I hadn’t wanted to do that. I hadn’tnotwanted to either, but it was still unsettling. A vague, pervasive sense of dread that I couldn’t quite name.
Giving my head a good southern shake, I turned on my heel and walked straight into Dean Mordue.
Dean Mordue, who had said not eight hours earlier that any student caught sniffing around the North Tower would be expelled on the spot.
‘Professor Mordue, I –’
‘It’s locked,’ she said in a clipped voice, holding up an ancient-looking brass key and wiggling it with an air of irritation. ‘Why are you here?’
I racked my brain for an innocent explanation, but nothing came. ‘I don’t know. I was just drawn to it, I guess.’
There was an agonising split second in which I had no idea how she was going to react. She looked simultaneously on the verge of detonation and tears.
Mercifully, the latter prevailed.
Her shoulders sank as she sighed heavily, pinching the bridge of her nose with her free hand.
‘I was so afraid of this.’ Her voice was quiet and watery; worlds away from the clarion pitch of her inauguration speech.
‘Afraid of what?’ I asked, practically a whisper.
My imagination galloped ahead of me.
Was she about to admit the tower was haunted? Or were aforementioned vodka-cranberries addling my judgement? Until this point in my life, I’d associated a belief in ‘hauntings’ with general psychological instability.
Mordue tucked the key into the pocket of her peacoat and stared up at the North Tower like it was a lifelong nemesis. ‘That students would be fixated on what happened here. That Carvell would always be about the murders, not the learning. That . . . that the wound would be prodded so much it would never heal. God, sorry.’ Her hand went to her cross necklace. ‘I shouldn’t be offloading this on you.’ I could practically hear her tell herself to toughen up. ‘If I see you here again, you’re gone. Okay?’
‘Okay.’ I nodded. ‘Thank you, miss.’ Adding ‘miss’ on to the end seemed an incredibly childish thing to do, but I had no idea how to address authority figures in this strange new world.
Scurrying back in the direction of my dorm, I looked down at the baby-pink wristwatch I’d been wearing since I was twelve.
Five minutes after midnight.
Something in my brain snagged on this, but it wasn’t until I got back to Willowood that I realised why.
All of the North Tower murders had happened within five minutes of midnight.