about the Brotherhood.” She spoke into the phone now. “You’ll find her, right? You’ll find her for me?”

“I can try,” I said, but the phone had gone dead. I looked at Poe.

His expression was grim. “That was a mistake. The Edison dean won’t presume malfeasance in the case of a girl who skipped town for the weekend, but if parents call and start raving about the ‘Brotherhood of Death,’ especially given the current media scrutiny, then there might actually be some police pressure put on this case. There’s definitely going to be more media attention. All undesirable circumstances.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “If there really is foul play going on, how can it hurt?”

“And if there isn’t, then we just committed treason.”

“How about this: My oaths to the society only pertain to the law-abiding parts?”

“If only it were that easy.”

“For me, it is.” I studied him. “Not for you?”

He was quiet for several seconds. “Ask me when this is over.”

“So you can decide after the choice has been made for you.” Digger, through and through. Would he consider his oaths sacred even if there were felonies involved? What the hell would that do to his political career?

“There’s no filter on that mouth of yours, is there?”

“I call it like I see it.”

“You don’t see everything you think you do.”

“Perhaps not,” I said, “but at least I discovered it wasn’t the patriarchs who have been calling looking for her. Maybe it’s because they know where she is.”

“Maybe it’s because they assume, and rightly, it seems, that the Santoses don’t. ” And then, as if to keep whatever threads of rapport we’d created from completely disintegrating, he looked down at the pad in his hand. “So now we assume the Santoses will be alerting the school, the police, and the media.”

“Hope they have better luck getting people to care than I did.”

“I hope they don’t. And as for us?”

“I think it’s clear.”

He snapped the pad closed. “Micah Price.”

Jenny had crap timing. I really needed to work this weekend. I had a meeting that afternoon with my thesis advisor, at which I’d promised I’d have him a topic at last, and I had a paper due tomorrow morning that I hadn’t even started.

Technically, the paper was due today at five, but everyone knew Professor Szyska never came into the office on Friday afternoons. That was the day her girlfriend came in from the pied-à-terre she kept in the city, to kick-start the weekend. Standing Szyska date night. As long as you slid the paper under her door by 10 A.M. on Saturday, when she showed up to work, you were golden. Which was good, because I hadn’t even picked a topic for the six-pager I had to write on The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. I was considering doing something about the current obscurity of Smollett in the modern collegiate academic curriculum. A well-placed film adaptation or two (perhaps written by Emma Thompson or Richard Curtis) would do wonders for the entire ostler subgenre of comedic 18th century English epistolary fiction.