Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(84)
*
Claire knows the off-campus mail—the credit card offers and spring break flyers and fashion catalogues—normally whispers into her box around two o’clock. She arrives a few minutes after, the mailroom a crush of students who tap messages into their cell phones and call loudly to each other over the din about test scores and coffee dates. She feels so still and silent among them. She opens her mailbox to find a J.Crew catalogue, a solicitation from MasterCard, and a nine-by-twelve manila envelope.
Once again, no return address and a Seattle postmark. Once again, the name Hope Robinson encased by quotation marks. She hardly notices she is walking toward the exit until it opens in front of her and the wind comes through like a great gasp.
It is the boy from class, the one with the tidy part in his yellow hair and the neatly pressed Oxford pinstripe. She thinks his name is Francis. He is heading into the mailroom, but she is hurrying her way out, so he steps aside and holds the door open, an obligatory politeness. His chin is rashed over with acne. He doesn’t say anything and she barely whispers thank you as she moves past him.
The sun cooked away the fog by noon and now the sky is bright blue and the snow-dusted mountains are visible in the near distance. She starts toward her dorm but guesses Andrea is still lounging in the room, napping off her hangover or watching YouTube or instant-messaging about some crushable boy, some dreamed-of love, so she changes course to the library.
Aside from the union, it is her second-favorite building on campus, a blend of Old and New World architecture, a modern glass-walled addition built onto a columned building made from red sandstone. She keeps busy with her classes—mostly prereqs, Calculus, Comp, Poli-Sci, and Lycan History. Her free time she spends in the library. Avoiding Andrea, avoiding everyone. Conversation is impossible for her. During orientation, she learned, when she faced the weeklong barrage of bonding activities with her fellow freshmen, that after learning your name and major, everyone wants to know where you are from, who you are, who you will become. She has no way to respond. Her history has been erased; her future is uncertain. So she hides in the library, where silence is the norm.
She takes the elevator to the fourth floor and walks down the line of carrels until she reaches a shadowy corner. She pulls her laptop out of her backpack and while it hums and bleeps to life she runs a finger along the top of the envelope and shreds it open. Another DVD falls out. She fumbles it onto the tray.
On the screen she sees a grassy field with blacktop trail running through it. A park, she realizes. There is a bench along the trail. A picnic table along the tree line. The sky boils with clouds and the camera lens is spotted with rain. The grass and the dandelions gone to seed shudder against a mild wind.
A few minutes pass and then the woods spit out a runner. Miriam is wearing a black tank top and matching running shorts and she is sprinting, her arms chopping the air, her legs scissoring. For a moment, Claire worries that something will emerge from the woods behind her, chasing her. Then Miriam slows and brings her hands to her hips and breathes heavily and kicks her legs, kicking away the lactic acid. She walks in slow circles for a few minutes, then goes offscreen and the camera jogs left, following her to an empty playground structure. Beyond it Claire spots another asphalt trail snaking off and disappearing into a wall of willow trees. Miriam stretches her arms and then leaps up to grab hold of the monkey bars. She hammers out a set of ten pull-ups, her head rising neatly between the bars, her muscles surging and the wings tattooed on her back seeming to rise and fall and help lift her weight from the ground.
Then a hand suddenly appears, the hand of whoever holds the video camera. It rakes the air as though clawing at Miriam and then retreats from view. It is visible only for the flash of a few seconds. Claire can’t be certain she sees what she thinks she sees. So she leans forward and drags the recording back and hits pause and captures the hand midswipe. There it is, blurred but clear enough, a hand that from this angle appears as big as Miriam and ready to gobble her up. A three-fingered hand, curled like a talon.
Puck.
Every hour, from eight a.m. until ten p.m., a shuttle—colored gray and purple, the school’s colors—leaves the union and drives the ten minutes to Missoula. The university is isolated, and though it makes an effort, with its markets, coffee shops, bowling alley, bookstore, and bar—the shuttles are almost always full. There are three drop points: the mall, the Safeway, and downtown.
Claire heads downtown—not for the bars or the restaurants, like most of the other heavily perfumed and cologned students that pack the seats around her—but for Café Diablo, a red-walled coffee shop with ironwork chandeliers and black cracked-leather chains. She comes for the free Wi-Fi. All incoming and outgoing messages on campus are monitored, Miriam warned her, so she should never attempt to contact her except from a remote server. Claire created a special email address for this express purpose. Not gmail. Miriam didn’t trust the way they scanned their messages for direct advertising. They used Yahoo instead. [email protected] was her address. When Claire wrote it down on a piece of paper, Miriam rolled her eyes and asked if she might consider changing her username to drama.queen.
They have exchanged only a few messages since the school year began. They do not use names. They do not speak in specifics. “Things are good,” Claire wrote when she first arrived on campus, her hands hovering over the keyboard, so uncertain as to what she could and could not say. “I made it here fine and the location is prettier than I imagined.” Miriam demanded that Claire not make any reference to William Archer or her classes or anything that could pinpoint her identity, in case their accounts should be compromised. She was told, too, not to use her debit card when at the coffee shop—cash only—so that no one could coordinate her presence with this email filtering through that particular Internet port. Claire told her she was being paranoid. “Maybe,” Miriam said. “But people are looking for us. We’re invisible until we give them something to see.”