“Around all of what?”
I rubbed my eyes. It was way past my usual bedtime, but at this point, no matter how exhausted I was, I doubted my brain’s ability to shut up long enough for me to get some rest. “Wes, I found proof that Lockwood and Flynn—Pluto and the Morrigan, if you will—are moving massive amounts of money around. That paired with all the other stuff—Jo Mitchell, the university manipulating student grades, the police cover-ups—I’m starting to think O’Connor was really on to something here. What if that’s why he’s gone missing, Wes? Because he found out about all the illegal stuff the university is doing?”
Wes closed his laptop and pulled me into his lap. “Nicole, it’s not your responsibility to expose whatever it is that’s going on here.”
“Yeah, but O’Connor—”
“O’Connor isn’t here,” he said, his breath tickling my ear. “I know you care about him, and I can assure you that the force is still working very hard to find out where he’s gone, but there’s only so much you can do. Besides, O’Connor should’ve known better than to throw you into the deep end like that.”
I rested my forehead on Wes’s shoulder and closed my eyes. “I can’t stop now.”
“You can for tonight,” said Wes, stroking my hair away from my face. “You’re exhausted. Let’s go to bed.”
I nodded, and Wes helped me down from his lap. In the bedroom, I peeled off my damp layers of clothing. As I leaned down to pry my ankles free from my jeans, the front-page headline of a photocopied issue of The Daily Bird peeked out from under a pile of additional research. I shoved the other papers aside, unearthing the issue, and read the entire headline: “New Wing of Waverly library Opens.” I sat down on the edge of the bed to skim through the rest of the article.
In a few short weeks, the new wing of the Waverly library, proposed and backed by a committee of Waverly alumni, will finally open its doors. This new addition, dedicated solely to rare manuscripts and other ageless texts, beckons a new era of education to our already esteemed institution. However, the new wing does not only inspire future Waverly scholars with its remarkable contents. The details of its architectural design also lend a hand in creating what is sure to be one of the most renowned university libraries on the continent. Mighty stone pillars tower over the entrance to the library. Waverly alumnus and former editor of The Daily Bird, Theodore Lockwood, describes the inspiration behind these pillars’ construction.
“The committee wanted the entrance of the library to invoke a sense of magnificence in every student that passed by it,” Lockwood says. “The pillars reference the Tenth Labor of Hercules, in which Hercules split the mountain range that joined Africa and Europe in order to reach the Atlantic Ocean and defeat a fearsome beast. We now know this split as the Strait of Gibraltar, but the Ancient Greeks believed that it was a passageway to the unknown. Furthermore, the pillars were said to bear the phrase nec plus ultra, or ‘Nothing further beyond.’ While the original purpose of this phrase was meant as a warning, we here at Waverly consider it as more of a challenge. Waverly students should be encouraged to reach beyond their own abilities. Take risks. Face the challenge. Conquer the beast. It is the only way to better ourselves.”
The issue of The Daily Bird was dated August 1910, and beneath the article was a note of gratitude to the committee of Waverly alumni that had funded the construction of the new wing. Lockwood, Davenport, Schwartz, Buchanan, St. Claire, Hastings, et cetera. Every single one of the committee members had been included in O’Connor’s research.
“Nicole, seriously,” said Wes, emerging from the bathroom with his toothbrush wedged between his lips. “Put that stuff down. It can at least wait until the sun comes up.”
“Look at this.” I brandished the paper at him. “Nec plus ultra rears its ugly head yet again.”
“So?”
“The Rapere Wing of the library opened in 1910, the same year The Daily Bird mysteriously stopped publishing new issues,” I explained, since Wes clearly had no intention of reading the article. “Theodore Lockwood had been an editor for the newspaper and helped fund the construction of the library’s new wing. And it’s not just him.” I flipped to the page of the paper that listed its staff at the time of that issue’s publication. “All the people that keep popping up in O’Connor’s research had grandfathers or whatever who worked at the Bird that year. Now that I think about it, I haven’t found any earlier records of those families at Waverly.”
Wes pulled back the quilt and crawled into bed, turning out his desk lamp in the process. “Baby, you kind of lost me,” he said, his voice husky with exhaustion. “Why does any of this matter?”
“Don’t you see?” I said, scattering other issues of the Bird across the floor in a frenzied attempt to confirm my hunch. The dim light of the moon was just enough to make out the familiar names. “This was the start of it all. These people met each other when they worked together on the paper. They all came from wealthy, respected families. They were all major players in the business world beyond the university. They all had something to contribute to each other. It’s a giant club, Wes. I mean, that has to be why the following generations keep turning up at Waverly. They know that going to Waverly means connecting with other students from those families and—”
“Nicole.” Wes groaned and turned over, snaking an arm around my waist and pulling me deeper into the tempting comfort of our queen-sized mattress. “Please. Save it for the morning.”
“I can’t,” I said. I escaped from Wes’s grasp and tiptoed out into the hallway again. The floor was stone cold, so I hurried into the living room,
