Chapter 13

“I’ve never heard anything like that,” Beatrix tells me over dinner in the faculty dining hall. “I assumed all of our relatives were from New Hampshire.” She rolls a cherry tomato around on her plate with her fork before scooping it up and carrying it to her mouth.

I stab mine with all four tines.

“Are you sure she said Darby Cove?”

“What else could she have said?” I ask with just the tiniest hint of snarkasm. “Carby Dove? Crassachusetts?”

Bea gives me a withering stare but I don’t care. She has lied to me, is probably lying to me right now.

“The Bellflowers have always lived in , and the Bennetts before them and the Whitneys before them…”

“Yes but we’re talking centuries ago, Bea. Abigail was born in 1695.”

Beatrix and I have our backs to the windows but I can still hear the wind pressing the panes inward; the pressure is building. The mist from this afternoon is threatening to become a full-fledged storm.

“What’s your point?” Bea wants to know.

“My point is…what if she could shift too?”

My aunt ignores the frankness of my question and answers me in our code. “Have you had any migraines since we came to Darby Prep?”

“Yes. One.”

“And did you take your medicine?”

How to respond without outright lying? Just because she did doesn’t mean I should. “I’ve done what I had to do,” I reply carefully.

“Good,” she says, as if that would end the conversation.

It doesn’t. “Beatrix, the shift? Do you think it goes all the way back to Abigail?”

Bea’s gaze darts toward the closest table of her fellow teachers, a quartet of women from the Language Department – Spanish and French teachers, I think – chatting quietly. Clearly they are more involved in their own conversation than in eavesdropping on ours but Bea isn’t convinced. She scoots her chair closer to mine and lowers her voice to a thin whisper; I have to read her lips to know what she’s saying.

“The shift is not something you need to be concerned about.”

“Why not?”

She breaks off a piece of a roll and dips it into a puddle of olive oil, lays it on the edge of her plate. “You’re taking your prescription so it can’t affect you,” she says matter-of-factly. “And if you aren’t, then you know what would happen.”

“I would die?”

Bea closes her eyes. “Exactly.”

“I want to see Abigail’s grave,” I say. “I want to go to the cemetery in town and see where she is buried.”

My aunt takes this change in topic to mean she has won the argument and gives me a small, yet perfectly smug, smile. “Why would you want to do that?”

I shrug. “Just because.”

“Callie…”

“Why are you looking at me like that? You think I have an ulterior motive?”

Bea’s smile turns wry. “You’ve got some very interesting things on your mind today.”

“Me? Bea, come on. You know me.”

She stares at me for a long moment while I try to maintain the most innocent expression I can for as long as I can. Finally, she shakes her head. “I think we should both leave it alone.”

“Leave…what? The shift?”

“Callie. Leave Abigail Sweet alone. Let her rest in peace.”

“You don’t even want to look, Bea? You, Miss Perfect Catholic, you don’t want to pay your respects to a family member?”

Plip, plip, plip…the rain falls harder against the window. It’s a cold rain; the wind through the cracks in the pane feels refrigerator-chilled, icebox-cold.

Beatrix reaches for a scarf and wraps it loosely around her shoulders, making her appear to be wearing a shawl - and far older than I know she is.

“My opinion,” she slowly enunciates for me, “is that you have a lot of work to do these days. This is your senior year and we need to be thinking about your future.”

“But—”

“I am also a brand new teacher here and I too have a lot of work, a lot of responsibilities on my shoulders.” She closes her hands, kneading the tops of her knuckles with her thumbs. “I’m a house mother. Those boys count on me. I can’t run off to…a cemetery in the middle of the day.”

“We’ll wait for the weekend!”

But her mind is made up. It was probably made up the moment I mentioned Abigail Sweet. I’m coming to realize Beatrix is not only stuffier than I had always believed but one hell of a control freak. If she didn’t come up with the idea, she’s not interested.

A student waitress comes to our table then and Beatrix is suddenly all-benevolence. The girl, younger than me, looks familiar. I think she hangs out with Molly sometimes. She smiles in my direction, recognizing me too.

“Hey.”

“Hello.” And to Bea, she says, “Ms. Bellflower, would you like some coffee tonight?” She holds up a thermal carafe in each hand. “Decaf or regular?”

Students used to be waitresses in the dorm dining halls years ago but the practice was discontinued because it created a social strata among the student body – the have’s vs. the have-not’s – although anyone who is on scholarship or doesn’t own the latest electronics is easily pegged as a have-not so why not let the students earn a little cash? They can still serve the faculty at dinner, though, like our waitress tonight.

“No thank you, Pamela,” my aunt says.

The girl turns to me. “Do you want any?”

Without looking at Beatrix, I nod and hold up a ceramic mug. “Yes, please. Regular, not decaf.” I hear my aunt snort her displeasure beside me. “I have a lot of work to do, remember, Bea?”

As Pamela pours the coffee into my cup, I resist thumbing my nose at my aunt.

This is nothing, I want to say to her. Do you know what I can do? Do you have any concept of what I’m capable of? I can become you. I can become Pamela. I can become anyone I have ever met and shaken hands with.

I force myself to sip my coffee – black and bitter and overcooked – so Beatrix won’t read victory on my face.

After Pamela leaves, my aunt ostentatiously gathers her things and stands, expecting me to join her. She grasps the back of her chair with both hands and stares down at me, waiting.

I gesture with my coffee. “I’m still drinking this.” Frankly it tastes so horrible I don’t know how I’ll manage to gulp it down but it’s the principle of the thing. I’m not leaving the dining hall simply because Bea wants me to.

“All right. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I say. “Why wouldn’t you?”

I can feel the standoff between us, the first I have ever experienced with Bea. She knows it too, she knows something has changed. Something has shifted.

She stares at me, curiously – suspiciously, I might say if I were a more paranoid person. And I stare right back, loudly slurping my coffee as I do so.

Beatrix holds her ground well; she’s been around a lot longer than I have and has been witness to, or been involved in, things I can only dream about at this point in my life.

This time around, she wins. I break our gaze first with a smile and a wave.

“Good night, Bea.”

“Good night, Calliope.”

Before she is out the door, I am already planning my visit to All Souls Church.

And to Abigail Sweet.