The fourth floor of St. Catherine’s had once been the dormitory where the men in training to be priests lived. It was a vast, drafty space with a sloping ceiling and windows tucked into the small space between slanted roof and floor. There was only this one stairway leading up to or down from the room, so in addition to it being noncompliant when it came to safety regulations, the space was inconvenient, and it had never been used in the time St. Catherine’s occupied the building.
It was unheated in the winter, not cooled in the summer, and good for pretty much nothing except that roof access door Eddie had mentioned, nailed shut for longer than Jazz had been alive, and another access door, also never used, that led to a labyrinth of pipes from the old steam heating system.
At the top of the stairs the room opened up left and right, and Jazz thought about the photos she’d seen from back when the seminary occupied the building. Fifteen beds on one side of the aisleway in the center of the room, and fifteen on the other. Thirty priests in training to the left of the doorway. Another thirty to the right.
Jazz couldn’t contain a cynical smile.
These days, Eileen couldn’t even convince a few girls to go to the chapel to hear a talk on religious vocations.
Philosophical thoughts aside, Jazz softened the edges of her smile and looked at Eddie. “Once you give me the go-ahead, I’ll bring the dogs up and take them over to the other side of the room,” she told him. “Then when you’re finished, you can go down and you won’t have to deal with them.”
He ran his tongue over his lips. “Thanks, Jazz. But I dunno.” He opened the door and they were met with a puff of stale air. “I don’t think this is a good room for the girls to be using. It’s got to be pretty dirty up there.”
“Dirty or not, it’s our only choice.” She waited for Eddie to get a move on. “And the girls are going to be here in just a couple of minutes.”
As messages went, it wasn’t exactly subtle, but it still took a bit for it to sink in, and when it finally did Eddie clambered up the stairs and Jazz waited for his signal. It didn’t come, not right away, and she caught herself tapping her foot. Eddie was sweeping, she reminded herself. He wanted the room to be as clean as possible before he called Jazz up. And she needed to chill. She still had plenty of time to hide her bait.
“It’s okay now, Jazz!” he finally called to her, and she took the dogs up the stairs and found Eddie waiting a safe distance from the door. He’d already given the room one quick sweep. There were cleaned, curved tracks in the dust on the floor and Eddie had worked up a sweat. His shirt was untucked; there was a sheen of sweet on his forehead.
Jazz let him finish, crossing thirty feet or more of empty attic space to stay far out of his way, her shoes slapping against the hardwood floor. She tied the dogs’ leads to a steam radiator not used for a hundred years, and once they were secured Eddie finished up. The small windows up there protested and refused to budge until he gave them a shove, and once they were open a stream of fresh air flowed into the room and Eddie scurried out of it, and Jazz hid the bait she’d brought along.
A tooth in an open container in the crook where wall and ceiling met at the far side of the room.
A metacarpal behind the radiator on the opposite side of the room from where the dogs waited.
Passing one of the windows, Jazz couldn’t help but shiver, thinking about how cold it gets in Cleveland in the winter. “What do you think, guys?” she asked the dogs when she headed back their way, and they tilted their heads and listened as if they understood every word. “Two radiators in a room this size? It must have been like the Antarctic up here. I wonder if the priests fought over who got to sleep closest to the radiators.”
Before she had a chance to consider it, she heard the first sounds of footsteps scrambling up the stairs.
Wally heard them, too, and hopped up on his back legs, eager for this next adventure, and Jazz waited for the first group of girls to arrive at the top of the steps.
These were seventh graders, the youngest girls in the school, and just about to step into the old dormitory the two girls leading the pack stopped and looked around, their eyes wide, their cheeks flushed.
Jazz was just about to tell them to get a move on when she realized what was going on.
There’s nothing like a locked door and an unused room to spark rumors. Over the years, stories had emerged about the old dormitory. Jazz had heard girls whisper that it was haunted. Some of them even swore they’d heard footsteps up there. Then there was the urban legend about how a homeless man snuck into the school every night and slept there. Jazz had even heard rumors about a cult that gathered in the old dormitory every month when the moon was full, sneaking in, she supposed, the same way that homeless man snuck in, though how either cult or homeless man outwitted St. Catherine’s state-of-the-art security system no one ever bothered to explain.
“Lucky you, huh?” She smiled at the girls at the top of the steps. “None of the girls at St. Catherine’s have ever been up here, not even the juniors or the seniors. You’re getting to see something none of them ever have.”
It was enough to put them at ease—at least these two, at least for now—and the two girls in the lead climbed the last step and into the dormitory, their gazes darting left and right, looking, no doubt, for ghosts and homeless men and cult members wearing long black robes with hoods.
Jazz waved them to a spot on the floor that looked at least relatively clean and had the rest of the girls and their homeroom teacher, Cissy Kaski, sit in a semicircle.
It didn’t take long for the girls to catch sight of the dogs, and after that Jazz knew all thoughts of how spooky the space was flew out of their heads. They squealed with delight, and a couple times Cissy had to remind them to sit down.
There were twenty girls in the group, and once they settled, Jazz asked how many of them had dogs at home.
A few hands went up.
“And how many of you would like to have a dog?”
This time, a couple more hands were raised and one girl blurted out, “Puppies are so cute!”
Far be it from Jazz to argue with that. “But they’re also a lot of work,” she told the girls, and she went over and untied Wally’s leash from the radiator.
He loved being the center of attention and the oohs and ahs from the girls only made him even more excited. Airedales have a way of prancing when they walk, a combination of runway strut and goofy clowning around.
When Jazz brought him to stand in front of the girls, the oohs and ahs intensified.
“Does anyone know what it takes to take care of a puppy?” she asked the girls.
“Picking up a lot of poop,” one of them announced, and the rest of them groaned.
“And feeding them,” another one put in.
“And cleaning up the floor!” one of them wailed because of course Wally picked that moment to pee.
Jazz had come prepared. She’d brought along a tote bag of supplies, and she pulled out paper towels, a plastic grocery bag, and a disinfectant wipe and cleaned up before she continued.
“There’s training, too,” she told the girls.
“Like the way you trained that dog that found that dead girl, right?” somebody asked, undeterred by a look from Cissy that told her it was a subject she wasn’t supposed to bring up.