Page 60 of An Academy for Liars

Emerson came out after her. “What the hell is going on, you two?”

“We’re going to Benedict’s,” said Claude, pulling Lennon to the elevator. He dragged the grate aside, stepped into the cabin, and mashed the button on the control panel that corresponded with Benedict’s house. He pushed it again and again, but the cabin didn’t move.

It didn’t seem like a random malfunction; the timing was too perfect. There was no way the elevator to Benedict’s home just conveniently stopped working directly after Lennon told the vice-chancellorhe’d been found dead. Perhaps Eileen had shut it down, a power that Lennon didn’t even think was possible until this moment. The way she saw it, the elevators in the school were reliably simple. They went back and forth between their designated locations on a fixed and unstoppable track. As far she knew, there was no gatekeeper responsible for them who could change their routes or stop them from working. But if that was true, Lennon wondered, then who had stopped the elevator from running now?

“Fuck,” said Claude and he kicked the wall of the cabin.

Blaine cocked her head. “What’s the rush?”

“Benedict is dead,” said Lennon, choking a little on the words. “Dante and I found him today with his wrists cut—”

“Shut up,” said Claude and he stepped out of the elevator, dragging Lennon with him. His grasp was so tight her wrist was beginning to hurt. “Open another,” he said, motioning to a bare spot on the wall. “I know you can fucking do it. Open an elevator to Benedict’s house.”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“Do it, Lennon.”

“Claude,” said Emerson. “Get ahold of yourself.”

“I need to see him,” said Claude. “And the elevator isn’t working. I can’t get to him, and I need to, and she’s just standing there fucking useless—”

Lennon tried to open a gate, but Amsterdam had exhausted her. Even with her new approach—the commanding nature of her power—she knew she shouldn’t call an elevator. She was far too spent, and Dante had warned her about the dangers of depleting herself. For once, she chose to listen to him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Fuck,” said Claude, and he slid down the wall in the middle of the hallway, landed hard on the floor, and put his head in his hands. Thetears came then, great racking sobs that shook his whole body. The sound of his crying drew more people upstairs. Sawyer came up and sat beside him, drew the shaking man (though in the moment, he seemed more like a broken boy) into his arms, as Lennon fielded questions from Emerson and Blaine and everyone else who wanted to know what had happened to Benedict.

“Who would do something like that?” Blaine asked, searching Lennon’s face for an answer. Her eyes were filled with tears. “Who would just murder someone in cold blood like that?”

“We don’t know that it was a murder,” said Kieran. “Maybe he’d just had enough.”

“Ben wouldn’t have left me,” Claude snapped, his face flushed a hot and angry red. He spit when he spoke. “Someone did this to him, and I’m going to find out who.”

There was nomemorial service for Benedict. No mention of his death apart from a small, framed obituary posted on the same bulletin in Irvine Hall where all of the students’ grades were announced. It was short and mostly devoid of emotion—detailing in large part Benedict’s contributions to the school and his love of gardening. Fittingly, students placed flowers beneath the posting until the arrangement spilled out into the middle of the corridor. No cause of death was mentioned in the obituary, but rumors about how and why Benedict died were thoroughly disseminated across the campus.

A long weekend followed Lennon’s return to Drayton. Classes were suspended for the week of Thanksgiving break, and many students returned to their homes for the holiday. Lennon was not among them, though she did call her mom in one of the phone booths scattered around the campus to tell her she was okay and busy with her studies.

“Are you sure you can’t come home?” The sound of her mother’s voice was enough to make Lennon’s throat clog with tears. “Not evenfor the day? We’ll be making all your favorites. Mac and cheese, yams with mini marshmallows burnt dark the way you like.”

“I’m sorry, Mom, but I’m too busy. I have to study.”

This was a lie.

The real reason that Lennon didn’t fly home for Thanksgiving was Claude. He was utterly inconsolable, and in the days after Benedict’s death he drank himself violently ill, to the point where Emerson poured every bottle of spirits on his bar cart down the toilet, just to avoid him poisoning himself. With his supply cut off, Claude took to wandering the campus and sometimes even venturing beyond it, sourcing his drinks from convenience stores in Savannah proper by way of the Logos elevator, which allowed access to a floor on the riverfront downtown. Claude’s drinking became so extreme that he couldn’t be left alone, so the members of Logos divided his care into shifts that lasted all day and stretched on deep into the night, when Claude was most prone to his drunken tantrums. One moment he’d be despondent in his chair, and the next he would rage, throwing things and toppling tables and cursing.

They should’ve taken him to the infirmary, but when Lennon suggested as much, the cold looks she received from Emerson, Kieran, and even Sawyer were enough to shoot that idea down dead in the water.

“If you take him to the infirmary in this state, they’re sure to expel him,” said Kieran sharply. “We have to give him a chance to grieve and sober up on his own terms. He’ll be fine with time.”

But Lennon wasn’t so sure.

Things came to a head on a particularly terrible night when it was her turn to watch Claude. He’d been abnormally subdued that evening, and Lennon was beginning to suspect that there was something seriously wrong—that he was succumbing to liver failure or someother malady caused by alcohol poisoning—when he sat upright in bed and looked at her.

“You know…Benedict never much cared for Dante.”

Lennon looked up from the book she’d been studying, a text on the thin and hazy boundary between psychology and religion, assigned by her metaphysics professor. Finals were just three weeks away, and she had a number of exams to study for, papers to write. “What?”

“Benedict didn’t like Dante. Didn’t trust him.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Lennon. She had learned to talk to Claude like a child when he was drunk, a strategy that usually soothed him. But that wasn’t the case tonight.

---