The Scarlet Letterman by Cara Lockwood Page B

stripes roaming around campus.
    “Cougars don’t come with stripes,” Blade points out.
    “I’m not sure if that’s what I saw, but it looked like it,” I say.
    “We also found a secret passageway in Ms. W’s room,” Hana adds. “Headless Sweatshirt Guy made his escape through it.”
    “Secret passageway! I knew it,” Blade says.
    Hana stares at her.
    “What? I mean, this place screams out for secret passageways,” she adds.
    “We couldn’t figure out how to open it, though. And anyway, we have more clues,” I add, showing them the scraps of paper. “I’ve found these in both Coach H and Ms. W’s rooms. And basically wherever Headless Sweatshirt Guy turned up. They have to mean something.”
    “But what?” Blade asks.
    “I don’t know. Something. I think that’s an ear,” I say, pointing to the one with a triangle.
    “Wait a second,” Blade says. She rips a piece of notebook paper out of her spiral notebook and puts it on the grass in front of us. She places the pieces on top of the paper and then arranges them one way, and then another. With a black marker, she draws the missing lines.
    “It’s a tiger,” I exclaim, suddenly seeing the picture come into focus. “So that is what I saw then. It’s not a cougar at all. It’s a tiger. I thought it could be, but I just thought it was too far-fetched.”
    “Are there lions and bears, too?” Samir jokes.
    “You’re sure it’s a tiger?” Hana asks. “I mean, what’s a tiger doing at Bard?”
    “It’s Bard. Do we need a good reason?” Blade asks.
    “Good point.”
    “Maybe these are clues to who is messing with the faculty,” I say.
    “Why would someone deliberately leave clues? And besides, we already know who the culprit is, don’t we? It’s Heathcliff.” Hana glares at me, as if daring me to contradict her.
    “But he’s not the Hooded Sweatshirt Stalker,” I say.
    “Correction — Headless Stalker. But maybe he is, after all,” Hana says. “You know that he’s not very powerful now that Wuthering Heights has been destroyed. Maybe he’s fading away, like the invisible man.”
    “I just don’t think it’s him,” I say, not bothering to volunteer the fact that I have a part of a page from that book in the locket around my neck. “I can’t explain it more than that.”
    “I can in three words,” Hana says. “Bad-boy mojo.”
    “Can we get back to the tiger? Hel-lo!” Blade says, tapping her piece of paper.
    Hana sighs. “Fine. Well, assuming that is a tiger, there are a few of them in literature. There’s the tiger Shere Khan in Kipling’s The Jungle Book. There’s also a tiger in Winnie-the-Pooh .”
    “Christopher Robin at Bard? Even in this place that sounds wacky,” I say.
    “Technically, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh is A. A. Milne,” Hana says. “And this tiger doesn’t look like the friendly, hyperactive Tigger, does it?”
    “No, it definitely doesn’t,” I say. We only have a few pieces of it, but it looks like a tiger of the more fierce variety. “Who else? Is there a poem, maybe? Or some kind of adventure story…”
    “Wait,” Hana says, as if getting an idea. “There is a poem about a tiger. A famous one. Tyger with a Y. ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright…’ But I can’t remember the rest. But it’s by Blake. Yeah, William Blake.”
    “The same crazy Blake we have for theology class?” I ask. “You don’t think that’s a little bit of a coincidence?”
    “Well, he is the only poet I can think of who was also an illustrator,” Hana says. “He could’ve drawn this. He illustrated his own books of poetry, as well as Dante’s Inferno .”
    “He has to be involved.”
    “Maybe,” Hana says. “Or maybe Heathcliff is trying to frame him.”
    “You know, I’m not even going to try to defend him. Will this prove to you that I’m overcoming the bad-boy mojo?”
    “It’s a start,” Hana says. “Come on, let’s find Blake.”

Seventeen

    We find Blake erasing the board in