Free The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai Page B

did not ask what Zee was referring to. And that was confirmation enough.
    Her seminar kids were already calling themselves The Ghostbusters and had written wonderful essays on The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House . They’d been quick to point out that these stories weren’t so much about ghosts as madness, and our slippery hold on reality. Good kids. She was surprised to find she was having more fun with them than with her Fictions of Empire students.
    After class, Fran Leffler followed Zee to her office to talk about grad school. Fran was a major, a sorority girl with dimples. Zee told her to sign up for Literary Theory, then leaned across her desk: “Listen, Fran, this is under wraps, but I’m sure you’ve heard about Professor Cole?”
    Fran looked concerned, like Zee was about to tell her the man had cancer.
    “I’m just asking because I believe this sort of thing is important to talk about, and you seem like someone who might hear if—Well, I just want to make sure people feel comfortable coming forward.”
    “Coming forward ? Did he, like—”
    “Oh, no! No, not that. It’s just his computer. I guess—I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve probably said too much already, and I don’t want your imagination getting the best of you. Apparently some students, some female students, have been made uncomfortable by the images on his computer. They were, you know . . . explicit.”
    Fran shook her head in horror, but her eyes were lit with gossip. “Is he in trouble?”
    “He’ll be in trouble if he needs to be. Who knows if it’s even true. But, as a senior—if you heard anything from younger women, anyone in your sorority—I hope you’d let someone know. At this point they’re just gathering information. And you didn’t hear it from me, please.”
    As Fran left, Zee took her shoes off and stretched her feet. Later that same day, she watched Golda Blum and some man she’d never seen before, a dumpy guy in a communist-green polo shirt who could only work for IT, go into Cole’s office without him.
    —
    “It’s marvelous,” Gracie said. They were at the breakfast table in the big house late that afternoon. Zee had just told her she could stop worrying about Doug, that there would be openings by the fall, as long as he could finish his book in an unshared house. (The debate would take months, of course, and they’d let Cole finish the year. But they’d start the head hunt soon to replace him.) Hidalgo, under the table, breathed hot air on Zee’s legs. “Do you think the school will really remain open, though, after this whole computer thing?” It took Zee a few terrifying seconds to realize she meant the Y2K bug. “Bruce reads absolutely all the news, and the smartest people are saying it’s just the end of everything.”
    Sofia was cleaning out the refrigerator, tossing old containersof deli salads Gracie and Bruce had never gotten around to eating. Zee wanted to ask her more about that dress, that yellow dress that had no reason to be on the floor, but now was not the time. It had been bothering her for weeks now, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt that somehow she’d seen it very recently, and remembered touching it. She’d started to consider that she might have done something in her sleep, walked to the big house and found the dress, crumpled it and hidden it from Miriam.
    But this was ridiculous, and she’d long ago trained herself not to second-guess things to the point where she lost the reality of them. She used to worry all the time about losing her mind. In the library at boarding school she’d found a book, The New World Barons , published in the 1960s, with sections on the Palmers and Carnegies and Devohrs, among others. “The Devohr history is not one of summer estates and long lineage held taut by familial love; it is one of scandal, Diaspora, insanity.” She spent hours on the floor between shelves, reading about the Devohrs who killed