Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

“It’s an ongoing process,” I said, sticking the jar into the microwave.

“That’s a great way of looking at it. I heard you saw Jane. She’s great, isn’t she?”

“She’s good,” I said.

We both watched the jar revolve slowly.

“Is she helping you?”

“I just went the once.”

“Well, she’s really great, I think. I think you already look better.”

The microwave beeped, and I opened it up.

“I’m glad,” I said. I smiled and maneuvered around her to get back to my room. I liked Jane too, but there was something deeply unnerving in the way Charlotte liked her. Charlotte liked Jane too much. I didn’t even know what that meant, or why it was a problem.

Maybe I had therapy jealousy.

I stuck my finger into the container and helped myself to a bit of the cheez, only to scald myself. I quickly put it in my mouth and bounced open the door with my elbow.

“Is Charlotte kind of creepy?” I asked Jazza, kicking the door shut behind me.

“Creepy how?”

“Just…creepy. I don’t know. Creepy.”

“It’s not the first word I would use to describe her.”

Jazza was digging around in her tuck chest for a suitable snack with which to consume the Cheez Whiz. Cheez Whiz is a very forgiving food—you just need something slightly more stable than Cheez Whiz to eat it with. I have been known to eat it with slices of actual cheese.

“Is she different, though? Since the attack?”

“Definitely different,” Jazza said. “A little nicer, but in an unctuous way. She wants to help all the time. I don’t need her help. Is that what you mean by creepy?”

“I think so,” I said.

“I suppose that’s good,” Jazza said, sighing a little. She could never be mean for more than a minute or two at a time, then something clicked inside her. “I know she’s going to therapy. It must be helping. I mean, I know she was hurt. But you were hurt worse.”

That was true. I really was. I was holding on to the title.

My phone was ringing, and Stephen’s name came up. I had to answer this, but I couldn’t answer it in front of Jazza, and this was going to be a problem. We didn’t leave the room to answer phone calls. But I had no choice in the matter, and bounced up with a quick “Be right back!”

“Where have you been?” I said.

“Doing my job. What’s wrong?”

I hurried down the hall and stood in the vestibule between the fire doors. This was as close to privacy as I was going to get.

“I don’t have long,” I said. “I’m in my building. People around.”

I launched into what I had discovered. He didn’t interrupt me. I went through all my notes. The location of Bedlam, how far it was from Wexford, the burial pit discovery. He listened to it all, and somehow, though he was totally silent, I knew I was catching his interest. Stephen liked research. He liked map reference numbers and dates and the word cartography.

“All right,” he said. “You’re right. It’s worth knowing.”

“What would you normally do next?”

“Talk to the suspect.”

“Okay. So let’s do that.”

“The suspect in question is in a mental health facility under close guard.”

Jazza waved to me and began to approach.

“Have to go,” I said. “Can you just…”

“All right,” he said, sighing a little. “I’ll look into it.”

I was in French on Friday when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I managed to slide it out and hide it in my lap, in the folds of my skirt. It was a message from Stephen.

Going to speak with suspect in Royal Gunpowder incident tomorrow morning.

I had long mastered the art of typing texts with one finger without really looking. Well, without looking much.

What time are you picking me up?

His response was quick:

Picking you up for what?

I’m going with you.

Out of the question.

My teacher was looking in my direction now. I quickly pressed the phone between my thighs, vanishing it.

“Let me just cover the things you’ve been able to do so far,” I said. The minute I got out of class, I had called Stephen. I was not giving up on this. I paced the green with the phone to my ear. The middle of the green was actually the safest place to talk. Too many people along the edges. “You convinced my therapist that she had to let me come back to school. You busted into my school’s security system. You arranged for me to be taken to a Tube station in the middle of the night to do a show for Thorpe—”

“Rory—”

“Not to mention all the stuff I don’t know about. Oh, and covering up the entire Ripper case with a fake dead body?”

“I didn’t do that,” he said.

“You know what I mean. You can arrange it so I can go.”

“Rory, this is a facility for the criminally insane. A medium secure unit. This man has confessed to murder. This is serious.”

“And the other things we’ve dealt with weren’t serious?”

“Of course they were serious,” he said. “But—”

“Let me ask you this, ” I cut in. “If there is something in that basement, and it needs to be taken care of, who’s going to do it? Who’s the terminus? Me. And if you want the terminus to behave, you have to take me.”

I surprised myself with this last one. It was very blunt. I think it shocked him into silence.

“I’ll get in touch with you later,” he said.

And he did. The reply came as I was walking home from dinner.

I’ll pick you up around the corner from Wexford at 9:45 tomorrow. Sharp. Wear plain white shirt and black trousers or skirt. -s

13

THERE WAS ONLY ONE SMALL PROBLEM WITH THIS OTHERwise flawless plan: I was supposed to be in art history at the same time we were going to the hospital. I am not, as a general rule, a class skipper. I’d only ever done it once, and that was entirely by accident. It had happened the year before, back at home. I was running late for school and didn’t have time for coffee. No coffee in the morning makes Rory a stupid girl. For all of first period, I battled to keep my eyes open. In second period, I thought it was third period. So instead of going to second-period French, I went to third-period study hall and went to sleep in the corner of the library, where they have this deflated fuzzy beanbag that no one wants to use because someone claimed there were bed bugs in it. I woke to find myself being shaken by the librarian. They’d realized I was missing from French and put out one of those school-wide Amber-alert things my school does. They track you down. I got a moron reprimand.

Wexford was a different sort of place. They didn’t follow you around. For my own conscience, I justified this in several ways: 1. Saturday art class was kind of a weird add-on class that wasn’t quite like the other classes. It wasn’t an extracurricular, but it didn’t have that “real class” feel. I may have entirely made this one up, but that was the way it appeared to me. 2. No idea what was going on anyway, so missing one more class would not hurt. 3. Mark was a cool guy and would probably figure I was getting some kind of treatment or therapy. He wasn’t regular faculty, so he wouldn’t have known my whole story or hung out much with the other teachers. 4. I had better things to do: namely, go to a mental hospital and talk to a murderer. That had to be way more important than me examining the works of the puddles and puffy clouds painters.

I should explain myself to Jerome, at least. He would wonder. He would worry. Would he worry? That was cute.

Or he’d think I had overslept and missed class. Much more likely.

I would worry about excuses later.

I cobbled together an outfit with one of my uniform shirts, and I planned on stealing a skirt out of Jazza’s closet the second she left the room. All I had to do was get out of the building and around the corner without being seen by the wrong people. The wrong people, in descending order of importance, were Jerome, Jazza, my teacher Mark, most of the people on my hall, and my art history classmates. I couldn’t go too early—Jazza would notice if I woke up and left before her (and I needed the skirt). The perfect time, I decided, was nine thirty. Most people went to breakfast then. I could slip out and no one would be the wiser.