Twenty-One

The final hours of the night are the bleakest I've ever known, steeped in grief and anger. But Tuesday morning feels like yet more darkness. I would rather do almost anything than go to my tutorial with O'Connor. I would rather do anything than sit across from him in his plush office while he pontificates about human genius and pretends to advise me on my book. But I need information, and he's the head of Magni Viri. That also means that I can't let him know that I know about Isabella. I need to act like my usual naive self. Considering how exhausted I am, it shouldn't be hard to pretend to be stupid.

I'm a few minutes late getting to the social sciences building. As I near O'Connor's door, I hear raised voices. I pause at the threshold, listening.

"My God, you haven't changed at all!" a woman snarls, fury lacing her words.

I'm shocked to recognize the voice as Dr. Hendrix's. "This is—this is practically criminal!" she yells.

"Andrea, you're being—" Dr. O'Connor starts.

"No, no, I'm done. I listened to you for twenty-three years, and I won't listen for a single moment more. This was a terrible mistake. I ought to have known better. I did know better!" The door slams open, and Dr. Hendrix barrels out, her nostrils flaring, her cheeks bright red. Her ever-present shawl is in disarray, falling off one shoulder.

"Oh!" she says when she nearly runs into me. "Tara, I'm so, so sorry. But I simply cannot." She shakes her head. "I cannot—" Too angry and flustered to finish the sentence, she brushes by me with a muttered apology, heading for the exit.

I watch her disappear down the hallway before I poke my head into Dr. O'Connor's office. Considering Dr. Hendrix's state, I expect to find him pacing and upset, but he sits calmly at his desk, rifling through some papers.

"Ah, Tara, come in," he says with an easy smile, as if his ex-wife didn't just barge out of his office in a rage. "I'm sorry if you heard any of that. I did warn you about my history with Dr. Hendrix."

"You did," I say, taking a seat across from his desk.

"I suppose we'll need Jimmy Coraline after all," he says with a laugh.

"Is she going to be okay?" I ask, glancing back at the doorway.

He waves a hand lazily. "Oh, she'll be fine. Divorce. It does interesting things to people, I suppose. But let's talk about your pages."

"Were they all right?" I ask, making my voice shy, hesitant. "They feel..." I let myself seem to grope for words. "They seem... like something someone else would write. They don't feel quite like me."

Dr. O'Connor freezes, his eyebrows raised. When he smiles, it doesn't reach his eyes. "Sometimes we do better work than we expect," he says carefully. "We're not aware of the depths of talent inside us."

I bite my lip and look down, since I can't force a blush. "Thank you, but I only mean that the story is darker than I expected. I didn't think I had a dark side like that."

"Ah," Dr. O'Connor says, his shoulders relaxing a fraction. "I see." He pauses as if thinking carefully of what to say next. "I was not surprised to see pages like this from someone like you."

"Someone like me?"

"You have been through a great deal. I believe you feel a great deal too, though you try to hide it. Resentment, class rage, ambition. I see so much of you in these pages, even in Eugenia."

I'm taken aback by his directness. I think he might be right, at least a little, but I don't like the casual way he presumes to know my feelings, smugly summing me up like a character in a story. I shake my head. "I'm nothing like her. I would never kill someone."

"Wouldn't you?" O'Connor volleys back. "If it came down to it, and someone was in the way of what you wanted, what you loved?"

"I... I'm not sure." I look away from him, my eyes wandering across the walls of his office. They land on a row of fussily framed black-and-white photographs, all portraits of tweedy, academic-looking men, seemingly from different eras judging by their haircuts and clothes. But one photo is of a dark-haired woman in mid-century fashion posing outside Denfeld Hall. I noticed it last time I was in here.

"I know I would," O'Connor says, drawing my gaze back to himself. He smiles. "I would fight tooth and nail for what matters to me. I would pay any price. Then again, my ex-wife never tires of telling me that I'm a ruthless man." His eyes flicker, and I wonder if he's warning me. "Perhaps that is why I like your writing so much. It is absolutely ruthless."

I stare at him a long moment, taking in what he has said. When I turn my head again, I only mean to avoid his eyes, but mine are drawn inevitably back to the photograph of the woman, and this time I see why. The breath leaves my body. Because I recognize her.

The woman in the photograph is the ghost I saw in the bathroom mirror. It's Isabella Snow.

At first all I can grasp is her face, that mocking face that stared back at me from the mirror—clever, haughty, implacable. She smirks at the camera the same way she smirked in my reflection. She's a little younger here, the lines around her mouth less pronounced. But it's her. My ghost.

Her dark hair is short and curled in a conservative style. She stands with lifted chin, her hands clasped in front of her. She wears a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. There are cat-eye reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She is thinner than me, small-boned, almost petite. But a ferocious intelligence radiates from her.

There's something familiar about the way she looks at the camera, as if she can look right through time and space and into your soul. As if she can see you, down to the cells that make up your body.

Her picture frame has a brass placard at the bottom, same as the others. I squint to read it. Isabella Snow, Director, 1961. She was here the whole time, waiting for me to recognize her.

"Tara?" O'Connor says.

But I can't respond. All I can do is blink at her, my tired brain struggling to take her in. This is the author of Cicada. This is the woman who has taken over my life. Who stuffs me in her coffin while she uses my body to write her novella. She wasn't some scholarship student, some hapless creative grasping at a better life. She was a professor. A director of a prestigious academic society. She had a good life, and now she's stealing mine.

Hatred rises in me like a wave, more powerful than anything I ever felt for Meredith. It takes all my self-possession not to leap from my seat, snatch her photograph from the wall, smash the glass, rip the picture into a thousand little pieces. I squeeze my fists at my sides and stare into her eyes.

"Tara? Are you all right?" O'Connor asks.

I turn to face him, my breaths coming short. It takes all my effort to swallow down my rage. But I can see that he has seen it and knows what caused it. My little naive schoolgirl act is over.

"Ah, Isabella Snow. She was before my time, but I am absolutely fascinated by her," he says casually. "Our first female director. A brilliant writer like yourself." He smiles at me, showing nearly every tooth in his mouth. It's a smile that tells me clearly that he knows how I am connected to her.A smile that tells me he knows how trapped I am. "Imagine what works of genius she might have produced if she had lived a little longer."

Bile rises in my throat. There's no more point in pretending. I can't even find the words to try. I gather my things and start to leave, my hands shaking all the while. The only thing I can think about is getting out of this room, away from both of them.

I've reached the door when O'Connor calls my name. I turn.

"You're doing brilliant work, Ms. Boone. You're living your dream. I'm so glad that Magni Viri has given you everything you hoped for."

His words are like an ice shard in my heart, sending their brutal cold all the way to my fingertips and toes. I don't think his ex-wife was even a little bit wrong about him. I think he is an absolutely ruthless man.

By the time I break into the cold morning, I am gasping. All this time, my ghost's photograph was hanging on Dr. O'Connor's wall. While he talked to me of my own brilliance, she was staring down at me. And he knew. Of course he knew. He set it all up.

As I walk across campus back to Denfeld, my shock begins to recede. But the anger stays, burning beneath my skin. They stole my life. Dr. O'Connor, Magni Viri, and Isabella Snow, they lured me in with the promise of a better future, and they stole my life.

But they aren't going to keep it. O'Connor says I'm like Eugenia Dossey? Well, maybe that's true. Because I will not lie down and let a bunch of rich assholes treat me like trash. Not anymore. I don't know how, but I'm going to get rid of Isabella Snow.

I know who she is, when she lived and died, where she's buried. She's not just a ghost in a mirror now. She belongs to the physical realm, and that means I can find a way to deal with her.

I refuse to let her win. She had her chance at life, and this is mine.

And I will fight with everything inside me to keep it.

Back at Denfeld, I launch into action. No more sitting around feeling sorry for myself. I have work to do.

First, I make a fresh pot of coffee and steal a Pop-Tart from someone's shelf in the kitchen, hoping the caffeine and sugar will help me survive the rest of this day. I check my email on my phone while I wait for the coffee to brew. There's already a sheepish message from Dr. Hendrix apologizing for storming out of the meeting. She offers to meet with me one-on-one to discuss my writing. I close out of it without responding. I have too much else to worry about.

Coffee in hand, I lock my bedroom door and get ready for research. I pull up Corbin's library page so I can check the databases and open a new Google search tab. I take a deep breath and type Isabella's name. It's time to learn everything I can about the woman who is trying to steal my life.

Thankfully, the library digitized every single edition of Corbin's student newspaper, The Corbin Review, so it doesn't take long for me to find Isabella's obituary. My breath catches when I see it. The obituary takes up half of the front page, which is considerable page space in a year that must have been dominated by news of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests. There's a black-and-white photograph of Isabella, looking much as she did in the photo from O'Connor's office. This one is more recent, the lines around her mouth deeper, the little divot in her forehead more pronounced. It must have been taken very near her death because she looks exactly as she did in my mirror. Her face is too thin and her eyes are shadowed, but she still has that indomitable eyebrow lifted, that haughty smirk.

I start to read.

Ms. Isabella Snow passed away on August 4 from a long illness. She was a member of the English department faculty for nine years, teaching English composition and creative writing. Among students, she was known as a teacher whose passion for her subject was rivaled only by her nearly unobtainable high standards. Perhaps this is why she became an adviser to, and then director of, the secretive academic society Magni Viri, from 1961 until her death. Hers was an unusual position for a woman and a professor lacking a doctoral degree, as the position of director was previously held only by tenured male faculty members. Her appointment caused a considerable stir among both faculty and students.

Little is known of Ms. Snow's history, except that she was born in this very county in 1931. She attended Corbin College as an undergraduate and returned to teach here immediately after completing a master's degree at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her family could not be located for comment.

As well as a teacher, Ms. Snow was an author in her own right, with stories published in several literary journals and a recently signed contract with Harcourt Publishers for a novel. Ms. Snow has been called the next Flannery O'Connor—

I immediately click off the tab and start searching for Isabella's published stories. After several minutes, I find her name mentioned in connection with an obscure literary magazine, but there's no full text in any database. Her stories haven't survived into the twenty-first century. I let out a disappointed sigh.

There's also no mention of her novel anywhere, which means she died before she could finish it. Was it Cicada? Or something else?

I sit back in my chair. It seems strange that she was born in this area—I've never met a single student who's also a local. Is that what drew Isabella back to Corbin College, to Magni Viri? Did she live with her family when she came back to teach? If they were blue collar like most people around here, it's hard to imagine that a woman as successful as Isabella would live comfortably among them.

I try to find records of Isabella's birth, but there's nothing. I can't find a death certificate either.

Eventually, I shrug and give up the search. It doesn't matter who her family was, does it? It's more important to know her personality, her goals and ambitions. And I think I've learned those.

Now I know that her life was bound up with this college and with Magni Viri. I think of the photo on O'Connor's wall, of her haughty, self-satisfied smirk, standing in front of Denfeld Hall like she had conquered it. I bet Magni Viri was the most important thing in the world to her, apart from her own writing. I wonder if she lived on campus. Maybe she even lived in Denfeld Hall. Chill bumps break out all over my skin at the thought. Maybe she slept in a room like this one, hurried up and down the stairs, sat in the library writing.

Then I realize—maybe she left more of herself behind than her ghost. Maybe there are clues of her life scattered all through this house, if I can only figure out where to look for them.

After all, if she didn't have any family, where else would her belongings have ended up? Who would have taken possession of her writing? It must be Magni Viri. She wouldn't have wanted it to go to anyone else.

There's a chance it's all still here, under this roof. And maybe there will be something that can help me get rid of her. Where would it all be stored? Denfeld Hall has only a small basement, and it's filled with washing machines.

But there's also an attic.

I bolt from the room and up the stairs, all the way to the top floor. There must be a way up to the attic. I walk through one wing, but there's nothing that looks like an attic door. I cross over to the other wing.

And there it is, a plain, unadorned wooden door squeezed into the wall at the end of the hallway. I jiggle the handle, but it's locked. Of course. I look around, trying to think through my haze of exhaustion. Maybe Laini has the key? Or O'Connor? Should I just break in?

On an impulse, I reach up and run my fingers over the top of the doorframe. A key falls down, along with a cloud of dust. I wipe the key off on my pants and shove it into the lock, my hands trembling with adrenaline. The door opens. The smell of mold and dust and animal droppings wafts out. My heart beats hard and fast. I pull a string dangling from the ceiling, spreading light up a set of cramped and spindly stairs. And then I start to climb.

At the top of the stairs is a light switch. I flick it on. The attic is huge, much bigger than I expected. It's filled with old furniture, dusty boxes, and endless piles of paper. There must be at least a hundred years' worth of stuff up here. But the care taken with these possessions is evident. All of it is neatly stacked, the boxes are labeled, and little aisles run all over the attic. This is a storage space that gets used. You're meant to be able to find the things you come looking for. Somehow that's creepier to me than a messy, abandoned attic would have been.

I follow the dates on the boxes, winding around and around until I'm near the middle of the attic. It reminds me of looking for Isabella's grave this morning—so much searching, only to find her at the center of everything. And her boxes are there, labeled with her name and the date she died.

I let out a breath. This feels too easy. It's almost as if I was supposed to be able to find Isabella's things. I shake my head and kneel in front of the boxes. One is a cedar chest. In it, I find Isabella's personal effects: clothing, shoes, jewelry. It's all surprisingly well preserved and tidy, as if someone expected her to come back for it.

The thought sends a shiver down my spine. Because that's what's unnerving about this attic. I'm not the one who's supposed to be able to find Isabella's things here—she is.

When I unearth an empty bottle of Dior perfume, I have to resist the urge to throw it at the wall. The crystal bottle might be empty, but I know exactly what its contents would smell like. Lily of the valley. Isabella Snow.

I slam the chest closed, then move on to a cardboard box. It's filled to the brim with notebooks. I pull the one on top out and open it, sucking in a breath. Every page is filled with tight, slanting cursive handwriting that is illegible to me. I can only guess at a word here and there—summer, laugh, poor. A diary? I put it to the side and pull out a big armful of identical notebooks. I leaf through them quickly, but there are no dates, no capital I's like you'd see in a journal. There are quotation marks sometimes, enclosing what looks like dialogue.

I realize it must all be fiction. Stories and novels. Isabella's literary legacy. My head buzzes.

At the bottom of the box is a manila file that contains official-looking papers. A signed teaching contract. A yellowing immunization card. And a birth certificate. I pull it out with careful fingers, wincing at the way it crinkles with age. The space under Father is blank. But the name listed under Mother is impossible. I read it three times, and I still don't believe it.

Eugenia Rebecca Dossey

Eugenia?

Why would Isabella use her mother's name for such an awful character?

I pause. No, it's more than that. I know the pages of Cicada as well as I know myself. Eugenia's character is imbued with all of Isabella's pain and rage and ambition. She is as real as Isabella was.

Eugenia isn't just named after Isabella's mother. She is Isabella's mother. I can feel it, as surely as I feel Isabella's presence inside me.

Before she was Isabella Snow, she was Isabella Dossey.

Before she belonged to Corbin College's student body or faculty, she belonged to its family of caretakers.

Isabella is the child Eugenia is pregnant with in the story. Isabella is the daughter of a murderess. Isabella's mother is the character at the bloody, vengeful heart of Cicada.

It all makes so much sense now, the obsession Isabella has with this book. Cicada isn't just a novella. It's a family history.