Mislaid. Nell Zink
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Ecco in 2015
Text © Nell Zink 2015
Nell Zink asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
Cover photograph © The Image Bank/Getty Images
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Source ISBN: 9780008139605
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008157814 Version: 2016-03-22
Contents
My life would be harder
without the magnificent collective
Zeitenspiegel Reportagen,
to whose members and supporters
I gratefully dedicate this book
… among the rabble—men,
Lion ambition is chained down—
And crouches to a keeper’s hand—
Not so in deserts, where the grand—
The wild—the terrible, conspire
With their own breath to fan his fire.
—E. A. Poe, “Tamerlane”
Stillwater College sat on the fall line south of Petersburg. One half of the campus was elevated over the other half, and the waters above were separated from the waters below by a ledge with stone outcroppings. The waters below lay still, and the waters above flowed down. They seeped into the sandy ground before they had time to form a stream. And that’s why the house had been named Stillwater. It overlooked a lake that lay motionless as if it had been dug with shovels and hand-lined with clay. But the lake had been there as long as anyone could remember. It had no visible outlet, and no docks because a piling might puncture the layer of clay. Nobody swam in the lake because of the leeches in the mud. There was no fishing because girls don’t fish.
The house had been a plantation. After the War Between the States it was turned into a school for girls, and after that a teachers’ college, and in the 1930s a women’s college. In the 1960s it was a mecca for lesbians, with girls in shorts standing in the reeds to smoke, popping little black leeches with their fingers, risking expulsion for cigarettes and going in the lake.
The road from the main highway forked and branched like lightning. You had to know where Stillwater was to find it. Strangers drove to the town of Stillwater, parked their cars, and walked around. They thought a college ought to be impossible to miss in a town that small. But people in Stillwater didn’t think you had any business going to the college if you didn’t know where it was. It was a dry county, and so small anyway that most businesses didn’t have signs. If you wanted even a haircut, or especially a drink, you had to know where to find it. The biggest sign in the county was for the colored snack bar out on the highway, Bunny Burger. The sign for Stillwater College was nailed to the fence by the last turnoff, where you could already see the outbuildings.
The main house faced the lake. The academic buildings and the dorms were behind the main house around a courtyard. All the girls lived on campus. From the loop road, little dirt tracks took off in all directions, leading to the faculty housing where the station wagons sat crooked in potholes under big oak trees.
The reason strangers came