The Secret History - Donna Tartt [124]
I was gazing at the sparks flying from the garbage can when suddenly I was struck by a harrowing thought. Why had Bunny decided to come to my room instead of Cloke’s, or Marion’s? As I looked out the windows the answer was so obvious it gave me a chill. It was because my room was by far the closest. Marion lived in Roxburgh, on the other end of campus, and Cloke’s was on the far side of Durbinstall. Neither place was readily apparent to a drunk stumbling out into the night. But Monmouth was scarcely thirty feet away, and my own room, with its conspicuously lighted window, must have loomed in his path like a beacon.
I suppose it would be interesting to say that at this point I felt torn in some way, grappled with the moral implications of each of the courses available to me. But I don’t recall experiencing anything of the sort. I put on a pair of loafers and went downstairs to call Henry.
The pay phone in Monmouth was on a wall by the back door, too exposed for my taste, so I walked over to the Science Building, my shoes squelching on the dewy grass, and found a particularly isolated booth on the third floor near the chemistry labs.
The phone must’ve rung a hundred times. No answer. Finally, in exasperation, I pressed down the receiver and dialed the twins. Eight rings, nine; then, to my relief, Charles’s sleepy hello.
“Hi, it’s me,” I said quickly. “Something happened.”
“What?” he said, suddenly alert. I could hear him sitting up in bed.
“He told me. Just now.”
There was a long silence.
“Hello?” I said.
“Call Henry,” said Charles abruptly. “Hang up the phone and call him right now.”
“I already did. He’s not answering the phone.”
Charles swore under his breath. “Let me think,” he said. “Oh, hell. Can you come over?”
“Sure. Now?”
“I’ll run down to Henry’s and see if I can get him to the door. We should be back by the time you get here. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
When I got there, about twenty minutes later, I met Charles coming from the direction of Henry’s, alone.
“No luck?”
“No,” he said, breathing hard. His hair was rumpled and he had a raincoat on over his pajamas.
“What’ll we do?”
“I don’t know. Come upstairs. We’ll think of something.”
We had just got our coats off when the light in Camilla’s room came on and she appeared in the doorway, blinking, cheeks aflame. “Charles? What are you doing here?” she said when she saw me.
Rather incoherently, Charles explained what had happened. With a drowsy forearm she shielded her eyes from the light and listened. She was wearing a man’s nightshirt, much too big for her, and I found myself staring at her bare legs—tawny calves, slender ankles, lovely, dusty-soled boy-feet.
“Is he there?” she said.
“I know he is.”
“You sure?”
“Where else would he be at three in the morning?”
“Wait a second,” she said, and went to the telephone. “I just want to try something.” She dialed, listened for a moment, hung up, dialed again.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s a code,” she said, the receiver cradled between shoulder and ear. “Ring twice, hang up, ring again.”
“Code?”
“Yes. He told me once—Oh, hello, Henry,” she said suddenly, and sat down.
Charles looked at me.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “He must have been awake the whole time.”
“Yes,” Camilla was saying; she stared at the floor, bobbing the foot of her crossed leg idly up and down. “That’s fine. I’ll tell him.”
She hung up. “He says to come over, Richard,” she said. “You should leave now. He’s waiting for you. Why are you looking at me like that?” she said crossly to Charles.
“Code, eh?”
“What about it?”
“You never told me about it.”
“It’s stupid. I never thought to.”
“What do you and Henry need a secret code for?”
“It’s not a secret.”
“Then why didn