The Initiation by Ridley Pearson Page B

through. We stumbled into the hall, where curious girls screamed at the sight and smell of us. Revolted, they hollered as a mob and pointed us back into the bathroom, where the tideof excrement was already subsiding, though with the speed of cold honey at the bottom of the jar. We headed for the showers, disgusted by the slop under our shoes, and soon were standing beneath streams of warm water, washing the goop off our faces and out of our hair. I was so beyond disgusted that I threw up. My clothes were maybe 50 percent free of the stuff, but I could feel a layer of it between my clothes and skin and so I undressed right there in the shower. Hearing Latisha’s clothes slap to the tile, I realized she’d had the same idea.
    â€œTowels and robes!” she called out loudly to the girls in the hallway.
    I lifted and lowered first one foot, then the other, unable to face the swirling goop I stood in. I heard proctors and a hall mistress and all kinds of adults shouting for the right to come in, but Latisha and I let them know only the women could enter and we needed robes and towels. I think half the school was in the dormitory by the time Latisha and I finally emerged, our hair up in towels, our feet still icky. Some teachers took us away and moved us along to a neighboring dorm and got us into clean showers there. I stayed under the water for over half an hour, washed my hair five times. Then twice more. The whole time, I thought about what Latisha and I had discovered about ourfathers. I was haunted especially by her telling me how many legacies were at the school. How many of them, I wondered, had fathers or mothers who visited late at night, making trips to places they disguised with postcards, warning their children what to do if they disappeared? What was going on at Baskerville, and how were the Moriartys involved?
    What I remembered more than anything was this: Sherlock standing halfway down the stairs where one dorm connected to the other, his face serious, his eyes locked onto me. What he lacked was any look of surprise, any curiosity—his hallmark. As I’d been shuttled between dorms, Sherlock had stood there above me, knowing and purposeful.
    It was, I thought, almost as if he’d expected this.

CHAPTER 13
OUT OF REACH

    J AMES AND HIS THREE ACCOMPLICES WALKED calmly around the back of the library through a series of connected parking lots that included the dining room, and across a section of treed lawn to behind the chapel. From there they entered through the choir room door and into the chancel, their steps reverberating inside the cavernous structure.
    James pointed to the ceiling’s center truss. “That’s where it is.”
    â€œThat’s a tricky climb,” said Clay.
    â€œI know. There’s probably another way to get out there, but I don’t see it.” James sounded somewhatconfounded. “We’ll use the rope Bret brought to make sure I don’t croak. The girls’ dorm is only going to buy us so much time, so we’d better get to it.” With that, James took the rope, moved up the pews to the wall, and tried to throw the rope over the overhead beam. It took the boys five tries to realize they had to tie a series of knots in the end of the rope to make it heavy enough to carry the rope over. Finally, they got it, but they’d wasted a good five minutes.
    Tying the end around his waist, James instructed the others, “I’m going to climb and the three of you are going to keep the slack.”
    â€œLike having you on belay,” Clay said. “I rock climb in the summer.”
    â€œWhatever. Wait a second! If you rock climb . . .” James took off the rope and handed it to Clay. “You just volunteered.”
    Clay didn’t like it, but he accepted James’s delegating the job to him.
    â€œDo any of you fools know anything about belay?” he asked.
    â€œI’m good to anchor,” said Bret, the stockiest