Weird Girl (17 page)

By the time she had delivered all of the envelopes, her arms
were aching, her feet hurt, and she was royally cranky. Really, there was
absolutely no good reason for that many adults to slam a door in her face all
in the same day. Some had looked angry or scared. Others just seemed resigned
to whatever fate may come. Nobody was happy to receive Cleo’s delivery. She
didn’t know much about the IRS, but apparently it was very bad news.

Blue met her at the top of the steps at the entrance to Main
Hall. “That’s all I had for you today,” she said. “You may return to your room
now.”

Cleo was surprised and disappointed. The only thing that had
given her the energy to trek all over campus playing mailman was the
anticipation of going back into the secret hallway. However, she could tell
from Blue’s stony expression that arguing would do no good, so she nodded and
headed toward Concord Hall, where she promptly fell into bed and was instantly
asleep, the strap of her bag still across her chest.

19

The next day, she looked for Jackson. Everywhere. It was
harder than she thought to search for somebody without it seeming like she was
searching. She couldn’t exactly walk up to people and say, “Have you seen Jackson?” They would wonder why she needed him, and theirs was a relationship that needed a
certain amount of secrecy.

The problem was that Jackson was supposed to provide a
distraction while Cleo explored the depths of Main Hall. If she didn’t know
where he was, she couldn’t risk using the hidden door. Once again, she would
have to put the plan on hold.

For two weeks, Cleo stapled, and punched holes, and
alphabetized. She licked envelopes and affixed stamps. Once, she was even
allowed to dust Ms. Adams’ office. It was killing her to be so close to that
elevator, and yet be unable to safely access it. Finally, during another round
of alphabetizing applications on a Friday afternoon, the front door to Main
Hall creaked gently, and when she looked out of her alcove, there stood Jackson.
He made eye contact and nodded once and then turned to greet Virginia as she
glided out of her office in a haze of Chanel perfume. “I trust everything went
well?” she said as she linked her arm through his. Cleo couldn’t hear what his
response was, but five minutes after the lock tripped, the atmosphere was rich
with jazz.

She wasted no time. After straightening the stacks of
applications and pushing the chair back under the desk, she grabbed her bag,
peered once out into the foyer, and then pushed on the wall mechanism. She
tentatively stuck her head through the opening to see if anyone was around, but
all she could hear were the (slightly embarrassing) sounds drifting alongside
the Etta James melody from the vicinity of the headmistress’ office. Crossing
her fingers that nobody was down in the basement, Cleo opened the outer door of
the elevator, walked in, and pushed the button marked
B
, pulling the
outer door shut a moment before the elevator doors closed. The thrum was louder
from inside, and the floor vibrated. As the car reached the lower floor, it
shook once as it settled, and then the doors slowly opened. So did Cleo’s
mouth.

***

It was a sea of file cabinets. The room was probably a
hundred feet long, and half as wide. Row upon row of blue, gray, green, beige,
and black metal cabinets filled the space. Cleo exited the elevator,
remembering at the last second to send the elevator back up to the main floor.
If Blue came back to find the elevator in the basement, she would wonder who
had left it there. As the doors shut and the gears began to grind, Cleo
suddenly felt lonely. Looking out at the monstrous task that awaited her, she
also felt small. It was going to be a long night.

Every cabinet was full, and many of them made no sense. One
cabinet might be brimming with old applications, and another would hold
newspaper clippings that weren’t even in chronological order, while a third set
of drawers were filled with takeout menus from all over the country.

Great, now I’m craving Chinese, and I’ve never even had
it before
.

She worked methodically, starting at the end of one long row
and working through every drawer of every cabinet. It was a slow process,
especially since some of them hadn’t been opened in quite a while.

Her plan had been to work for a couple of hours, sneak back
out, and come back the following Monday. But then the lights went out.

She froze. Minutes ticked by while she listened, her body
tense, for the elevator to come down. It didn’t. As her eyes finally adjusted
to the darkness, she tried to remember if she had seen a light switch anywhere.
She pulled out the top drawer of the next cabinet to be searched, marking her
place so that she could find it again, and then began feeling her way back in
the direction of the elevator. She ran her hands all over the walls until she
felt the familiar shapes of light switches, and smiled as she flipped them all
up with one stroke. Nothing happened. She wiggled them up and down. Nada.

Okay, so it was going to be dark. This was probably a good
time to call it a day, she thought. She worked her way back to the open file
cabinet, eased the drawer shut, and then counted out loud as she walked back up
the row to where she had started her search. She had completed twelve cabinets,
and was on number thirteen. This would help her find her place when she came
back.

Cleo made her way back to the elevator, cussing mightily as
she hit her elbow (twice) on sharp metal corners along the way. Breathing a
sigh of relief as she felt the panel by the elevator, she pressed the single
round button in the center to call the car back down. Nothing happened. She
pushed again. Still nothing. Panic bubbled up in her chest. She was trapped. In
the basement. In the dark.

A breaker had tripped. Or, someone had turned it off. That
just meant that she had to hold tight until someone turned it back on again.
But then she remembered—it was Friday. It might be two days or more before
anybody came back to Main Hall. She couldn’t sit in the dark for two days.

Sometimes it helps to close your eyes, even if you’re
standing in a gaping black hole of a basement. She took four calming breaths,
and then realized two very important things: 1. there was probably a set of
stairs somewhere in case of elevator malfunction; and 2. there was a chance
that the breaker panel was in the basement. She just had to find one of those
things.

Cleo tried to imagine the layout of the basement as she had
stepped out of the elevator. There were filing cabinets everywhere, but they
were organized into neat rows. The aisles were at least six feet wide. The
first row of cabinets, where she had started her search, was backed up against
the entire left wall. Which meant that if there was a stairwell, or a breaker
panel, it would probably be to the right for easier access. She pressed her
back up against the elevator doors to set her internal compass, and then turned
to the right, dragging her fingertips along the wall at shoulder height.

Her arm muscles were screaming by the time she found the
first corner, so she stood still for a minute and shook her limbs to restore
proper blood flow. Then she reached out for the reassuring firmness of painted
cinderblock, and turned to follow the next wall. Fifteen feet down it, she felt
the unmistakable hardness of a doorframe, and within a few more inches, a
doorknob. Eureka!

Surprisingly, the door was not locked. She had no idea where
it led, but quickly discovered (the hard way) that there were indeed stairs
beyond it.

“Sonofabitch piece of shit!” she yelled as her chin hit the
edge of a carpeted step. Reaching up along the wall, she found a handrail and
pulled herself to a standing position, rubbing her face with the other hand and
blinking away tears. Then she began her ascent. The staircase had a landing, at
which point she walked straight into a wall before discovering that the next
flight of stairs was at a ninety degree angle, but she soon reached the top
(and once again bounced her face off of a solid surface). She skimmed her palms
across the smooth wood in search of a doorknob, but there wasn’t one. This
staircase led to a wall.

First, she panicked. Then, she realized that it must be
another secret panel. “Fucking secret doors,” she muttered as she scraped her
fingernails up and down on the wood. Finding the mechanism, she pulled down and
then allowed the door to swing open. The smell was oddly familiar, and there
was a little bit more light here. Once her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she
recognized where she was: Ms. Adams’ office, behind the desk. She had known
about the other door, the one that led to the hallway, but this new one was a
surprise. It also meant that Virginia Adams wanted easy and direct access to
whatever was in the basement.

Cleo had intended to leave, but the knowledge that she would
have two full days to explore, with very little chance of being interrupted,
had her turning toward the other hidden panel. Her ears told her that no one
was in this part of the building, so she reached out and counted doorways until
she reached the one that led to Blue’s office. Pulling her lock picks out of
her bag, she let herself in and immediately turned left, reaching out into the
blackness until she felt the two metal file cabinets. The lost and found items
were on the left, which meant that in the cabinet to the right, in the third
drawer down…was a flashlight.

Miraculously, it worked. She went around the desk and yanked
open the bottom drawer, pulling out a bag of chips, two pudding cups, and half
a six pack of Coca Cola. Hooking her fingers through the plastic loops holding
the cans together, she dropped the pudding into her bag, secured the chip bag
between her teeth, and relocked Blue’s door before returning to Ms. Adams’
office and down the stairs. Once she was back in the basement, Cleo dropped the
junk food and her bag and went in search of the electrical panel.

The sequential clicking of fluorescent lights coming on was
the most beautiful sound she had heard all day. Cleo grabbed her bag and
supplies and went back to Number 13 to continue her search.

Three hours later, she was exhausted and on a rapid descent
from a sugar and caffeine binge. After a quick trip back upstairs to make use
of Ms. Adams’ executive bathroom (where every drawer and cabinet held either
one-pound bags of M&Ms or boxes of condoms), Cleo raided Cabinet 22, which
was inexplicably full of sweatshirts, made a pallet on the floor, and went to
sleep.

***

She awoke feeling rested, and treated herself to a Coke and
pudding cup breakfast.  She had to eat the pudding with her fingers, which took
longer, so she took her time and thought about her progress up to that point.
She looked at each cabinet, beginning with Number 1, and recited its contents
to make sure that she hadn’t missed some vital clue. It was strange that
Cabinets 1 through 22 were unlocked, but she had to jimmy open Number 23,
especially since the contents of that last one still didn’t look like important
files. In fact, it was packed with photographs. Numbers 24, 25, and 26 weren’t
locked, but Number 27 was, although she hadn’t opened it yet.

Cleo stuck her pudding cup in the bottom drawer of 26,
crammed the sweatshirts back into their proper drawers, and swiftly picked the
lock of cabinet 27. This one actually held files.

A speedy flip-through of the folders revealed that they all
seemed to contain information about employees of the school. The top drawer started
with the letter A, and the bottom drawer contained K-L, which hinted that the
rest of the alphabet was…somewhere. Cleo sorted through the Js twice until she
realized that Jackson was a first name, and these were organized by surname.
Since she had no idea what Jackson’s full name was, she was going to have to
look at every friggin’ folder, provided that she found the rest.

She was just locking the cabinet back when she had a
thought—the photographs were also of teachers at the school. And both of these
cabinets were locked, while the random shit was in all of the unlocked
cabinets. Cleo took a step back and glanced up and down the row at the
multicolored assortment of cabinets. Both of the locked cabinets were blue.

Hmmmmm.

Cleo pulled open a drawer of the next (beige, unlocked)
cabinet, revealing an assortment of aquarium supplies and fish food. Then, she
walked past three more (black, gray, green) and reached for the handle on a
blue metal drawer. It didn’t budge. She jogged to another blue file cabinet and
tugged. Locked. Four more blue cabinets—all locked. Cleo used the drawer
handles as footholds and climbed on top, looking out over the mass of cabinets,
and smiled. It was genius, really. Out of the hundred-plus cabinets in the
room, she counted twenty-five blue ones, and she would bet money that they were
the only locked vessels in the entire basement. The rest of the cabinets were
decoys, designed to frustrate and confuse anyone who came down her searching
for something in particular. None of the cabinets were labeled, which meant
that the person or persons who stored items of importance had memorized exactly
which cabinet held what.

What would have taken Cleo days to cover now took her only
five more hours. Every blue cabinet was indeed locked, and most of them held
files or photographs. All of these seemed to pertain to staff of the school.
There was one cabinet that confused her, as every drawer held photos of a
beautiful woman in various stages of undress, possibly in a nightclub or
theatre setting since there seemed to be spotlights illuminating
her…attributes. Cleo had already moved on to the next set of drawers when she
realized why the woman looked so familiar. She was Blue, but with silky black
hair long enough to cover her breasts (although she didn’t take advantage of
this very often according to these pictures).

Cleo found Jackson’s file in the nineteenth blue cabinet
that she opened. His last name was Temple, she learned. After reading through
it, she shoved the folder into her bag before completing her survey of the blue
cabinets. Again, more files and photographs, although the last three cabinets
were stuffed with stacks of cash.

Not wanting to risk the elevator malfunctioning and trapping
her for real, Cleo turned the breaker back off and, using the flashlight,
navigated up the steps and exited the building through the front. It was dark
again, which meant that it was probably Saturday night, so she managed to
return to her room unseen, where Jackson was nearly catatonic, having been
there for twenty-four hours awaiting Cleo’s return.