“This is different.”
They brought Professor Uzig down to the cave. He shone the flashlight they’d given him here and there; not lingering, Nat noticed, on the wreckage, Lorenzo, or even the ransom note; but more on the undamaged parts: the gilded molding, the velvet chairs and couches, the fine old rugs. “My God,” he said. “This couldn’t be better.” Izzie shone her light at him. He shielded his eyes. “Did you say there were candles?” he said.
Nat and Izzie lit some. Professor Uzig gazed at the high ceiling, with its coffered woodwork, carved with leaves, flowers, grapes, horns of plenty. “Metaphorically, historically, culturally-it’s perfect, perfect in so many ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“You must know, if you’ve been coming here. What shall I call it? A time capsule, and planted with the same sort of deliberation. Can you read that?” He pointed to the Greek writing on the wall. “From the Republic,” he said, reading it in Greek and then translating: “Let early education be a sort of amusement.”
Didn’t Plato have a cave? This can be Nietzsche’s. Izzie had said that, when they were naming this place.
“There were social clubs at Inverness in the nineteenth century,” Professor Uzig was saying. “Not fraternities-more in the Oxford-Cambridge style. They had a powerful influence, almost independent of the college. The board of trustees outlawed them after World War One, bought up their houses, Goodrich Hall being one. There must be a direct route into Goodrich, sealed off.”
“There is,” Nat said.
Professor Uzig nodded. “Sealed off by the club members, of course, in order to preserve this secret space. A kind of defiance, do you see, an underground resistance forever in opposition to whatever modernizing forces they despised. Metaphorically, historically, culturally perfect, as I said.” He eyed them. “And motivationally,” he added.
“Motivationally?” said Izzie.
Nat felt it coming.
“There couldn’t be a more seductive setting for dreaming up little schemes like yours,” said Professor Uzig. “A place like this can almost be said to dream them up by itself. And the consequent destruction in light of the failure of the scheme makes perfect sense.”
“Mr. Zorn called you?” Nat said.
“I was hanging up when you knocked on my door.”
“You’re saying you don’t believe us?” Izzie said. “What about the goddamn note?” She took him by the front of his tweed jacket-seized him, really-and yanked him toward it. Professor Uzig, barrel-chested, fit for his age, didn’t like being yanked, resisted, but not successfully.
“Yes,” he said, smoothing his jacket when Izzie had released him, “I heard about this note.” He looked it over. All texts, as Nat recalled, were transparent to him. “Don’t you realize you’re starting to embarrass yourselves?”
“What’s wrong with everybody?” Izzie said. “We didn’t write it.”
“Your father doesn’t doubt that. He knows it was Grace.”
Izzie turned on him. “When I say we, Grace is included.”
Professor Uzig took a step back. “Who else could have written it, then?”
“I thought you were the one who knew how to think. Some real kidnapper, of course.”
Professor Uzig’s voice rose, but only slightly. “This is not the note of a real kidnapper. And what real kidnapper would know about this place? For that matter, have you told anyone else about it?”
“No,” Nat said. “But…” An idea was starting to form in his mind.
“But what?” said Professor Uzig.
“There’s a thief on campus.”
“There are always thieves on campus, almost invariably your fellow students.”
“But this one knows about the tunnels,” Izzie said.
“Why do you say that?” said Professor Uzig.
Nat told Professor Uzig about the theft of Wags’s TV, how he’d followed the thief until he’d disappeared in the Plessey basement.
“That doesn’t mean he knows about the tunnels.”
“There was nowhere else he could have gone.”
Professor Uzig didn’t looked convinced. “Could you identify this person?”
“I only saw him from behind,” Nat said. “Big, with a ponytail.”
A strange expression crossed Professor’s Uzig’s face. Nat’s mom would have said he looked a little green; as though he’d eaten something bad or was seasick. “It won’t work,” he said.
“What won’t work?” Izzie said.
“Whatever you kids are up to,” said Professor Uzig. He turned to Nat. “Time for you to go home. Worse things have happened.”
“Worse things are happening now,” Nat said. A milion sounds nice. Whatever was bothering him was in that sentence. A milion sounds nice. And it wasn’t the spelling. He walked along the walls of the room, tapping here and there, listening for hollow sounds, although not sure why. They sounded hollow everywhere.
“You’re not going to talk to him?” Izzie said.
Professor Uzig shook his head. “You’ve given me nothing to talk about.”
“Nicely put,” said Izzie, “as usual. But would you be saying that if he wasn’t dangling this endowed chair in front of your nose?”
There was no persuading Professor Uzig after that. He didn’t say another word. They went upstairs in silence.
“What about calling the police?” Nat said to Izzie when they were alone; not because he thought it was a good idea, more because it seemed the kind of thing people said at a time like this.
“Brilliant,” Izzie said. “If we forget about what the note says, and about what will happen when the police call my father and ask when the money’s coming.”
“Izzie,” he said; not because she was wrong, but because of how she’d spoken to him. She was acting so strange.
“What?”
She was acting so strange, but he’d already said that.
Izzie took a deep breath. He could almost feel her getting hold of herself, slowing down.
“Sorry,” she said. She gave him a kiss, soft and quick, on the cheek. “Better?”
That left the bowling jacket. Saul’s Collision. Nat knew a bit about bowling-his mom had been in the Tuesday league for years, always fixing chicken pot pie that night, so he could warm it for himself when he got home from basketball-and had noticed lanes at the bottom of College Hill, not far from the tracks. All-Star Bowling, or something like that. He looked them up in the phone book, called the number.
“Does a team from Saul’s Collision bowl there?” he said.
“Sure does.”
“Because one of them lost his jacket. I’d like to return it.”
“We’re open till ten.”
“I meant personally.”
“Personally?”
“I’m looking to join a team.”
“You could do better than Saul’s, you’re any kind of bowler at all.”
“But I like their jacket.”
“I hear you. Tell you what. Where you calling from?”
“Here-in Inverness.”
“There’s only one team member lives in town. That would be Ronnie Medeiros, over on River Street. He’s in the book.”
