Graveland: A Novel Read online

  He’s prepared to bet that Lizzie’s bedroom is not like this. He looks over. The door is closed.

  “Rachel,” he says, turning to her, taking a deep breath, “Sally here told me what you said. Lizzie is away, is that right?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “I’m not checking up on her or anything. I—”

  “No, no, I—”

  “I’ve just been worried, that’s all. She hasn’t been returning my calls. Or texts.” He swallows. “Or anything.”

  “I understand, Mr. Bishop, of course. She and Alex took off last Friday. It had been planned for a while, or … so it seemed.”

  Frank stands there, looking into this girl’s startling blue eyes, uncomfortable in his sudden awareness of her perfume, of the tone of her skin … and he feels a rising sense of how indefensibly ridiculous what he’s about to say will sound.

  “Alex?”

  “Oh, oh, er … he’s—”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. Please. Alex, Schmalex … whatever. But do you know where they went?”

  Before she has a chance to answer he thinks, last Friday. That means that when he spoke to her on Saturday evening she wasn’t here, settling in to finish a paper. She was somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else.

  She was lying.

  But again, fuck it, that’s not the point. He sounds indefensibly ridiculous to himself now, when the only thing he’s interested in, the only thing he cares about is … is she okay?

  Realizing then that Rachel has already answered his question, and that he wasn’t listening, he says, “Sorry?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Bishop,” she repeats, obviously bewildered at having to do so. “Lizzie wouldn’t tell me. I got the impression they just needed some time on their own.” She pauses. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  As Frank turns away, he catches a glimpse of Sally glaring at Rachel.

  “Let me try her,” Rachel then offers, but not sounding too hopeful for some reason. As Frank stares at a framed She & Him album cover on the wall, he senses determined phone busyness behind him. After a moment, he hears, “Shit, voicemail,” a pause, and then, in a concerned monotone, “Liz, Rach, call me.”

  Frank turns back around.

  A century on from two minutes ago, he looks at them both in turn, and says, “Okay, what do we know about this Alex guy?”

  * * *

  On the train to Albany, Ellen does as much background research on Atherton as she can.

  A liberal arts college founded in the late 1870s, it was originally built on a twenty-five-acre site in the Sasketchaw Valley a few miles east of Atherton. The college moved to its present, much larger site a mile north of the town when it acquired the former Van Loon family estate in 1953. Most of the buildings currently in use on the campus were constructed in the 1960s, giving the place a curious feel, simultaneously contemporary and dated.

  Atherton first admitted women in 1936, and today has a total enrollment of just under two thousand. It offers twenty-five majors leading to arts or science degrees, as well as pre-professional programs in law, medicine, engineering, and IT.

  This takes Ellen as far as Yonkers. She then switches her focus to more practical matters.

  As a school, Atherton is primarily residential, and most students live on campus. All of its three residence halls have common study areas, pantries, phone and cable connections, and Internet access. Suites are generally single-sex, but gender-neutral accommodation is available in the upper two floors of the third building. As an ex-Cartwright girl, Ellen is familiar with this kind of stuff, most of it, anyway—though she is certainly surprised by one thing, the range of food options available. Atherton’s main dining hall has five different sections, the Globe Café (serving a selection of cuisines from around the world), the Cabbage Patch (salads and vegan), the Spoon (burgers, pizza), the Deli-Zone (sandwiches, wraps), and the Juice Depot.

  She looks up from the screen for a moment, and out the window.

  Croton-Harmon.

  And then back.

  Atherton has all the usual other stuff as well, a Student Government Association that liaises with the college administration. It has an official student-run newspaper, the Atherton Chronicle, and a closed-circuit TV station (AthTV) that covers events on campus and in the surrounding area, as well as a highly respected and long-established college radio station (WKNT–92 FM) that broadcasts a mix of musical programming and various innovative talk-show formats.

  Poughkeepsie.

  In terms of security, Atherton is staffed by twelve full-time and six part-time professionals who are all state-certified security guards. The security staff also receives specialist training in first aid, CPR, conflict resolution, sex-aggression defense techniques, cyber crime, and diversity awareness.

  Rhinecliff.

  Ellen then spends a bit of time digging into the college’s history, looking out for any tradition of student radicalism, or of anything politically sensitive at all, but there’s really very little there. The late sixties and early seventies saw the usual reactions to Chicago, Kent State, Cambodia, and so on, there were sit-ins and marches, but nothing exceptional. In 2007, a chapter of the recently re-formed SDS was opened at Atherton, but the main focus of activity here seemed to be either teaming up with wider antiwar protest networks or working to change the state education system.

  Hudson.

  In more recent years, there’s been nothing of any special interest or note—no links beyond the obvious ones to the Occupy movement, and no discernible drift the other way either.

  Ellen’s impression is of a fairly insular place, self-satisfied and maybe even a little smug, probably not unlike hundreds of other colleges across the country.

  So what the fuck is she doing up here?

  As she gets off the train at Albany-Rensselaer, no new answer comes to mind—just the old one: It’s all she’s got.

  She picks up the rental car she booked earlier and gets to Atherton in under an hour.

  As she approaches the campus, she sees that it does indeed have a slight time-warp feel to it—angular gray concrete buildings, now partially streaked and stained but that must have once seemed futuristic and full of promise. Mitigating this somewhat is the landscaping, the well-kept lawns, flower beds, and trees.

  Ellen parks in front of the Administration Building and then has a quick think about how to proceed. Does she announce herself and spin some story about researching a piece on New York colleges, or does she wander around and wait until she gets busted by security?

  She decides to wander around.

  It takes her about thirty-five minutes to do a complete tour of the campus, stopping occasionally to inspect a building or to check out a sign or notice board.

  She doesn’t get busted, and nothing catches her attention.

  Except some of the students.

  She remembers being a student herself, and vividly—it wasn’t that long ago—but these people here are like a different species. There’s an air of confidence and self-assurance about the place that she’s finding unfamiliar, and not a little strange. The crowd she ran with at Cartwright were all cocky and opinionated, no question about that, but this is not the same thing. This is like a sense of entitlement, or of ownership—and not ownership of property or material things, not even of position or privilege, but just of … their own world.

  And its ways, whatever they may be.

  Not exactly a formula for political engagement, she thinks, but maybe not a fair assessment either. Because she hasn’t actually spoken to anyone yet.

  It’s early afternoon, sunny and cool, and quite a few people are out, some sitting on benches and lawns, others strolling around the various quads—most, it appears, in small groups, self-contained, cocooned.

  Striking up a casual conversation out here isn’t going to be easy, so she decides to head for the main dining hall. The logic isn’t exactly airtight, but she imagines that standing in line for food could
well generate an opening gambit or two.

  Besides, she’s hungry.

  She heads for the Cabbage Patch. There actually isn’t much of a line here, but she starts eyeing the salads on offer anyway.

  “Check out the Avocado Wasabi.”

  That was quick.

  Ellen turns to her left.

  “Good?”

  “Oh my.”

  The girl is early twenties, younger even, and quite geeky. She’s in glasses, jeans, and a T-shirt that has a cartoony graphic of a computer keyboard on it … geeky, that is, except for the small tattoo on the side of her neck, which Ellen now sees—as the girl turns around slightly—may well be part of a much bigger one all down her shoulder, or even her back.

  Ellen takes the salad from the display and looks at the girl. “Twenty years ago, when I was a student? Wasabi? I don’t fucking think so. You do pretty well here.”

  The girl draws back a little. “Twenty years ago? You’re kidding, right?”

  Shaking her head, but saying nothing, Ellen reaches for a bottle of water.

  “Here?”

  “No, at Cartwright.”

  “Wow. I’m at the wrong school.”

  Moving her tray along the counter, Ellen glances back. “What are you studying?”

  The girl pauses, maintaining eye contact and pursing her lips. “You mean right now?”

  Ellen feels like telling her there’s a speed limit in this state, but she plays along, and within five minutes they’ve been joined at a table by two of Geek Girl’s friends and Ellen is pumping them hard for information, so hard in fact that she eventually has no choice but to partially blow her cover and tell them she’s a journalist.

  One of them has heard of her and is wildly impressed.

  But not a lot comes of it. She explains that she’s researching student activism post-Occupy and would like to identify any sources of radicalism in the college. Not wanting to freak them out or scare them off, she quickly adds that she isn’t looking for names or anything, which is a lie, of course, but she also gets the impression that if they had any such names, giving them out wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for these girls, and not because of any latent McCarthyite tendencies they might have, but rather because it just wouldn’t occur to them that anyone could possibly object.

  Going by their ages, which probably average out at about twenty, it’s a safe bet to assume that these girls have fully recorded and documented their lives online, at least from the start of adolescence, and that it’s all still out there—every last confession, playlist, and photo, and for anyone at all to see, at any time—on Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo. It’s the great fault line of the new generation gap, the end of privacy—and it’s what makes Max Daitch (for example) such a dinosaur. He thinks, why would you do such a thing? They think, why wouldn’t you?

  It’s just that right now, for Ellen, none of this is of any use, because it turns out that Geek Girl here and her friends are about as politically aware as, she doesn’t know … the Smurfs. Or the Bratz.

  One of them, however—the Smart One—does make a useful suggestion.

  Ellen should check out a few past numbers of the Atherton Chronicle. She’ll find a pile of them in the main library. And she should probably also listen back to some of the talk stuff they do on the college radio station—some of that shit, apparently, can get very political. She’ll find it all archived online.

  Before Ellen leaves the Cabbage Patch to head for the library, she vacuums some personal details up from around the table—phone numbers, e-mail and Web addresses, usernames, handles, hash tags—info she may find useful later on, if it turns out she needs a quick route into the Atherton College social mediasphere.

  The girls, of course, are only too willing to hand over anything she asks for.

  * * *

  “She did say one thing, now that I remember.”

  Frank looks at Rachel. Whatever this is, she’s pretending she’s only just remembered it—Frank can see that clearly, and he’s annoyed—but at this stage the information is what counts, nothing else.

  “What is it?”

  “Before she left, she said there’d be radio silence for a while. That’s what she called it.”

  “Radio silence.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meaning?”

  Rachel swallows, uncomfortable now. “I guess that, yeah, she wouldn’t be answering her phone, or tweeting, that kind of stuff.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Bishop. She didn’t elaborate. Lizzie isn’t that forthcoming.”

  He also finds it annoying being told what his daughter is supposedly like. “You didn’t ask?”

  Rachel shuffles for a bit—in her bare feet, which Frank has just noticed—and then adjusts her glasses. “No, I didn’t. She’s not big on social media, she’s not an obsessive like I am, or like most people these days, so it didn’t seem like such a big deal, you know? Things can get pretty intense around here, and I just figured she and Alex maybe needed to, I don’t know, zone out for a bit.”

  Alex.

  She didn’t have much to say about him either. Sally Peake is currently out in the hallway trying to see who she can scare up that might have a little more to say about him.

  Frank feels he’s getting something of a mixed message from these two. On the one hand, it’s obvious they think he’s a nutjob, and that he didn’t get—or read—the memo about how his daughter going to college meant that SHE WAS LEAVING HOME. On the other hand, he senses a slight nervousness, especially on Sally’s part, a desire to wrap this up, to contain it before security has to be called in.

  “Around here,” Frank then says to Rachel. “You said things can get pretty intense. You mean specifically at Atherton?”

  “Yes. There’s a lot of academic pressure, a lot of competitiveness.”

  Frank nods. Now that he thinks about it, Lizzie is actually a very good student. She’s always done well and gotten good grades. She’s focused and works hard. She got a part scholarship to this place.

  So maybe she did just need a break.

  And maybe her old man is a fucking nutjob, who could do with seeing a psychiatrist.

  Sally Peake reappears in the doorway, again holding up her phone. “Friend of Alex, guy who knows him pretty well? He’s just coming out of the VLA, says he’ll meet us at the Spoon in ten.”

  Frank nods at Rachel and says, “Thanks.”

  She nods back.

  As he’s walking out of the room, he sees her lifting up her phone and starting to text.

  The Spoon is a section of the main dining hall, which itself is more like a food court in a suburban mall, not unlike the one in Winterbrook, in fact—though seeing it again now, Frank realizes that this one is a tad fancier.

  They approach a table near the front, where Sally Peake introduces him to a young guy named Claudio Mazza. Frank tries to get an instant fix on him, but is thwarted from the get-go. Despite his Italian name, Claudio Mazza has blond hair and blue eyes. Frank is also finding it hard to categorize him as a typical college kid. Is he a nerd, a jock, a hipster, or a partier? None of these really seems to fit. He does have a book next to his coffee cup, but that hardly counts as a clue around this place. Probably nineteen or twenty years old, he’s dressed with a nod to punk—or maybe it’s punk-meets-goth—in dirty, wide-strapped, spiked boots and a pair of studded jeans that look like something from an art installation. But these are offset sharply by an almost foppish upper half—tweed jacket and a plain white T-shirt.

  What’s that called?

  Frank gives up.

  With Sally Peake hovering in the background, he sits at the table and starts asking questions.

  Claudio and Alex, it seems, are taking some of the same literature courses (Melville, Dos Passos, Coover) and that’s how they know each other. Claudio says Alex is a really nice guy who doesn’t drink or do drugs. He’s very smart, very shy, very independent minded, but he a
lso has a naive streak in him a mile wide. Thinks he can change the world. He has an older brother he’s in thrall to, Julian, who was at Atherton a couple of years back and is a veteran anti-globalization protester. Julian is apparently a streets guy. With Alex, it tends to be more cerebral. On hearing all of this, Frank finds himself simultaneously relieved and a little concerned.

  He then asks Claudio about Alex and Lizzie.

  It turns out the pair have been an item for several months now, and are rarely seen apart.

  Or in the company of others.

  “It’s a very exclusive relationship,” Claudio says, “and not just romantically. They tend to rely on each other in all sorts of … function-specific situations.” He reaches for his coffee cup, lifts it, then puts it down again. “But it’s an arrangement that seems to work pretty well,” he adds, “given that neither of them has a lot going on in the old social skills department.”

  Frank bristles at this, even though he knows it’s true, at least in relation to Lizzie.

  He leans back in his chair, unsure of what to think.

  This Claudio seems fairly smart himself, and confident—though maybe a little too eager to showcase the Psych 101 stuff. Still, there’s no reason not to believe what he’s saying about Alex.

  But where does that leave matters?

  Deflating slightly, Frank glances around.

  The Globe Café? The Juice Depot? This is so not like the food court at Winterbrook Mall. There are no obese people here, for starters. Everyone he can see is young and healthy. Look at Sally Peake, for instance—over there, pacing up and down, on her phone—the very picture of long-limbed, pink-cheeked, genetically unmodified youth.

  Frank bends his neck slightly to get a look at the spine of Claudio’s book.

  And no one at the mall is reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, that’s for sure.

  After a moment, he catches Claudio’s eye and says, “Do you have any idea where they are?”

  “No, Mr. Bishop, I don’t. Alex wouldn’t tell me, but he did mention they’d be gone for a week, and that means—what day is this? Thursday?—they’ll probably be back tomorrow.” He shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, Hey, problem solved. Frank then half expects this nineteen-year-old to produce a small pad and a pen and to write him out a prescription for some Xanax.